You are sat in a room filled with peculiar characters you've met only an hour ago, or maybe you remember some faces, or know some names by reputation in the circles you're commonly found in. Scientists, scholars, as well as types you'd find in warzones or unmarked police cars, driving or riding in the back. Either way, it isn't every day you get a flight paid for by... well, you're not really sure. All is quiet in the small house here in Blackriver, West Virginia, that will be your home for the foreseeable future- even though the future could hold anything at this point. Finally, a familiar man emerges from the door to the garage and smiles in a way that is too genuine to be trustworthy. "Hello, ladies and gentlemen, let's begin shall we?"

==Days Earlier==

You sit on the edge of your bed, the news playing in the background with a litany of what's wrong in the world- murders, kidnappings, pesticides, the war on terror, etc. You clutch a phone in your hand- not yours, a pre-paid thing of the past- waiting. Thinking and waiting.

The meeting with the higher-ups was odd. Told you to be at the meeting place- it could've been a coffee shop, a dive bar, a museum, a library, anywhere- but only if you got the go-ahead from the only number programmed on the phone. There was a man you'd never met before there, just sitting at the table, but eating and lounging as if no one else could see him. He wasn't even dressed like the others. The higher-ups asked you the routine questions- things about drug use in the past, past employment, what you were responsible for now in your current career. It was almost like a damned review, but nothing of that type was scheduled this month. After you give your answers, the man perks up and asks, "How do you feel about flying?"

What kind of question is that? You give your answer and he smiles and nods, then starts the conversation.

Have you ever been outside the US? Ever been in trouble with the law? Do you travel often? Do you have any friends or family overseas? You answer his questions, albeit a little stilted and awkwardly. You're not sure what the hell is with this guy.

"There's an opportunity for you. This is probably something you'd do well to take up. A door has opened for you, but only if you want it." The man says, suddenly the air in the room is even more serious than it was before the man first spoke.

"We do urge you to choose wisely."

A phone is slid across the table to you. A pre-paid thing of the past. "Wait for the text tonight."

The very same phone in your hands now buzzes. Flipping it open reveals the automated message '1 new txt msg.' Opening up the text reveals a peculiar message, You are cordially invited to a night at the opera. Meet me at, and you do. The meeting goes well, discussing you, your past, your home life, your social media presence. Then it delves into your knowledge of the recent news of the Blackriver Killer. Never heard of him. The man nods, "I wouldn’t think so. Let me tell you what this is about..."

==Present==

The day's briefing is held in the living room by the same lax-dressed man that you talked to those few days back, as well as an unnamed stranger. The familiar man hands out a sheet of paper to be passed around the room. A list of names, before he expands upon them. These people are all victims of the Blackriver Killer. A description of the wounds found on the victims, pictures of the victims from social media, etc..

"At 2200 hours, Officer Morales was kidnapped when he responded to the scene of the Blackriver Killer’s murder that night, which took the lives of Daniel and Vicki Mulligan. Officially, you are all advisers and consultants for the Department of Justice. The FBI has no presence here and the CDC hasn’t heard a word back from their team since they touched down and made their way to White Tree. It is of utmost importance that we find Morales, the Mulligans' killer, and these other missing individuals. The first lead I want you to visit is Maryanne Roy, a state police detective. Other than that, get a feel for this place, have a look around some places. Welcome to the team. My name is Steve Foster."



All Forum-wide Rules Apply

The GM's word is law

This RP was inspired by the Delta Green tabletop game, The Cthulu Wars by Kenneth Hite and Kennon Bauman, True Detective S1 and Denis Villeneuve's Sicario

What is Delta Green?




Hello!

As the title says, this RP is one about action and intrigue with an occult bent. Heavily influenced by media such as the Delta Green tabletop game and the Cthulu Wars book, from which came the premise of this RP, and mainly season one of True Detective and Denis Villeneuve's Sicario film, the atmosphere of which I hope to weave into this game. Your characters can come from any number of organizations and institutions both government and civilian. Although this is an action game, I don't want players to think they have to necessarily be Hank Stonebulge, war veteran and supercop with ten machineguns, a wardrobe of tanktops, blue jeans and several shades, and gets his calories from red meat and cigarettes.

