Play Report: Delta Green - Impossible Landscapes: The Night Floors

NOTE: This post contains minor spoilers for Act 1 of the Delta Green campaign Impossible Landscapes. If you're going to be a player in this campaign, you may want to skip this one. 

Our group recently completed The Night Floors, Act I of Delta Green's mammoth campaign, Impossible Landscapes. Delta Green is a game of modern horror and conspiracy; Impossible Landscapes takes this theme and twists it into surreal horror with themes similar to shows like Twin Peaks or True Detective. While based on the original Call of Cthulhu rules, Delta Green differentiates itself with a focus on dealing with mundane bureaucracy and the outside personal relationships of the PCs (called Agents), in particular, how the Agents involvement in Delta Green erodes and ultimately destroys those relationships. The consequences of the game, then, are surprisingly intimate and personal. Losing hit points is a trivial consequence in Delta Green - alienating Agents' loved ones is the true cost of being in Delta Green and that's where the emotional core of the game lies. 

I first became aware of Impossible Landscapes thanks to the Quinns' Quest review on Youtube. Impossible Landscapes is a campaign of mythic proportions - a hardcover tome spanning nearly 400 pages of intersecting clues, threads, footnotes, marginalia, and quotations spanning a story that stretches from the 1400s to 2015 and to worlds beyond. It's such a vastly strange, nearly impenetrable, and richly rewarding campaign that there's an entire Discord server of over a thousand Handlers (DG's moniker for 'GM') dedicated to deciphering and running it for their players. Having long been interested in The King in Yellow, the 1895 Robert W. Chambers short story collection from which Impossible Landscapes draws inspiration, I was immediately interested in running it and my players and I undertook a campaign that began over the summer. 

Act I of the campaign is called The Night Floors. What begins as a missing persons investigation with suspected occult ties turns into a sprawling haunted house story akin to Danielewski's House of Leaves. The Macallister Building, the residence of the missing woman (Abigail Wright), is infected with the influence of the mysterious King in the Yellow, turning the upper floors at night into a sprawling, endless labyrinth filled with surreal horrors. As the Agents unearth the history of the Macallister, investigate the other residents, and stumble haphazardly into a sprawling nightmare upstairs, they find themselves caught up in an unknowable and unsolvable mystery. 

But this play report isn't a review of Impossible Landscapes or Delta Green. Because as extraordinary as the campaign may be, it is just a shell until it's inhabited by players. And those players, the way their agents connected and engaged with each other, their outside relationships, and the world of Impossible Landscapes, struck me with a poignancy that I have rarely experienced at the game table. I want to show you how this game made me feel.

There's a strangeness when running this particular mystery, of watching the Agents fumbling in the dark, knowing as the Handler what is going on and how utterly impenetrable the mystery is - it's meant for the Agents to hit their heads against. You can hand them clue after clue and the only place the clues lead is further down a rabbit hole. And yet though I knew what was going on, where those threads would ultimately draw the Agents, I could never have predicated how my players would respond to the events unfolding in the scenario and how they would complicate the situation and surprise me with their choices. And nowhere was this more nakedly exposed to me than in the conclusion of Act 1.

So let me tell you about the Agents. First their was Rick Mexico (played by Chris), a DEA agent whose estranged relationship with his ex-wife was making it increasingly difficult to stay connected to his son, Rick. Jr. 

Then there was Sam Stone (played by Carsen), a young NYC firefighter at the cusp of starting a family, eager to please his father and his fiancé, and terrified that the horrible truth he had stumbled into would somehow spread elsewhere in his life.

Cooper Crimm (played by Jeff) was an investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist, whose obsession with uncovering government conspiracies first brought him to the attention of Delta Green, and whose search for the big story masked the complexities of his personal life.

Adam Weber (played by Frank) was an FBI agent with few personal connections who was already struggling with emotional balance at the outset of the story, and who would only become more unhinged and prone to violence as the campaign progressed. 

And Abigail "Abi" Davis (played by Tyler), a brilliant young computer hacker teetering on the edge of cocaine addiction and wrestling with the expectations and addictions in her own family. (In a deliciously strange coincidence, Tyler elected to give his character the same first name as the missing person the Agents are sent to investigate at the outset of the campaign.)

