We Don't Talk Like We Used To

## INTRODUCTION

It’s every Delta Green agent’s worst nightmare. She found the case files. She found the letter that explains everything, the one that talks about what you fight. The one that you never meant to send.
Your handler is screaming at you. You fucked it up. Big time. Your mind is racing with all the different outcomes and escape plans. The go-bag is in the trunk. Your service pistol is loaded. But first, you have to see her. Make sure she’s okay.
You’re not thinking about how the story doesn’t make sense.
It’s a place that’s familiar to you both. Public, so no one makes a scene. Your favorite bar, a coffee shop, maybe that nice Italian place down the road. You don’t notice her car isn’t parked outside. You open the door and step inside, but something’s not right…
*They’re* here.

## THE SITUATION

Each agent has been lured to a familiar location by the warbling voice of a beloved Bond. Or perhaps it was a perfect replica of their handler, screaming red obscenities at them for breaching the conspiracy and threatening their Bond to ensure compliance.
It’s all lies. They’ve instead stepped into the foyer of a sprawling estate - the Manse. A fragment of the Night World, lovingly crafted for the Agents. Every detail is just right.
It is a construct of the campaign - the Agents, their Bonds, their shared operations and traumas. They built it together. The door behind them has vanished.
The Agents hear terrified whispers behind a stately mahogany door. Behind it, they find their Bonds. Although the Introduction describes how an Agent might view the situation if their Bond is a significant other, the ‘captured’ Bond might instead be a child, parent, or best friend.
In truth, these are Dolls. Facsimile creatures that have had the consciousnesses of the Agents’ beloved Bonds grafted onto them. They will pass every physical inspection, as well as any interrogation.
They do not know they are inhabiting Dolls.
They have been locked in this room for hours after being kidnapped by masked assailants. The descriptions the Bonds give should match any recurring antagonists or cultists encountered by the Agents, or possibly even federal agents for an extra layer of paranoia.
Each Doll is wearing a symbol-bearing necklace they cannot remove. Any agent with **Occult** or **Unnatural** above 10% recognizes them as binding artifacts that are keeping everyone trapped within the Manse. If no Agent has the skill, one of the Bonds will have ‘overheard’ this from one of their captors.
The Agents must find a way to dispel the binding artifacts to escape the Manse with their loved ones.

## EXPLORING THE MANSE

### *Setting Off:*

Before attempting to find an escape, use this opportunity for roleplay. Normally restricted to home scenes, the characters’ Bonds are now front and center. They are terrified by their newfound circumstances but trust the Agents to see them through, no matter how much their relationship has degraded.
The Bonds will react poorly to the horrors of the Night World. They might flee, cower, or mentally retreat from the horrors on display. They may be transfixed by sanity-shredding sights they cannot comprehend. Their bodies may be Unnatural constructs, but their minds are real enough.

### *The Manse:*

The Manse is debilitating to witness. While predominantly reflecting Carcosa’s omnipresent late nineteenth-century architectural themes, these have been crudely interspersed with motifs familiar to the Agents. Weeping lesions in red velvet wallpaper reveal sterile white hospital linoleum. Modern, metal-sheen appliances interrupt lush wooden upholstery. Carpeted cubicle walls cut through a private study lit by shimmering candlelight.
There is no consistency to how the Manse’s endless halls, rooms, and corridors intersect. Navigating the Manse does not require SAN checks, but for every hour of play time spent within the Manse, the Agents must roll SAN **[1/1d4 SAN - Unnatural]**.
Attempting to backtrack, however, automatically incurs one of these checks, as the Agents find the hallway behind them has changed.

### *Hints*:

Occasionally, the Manse offers hints to the desperate Agents. A domineering impressionist painting with a gilded frame might depict an agent smashing their Bond’s head in with a baseball bat, or it might show the Agents shepherding clueless, misshapen biomechanical creatures. A beautifully-embroidered throw pillow might have the message “If they die they’ll REMEMBER”.
Victorian-styled curios might contain secret messages that can guide the agents towards escape. One piece of blood-soaked paper proposes ‘the Exchange’ to the curious agent - murder one of the other agent’s Bonds, and theirs will be set free. Sharing this fact with another will nullify the Exchange.
NPCs encountered in the Manse might also hint about how to escape.

