The Delta Green Sunsetter Campaign - Convergence Report (Sessions 3 and 4)
On July 12 and 26 of this year, me and the Sunsetters played through Convergence. I don't have much to say about the topic. Full spoilers ahead for the module.
For quick summary of the events of the module: a young man kills his father accidentally as he finds out his body is much stronger than he thought he was. Delta Green captures him and sends the agents out to Groversville, Tennessee, to investigate what brought this about. The agents eventually put together that it's probably aliens that have been messing with the entire town, and it culminates either with a showdown with the aliens or with them declaring a hasty quarantine and having the aliens pull out unseen.
This is a famously deadly scenario and my players mostly followed the expected clues of the investigation, except one of them - Agent Cornwell - thought to immediately start looking for UFOs, which resulted in them being thrown right in the thick of it.
The scenario ended with one of the agents (Cornwell again) failing a Stealth roll and attracting the 6 aliens, who had basically the equivalent of portable LMGs, and making a firefight that ended with half the party dead. The other half, Pitt, escaped with an unconscious Agent Welling and met mysterious government men who left them both to die as the aliens provoked a massive explosion followed by a plague when they pulled out of Earth.
This was all the expected outcome I had thought, but as someone who doesn't particularly enjoys killing players or creating a TPK, it felt bittersweet. The characters still had a bunch of juice in the tank, but if it's a game, you must be able to lose sometimes.
It particularly didn't sit well with me that the fight was provoked by a failed dice roll, but again, that's just the nature of these games. It just feels bad because the players didn't really make any bad decisions, yet were strung up almost entirely by the decision of not sending their stealthiest man to investigate something they thought was abandoned.
I don't have much insight to offer or take from these two sessions tbh. They went roughly about how I expected, I didn't overprepare, and while there were mistakes here and there (I still say "uhhh" too much, I didn't give the opportunity for a player to make an important roll that was sensible at the moment, I described things incorrectly once or twice and had to say "Wait, forget that"), I think overall it was a success. Hopefully the Sunsetters will have better odds in other, less overtly deadly operations.