Definitly the best TTRPG campaign I ever played. Night Floors is my favorite scenario of all time, and Impossible Landscapes extends it to an incredible campaign with surreal horror and really cool Twin Peaks vibes. Hail to the Yellow King!

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.

I'm currently running two versions of this amazing campaign, its beautifully mad. Lots and Lots of thought went into it, the only thing I hope is that the US medical system isn't as bad as it is portrayed in this book, the UK ones are a bit better!

One campaign started at the beginning in night floors, but the players really didn't want to leave Abby to the King, it took a lot of direct prompts to get them to back off - Your experience may differ but the set up is to find this person and get them out and all the weirdness just spurred my group on. Went through a lot of the preplanned weird encounters so will have to generate new ones for later in the adventure which is a shame as they could've written a number of scenarios for the Dorchester house part.

The second started at Dorchester house and they found the group therapy session good, which bodes well for the later sections around the meetup group. I felt they didn't lose much from not doing the night floors, as the hook for Abby being missing is easy to incorparate after it.

All in all, a very good book and my players are in love with Melonia (or Ghost Cocaine as they call it) because it helps them through some of the 'what do we do next' bits.

This was probably the most interesting cerebral campaign book I've ever read. It's definitely one of (if not the best) horror campaign book I've found. My only complaint is that the complexity makes it very difficult to navigate and prepare to run.

I tend to not keeping players in a snowstorm villa or some sort so that they will always have access to normal world or a sanctuary that they can retreat to. This way, it won't be an adventure into a dungeon but be an investigation that can happen on a normal Wednesday daytime and they can head off home when it gets late.

Although this method keeps the investigation feeling flow, it also decrease the tense of horror when it happens because they can just "I'm going home".

Not for this book.

This book is true to the theme of "Horror in the truth" and unlike others, this truth is not bound to space, time or entities. It's not even inescapable because the idea of escape entails before and after the encounter. But there is no such thing here. (Curtain calls) It is and will always be me writing the comments here. Until I write it again.

This is a gargantuan beast, a wonder of design and flavor.

A pleasure to read and a pleasure to run.

But this is madness. Not as gritty reality of the rest but in perfect adequation with the King in Yellow.

I highly recommend it.

Just finished running this with my group and I must say it was AMAZING. Not only is the book crammed full of an amazing campaign that will befuddle and terrify players, but it is also laid out well that running this complex adventure isn't more ardous than any other linear story. Even if you're not sure if you're going to run this, I urge you to get this book, it's an excellent read through and can provide ideas for many other adventures.

Possibly the best CoC/Delta Green campaign ever written. Worth every penny if you're into the Hastur/KiY mythos.

This is an incredible campaign! It has all of the things that make Delta Green such an engaging game - investigation, creeping cosmic horror and dread, tense character decisions and dramatic death spirals, but it also moves beyond that into larger exploration of storytelling, reality, and the nature of gaming itself. Besides the thematic elements, Impossible Landscapes is an incredible and intuitive game to run. The digital handouts and detailed descriptions of NPCs and locations give Handlers all the tools they need to bring it to their physical or virtual tabletops. This is a richly designed campaign that will have Agents hooked from the very beginning as they attempt to unravel its secrets and mysteries. I've run it twice and each time was a really fun experience. I can't recommend it enough!

Fucking amazing. That's all I can say. Rich, deep and satisfying. Transcends the conventions of roleplaying to become a great work of wierd literature.

Impossible Landscapes is beautiful and engrossing. I have no particular interest in the Carcosa/ King in Yellow mythos. I expected to just skim it for ideas. It sucked me in so fast that 19 pages in, I found myself making a red string board of the connections it was hinting at in the images and marginalia.

I can sincerely say this is the most beautiful book I've ever read; and the art doesn't get in the way of function. I've never read an RPG with better layout. It's easy to navigate the main text and sidebars to understand how to run the campaign. It's also easy to see how to weave setpieces or characters from Impossible Landscapes into an existing Delta Green game. And if you want, you can go very deep extracting extra ideas from its marginalia. (Snippets from Project Stargate documents and Wikileaks releases; anagrams like "Hygromanteia = Mahogany Rite"; hints at the Imperial Dynasty of America timeline...)

There are two flaws, both common in horror campaigns:

1) There are setpieces that players will think can be solved by investigation or combat, but actually can only be solved by fleeing. (Don't make your PCs wander around losing sanity while learning nothing until everyone's bored and frustrated; or all get anticlimactically shot dead without knowing why or by who. Drop appropriate hints).

2) The book gives the GM a ton of cool information, much of which the PCs have no way to learn and no reason to investigate. (Come up with ways for your PCs to discover everything in the book that strikes you as particularly interesting, horrifying, etc).

These flaws are less pronounced than in some older Delta Green books. The authors are clearly aware that stubborn players will try to find the end of an endless maze or stand their ground against respawning murderers, and aren't cheering for the GM to trick their players into failure states. There's appropriate advice on how to run a horror game, how to keep players' choices and their characters' defining traits important within an overall mood of doom and danger.

Impossible Landscapes is a joy to read. I'd love to run the campaign. I'd recommend reading it for the story and art to anyone with an interest in horror, alternate history, or investigation.

