Twin Cities By Night plays “Hoard”
Oh shit, why did I think of things?— Tilmann repeats the mantra of every HPL protagonist
In 2020, the Twin Cities By Night TRPG podcast incorporated one of my Delta Green scenarios into a campaign. It was “Hoard”, an entry in the Delta Green Mailing List’s 2013 competition for short stand-alone work. The original text of the scenario is available here, with heavy spoilers.
| Podbean URL | Podcast episode | Release date | Runtime | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter 1 | Link | 448 | 2020-08-30 | 40 |
| Chapter 2 | Link | 449 | 2020-09-02 | 64 |
| Chapter 3 | Link | 450 | 2020-09-06 | 50 |
As written, the scenario is very much a sandbox with no obvious single point of entry or sequence of events, no elaborate set pieces and not much structure in general. It could do with another 500 words. As he GM’d it for the podcast, “Adam” went so far in his integration that the style is almost reversed. At times, he takes the shortcut of dictating the sole player character’s emotions.
“Adam” did a good job adding plausible detail, improvising and sewing the scenario into a larger ongoing plot around a single player, at a good pace. The first elements of my material do not appear until 26 minutes into the first chapter. The player, “Tilmann”, does very well, rejecting weapons and picking the gumshoe approach. The rules of the game—contemporary post-CoC DG—barely enter into it, and do no harm.
Author’s nitpicks:
- Hawkins’s psychoanalyst’s last name, “Franciscano”, is read as “Francisco”.
- Sumner Kelsey is recast as a woman. The scenario does not explicitly gender Kelsey, but implies he is a gay man.
- The order of the floors is reversed. As written, the elders are on the second floor from the street, partly because that makes it easy to spot the hoard and partly because the PCs will be passing them to get to the other occupied floors. This is not a problem in the playthrough.
- The setting is moved to the present day, from the year 2000, but it’s not fully updated. For instance, the building was still damaged in the 1994 earthquake. It seems unlikely that it would go unrenovated for an extra 20 years and still be considered fancy.