Contacts (Insurgency)

In Delta Green, bonds are meant to be your character's emotional support network, NPCs you can rely on (at least to a point) to help you deal with the massive psychological trauma inherent in the job.

These bonds could be with your spouse, childhood best friend, Very Good Dog, whatever. The point is that they don't directly represent an in-game resource as written, though they do help agents recover some of their sanity between sessions.

That doesn't model an insurgency campaign very well. For one thing, your closest bonds as a dedicated freedom fighter, after a little while fighting alongside your comrades, are probably going to be with them, not anyone you left behind. For another thing, if you have every reason to assume you're being watched by people who want you dead, you don't go visit your family between missions.

This frees bonds up to do something more appropriate to the context.

Basically what I want is: someone at the table says "hey we need fake IDs to try and get on base and none of us have the forgery skill" and then someone else says "fine then I have a cousin Smirnoff who makes those for a living" and they write it on their character sheet and then the player cell has a new resource and the occupiers may or may not find a new way to get close to the PCs.

Rule Changes:
>Call it "contacts" instead of "bonds".
>Each contact has 85% in one professional specialty.
>You don't have to decide who your contacts are or what they do until it comes up in-game.
>Your contact score = CHA x 4.
  >>Roll under with d% to call in a favor.
  >>If the roll fails, they still have a 50% chance of deciding to help you ("but I swear this is the last time do you hear me!?"). Either way, their contact score goes down by 1d20 points.
  >>If your contact score ever reaches 0%, they refuse to help or even see you ever again.
  >>You can potentially increase your contact score by doing favors for your contact.
>There are conditions that add bonuses or penalties to these rolls (maximum total of 99%, minimum of 1%).
  >>Absolutely no chance of being found out: +20% bonus.
  >>Favor will likely earn money or status for the contact: +20% bonus.
  >>Satisfies a preexisting grudge: +40% bonus.
  >>Secrecy* score is 60% or less: -20% penalty.
  >>Secrecy* score is 40% or less: -40% penalty.
  >>Public Support* score is -10% or less: -20% penalty.
  >>Direct physical danger to self or family: -40% penalty.

You could, if you wanted to, game this system to give you a contact you could use to reduce your PC's mental strain, just like a bond in the rules-as-written. You'd just need to use a contact slot on a mental health professional who could then use their skill to help keep you from losing your shit.

*These are two of the scales I've been using to track how the PCs' actions affect the overall campaign.

Kovakistan Liberation Party

This is not about a political faction.

So… we’re at a point where everyone reading this has tried out Jeff Rients’ carousing rules right?

If you aren’t familiar with it, the idea is PCs can get a bunch of XP if they blow hundreds or thousands of monies throwing a giant party. If they do that, they have to make a saving throw vs. poison or get shitfaced and have to roll on the table to see what they did while they were blacked out.

The other evening, I was running Kovakistan and an unusual situation came up, where I actually wanted to play the party out. The PCs weren’t looking for bonus XP at all, they wanted to throw a party and invite everyone in the same high-rise project as their safe house to build support for the revolution.

I didn’t tell them this but the risk they were taking was that the party might get too loud (with celebratory AK-47 fire and patriotic shouting and whatnot) and be heard by a passing USIncorporated patrol, possibly triggering a massacre that would be the PCs’ fault.

There wasn’t anything stopping me from still using the carousing rules but in a different way, making the PCs roll saving throws to avoid blacking out whenever they get more fucked up. But some of these players were doing a good enough job of keeping up with their characters that there was no need to artificially handicap their judgement.

KOVAKISTAN PARTY RULES

If all goes well and all encounters are dealt with successfully, public support for the revolution goes up by 1% for every hour the party goes on for (this is for Delta Green, which uses a resource roll instead of keeping track of the players’ money. if i was using this for D&D, it’d just be 1% per 100 monies spent on the party or something). If your characters are open about their identities with the party guests, this also affects public support for their cell and/or faction specifically, but there’s a risk of someone giving away your location to USInc. forces.