That is to say, you can be a scientist, a scholar, a private eye, a federal agent, or a career criminal with a history of working for the law to cut a deal. Steve Foster is not beholden to tradition for recruiting teams and neither am I. This is mainly to not alienate people who are interested but don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of federal agencies or the like. I do encourage players to get creative with their characters, as long as they make sense, of course. An analyst probably won't be the greatest at making 400 meter shots with a rifle but might have rudimentary training in fieldwork.

Like said above, I do hope to capture the atmosphere of Sicario and True Detective. The RP will mainly be about the investigation of the case the team has been brought on for, as well as how they bond with their teammates, cope with the events of the RP that might challenge their ideals, and grow along the time spent working this case and just what it uncovers about the true workings of the world around them. As such, don't expect shooting first and asking questions later to get you far. You may be working for a shadowy 'Man in Black' but that doesn't give you legal immunity. Player characters will have to navigate this new world of intrigue and horror smartly, and may be called upon to do morally repugnant things in the name of not only national security, but the preservation of humanity as they know it. Join me on this romp from the heartbroken hills of West Virginia to the rain-slick, somber city of Seattle, and all the way down to Juarez, Mexico, and beyond.

Over the course of the RP, questions may arise. Who is Steve Foster? Why are the Mulligans so important? What connections do the Argentinian Ratlines of WWII have with Sergeant Gregory Morales? Why is such a small case being treated with such secrecy and ambiguity? How far does this whole thing go? Who can I really trust?

And remember...

“Deception is a right. Truth is a privilege. Innocence is a luxury. The war is never over.”

"Yeah, man, like, you know, I saw black shadowy figures once, back at Woodstock."

As long as ONE OF US ends up in an insane asylum, I'm IN.

Subbed. I like the sound of this.

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This sounds interesting. My interest is piqued.

@Peik@Big Dread@Andreyich@Roosan@Ionisus

Guess who’s back

Hmm, interesting but the theoretical roster confuses me. Can I as an example be a journalist working parallel to the big boy team?

@Leidenschaft
Very much interested!
Would Steve Foster consider as a potential recruit an occult ex-KGB operative who double-crossed his way through the deadly shadows of the world since the first world war thanks to the unholy secrets of physical reanimation gleaned from the corpse of Rasputin, investigation of which was the final nudge that sent him over the edge of sanity?
Cause that's what I'd like to play. A slightly mad, conspiracy theorist reanimating russian. Think Boris the Bullet Dodger but with more personal integrity.

@Leidenschaft
Very much interested!
Would Steve Foster consider as a potential recruit an occult ex-KGB operative who double-crossed his way through the deadly shadows of the world since the first world war thanks to the unholy secrets of physical reanimation gleaned from the corpse of Rasputin, investigation of which was the final nudge that sent him over the edge of sanity?
Cause that's what I'd like to play. A slightly mad, conspiracy theorist reanimating russian. Think Boris the Bullet Dodger but with more personal integrity.

The premise for the characters in the RP is to either have no knowledge of the paranormal or a slight inkling of it stemming from encounters with it in their pasts. If this ex-KGB agent were to have his brakes pumped a bit and, say, been tasked with the "debriefing" aka assassinations of Russian soldiers who abandoned their mission because of "eaters of the dead" aka a nest of ghouls they encountered, then yes. Or other such ambiguously paranormal things.

But, I'm afraid there'll be no magic Russian liches on the team, I'm afraid. Seems more like something the team would be shooting at then burning the corpse of.

Hmm, interesting but the theoretical roster confuses me. Can I as an example be a journalist working parallel to the big boy team?

Journalists mostly end up as loose ends in this line of work. If you can come up with any sort of justification, maybe, but Steve Foster wants talented professionals that can keep hush-hush and have skills related to the mission. The definition of "professional" gets looser when talking of profession, though.

@Leidenschaft
What about kinda-paranormal-but-not-exactly-magical characters? For example, a parapsychic successful result of the MK-ULTRA program who was endowed with mild reality-adjusting capabilities stemming from a particularly inspired state of mind which must be induced via meditation and LSD? A terribly mentally shaken person plagued by flashbacks from pasts that have never been and memories of places he never visited, gone rogue and hunted across the globe for the contents of his head, grasping for any straw that could keep him from falling into the abyss.

