Delta Green: Last Things Last - Handler's Debriefing (Play Report)
This game was played in June 15, 2024, from around 14:00 (2 PM) BST to roughly 17:00 (5 PM) with Kirko (Computer Scientist Kurtz) and NBateman (FBI Special Agent Cornwell) on the OSR Discord.
All spoilers ahead.
I ran a slightly altered version of Last Things Last, mixing aspects from the original Shotgun Scenario with the revamped adventure and adding a little bit of detail of my own.
The two played as premade agents from Need to Know and we barely used any rules at all.
I set the adventure in Boston, January 29, 2005, a friday. Cornwell was told he had been assigned to a secret task force being assembled, but Kurtz just missed a day of work using the aspect from his character sheet that his coworkers thought he was a weird guy and that he had forgotten a trip he'd already planned with his wife - although unmarried.
Both of them convened with Agent Brown, their handler, and I figured she was probably a Cowboy who knew Baughman. She gave them the mission of going up to Baughman's apartment and seek-and-destroy whatever connection he might have to 'the group' (Delta Green) in under 48 hours, which was when the heirs would come knocking.
Handler's Observation: Honestly, after running this twice, I think the original start where the agents receive an e-mail instead of being directed to a full place with a person there is probably better. There aren't many good questions to ask, and all the ones that should be asked are better off leaving them in the dark.
Also I kept fucking calling 'the group' Delta Green and having to correct myself.
They went down inconspicuously to Baughman's apartment in South Boston and were intercepted by Mr. Janowitz, which I didn't leave to a Luck roll.
Agents didn't even attempt to get information about Baughman from him; Cornwell was very neighbourly and had the idea of saying he was coming to "visit Skippy", a nickname to throw the scent off, and then started talking politics with Janowitz. Meanwhile Kurtz went in, Cornwell managed to dodge Janowitz, and they investigated the apartment.
Handler's Observation: Baughman's apartment is nice to build up tension and a picture of his life, but I never quite got a handle on what the picture in the refrigerator actually depicts.
They ignored the keys to the cabin and were very careful, only looking through most stuff and grabbing only the photographs. I used the two from Need to Know as handouts, and it didn't occur to me that Marlene has her eyes crossed out in there very ominously, but I just rolled with it to build mystery.
Agents were very cautious, studied all the paperwork in Baughman's office, got the location of the cabin, but I gave them a warning about exhaustion and they agreed to sleep a little bit and go up to it at 4 AM.
I located the cabin in deep Maine, next to a little town called Lagrange, and they immediately took notice of it. Instead of driving straight up towards the cabin, they stopped and interrogated most of the town, saying they were FBI, and getting the sense that Baughman was weird and kept to himself, but they also got the info that Baughman had gotten a ton of gasoline a while ago and folks thought that was suspicious.
Handler's Observation: This wasn't entirely planned but it was expected for reasons that I'll mention briefly. Them mentioning the FBI raised a lot of attention and could have ended extremely badly for them. They also interrogated the owner of the gas station and found out that he knew that Baughman was hiding the gas somehow, and that he had lied about the reason.
When they were driving up to the cabin, I put in a Drive roll which Kurtz promptly failed to not hit a deer that was being hunted. The hunters got mad at them and walked off, the deer was left there.
Handler's Observation: This was a bit of foreshadowing that surprisingly worked.
Arriving in the cabin, Cornwell walked around the perimeter and immediately found the septic tank; Kurtz went looking for the unattended gas and found that the shed had been broken in and all the gas stolen. Kurtz' player immediatelly grokked that it was weird as hell to have an outhouse AND a septic tank, which was a pretty smart moment.
Handler's Observation: These were pretty interesting sequence-breaks, because at this point their suspicion was mostly directed towards the people of Lagrange, though they smartly understood too that their distrust was well-founded.
They looked for a way to get inside and found that one of the windows had been forced open; since they were keyless, they went in through it.
Inside, Cornwell did his due FBI diligence and dusted for prints of the gas thieves, while Kurtz found Baughman's footlocker with all the Delta Green goodies, as well as the envelope telling them to finish his last mission and throw the gasoline into the septic tank without looking inside.
Kurtz rooted around the footlocker a bit and found the tapes from August 1972 but didn't listen to them, just to confirm that it really was the Delta Green evidence.
They went back to Lagrange and had some coffee with the gasman which they were suspecting, hatching up a very nice plan to bring him coffee and then offering to throw his cup away, but actually snatching it. The agents then returned to the motel and carried the footlocker through the back door to avoid some of the hunters that were loitering in front - which raised an eyebrow by the clerk but she didn't question them further.
Cornwell confirmed that the prints really were the gasman's while Kurtz rooted some more on the footlocker and lost a point of SAN to the glass ball that is much more magnetic than it should be.
The agents then decided that Cornwell would confront the gasman. They mentioned that they knew about the theft of gas, the gasman insinuated that they were pretty damn far from a big city and that they were all packing in Lagrange.
Cornwell broke mission protocol by saying that there was something they needed to get rid off inside the septic tank, and that he needed gasoline for that - basically saying that yes, he was operating outside of the law just like them and needed his help.
The gasman was going to ask him further, but I decided to go ahead and play on Lagrange's suspicion regarding Baughman and say that they suspected that he was cooking meth in there, and the agents just rolled with it.
They obtained the gas and drove back to the cabin. It was around 4:10 PM of the Saturday, so they had less than 24 hours remaining and just 30 minutes of sunlight in this day.
When they arrived in the cabin, they went up to the septic tank, which was padlocked. Cornwell missed his lockpick roll so they just busted the padlock open, cracked open the hatch to drop in the gasoline, and heard a strange voice saying "Clyde" from the inside, and sloshing its way towards the hatch.
Handler's Observation: This wasn't the Marlene from the new version, this was the Marlene from the old version, so she's pretty weak and could only thump futilely against the hatch. I thought it was more melancholic for that to be the case than for it to end in a shootout in the woods; but I still kept the bit about Marlene having been possessed by The Other.
They both closed the hatch and Cornwell started going off about getting some heavy ordinance, calling in the guys to clean all this stuff out, get a team - none of which they had enough time to gather - but Kurtz had a bit of a more practical idea: simply drill a hole on the septic tank and pour the gas through there.
The sun set, Cornwell stood guard in the cold and with headphones to distract himself from the woman beating on the hatch while Kurtz went back to Lagrange to get a cordless power drill and a ball of twine to use as a wick.
The plan worked like a charm, they went back to Boston, stopped in a hotel along the way, and used the cover story of a meth lab that blew up around Boyd Lake; Baughman's legacy was tarnished and his estrangement with his children was complete, they brought the footlocker back to their case officer, and that was that.
I finished the session mentioning that, on their way back to Lagrange, after torching the cabin and the septic tank, they didn't see the deer that Kurtz had ran over earlier; the thing that possessed Marlene was still out there, and now it was free.
Overall, it was a very short, fun time. The investigation was interesting but it was clearly more there to build tension; the real meat of the scenario was the cabin situation. I think thad adding the gas theft really helped the pacing too, otherwise the session might have easily been over an hour earlier. Plus, that really put a time strain on them, but I don't see how they could have gone over the time limit.
Seth Skorkowsky on his video had a suggestion of maybe making the Other constantly flip through bodies until it found a human and then tell the authorities that they were being attacked by the agents, but I'm not a fan of that. It turns the adventure too much into a shooty kind of scenario, and I think this one is more about heightening how broken and shitty was the life of Clyde Baughman - a Delta Green veteran and basically them in the future - than putting in a big monster to shoot at.