Every hour (or more often if you feel like it, just adjust the public support reward to compensate for the added risk) roll 1d8 and 1d10. If the d8 results in a 1, two Kovakistani Police officers show up. They’ll call for backup and try to shut the party down if they aren’t dealt with somehow. KPs are usually open to large enough bribes, but they'll know they can come back to shake the PCs down in the future. Kidnapping them and using them for an execution video may be an effective propaganda tool, but would harsh the partygoers’ buzz enough for them to leave.

(and if the KPs had recognized any of the PCs from wanted posters the jig would be up, but they had all disguised themselves earlier)

The d10 is to see what happens at the party that the PCs now have to deal with. Things can happen more than once; ref's discretion whether they involve the same NPCs as the first time or not.

1. Someone has gone and grabbed their AK-47 and starts shooting into the air, while bellowing the Kovakistani national anthem. If this keeps up long enough for the Americans to notice, they’ll send a reaction force to “disperse” this illegal gathering.

2. A skeezy looking dude with a coke ring and his hair slicked back just pulled up in an American muscle car. He’s got a duffel bag in the trunk full of drugs that he’s willing to share, but it won’t be long before he starts creeping out the women. If they start leaving, everyone else will, too.

3. Someone is stealing peoples’ cell phones (1d20+6 so far) and people are starting to notice they’re missing. The thief will try to sneak away after realizing the jig is up. Public support goes down by 1% for every phone lost, so catching the thief is advisable.

4. A couple twenty-something dudes with a few years of krav maga training have lost their shirts somehow and are fighting for fun in the parking lot. People are laying down bets (yes of course the PCs can get in on this). Everything is fun and games unless someone loses an eye. If a PC challenges the winner and beats him, public support goes up by 5% in addition to the normal boost just for throwing the party. If the PC injures their opponent badly enough to hospitalize, maim, or kill him, public support goes down by 10% instead.

5. Someone catches their significant other at the party with the S.O.’s side piece. First words then blows are exchanged and a pistol will soon be drawn.

6. Basically the same as #5 except it’s either a rap battle or a break dance battle (referee’s discretion).

7. Someone who is too drunk to remember why is bleeding everywhere. Like a big-ass stream of blood spurts out with every heartbeat. If this person dies at or after leaving the party, no public support points will be awarded for the night.

8. A group of partygoers leaves for a while and returns with a goat and a chainsaw, with which they sacrifice the goat. Everyone yells HAIL SATAN and the public support boost for throwing this party is doubled.

9. The booze and/or drugs are starting to run low. The PCs have 2d6*10 minutes to replenish the supply somehow or the partiers will start to leave.

10. Someone decided to light a bunch of shots of dangerously strong basement hooch and the resulting kitchen fire surprised everyone enough that someone else dropped the bottle in the middle of it and now the safe house is on fire.

Kovakistani Mountains Die Drop Table

In a guerrilla warfare campaign with a foreign occupying force, the local terrain is going to become the resistance’s greatest weapon. The earliest historical anecdotes I’ve read examples of that statement in were rebellions against Roman Imperial rule, but I’m sure it goes back further than that.

At the end of the first session of my KLA campaign, the PC cell fled the capital city to head into the mountains. Which meant that my prep for episode two basically consisted of making another one of these:



sized to fit in the bottom of a 12 pack of ramen (as all die drop tables should be)

This one’s a little bit different from the two previous ones I posted, partly because of the more realistic genre, but also to account for less extreme weather conditions, variable alertness levels for local units of the occupying force, and human-made infrastructure. The other key difference is that (unless they REALLY fuck up) the PCs will be sticking to the roads, which means that smaller wilderness features won't generally even be noticed, at least not as readily as if the party cell was hiking through the woods. The random alertness (bottom edge) in particular makes traveling more of a hassle by increasing the number of encounters per journey from the standard 1 in 6. It's also helpful when figuring out how any soldiers encountered should behave by default.

Here’s a more legible version:

click here to download pdf

I'd like to say I'll clean this up at some point but that's what I said about the jungle one like a year ago so let's assume I care more about pure functionality with these.

It may just be that my players were really on it, but this worked really well in practice. The random terrain and constantly shifting fog added an element of tactical variety that gave the PCs room to deal with pretty repetitive encounters differently in different situations.

