First Hand Accounts

This is an open ended “whodunnit?” scenario that provides the Keeper with many possible resolutions for the story.  Also, it gives players the chance to use their imaginations if and when they engage in an undercover operation to infiltrate a mythos related support group.

## Introduction

There is a support group named “Survivors of Sachohelioblastoma” that meets regularly at the Beth Israel Medical Center’s Bernstein pavilion in Manhattan on wednesday nights.  Every week these brave souls gather together, talk about their experiences and how they have begun the healing process.  To the casual onlooker, “SoS” just looks like any typical, if overly private, support group.  They are only partially right.

Sachohelioblastoma is not real.  The people belonging to SoS made it up in order to give cover to what they actually discuss amongst each other every wednesday night; strange aliens, hideous monstrosities and insidious cults, to name a few.  These things, by contrast, are very dangerous and very real.

They are survivors of the Mythos and they are starting to disappear one at a time.

## Background

Janice Cooke formed the SoS shortly after she encountered a woman who could wipe memories with her voice.  Searching online, she desperately sought others who experienced something that defied reality.  Successful, she found that speaking openly with others about their strange encounters gave them all strength.  Specifically, the strength to make sense out of what they experienced.  She is proud of her accomplishments in getting the others to open up about their traumatic experiences and is constantly seeking to bring new members into the fold.

## Hook

Daniel Webb was an accomplished electrician for over ten years.  He sometimes talked about seeing “ratmen” in the tunnels underneath Manhattan.  Everyone laughed at the notion until  the day his wife, Kate, filed a missing persons report with the police.  Now Daniel’s photocopied face is up on every bulletin board and telephone pole in Midtown.

A Friendly working at the local police precinct read through the reports and found the mention of a “ratman” encounter and the shady support group as something that would interest Delta Green.

## Investigation

The agents will be instructed to infiltrate the support group and find out what happened to Daniel Webb.

Because of the secretive nature of the support group, Delta Green is suspicious that the SoS may be a front for a cult or something much worse.  Discretion and patience are the order of the day.

First they are to conduct surveillance on them for a week or two in order to find out just what kind of group they are.  During this time, the members will be cautiously on the lookout.  They heard about Daniel’s disappearance and this has led some of them to think that maybe they are being targeted by an outside group.

When a session finishes, the group will walk one another to their vehicles to ensure safety in numbers.  Also, it will be apparent from casual surveillance that most of the members carry some kind of self protection.  Janice carries pepper spray.  Nick carries brass knuckles with him, always.  William owns a shotgun he keeps in his truck and openly carries a .357 magnum.  Michelle carries a knife in her bookbag and has used it on others in the past.

Once surveillance is conducted and the nature of the group is understood, the agents are to construct a fictional persona for their covers—including their own personally fabricated Mythos encounter.  Once this is done, they are to contact SoS online and ask for a meeting.  This method proves to be surprisingly successful.  Janice wants to help others as much as she wants to help herself.

In their first session with the group, Janice will direct everyone to speak of experience with the Mythos.  Then, after introducing everyone to the “new people” the agents will need to tell their stories.  Like most sessions, the group will break for fifteen minutes to grab coffee and use the restrooms at the pavilion.  Afterwards, the meeting will move to a “resolution phase” where members will talk about what new “truths” they have discovered in their search to make meaning out of their individual encounters.

After the agents have their first session undercover, Janice will not be present for the next week’s meeting.  This will place an already paranoid group on their highest alert and should show the agents that time is running out for everyone.

## NPCs

### Janice Cooke

A former social worker from Maryland who was the victim of a cultist’s mind control while working for Child Protective Services (CPS).  Years ago she began investigating claims of abuse on an orphanage run by an eastern european orthodox church.  By the end of her investigation one of her coworkers had committed suicide and her memory of the entire case had been wiped.  When her memory returned, she resigned and moved back to Harlem.  Afterward, she felt compelled to look for others that had experienced similar strangeness and share her story.

### Nicholas Carmichael

A bartender who doesn’t remember five years of his life because “aliens abducted his mind”.  Nick’s mind was transferred to a strange alien body far, far away in the past.  In the place of his mind was the alien’s whose body he was now inhabiting.  This lasted for five years.  His mind was forever changed when he returned to his body.  Shaken from his experience, it took Nick months to adjust to being human again.  Despite this, Nick maintains that these things will be coming for him again.  To him, it's simply a matter of when.

### William “Billy” Jessup

A truck driver from Mississippi who encountered a strange headless monstrosity at night while on one his interstate runs.  Someone ran out in front of his big rig, screaming, and was followed by something he could not describe.  Billy stopped the truck, called in what happened, grabbed his shotgun and followed the screaming.  He found a headless and bloated corpse with mouths on its hands and a dead woman in the woods.  He fired at the creature but it did nothing.  The creature then began to shamble towards him.  Billy tells everyone that he continued to fire until the creature struck him and knocked him backward.  He then ran back to his truck and locked himself inside until the highway patrol arrived.  What he doesn’t tell people is that the wound he suffered has not healed in two years.

### Michelle Yardley

A young teenage runaway from Gary, Indiana who found acceptance with a cult that worshipped ‘the Great Mother’ only to find out about the group’s more sinister purposes the hard way.  Michelle first ran away from home at the age of sixteen.  She met the wrong people and was convinced to join a sect called the “Children of the Great Mother”.  At first, it seemed like just a group of hippies that enjoyed travelling in the outdoors.  Then she attended an “anointing” ceremony where someone was tied to an oak tree and murdered.  She fled screaming through those woods and never looked back.

## Possibilities

It should be noted that each of the members of the support group are suspects.  The following are a series of possibilities this scenario could take depending on the Keeper and/or the group’s tastes.

### It was Nick

There’s a good explanation as to why Nick is behind the disappearances;  Nick never got his body back.  The Yithian that took over his body still remains.  He used Nick’s story and his connection to the group in order to extract their brains from their skulls as part of this Yithian’s growing fascination with the human brain.  He lured Daniel to his apartment, murdered him and then proceeded to cut open his skull and place his brain in a jar.  Back at his apartment, Nick has several jars with brains suspended inside.  If the investigators confront him or wish to do so before a SWAT team does, he will be waiting with a lightning gun.

### It was William

What poor Billy does not realize is that ever since he was struck by that creature in the woods, he has been an unwitting pawn of Y’golonac.  He called Daniel out to meet him for drinks, got him drunk and drove him to the nearby woods where the creature was waiting to be fed.  In those woods, the investigators will find a headless corpse with mouths formed at the palm of its hands.

### It was Michelle

Michelle never left the cult.  This entire support group was used as a clever ploy by the “Children of the Great Mother” to lure out suitable sacrifices.  Daniel was called out to a remote cabin in the New Jersey woods where Michelle and a band of cultists descended down upon him, strapped him to a tree and murdered him for their dark goddess.  If the investigators go there, they will find corpses, some armed cultists and possibly a Mythos creature or two of the Keeper’s liking.

## Credits

First Hand Accounts was written by Eric Rodriguez for the 2014 shotgun scenario contest.