Doesn't get better than this. Beautiful book, great writing, very well thought out. I haven't run it yet but I will soon and I cannot wait.

Impossible Landscapes continues Arc Dream Publishing's tradition of setting the bar higher and higher for each of their new products. This campaign is intricate, thought-provoking and horrifying, while also telling a very compelling story that your players will talk about for years to come. Excellently written, lavishly and equally excellently illustrated and illuminated; this is the epitome of what we ought to expect from published scenarios and campaigns.

Fear is fractal, and your world is a lie.

The new Delta Green series from Arc Dream has redefined the production standards for RPGs. Taking what was already a popular and exciting setting and then upping it to the next level in terms of artwork, layout, design . . . all intended to enhance the feel and mood of the game.

Impossible Landscapes takes this to another level still. It was already a complex and advanced way to treat Hastur, Carcosa and the King in Yellow besides being 'just another tentacled beastie' . . . the existing Delta Green take on this part of the mythos was to portray it as a subtle cancer on reality: an example of surreal horror as normality and rationality starts to crumble and give way. The book itself treads a narrow path between a game supplement and evocative manual, the very design of which starts to mirror the breakdown of reality as players progress through the campaign. Hints of madness almost creep off the page with the marginal scribbles and the disturbing artwork from Dennis Detwiller, that can be both photo-realistic and chillingly surreal.

It's a monster of a supplement (figuratively and literally) and you can tell that many, many weeks of effort, sweat and tears have been poured into it to update the ideas and original adventure (Night Floors) into the polished format and integrate with the other material. And in reading through you are drawn into the weird, fictive half-life that the survivors and refugees from Carcosa are drawn into. A bit like Arthur Machen in 'Baghdad', or Samuel Beckett's Malloy and Malone, there's a slight worry that after too much reading you'll start to see these characters pop up in real life, or merge into eachother. If DG were real, this book would be categorised as hazardous and there would be cells chasing down copies for eradication.

The bar got set high by the Agent's Manual, then blown out of the park by the Handler's Guide. This is going to be one of those supplements that people remember as being a milestone for RPGs, let alone the particular system it's written for.

I love the mythos around Howard Chamber’s The King in Yellow, and I love Delta Green, so when I found out about this campaign I was pretty damn excited. So does Impossible Landscapes live up to the hype? Is it Delta Green’s version of Masks of Nyarlathotep? The short answer is yes. This book is nothing short of amazing and if you like Delta Green you should buy this book immediately.

I’m the kind of person who reads RPG books for fun, even modules that I have no intention of running. I’ve read quite a few books for many different RPGs, and I feel pretty comfortable saying that Impossible Landscapes is probably my favorite RPG module of all time. It’s sprawling, ambitious, horrifying, and most importantly, creative as hell. It explores and expands upon the Carcosa mythos more deeply than any other piece of media I’ve seen, while at the same time respecting Chamber’s original vision.

Impossible Landscapes is broken into 4 interconnected segments. The introduction, set in 1995, is a reimagining of an older scenario which sees the Agents looking into the disappearance of a young artist in New York City. From there, the action jumps forward to 2015, where the same Agents are once again enlisted by Delta Green, this time to look into some disappearances at a psychiatric facility in Boston. Without going into too much detail, this sets the Agents on a journey of surreal horror and madness as they discover the true nature of reality.

This module asks a lot of both the Agents and the Handler. Agents will have to be clever and inventive to solve many of this campaign’s challenges. There’s actually not a ton of combat in Impossible Landscapes, but due to the sheer amount of horrific circumstances and revelations that are thrown at the Agents, PC death and especially insanity is probably going to be very, very common. But for the Handler, this module is nothing short of intimidating, with tons of NPCs, handouts, plot details, and possible encounters to keep track of. And on top of that, there are many cases where the Handler has to keep track of and remember many, many small details at once as they unfold in real time. This is definitely not a scenario for a newer Delta Green Handler.

This is also not a scenario for the squeamish, as it contains disturbing and unsettling scenes and motifs throughout. It never really goes into anything sexual, but there is lots of violence, body horror, psychological horror, and just plain insanity. Just reading Impossible Landscapes is pretty unsettling, and the authors definitely lean into that in some fun ways. There’s a lot of creepy little details in this book that only the Handler will ever see.

My only real complaint with Impossible Landscapes has to do with NPCs. In my opinion, this book doesn’t do a great job when it comes to introducing NPCs to the Handler. It’ll tell you a lot about what they look like (the NPC portraits in this book are fantastic, by the way) and how they interact with the Agents, but it doesn’t really communicate their overall place in the story. There were a lot of times when an NPC would be introduced, seeming to be one type of character, and then like 100 pages later would be revealed to be something completely different. Or an NPC who seemed initially of little importance would suddenly become vital to the story much later, without any warning. These types of twists are fun for the Agents but there’s no reason to throw them at the Handler. I just wanted a few sentences like: “This is so-and-so, right now the Agents think he is [x] but he is actually [y]” or “This NPC might not seem very useful right now, but make sure that you set him up properly because he’s going to be very important later on.”

This is a relatively small complaint though, and overall I can’t recommend this book enough. If you have a Delta Green group you owe it to them and yourself to run this scenario. Impossible Landscapes is a must-buy.