There have been a number of introductory scenarios for jumpstarting a Delta Green campaign. Adam Scott Glancy’s Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is the OG. And while it's not without issues, it’s still among the best.

For a start it gets 10/10 for tone and genre. More than any Delta Green scenario I’ve played, Puppet Shows really scratches the detective procedural itch. Most Delta Green scenarios have a murder mystery or disappearing person(s) premise, but this premise tends to blur quickly into other genres (body horror, bug hunt, surreal horror). Puppet Shows hews more consistently to the tropes. Players get to fully immerse themselves in the roles of True Detectives, pursuing answers to murders both gory and intriguing. It’s rare for our table to spend a full thirty minutes puzzling over evidence without anyone getting bored, GM included.

Equally outstanding is the setting of Arizona. Its contemporary Western feel is super evocative and a nice break from the alternating white small-town backwaters or big city locales that situate most other DG scenarios. If approached with sensitivity, the reservation-federal politics add a welcome wrinkle of complexity. We foregrounded this by having one of our team play a member of the tribal police assisting the feds.

The downsides pertain to the railroaded way in which much of the scenario is written. First published in the 90s, Puppet Shows bears the linear markings of too much of that era’s adventure design. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a degree of predetermination. After all, this is a murder mystery: there is only one possible murderer and the players WILL find that person provided they don’t utterly fail at being detectives.

But a mystery scenario should offer a range of avenues to arrive there. Clues need to be sufficient and ideally discoverable in a few different ways and places. Puppet Shows falls short here. There is one key clue that players are unlikely to unearth without heavy GM prompting (so much so that the scenario suggests local law enforcement can just find it if the players don’t). And there’s one essential location which has insufficiently compelling leads pointing players there; leads so absent that a dream sequence of all things is suggested as a means of telling the players they should go there. I highly encourage GMs to concoct a few additional leads and clues that give the players greater agency.

These design choices may derive from the fact that Puppet Shows was originally angled at first-time players. Apparently such players needed hand-holding while they got comfortable with the system and setting. This might have made sense in the 90s, when Puppet Shows was the only introduction to Delta Green. But in 2024, this scenario is the go-to introduction for playing Delta Green in the 90s. That difference makes all the difference. And whether they’re experienced or novice, players don’t need to be railroaded. They certainly don’t need NPCs or GM-initiated dream sequences doing their detective work for them.

And yet…Puppet Shows gets so much right on the macro scale. The premise, the villain, the escalating mystery, the showdown, the hints of mysterious benefactors and governmental antagonists - these are a compact yet flexible kit of parts with which to get players hooked on a Delta Green campaign.

The proof is in the playing. There are objectively better written and designed Delta Green scenarios. But few have been as enjoyable for myself and my players.

SPOILER ALERT

Our group finished Impossible Landscapes last weekend. Looking back, I find it is an amazing experience, so much so that I’m sad I’ll never get to play in it. I’ve played one-shots where doom and inescapable horror is the premise. But to pull that off well in a campaign that took our group 5 or 6 months to finish, playing mostly weekly, is a considerable feat. The secret, I think, is the sandbox nature of much of the campaign, which gives you a lot of choice despite the inevitable end (c'est la vie).

By far the best chapter in this regard is A Volume of Secret Faces, if you take the trouble to flag up all the different threads that can be explored. And the Night Floors is also exceptional. I feared that The End of the World of the End would suffer from railroading, based on concerns others have raised. But I don’t really understand where this complaint comes from. It’s pretty clear what the players need to do and where they need to go. But there are many ways to navigate their way there. The ability to mentally conjure objects and situations is a masterstroke in this regard, and the whole setting is so atmospheric (tip: soundtrack this with the last pieces in The Caretaker's aptly named Everywhere At the End of Time mega-album, using the very final track for the Masquerade itself). There is also so much tension in navigating a war-stricken city, and the Factory and Gallery of Shades are amazing locations to explore. I’ve heard at least one person advise against using the countdown clock during the Masquerade. But it worked wonderfully well in our final session.

My main issues with the campaign concern the two lethal ‘funnel points’, the clown chase and STATIC chase, where there is little to no agency and only one correct action to take. These were the weakest points for the players, who found both frustrating. And I don’t think it’s incidental that the span between these two sequences was, for them, the least engaging part of the campaign, even though their investigation of the Samigina House during the Like a Map Made of Skin chapter was a campaign highlight.

I think these two chases are doubly problematic because of their lethality. It’s one thing to have a bit of railroading in a campaign that is otherwise very open. It’s another when these two sequences are likely to kill you. My players did not have fun dying in either (and STATIC was a TPK). No cool stories or reminiscences (unlike the War Zone in Chapter 4). Just quiet disappointment until I encouraged them to vent their frustrations.

So I’ll definitely be changing up those two chases the next time I run this. Taking a page out of Night's Black Agents' chase rules, for the clown chase I'll give some thought as to how players can attempt skill checks to obstruct the clown, which provide bonuses to the Agent being chased. And I'll probably come up with some other ways to get into Broadalbin, using the various STATIC sightings as a kind of countdown clock ('You feel them pulling nearer each time you see them'), with the chase as a fail state.

But all in all this was fantastic! Definitely going to run it again, both because of the fun I had, and because it was so prep intensive that I deserve even more from the time I invested. This is not for a novice GM, and it's not for all players (asking your players if they want to play Twin Peaks: The Roleplaying Game is not a bad litmus test). But if you're down for a detailed campaign of bleak surreal horror, this comes close to a gold standard.

This is not new information for the Impossible Landscapes campaign. It's a re-organisation of the timeline found in the 'King in History' chapter, grouped mainly by NPCs, but also occasionally groups, locations, books, or other objects.

How is this useful? When players go down a corner of research or enquiry, especially if it's off the beaten path, you can turn to the object of inquiry and have a detailed summary of what they could find. This WILL happen, and while you could put together a document like this yourself, at $5 it's certainly worth paying for the labour.

My only criticism is that many of the table of contents are linked wrong, taking you a few pages off where you want to be. While I've gotten used to re-orientating myself because I know my alphabetical order, this is a major flaw in a product designed for spur-of-the-moment reference. I really hope this gets fixed and I'll amend my review when that happens.

I never read nor ran the original 90s scenario. But what's presented here makes me want to unleash it on my group ASAP. John Scott Tynes' writing (aided by the editing team of Caleb Stokes and Shane Ivey) is lean and free of fat. Unlike scenarios that try to overwrite the GM into a corner, Tynes leaves necessary embellishing room, while presenting all the key information needed to run a sandbox investigation of escalating terror. Based on the evidence here, it's easy to see where this legendary scenario got its reputation, and Dennis Detwiller's new illustrations are uniformly excellent and unsettling.