After Action Report

Decided to give this freedom fighter campaign a go starting last evening. I’m still sorting this out in my head so I guess you get to watch me do it in real-time.

I’m using Delta Green/Call of Cthulhu rules, with the house rule that players can come up with their Bonds (NPC relationships) on the fly as needed. So far this has been used twice, to establish a base of operations each time (they kinda fucked the first one up already which is a little impressive in a way).

I’m not currently planning on adding any of the supernatural weirdness that game was made for, but the equipment and skill lists are pretty much perfect for this and there’s PTSD rules baked in.

Pretty much every mechanic in DG is based on a roll-under percentile mechanic, so that’s how I’ll be approaching Secrecy, War Weariness, and Public Support. Secrecy starts at 100% and goes down as the PCs make contacts and build up a reputation. War Weariness starts at 0%. Public Support also starts at 0%, but goes from -50% to 50%. This is because I don’t think I’ll ever need to roll under it, I’ll just be using it as a bonus or penalty to other rolls.

The setting is Northern Kovakistan, a fictional country somewhere in eastern Europe, which has been invaded by America Inc sometime in the near future. The PC cell’s major goals at this early stage are to get some cash and connect with a larger terrorist network to gain access to intel and equipment.

The party has already done a few things that affect these three scores. In order of occurrence:

1. They robbed a store for bomb-making supplies.

2. They killed the store owner.

(Even if 1 & 2 aren’t linked back to the PCs, it hurts Public Support for the revolution in general when civilians are targeted. Secrecy refers to the PC cell, but Public Support is for the whole movement.)

3. They did manage to not only blow up an American convoy without any direct civilian casualties, but also to get the explosion on film.

4. They betrayed the only bond which had been established at that point, Pizza Josef, who was the employer, landlord, and possibly illegitimate father of one of the PCs, and got him arrested in connection with the convoy attack.

5. They staged the attack literally right outside their base of operations (although i think the original plan was for the bomb to go off inside the restaurant which… well fuck Josef I guess).

6. They completely abandoned that base of operations.

5 and 6 would normally both be pretty extreme adjustments but in this case they mostly just cancel each other out. Although they would probably have left some clues behind… I’ll have to get them to make a Forensics check at the top of next session to see how well they cleaned up. If the check fails, Secrecy goes down by the same amount the check fails by.

4 is easy. The party set Josef up to take the fall, he knows it was them, and is gonna tell the Americans everything he knows even before they start torturing him (which they will do anyway). The strength of that bond was 13%, so Secrecy is gonna take a 13% hit. This represents the value of whatever intel Josef was able to give the interrogators. If the bond had been stronger, he would have known more about the PC, so the Secrecy rating would suffer more of a penalty.

1 & 2 are definitely going to directly affect Public Support, which will indirectly affect Secrecy. For now I’m just going to say that each fuckup (including multiple fuckups in the same event) results in a 5% penalty. So this puts Public Support at -10%, which means a 10% penalty to Secrecy.

3 will increase War Weariness. Once the PCs release the video, it will also increase Public Support. Five soldiers died in the attack, so War Weariness is now at 5%.

(This is a little unreasonable, in reality tens of thousands of soldiers need to die in vain for the civilian population to start caring, but I’m only counting deaths directly caused by the PCs and you can always assume there’s a lot more going on in the setting than just what they’re up to and besides it would take forever even to get as high as 50% otherwise.)

So now I need to make two out-of-game rolls to see what’s going on in the world.

The PC cell’s Secrecy rating is currently 77%. I rolled 03, so the authorities are not yet onto them. Every time this fails, the occupying force will get one step closer to the PC cell by connecting some dots about their activities or interrogating one of their contacts or something similar.

The War Weariness of America Inc is at 5%, so a 93 tells me that nationalist jingoism is doing quite well thank you very much. If I ever start rolling under this, dissent will start growing in the occupiers’ homeland, germinating in academia before spreading to the voters and eventually the politicians and business leaders.

Oh, if you’re curious, these are the pregens I threw together. We ended up with an engineer, an ex-secret police inspector for the deposed Kovakistani regime, a burglar, a journalist, and a smuggler for this session. No one went for the shock troop or the paramedic.

bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao

Pretty much every OSR setting is horrible for the people who live in it.