Or do we have to be like completely mundane guys mandatorily fully out of their depth at the start of the game?

@Leidenschaft
What about kinda-paranormal-but-not-exactly-magical characters? For example, a parapsychic successful result of the MK-ULTRA program who was endowed with mild reality-adjusting capabilities stemming from a particularly inspired state of mind which must be induced via meditation and LSD? A terribly mentally shaken person plagued by flashbacks from pasts that have never been and memories of places he never visited, gone rogue and hunted across the globe for the contents of his head, grasping for any straw that could keep him from falling into the abyss.

Or do we have to be like completely mundane guys mandatorily fully out of their depth at the start of the game?

Short answer is yes. The characters at the beginning of the RP are supposed to be "level 1" per se. At most, they've had brushes with the paranormal, extraterrestrial, HPL mythos. All of these proposed characters have already lived out their most interesting stories, so it'd be a little redundant and almost silly to have Russian KGB lich be brought into a boardroom for Steve Foster to look at and the higher-ups to be kind of suckering the player into the mission, as is implied by their secrecy about it.

Steve Foster wants talented professionals as I said, yes, but he also wants blank slates. He's recruiting our characters into Delta Green, and considering this mission as their field test. Characters can embody this "blank slate" concept, or, as far as I'm willing to let people go, be as far along the sane-insane scale as Rustin Cohle of True Detective. That is, the character knows that there is more to the world because of what he's seen/thought he saw, but isn't babbling and scrawling glyphs on his cell wall with his own excrement.

Sorry if that puts you off.

@Leidenschaft
Well it's a bit sad since in my experience it's quite hard to have character's attitude and level of mental stability and characterization to change and progress realistically, believably and reasonably quickly within the narrative of the ongoing game - after all, when the character is made he has long years of personality-shaping background behind him whereas events of the game usually progress in a much smaller scale - but playing a completely normal guy doesn't put me off too much.

@KeksalotTo clarify, I'm not forcing people to play characters plucked out of a college that still look like children wearing daddy's business suit. If you want to play the grizzled veteran of whatever you wanted him doing prior to being recruited, go ahead. All I'm saying is we're not going to be mozambique-drilling Nyarlathotep in the RP, nor do I want the other end of that spectrum where everyone's a bumblefuck rookie or a pencil-pushing armchair commando. My gripes weren't so much that the characters [url]weren't[/url] blank-slate average joes that were about to have their entire worldview slowly flayed from them through the course of the RP, but that the characters seemed more like what Delta Green agents would be dispatched against to bodybag.

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@HomosaxophoneAs long as he wasn't like "Oh my god, thanks for showing this to me, grandma. I now know that Azathoth dreams up reality and one day he will awaken and I will cease to exist!"

It's a slow burn I'm going for here. If his only ties to the occult is some person who babbled on about it, a charm, and a general superstition, that's fine.

What about the soldier who had no previous run-ins with supernatural per se, but is himself a result of one of the army's experiments? Nothing too drastic, just one of these programs to make soldiers more resistant to stress of the battle, to which the guy proved unexpectedly receptive, mentally freezing into a completely unflappable if somewhat detached person?

@Progenitus1. Are we talking Will Smith from that one movie about Jaden Smith levels of detached? Or T1000 detached?

2. Does this soldier have any experience in tradecraft or investigation?

3. I guess it might be about time to start an OOC.

1) Unfamilliar with that movie. But basically - someone who can't really be let out back into civilian life due to being for most intents a highly functioning psychopath. He's rational, he doesn't have any weird urges, and he won't find shooting children or cutting off his own leg crushed under the rubble any harder mentally than smashing eggs to make a breakfast. Neither he would flinch under the heavy machinegun fire - fear for his life is more of an intellectual concept to this guy. He doesn't get bored, does not doubt his choices(merele acknowledging badly made ones) and is physically incapable of getting angry. He's a perfect soldier, mental integrity-wise, but that also makes soldiering and similar high-stress professions the only thing he's good for.

2) He's probably former special forces, volunteering for the procedure.

Erm, what I meant by journalist was one who isn't part of the team, rather a man who is investigating the going ons of the town parallel but not at the same time/path as the team.

@Progenitusthat would effectively make it so that your character is unaffected by the morally repugnant choices they will have to make and the otherworldly things they’ll have to fight.