Thank you! The inital idea was "what if Dracula was the King in Yellow".
lordgrendell
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Ok. I think I finally have enough going that I'm gonna put my bid in.
It's a twist on the King in Yellow steeped in Romanian folklore. In the scenario, the King is called Zmeu, and is envisioned as an unknowable Golden Serpent that exists beyond reality in the Golden Realm. The inspiration here was a mashup of The Lonely/King in Yellow and Dracula
The mini-campaign centers on the Lonely, and takes place in 2022 in Providence, RI.
The agents are a mix of civilian contractors and government agents who specialize in domestic terrorism and cybercrime. There are tables for the agents to determine their connections to the plot (including bad habits, and particular motivations). Bonds are encouraged to be thoroughly fleshed out. They are unwittingly organized by a Program Director known by his codename, Vannes into this scenario. He has had experience with this threat in the past, through BBS systems and involvement with the Outlaws in the 1980s and 90s. His obsession with an outside entity known as Zmeu drives Vannes to operate outside the lines of his normal parameters, so the agents are not “officially sanctioned” at the beginning of the campaign. They are barely even friendlies. This scenario is their smoke test.
The villain is Andreas Drachemir, who goes by his online handle Drake Poole. He has fused his body with a server tower and now exists as a biomechanical monstrosity that feeds on shame and feer to survive. Once he was a Karotechia member, and before that, he was the son of a Royalist Wizard in the high mountains of Transylvania. He seeks to set himself up as the Last King of America, to bring about the apocalypse, form a hive-consciousness of shame, and thereby gain apotheosis.
A prologue depicts a ritual killing and introducing the Manuscript and hypergeometry, and one strange-looking QR code for each of the agents. Some evidence online shows that the victim must have had help orchestrating the event. Successful rolls reveal the victim had been recently radicalized into a private reddit group called r/LethalChamber which is known to promote suicide and public violence. The manuscript depicts America as a Golden City on the hill where lofty elites look upon the downtrodden with disgust in a macabre masquerade dance; that the Last King will come to America, and at last, all masks will be removed. After examining the evidence, there is no sign that anyone else was involved in the victim’s death. If agents infiltrate the subreddit, they discover ties to a radical group called The Nightwatch that operates on dark web chat rooms. The QR code scanned by a normal reader takes the user to a website that is the agents’ first and last name, which displays only the plain white text on a black background: Welcome to the beginning of the end. The scenario ends with cold leads.
Several days later, agents are organized by Vannes to infiltrate the crowd at a night-time gay pride parade in Providence, RI after threats are made to public safety on a NikNok livestream by user R4V3NR (Eustace Corfield). A power station is bombed, and the power across downtown goes out. Phantoms of missing people appear to attack the crowds with firearms, but no one is physically injured. Videos are uploaded online depicting brutal, senseless acts of violence. All turn out to be somehow fake. Only the bomber, Eustace Corfield, was ever really there. If the agents are successful, he is apprehended, seemingly too easily. If they are not, he turns himself in. The Scenario ends with Corfield being carted away in a police car, grinning like an idiot, claiming that he’ll be back on the streets before long.
Vannes finally reveals that he has been tracking the Agents' movements and that he works for a secret government organization that investigates paranormal occurences. He informs the agents that online actors are involved with occult threats the likes of which the agents are not prepared to face. Nevertheless, he outlines the purpose of Delta Green. Players are tasked with justifying their agents' reasons for taking up the case.
Interviewing Corfield, he reveals that the Herald is coming. The pantom in darkness. The Drake in the Poole. He is rambling, but agents can glean Nightwatch191616.onion, a mobile-only dark web site; during the interview, Corfield claims that he has been helping “The Herald” grooming new “true believers in the lethal chamber”. Online research into the Lethal Chamber reveals it is a philosophy made popular by Drake Poole. Drake Poole turns out to be a pretty important player in international contraband, but no charges have ever stuck to him. Deep research reveals CptnSnshn and the international sex-labor trade run by the Network. CptnSnshn is the Lord of Light. Agents learn that a QR code can be used to access the site. Should the agents succeed in accessing the site, the phone used to access the site dissolves and fuses with the hand of the agent operating it, connecting them permanently to the mobile network. A haunting presence begins watching them. They perceive it as a brilliant ball of light, that allows them to look into a kind of physical manifestation of a message board where phantoms post totems of shame: revenge porn, confessions, photographs and records of illicit activities. Some of it is real, some of it is imaginary, like a museum of shame and deception. This is the Hoard, a place that exists within Drachemir’s corrupted body. It is a living gateway, and it is aware of the agents. It knows their shame, and uses their background information to taunt and torment them whenever they access the Hoard. But the Hoard can be used to reveal secret knowledge, for the Golden Serpent guides all events, and tempts the agents with especially dark rituals of great power (and heinous evil).
Corfield's apartment in a nearby tenement is a nightmarish vector for the Golden Realm. In the day, the tenement appears to be a normal, condemned tenement. Exploring the site, they find no signs of recent inhabitation, let alone torture. But, time passes irregularly here, and after experiencing strange apparitions, before agents know it, night falls. From here, the agents are trapped in the Night Realm, a space between reality and the Golden Realm, where the dead are doomed to repeat their cycle until they find their way through the gilded jaws of Ymeu. They stumble through a maze of surreal visions. They rescue torture victims Jon and Lulu from their nightmare prisons and escape. A week has passed, and all hell has broken loose.
Back at the black site, Corfield has impossibly escaped his bondage. It is clear from Lulu and Jon that Corfield was not the one who was tortured them. A man who called himself Drache tortured Jon hatefully. Lulu seems to have no enmity toward her captor and dreamily reports that he called himself Andreas, treated her with dignity, aside from restricting her movements. Agents have the opportunity to get information from Lulu, but it is clear she has taken the bait, and sees this Andreas as a man on the verge of godhood. Overconfident in his godlike grace, she reveals too many details that he has shared with her. That he will merge with the Data Center in downtown Providence. From there, he will be able to access every home and unleash the Hoard of Shame upon the poor hapless people of the city, thereby attaining godhood.
The Agents descend upon downtown once more, but this time it has begun to sink into the Nightmare World of the Golden Realm. They must stop Drachemir from completing his ritual or they (and possibly the whole world?) will be sucked into the Golden Realm forever!