Which obviously isn’t for everyone. I’m told there are people who prefer optimistic settings they can use as a pure escape from the everyday horrors of real life. Some of them look at an RPG setting that features rampant slavery (for example) and see a product that explicitly supports slavery. Whereas I mainly see an opportunity for the PCs to roleplay as freedom fighters.

I’ve been thinking about how to codify the revolutionary story arc. Not as an adventure path or anything scripted like that, but with a set of mechanics that shapes the direction and pace of the campaign based on PC activities and a bit of randomness. Ideally this would work with any setting where the status quo sucks and pretty much any ruleset, just a short, slimmed down set of mechanics designed to completely redirect the flow of whatever campaign you’d want to bolt it onto.

TSR Marvel’s Nightmares of Future Past gets part of the way there with its Search Flow Chart, which keeps track of how well hidden the PCs are from their sentinel oppressors. The secrecy of their hideout (in this case abstracted into more or less powerful jamming devices) is the only factor that comes into play though, and it doesn’t do much to build tension unless the players can actually see it. It kind of works in this high-tech setting, and you could easily replace the sentinel’s scanning devices with divination spells in a high-magic campaign. This doesn’t cover low-magic or modern though. I think it’d be pretty fun to play as members of the French Resistance, or Viet Cong, or any number of Roman-occupied territories, or any of the European colonies from the 15th to 20th centuries. Or fuck it, the US after Trump’s re-election.

For those campaigns, it would make the game more interesting to keep track of more than just the secrecy level of the PC cell (assuming good graphic design that actually allows the referee to do that without thinking any harder obviously).

Popularity is clearly pretty important too. It would go up when the occupiers cause collateral damage and down if the PCs or one of their parallel cells do. When it’s high, secrecy goes up, cause ain’t no one trynna snitch. 

It seems like a pretty safe assumption that the PCs will be making contacts during gameplay, including business owners, officials, and members of other revolutionary cells. Anyone who can substantially help the PCs or hurt the occupying force, really. As the party builds up trust with these NPCs, they become more helpful when called upon. I’ll be referring to the sum of the strength of these contacts as resources. When this score goes up, secrecy goes down, because trusting anyone is fucking dangerous. (i guess this kinda replaces the secret tracking of henchman loyalty, which i’m fine with because it always struck me as awkward anyway)

Right now I’m thinking the best way of handling that is letting the players themselves explicitly decide which NPCs they want to maintain as contacts, so they always have the option to sacrifice a little secrecy in exchange for whatever in-game advantage that NPC can provide (equipment, intel, access to restricted areas, etc).

So it should be pretty difficult for the PCs to accomplish major goals without first seeking out resources, but doing so is dangerous. Stakes automatically increase as the game progresses.

Some of those contacts may also be public figures, but the venn diagram doesn’t completely overlap. Public figures could be scholars, religious leaders, politicians, generals, whatever. They can be opposed to or in favor of the occupation, and wouldn’t necessarily be native to the occupied lands. They would have influence on the revolution’s popularity, and it will be in the PCs’ best interest to keep those friendly to them alive, free, and vocal. 

Public figures are the key NPCs of the campaign, and should be written up and/or randomly generated ahead of time.

The war weariness of civilians in the occupier’s homeland increases as their casualty count gets higher or scandals come to light, and drops dramatically anytime the PCs or a rival cell attacks their homeland or otherwise provides what they see as a justification for the war. Assassinating military public figures on the occupying side should increase war weariness, but targeting civilian public figures may have the opposite effect. If this score maxes out, the occupiers will have no choice but to pull out, like the US in Vietnam. It’s possible that this score shouldn’t exist in ancient historical settings, but it would also be pretty easy to ignore.

I haven’t decided how exactly to handle random events yet, but they should (in no particular order) be general enough that they work in any setting, be affected by the various scores I laid out, motivate the PCs to do something if they aren’t already up to much, and automatically become more intense as the campaign progresses. I think the way I organize them is going to depend on the list I end up with.