First Impressions - Impossible Landscapes (Delta Green RPG) [Minor Spoilers]

Have you seen it?

TL;DR: Impossible Landscapes is a complex, beautiful and ambitiously campaign for the Delta Green roleplaying game which dives deeply into Chamber's King in Yellow ideas to deliver a powerful and dangerous campaign of alienation and surrealness, where those of a creative nature are more at threat and the aesthetics of Carcosa echo into our world. This 362-page full colour hardback is gorgeously laid and a masterclass in clear layout. Highly recommended.

I played a lot of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game when I first got into RPGs. Indeed, it was the first game I bought for myself and having only recently read Lovecraft's collections, it was pretty impactful on me. I ran a lot of sessions and played more, but slowly became jaded about it. Everyone playing knew what the statistics of the unknown gibbering loathsome creatures were and we'd all read the books. The fear and wonder of the unknown had gone. I stopped playing the game because it just didn't inspire me anymore. I never went down the route that some people did of just creating scenarios to see who'd be the last one to die; that kind of horror never attracted me.

And then I found Delta Green. A supplement for Call of Cthulhu that twisted the mythos and embraced the feel of the X-Files. A modern setting were - if anything - the horror of the setting was even more terrifying. A setting were players took the role of rogue agents trying to suppress the horror, knowing that they were the only barrier between humanity and extinction. Agents fighting a war that they knew they'd probably lose. The second supplement, Countdown, included a scenario called 'Night Floors' where John Scott Tynes explored the horrors of Robert Chamber's King in Yellow stories of Carcosa. Relegated to a monster in Call of Cthulhu, Tynes had gone back to the source material and written a scenario that derived its horror from the fracturing of the nature of reality. It really gripped me, as it was so different to anything I had seen before. I picked up the Chambers book and really enjoyed the way the stories explored reality twisting. It was the standout scenario for Delta Green for me.

Let's fast forward to 2015. Delta Green returned in a big way with an extremely success Kickstarter to release the game as a standalone system with gorgeous production values. It raised $362k in October of the year and spawned a large number of supplements as stretch goals. They're only just coming to the end of the books promised from that first Kickstarter; every six to twelve months another tome lands, beautifully illustrated with high quality writing and editing. Impossible Landscapes is the latest of these.

Strange is the night where blacks stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies

But stranger still is 

Lost Carcosa

Impossible Landscapes is a 368-page full-colour hardback campaign for Delta Green described as a pursuit of the Terrors of Carcosa and the King in Yellow. The illustration is of incredibly high quality and the layout perhaps one of the clearest you'll find in a roleplaying game. Gorgeous and evocative.

The campaign spans decades and realities. Perhaps the closest campaign I've read to it in scope and feel was The Dracula Dossier for Night's Black Agents, but this is something unique. There are at least two different voices annotating the main text, which is fun. Although there are four main tent-poles to the campaign, there's the scope for them to turn out very differently each time you play this.

The characters will cross the threshold of the King in Yellow in 1995, where they will face an updated version of 'Night Floors'. This is a missing persons investigation, OPERATION ALICE. An artist has gone missing, and a Delta Green friendly noticed an occult symbol in papers in their apartment. The agents are sent to catalogue what is in the apartment and to confirm that there's no unnatural influences in the disappearances. And like the operations namesake, they go down the rabbit hole.

Before we go there, let's pull back for a moment. The first sixty or so pages discuss running the campaign with solid advice on pacing and the types of scenes that can be used. The core themes are noted (alienation, surrealness, creativity and aesthetics) and discussed. A new mechanic - corruption - is introduced to track how exposed the agents have become to the King in Yellow. Some clues will not be evident unless you've moved deep enough into the influence of Carcosa. There's a play example for using corruption which also sets the tone for the campaign. 

The book then discusses the King in Yellow (the book which operates as a memetic infection from Carcosa), the Night World and Carcosa itself. Delta Green's involvement and understanding is explained, including the very brutal STATIC Protocol introduced in response. Carcosa differs from the the cults of the Great Old Ones. It doesn't seek to bring the King to power, but rather it spreads like a virus, memetically, drawing humanity into the orbit of the Yellow King and breaking our reality. There is a timeline to support the campaign; it starts 1402 and ends in late 2015. The timeline is extensively footnoted and brings together threads from all over.

Assuming some of the players survive the Night Floors (and focusing on survival may well be the most important thing for them as they won't have enough understanding or the tools to solve it), they continue on in their careers, both legitimate and covert. They remain part of the original Delta Green, and are activated in 2015 for Operation INDIA MOON, an investigation into The Dorchester House Psychiatric Facility where some former Delta Green operatives have gone missing. Evidence at the scene links back to Operation ALICE, so as many of the investigative team involved were sought. They'll investigate the facility and become drawn into the influence of the Night World, the hinterland around Carcosa. They'll potentially also discover what the STATIC protocol is and its implications. 

They'll discover - post mission - that their contact with Carcosa threatens their Bonds (significant contacts who are sources of sanity) and find themselves hunted by agents of the King in Yellow. Ultimately, clues will point them to find the mysterious Hotel Broadalbin, which has shades of the Hotel California. Exploring and understanding the Hotel and its guests will lead the Agents to realise that the only way home to to press on deeper, into the heart of Carcosa itself.

The final part of the campaign sees the characters arrive in Carcosa, and eventually attend a Masquerade Ball. They could be lost forever in Carcosa, destroyed or perhaps even make it home. The final part is surreal and evocative, referencing previous parts of the campaign. The book closes with details of entities like the King in Yellow, artefacts which may be found, closing with unnatural tomes and rituals.

This is a huge campaign, so the detailed index is welcomed. To run it, I think that it will need several readings. There are multiple cross references between parts, and the scope exists to move between them and change reality. It's complex, and the first parts of the campaign will see the agents struggling to gain understanding; later they'll realise that understanding is dangerous. Someone will inevitably see the Yellow Sign or read the King in Yellow (and the impact of doing that is cross referenced). You'd need a mature group of players but I think that it would be a fantastic experience (especially having seen Paul Baldowski's recent tweets about the campaign).

I will run this. For a start, Dr Mitch has dropped a hint and added it to my to-do list. 

Excellent. Very much recommended.

26 August 2022