### *Possible Rooms and Events:*

**The Toy Room:** If an Agent has ever wished for a specific piece of gear, they can find it here. Night vision goggles, assault rifles with the serial numbers scraped off, a packet of plastic explosives. It’s here, and it’s glorious. When first attempting to use items found here, the agent makes a **Luck** roll. If it succeeds, it functions normally. If it fails, the item was a perfect fake. A dud.

**The Guide:** A deceased member of the group (or abandoned Bond) finds the Agents and steers them towards the most explosive escape from the Manse - murdering the Dolls.
**Piece of the Puzzle:** An oppressively vibrant yet frigid painter’s workshop. There are dozens of vaguely familiar portraits that have been slashed open. The tear in the tallest portrait (depicting the Agents’ handler) contains a third of the Shearing Knife ritual that will free the Agents and the minds of their Bonds. It also contains a hint about how to complete the spell - “doors are not the answer”. By tearing open paintings, smashing windows, or shunting aside furniture elsewhere in the Manse, they’ll find rooms and crawl spaces with the remaining fragments of Shearing Knife.
**The Captors:** Well-armed masked men spot and assault the party. They never target the Bonds. Although Captors’ bodies seem normal, removing their masks reveals an ever-shifting mass of flesh. Dolls. There are always more.
**Home Sweet Home:** A door opens up into an agent’s front yard. Entering the house, they find their Bond sleeping fitfully. Any agent succeeding an **Unnatural** roll (or failing a SAN check) might realize that this is a vision of what’s happening to their Bonds’ real bodies. And if that’s the case… who have they been escorting?

**Things to Come:** It’s the holidays at the Agents’ childhood home. A deceased parent greets them warmly. “You forgot this,” they say, handing them a metallic film canister. A note is written on the side in red permanent marker in the agent’s own hand - ‘Emergency Use Only’. Within is a manila folder, useful device, or written note from themselves that will aid them in a future investigation. Using it costs **[1/1d4 SAN - Unnatural]**.
Add or alter rooms and encounters as you see fit!

## ESCAPING THE MANSE

There are only three ways to escape the Manse.

1. Killing the Dolls. Killing the Doll will free the respective Bond’s mind, but they will remember everything about their experience in the Manse. When a Doll is wounded, its disguise frays to reveal its true form - a biomechanical monstrosity made of maws and warm, familiar eyes.
2. Dispelling the Artifacts. Doing so requires learning the hypergeometric Shearing Knife ritual that will free each Bond. This should be painful to accomplish - the Agents must trade their own health and sanity to safeguard their Bonds.
3. The Exchange. Any agent that murders a comrade’s Bond frees their own.

When every Bonds’ mind has returned to reality, the Agents find a door that exits the Manse.

## RESOLUTION

### *The Fallout*

If the Shearing Knife ritual is performed, the Bonds’ minds will return to their true bodies. They will only remember fragments of the Manse, and shake them away as a strange yet vivid nightmare. Upon returning home, the agent will find them at the breakfast table, a steaming cup of coffee in hand. They’re safe. “We don’t talk like we used to,” they say. Gain 1d8 SAN.
If a Bond’s Doll-body is killed, they awaken in their bed, wrapped in a cocoon of clammy sheets. They don’t know how, but they know it was real. Things will never be the same. The Manse might destroy the bond, or it might strengthen it, the relationship rekindled by shared trauma. However, they’ve been exposed to the Unnatural, which they might seek. It might seek them. If the handler finds out, they’ll be the next Operation.
Upon returning to reality, any items removed from the Manse are found at the foot of the agent’s bed, packed into a piece of Victorian luggage. Any wounds suffered in the Manse will begin manifesting over the next 1d4 hours.

### *It Was Always Going to Shake Out This Way*

If your campaign already features Carcosa or the King in Yellow (or you are running *Impossible Landscapes*), consider working in hints that the Agents built the Manse to entertain and enlighten their past selves.

## APPENDIX

The creatures and rituals that appear in the scenario.