These characters became real to me, not just because of how my players role-played them when faced with surreal horrors in the Night Floors, but because of how they interacted outside of the horrific moments, how they struggled in interactions with loved ones, how they trusted one and betrayed one another, how they injured and saved one another. And at the end, how they banded together to face something they had no hope of ever defeating, or even understanding.

I want you to know how Rick Mexico, whose struggles with his ex-wife led to estrangement from his only son, tried to protect Abi, offering her not just a place to stay but a friendly ear and a helping hand when she had hit rock bottom.

And Abi, dirt broke, exhausted, suffering from insomnia and prolonged cocaine abuse, couldn't take that offered hand. A woman who needed help but couldn't accept it, she betrayed that offer by stealing from Rick and fleeing her fellow Agents to seek solace from the horrors they had just experienced in partying and more drugs. 

Abi's relationship to her mother was central to understanding her. A hoarder who filled their tiny New York apartment with mountains of bread and other packaged foods, Abi's mother would spend her days studying piles of receipts and obsessing over the prices while surrounded by expired food they could never eat. In a fugue of drug-addled insomnia, Abigail scrawled the dangerous Yellow Sign across all of those receipts, like leaving a viper in her mother's bed.

Cooper, a 1990's closeted gay man who had dedicated his life to his career and his dog Walt, used his influence as a successful journalist to pressure a young, impressionable reporter named Scoop Jones into the conspiracy. When Scoop showed up shaken and profoundly disturbed by what he'd uncovered, Crimm placated his fears, inspiring Scoop to delve further into the mystery, a decision that ultimately ended with Scoop disappearing in the endless Night Floors, never to be seen again. 

Adam, the only FBI agent among the bunch, was unhinged and could often be found talking to a mannequin head while fondling his collection of black-market firearms. Comic relief? Maybe. Yet for all his deranged rants, he was the only one whose plan for stopping the unending surreal horrors of the Night Floors - dismissed time and again by the other the Agents as too extreme - had a hope of success. 

In one particularly visceral moment that would have ramifications that echoed throughout the campaign, the Agents fell down an elevator shaft. Adam, always with a loaded gun in hand, accidentally shot Cooper when his weapon misfired, landing Cooper in the hospital and drawing the unwelcome attention of a suspicious police detective, Giuradanda. 

Our final session of Act 1 peaked in a crescendo of violence. Our Agents, suffering from extensive injuries and psychological trauma, were chased from the Night Floors by masked gunmen. Detective Giuradanda arrived on the scene, hoping to find out what the Agents were really up to, and was shot and killed by the gunmen. With Rick and Adam already severely injured, the Agents made a last stand. Abi charged up the stairs in desperate attempt to save her friends and take down the last gunman with her bare hands. The gun fired, and Abi fell, dead. Blood ran down the stairs.

Responding to 911 calls of area residents in response to the shootout, police arrived, quickly discovering the dead body of the police detective. The surviving Agents had few choices remaining as their avenues of escape closed. At the bottom of the stairs, the police, a dead detective, and an investigation that would surely be filled with questions they were unable to answer, that might end up with them in prison. And at the top of the stairs, a doorway that led to parts unknown, a world of darkness from which each of them knew with a dread certainty they would never, ever return.

And one-by-one, they climbed the stairs and chose to go through the door. 

What must have been going through their heads when they opened that door to the Night Floors and experienced only endless darkness and sense of impending doom? 

I can only guess: Sam, maybe believing he could somehow find the missing woman who was still presumably lost inside, or perhaps just unable to face his fiancé and tell her the truth. 

Cooper, carrying Abi's shattered body, believing that he should have been the one who died, and hoping beyond hope that maybe if he carried her across the threshold and out of the "real" world, she might somehow live again. 

Adam, always up for one more adventure. 

And Rick, dedicated to protecting the others, even at the cost of his own future.

Each one of them made the choice, passing through that doorway, never to return. 

...

That isn't how Act 1 of Impossible Landscapes is supposed to end, but that's what makes role-playing games so special. This is the story is what happens at the table, not what's written in a book. And my players chose to venture to places unknown and unknowable, knowing they could never return, and bringing a poignant end to their characters. 

When and how we continue Act 2 of Impossible Landscapes with new characters remains to be seen, but without a doubt, this will be a game that lingers with us long after the campaign book is closed.