The Yellow Box Podcast

## Background

An underground podcast known as The Yellow Box podcast have for several years put out an yearly podcast discussing the greatest acts of supernatural terror that have occured during the past year. The podcasters rank their favorite acts of mayhem and madness. While this started as something small and fun for a group of eccentric Hastur cultists to do, it quickly turned into something more. While the hastening of the end of all things is the true goal of most Hastur cults they are also, almost to a man, creatives. Those dragged in under the sway of Carcosa are mostly people who sought out the play The King in Yellow or art inspired by it. They now create their own art in the form of the terror they unleash. And they want some recognition, damn it! The yearly Yellow Box podcast had become a venue where up and coming sorcerers could get noticed and where the big boys could get recognised as leading in the field. It was the Oscars for Hastur cultists!

And suddenly it was over. In their latest podcast the hosts announced that they would broaden their scope to the entire spectrum of the occult and not just talk about Hastur. This ignited the same flame of terror in the hearts of Hastur cultists accross the world… Would they release the yearly podcast where they ranked their favorite acts of Hasturian terrorism? They had to, right? But perhaps they wouldn't! That could not stand!

A bunch of Hastur cultists got together and made a plan. They sent out invitations. They will make sure that The Yellow Box podcast will put out the episode. At the same time, during December 2022, they will all descend upon the small town of Greenville, Indiana, and they will unleash all their creativity! One occultist joked about them ”machine gunning them with quality”, this took hold and the whole endeavor is now known as the ”Machine Gun Contest ''.

## How do you distribute an illegal, occult podcast anyway?

By lowtech means and with the help of scrying. The hosts of The Yellow Box podcast use scrying and one hosts psychic abilities to find other people connected to Carcosa. They then mail them cassette tapes with the podcasts. The occult underground then circulates and copies the tapes.

## How does Delta Green get involved

A small traveling theater company by the name of BananaBanana have announced that they are performing the play ”The King in Yellow” on a field just outside Greenville the 13th of December as a part of a local culture festival and fair. That cannot happen. The organization scrambles and sends in a cell or working group to deal with it.

That part is a lie. Yeah, there is a performance art group by the name BananaBanana but they are as confused as the agents are. That is because Hastur cultists have lured the agents to Greenville. What is a performance art contest without spectators after all? And the rest of the fair? It is Carcosa tinted nightmares.

## Solving the problem

Kill them all! Welcome to a target rich environment filled with irredeemable bastards beyond sanity. Let the bodies hit the floor! Cleaning up the evidence will be the bigger problem in this situation.

## Showtime

Jonas Preston is a nightmarish domestic terrorist and performance artist. He is wanted for kidnapping, torture and murder after having used chemical agents on kidnapped sex workers in Chicago resulting in their grissly suicides. He is posing as the proprietor of a house of mirrors set up as part of the fair. Once visitors are inside he releases the exotic chemical agents as a gas that causes the victims to see their deepest fears and nightmares come to life. This causes 1 point of sanity per 10 seconds exposed to it while at the same time leaving the victims too dazed to navigate the maze.

Tobias Wilsson is a renegade movie director who has just finished his masterpiece, a malign sentient movie. Seeing any part the movie causes 1d6 sanity loss, not immediately stopping watching causes an additional 1d100 sanity loss. He is calling the movie ”Fun time adventures” and is showing it for free for children and parents in the local cinema as part of the fair. If the movie is allowed to play in its entirety it will try to migrate to other screens and show itself without warning on the new screen. This ends if a showing of the movie is interrupted.

Janni Freeman is a performance artist and actor. She is dressed up as a whimsical princess in an Alice in Wonderland inspired fashion. She is wearing all yellow and is calling herself the Yellow Princess. She is handing out candy and treasure hunt maps to children at the fair. Children who follow the, to adult eyes' very simple and safe, maps are never seen again. They wander into the domain of the Yellow King.

Franz Smith is new to the scene and is going high tech with his project as a way to stand out from the competition. He is letting visitors to the fair try a new mobile game where the different players are supposed to fight monsters and find treasures in a  specific area, for this test the fair. Mostly the players cooperate but there is also a battle mode where players duel each other. The twist? If you die in the game, you die in real life!

Stefan Chapman is a serial killer who through his occult practices have become weird. The people he kills are ”forgotten” by everyone that knew them. No amount of evidence can convince them that the victim ever existed. He is killing people at the fair, first discreetly and then more and more openly. If not stopped he will end the evening by shooting into the crowd with an AR-15. Families will go home missing members that they deny ever existed.

Sara Jones is an pharmapsychologist and a malign psychonaut, using drugs and alchemical concoctions to achieve altered mental states in which truths about the mind and the universe are perceived. She wants to share her insights about the true insignificance of human lives and aspirations with the world. She has prepared her strongest potion, added a lot of sugar and is handing it out in colorful bottles as free samples of ”Space Activity energy drink”. Drinking Space Activity causes hideous visions, irrational behavior and 1d20 sanity loss within one hour.

Eric Morris is a disturbed artist touched by the beyond. He is painting fun caricatures of visitors to the fair for free.  If somebody takes the caricature of themselves home and sleeps with it in their home the supernatural effect takes place. At this point the caricature crawls out of the painting and tries to murder their model. If they succeed the model is trapped inside the painting, aware but unable to move, while the caricature takes over their life. Nobody except the model can see the living caricature. If the caricature is killed the picture loses its supernatural nature. The caricature has the exact same capabilities as the model.

Sebastian Shea is an engineer that runs the small roller coaster that sits at the outskirts of the fair. The roller coaster is built from metal and is painted yellow. It is intricate for this type of mobile roller coaster that is built up for fairs and the like, but not suspiciously so. The roller coaster is however built according to occult principles and causes a strange alchemical effect in the brains of those who ride it if they are taller than 6 foot 5 inches. The process is painful but the screams are not noticed because the victims are riding a roller coaster. The change in the brain chemistry allows Shea to take over their bodies and control their minds. He can do this with up to 10 victims at once, when he has reached this number he will feign a mechanical malfunction and shut the roller coaster down. He will then control the people he has taken control over, wait until they get home and then use their bodies to kill their families and form the Yellow Sign from their intestines.

Marie Dietz is an up and coming cultist and Youtuber. She is not herself unleashing any mayhem but she is here to document the madness and then spread footage of it online. She is livestreaming her experience but is also preparing to make a several hour long video essay about the mythos events that are going down at the fair. She will in some ways do more damage than the others since she will multiply the number of people who see the unnatural occurrences. She will probably cross paths with the agents since she is investigating the same things they are, but for a wildly different reason.

## Credits

The Yellow Box Podcast was written by Sebastian Lindeberg for the 2022  Shotgun Scenario contest. Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wPFWN9cF0GZ2V1hy7Zhk0JYP6ErFgIh4vZm-Rzj2k8M/edit.

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are © Sebastian Lindeberg, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

The Yellow Box Podcast is not available here under CC-BY-SA.

For preservation purposes, a PDF backup of the original submission can be found here.