### **The Dolls**

*They just want to go home*

**STR** 10 **CON** 10 **DEX** 10 **INT** 10 **POW** 10

**HP** 10

**ARMOR**: None

**SKILLS**: Same as Bonds’

**ATTACKS**: Unarmed 30%, damage 1d4. If given a weapon, their Skill with it matches the Bond’s.

**GRAFTED CONSCIOUSNESS**: Through a hypergeometric ritual known as “Sublime Transference”, the Dolls’ creators have bound the consciousness of an agent’s Bond to the Doll. They act exactly as that Bond would. They can suffer SAN depletion and Temporary Insanity as normal, but these will only be permanent if the Doll’s HP reaches 0.

**FRAYING SIMULACRUM**: As part of Sublime Transference, the Doll’s physical appearance perfectly replicates the Bond’s mental image of themselves. Only when suffering significant damage will this illusion fray - fingernails clatter to the floor, hair falls out in chunks, and skin sloughs away. Realization of what’s underneath inflicts the SAN LOSS described below. Further realization that the Doll still contains a Bond’s actual consciousness also inflicts SAN LOSS.

**MADE WITH LOVE**: Underneath the illusion, the Dolls are shifting, biomechanical monstrosities that have no power source and do not conform to conventional physics. Making a called shot for “vitals” or another apparently vulnerable area inflicts normal damage, with no special game effect.

**SAN LOSS**: 1/1d8

### **The Captors**

*They’re smiling under their masks*

**STR** 14 **CON** 14 **DEX** 14 **INT** 14 **POW** N/A

**HP** 14

**ARMOR**: None OR Light Kevlar Vest (2)

**SKILLS**: Same as Federal Agent, Unnatural 75%.

**ATTACKS**:

9mm pistol 50%, damage 1D10, OR 9mm submachine gun 50%, damage 1d10. Unarmed 60%, damage 1d4, Remove the Mask: SAN 0/1d4

**EXACTLY AS YOU FEARED**: Outwardly, the Captors’ appearances are a masked and heavily armed version of the Agents’ primary human antagonists. Only removing their masks or analyzing their remains will inflict SAN LOSS.

**DON’T LINGER**: If an agent spends too long analyzing a ‘dead’ Captor, the body will erupt into a mass of bone and bladed wire that covers a square meter and will deal 1d6 laceration damage to anything within that area. A successful DEX X 5 check will halve this damage.

**MADE WITH GLEE**: The Captors are also Dolls - biomechanical monstrosities that have no power source, and do not conform to conventional physics. Making a called shot for “vitals” or another apparently vulnerable area inflicts normal damage, with no special game effect.

**SAN LOSS**: 1/1d4

### **Sublime Transference**

*Complex ritual*. Study time: *days*; *1d6 SAN.* Activation: *hours*; *8 WP, 1d6 SAN*, *biological sample of target*

The operator binds a chosen subject’s consciousness to a mobile, illusory, and Unnatural vessel known as a Doll. It requires a biological sample from the subject (hair, blood, skin, etc.) and an empty Doll, over which the performer chants a complex incantation. The subject-doll hybrid may be left to their own devices, unconsciously conditioned to perform specific tasks (for an additional 2 WP per task), or implanted with false memories (2 WP per memory). The subject is not aware the transference ever took place, but their true bodies enter a comatose state. If the Doll (or the necklace each Doll wears) is destroyed, the consciousness returns to its original vessel with all memories of their time as a Doll intact.

### **Shearing Knife**

*Simple ritual*. Study time: *hours; 1D4-1 SAN*. Activation: *20 minutes; 3 WP, 1d4 SAN*.

This ritual severs the connection between a creature and the consciousness within it. The ritual requires the operator to draw complex diagrams around a supine body, followed by a brief, intense chant. If performed on a Doll (or other Unnatural container), the imprisoned mind will return to its original body (if it remains intact). If performed on a normal human or the original body has been destroyed, the subject’s mind is instead torn from their brain and hurled into the screaming cosmic winds.

## Credits

We Don't Talk Like We Used To was written by GunmetalStuG for the 2021  shotgun scenario contest.

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 © GunmetalStuG, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

We Don't Talk Like We Used To is not available here under CC-BY-SA.
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xc25m4MP4YGs6AbyOHMXl01iBp94gWz6nXONjLDLqfM/edit