QUIA QUOD STULTUM EST DEI SAPIENTIUS EST HOMINIBUS ET QUOD INFIRMUM EST DEI FORTIUS EST HOMINIBUS
After several delays due to me being a busy bee, me & the boys have finally started our Delta Green campaign.
Our party is:
Bart "Codekiller" Regis
Manhoman "Dr. House" Kamaroff (portrayed by friend of the blog deus ex parabola)
Auggy "Shillelagh" Ashe
(With one more knight set to join us, when he's not giving his girlfriend a ride from the airport.)
They're not your typical Delta Green, because I will be FUCKED before I use someone else's lore for MY games - they are Knights of St. Phanourious, a British Catholic secret society that gets stuck with the occult bitchwork of the Commonwealth.
They've been sent to the northwestern Ontario town of Pinemarten, where news of a spree of decapitations has made it through the grapevine to the knights' superiors, so they've been dispatched to investigate and solve the problem.
Pinemarten is about a workday's drive away from Toronto. Oh, there's other places in Ontario I could have used as a reference? I don't care. You are telling a man in the fires of Perdition that Purgatory is just a breath of God's love away. I'm down here for a reason.
Lakeside location, population of a couple thousand - a former booming mining town, nowadays scraping by on pensioned retirees, all-seasons tourism, logging, and a hub of remote-working techies who moved out here during the VOID lockdowns.
There's been a freak snow-storm the last few days. Everything is buried under many feet of snow. Getting anywhere, especially anywhere out of town, is a slog.
The knights roll up to the cottage (more of a luxury house) where the decapitations were reported. Strung between trees above the driveway is a(n AI-generated) banner announcing the First Annual Rodnovprom Associate Artists' Retreat. A perfunctory attempt has been made to cordon off the place.
Making their way inside, the knights find a trio of corpses in isolated positions in the house, all neatly decapitated (and getting pretty ripe) - their nerves and brain-matter "unspooled", for lack of a better term, into decomposing fans stretched out from their necks. They find no signs of forced entry, but outside find indents in the snow, each 5-10 feet apart, as if something about human-sized had lain down in the snow - though their are no footsteps or other such tracks between the indentations.
They stumble upon a duo who'd been hiding in a closet for a while - urban romantasy series authour Sam Fishbourne, and Rodnovprom PR specialist Nelya Stasiuk. They're both thirsty, hungry, tired, smelly, and don't seem to know much about what happened to the others - they stumbled across Jaythan Daniels' (zoomer influencer & sports-betting analyst) corpse and hid. Nelya gives them some info on Rodnovprom's operation in Pinemarten: they're turning the old mine into a grow-op for psychedelic mushrooms for pharmaceutical applications, and Nelya sees it as a spiritual, enlightening mission.
The party takes Nelya and Sam into their custody for further questioning, and drive into town. They come across a diner, the Lucky Mouse, and bring the pair inside for food and coffee. Auggy orders one of everything on the menu, and the waitress - an old Filipina lady named Alice Ortiz - pours them coffees with a shot of vodka added when she notices how rattled they look.
Local person of houselessness Moroz stumbles into the diner, mumbling to himself about how he "got out" and how "it's all one thread". Nelya notes that Moroz did some design for the Rodnovprom website before losing his mind from drugs. He reacts poorly to Bart addressing him in Surzhyk, which prompts Bart and Manhoman to violently restrain him and drag him out to their van - and also get the address of the local cop, Debbie, from Alice. Nelya and Sam take this opportunity to bolt out the back.
Manhoman force-feeds Moroz a xanax to chill him out, and they interrogate him some more, not getting much actionable info in the process.
They drive to Debbie's house, and witness her arguing with her daughter on the porch. Debbie claims the argument was about "family business", which Bart intuits to mean literally a family business, and one that's not above-board if she's being so evasive about it. They plant the idea that Moroz, in a drug-fueled frenzy, may have been responsible for the decapitations. Debbie complains about being busy handling a horse theft from the property of local rich person Chloranthy Williams-Wynn, but gives Bart her number.
They follow after Marlin to an abandoned skating rink, and bust down the door. The gang of rowdy teenagers within tries to scatter, but Manhoman fires his revolver into the ceiling and tackles Marlin, force-feeding her xanax like he did Moroz. She too is hauled to their van. Moroz recognizes her as the one who sold him drugs, but she claims to have only sold regular-ass downers, and that he probably had some latent mental illness that was activated by a bad trip.
The party settles on the plan of breaking into Rodnovprom's restored mine, but Marlin warns them that the place has serious security - the Norsefire company. They negotiate for her gang's help in breaking in, and she agrees that if she takes out rival teen gang leader Stan Koontz for her then she'll go along with the plan. They drive to Stan's hideout, the Copperbottom Theater, and after getting there zonk out Moroz and Marlin with more xanaxes. The front door's locked, and the doorman asks for a password, so Manhoman acts like a violent maniac, claims to have killed Marlin, then shoots the lock off the door. They enter, intimidate some teens with Bart's excessively high-lumen flashlight, and find Stan watching auteur director Richard Brace's gladiator movie Blood on the Wheat. Manhoman tries to convince Stan's guys that Stan hired him to kill Marlin, which none of them buy. Bart texts Debbie on his Blackberry device that Stan had kidnapped and drugged Marlin. The session ends here, with the party debating what to do with the semi-conscious Marlin to convince her mom that Stan really had done that.
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