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Delta Green: Finding the Elder Sign
🕑 Added 2019-09-13 14:00:00 +0000 UTC
Excerpted from a passage I wrote for the forthcoming Iconoclasts.
The ritual to create the Elder Sign is described in the Handler’s Guide. Any Agent who learns of it is likely to want to master it. But first, they have to find a source for it.
RESEARCHING THE RITUAL
Identifying reliable sources for the Elder Sign requires a successful Unnatural roll to search occult and weird sources and sift valuable data from oceans of nonsense.
The researcher can improve the chances with the Occult skill, but without some knowledge of the Unnatural skill, the researcher has no chance at all. A successful Occult roll by the researcher or an assistant (who must also have at least 1% in Unnatural) grants a +20% bonus, or +40% with a critical success. A fumble incurs a −20% penalty.
Each roll of either skill takes at least a few days. It may take much longer if the Handler prefers.
Success identifies two tomes said by multiple sources to contain a detailed description of the Elder Sign ritual:
- A copy of The Eltdown Shards last seen at Cambridge University
- And a copy of the Livre d’Ivon last seen at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris, France
CAMBRIDGE: THE ELTDOWN SHARDS
A call to Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, part of the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, determines that Cambridge sold its copy of The Eltdown Shards in 2011 to a private collector. The buyer requested privacy. The museum director has had calls about The Eltdown Shards from kooks and conspiracy theorists before, so it takes a good argument and a successful Persuade test to convince her to provide contact information.
The current owner is Emmaline Hale, a retired history professor about 70 years old. Before teaching history at Cambridge, Hale served as an analyst for MI-6. More specifically, and not listed in any sources the Agents are likely to access, she worked for the British unnatural investigative agency PISCES from 1977 to 1999.
Hale was never highly placed in either agency, but she saw enough to fear the possibilities of unnatural infiltration. If the Agents convince her that their interest is academic or journalistic, a Persuade roll is enough for her to grant them a visit to study the book. If she suspects that they are kooks, cultists, or government agents, the Persuade roll is at –20%. If she suspects that they are government agents with a specific interest in the unnatural, the roll is at –40% and she is surprisingly quick to hang up in fear.
Hale lives in a mid-size house in Sussex, mostly given over to books in a dozen languages on history, the occult, espionage, mythology, archeology, and religion. She has a well-trained Irish wolfhound named Oak, which growls angrily at anything unnatural, but no immediate family.
For all her years in the darkest corners of British intelligence, Hale was an analyst, not a field agent. She poses no physical threat to the Agents. But if they give her any reason for grief and leave any evidence behind, she quickly turns it over to PISCES for investigation. At the Handler’s discretion, that could result in an ugly counteroperation by PISCES operatives in the U.S. Or it could result in the Program running interference on the Agents’ behalf—as long as the Agents turn over to the Program whatever they seized or learned.
The Eltdown Shards is detailed in the Handler’s Guide on page 158.
EPHE: THE LIVRE D'IVON
A copy of the Livre d’Ivon was last seen in a restricted collection in the Bibliothèque Michel Fleury, Sciences historiques et philologiques (“Michel Fleury Library, Historical and Philological Sciences”), in Paris, France. The library is part of the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE, “Practical School of Higher Studies”), one of the world’s most prestiguous centers of religious and historical learning.
A call to the library requires a CHAx5% test unless the Agent has at least 20% skill in Foreign Language (French) or is a native speaker. Failing that, the librarian loses patience and hangs up. If the attempt succeeds, the librarian offers to make an appointment for the Agent to study the book in 3D6 weeks. A successful Bureaucracy or Persuade roll can reduce that to 3D6 days.
The library keeps records of researchers who make appointments to see the book for only 90 days. It never grants permission for the book to be removed.
The Livre d’Ivon is detailed in the Handler’s Guide on page 161.
Comments
Arc Dream Publishing
The Program's official line is that there's a world of difference between physical technology that can be transported and examined, and unpredictable rituals that deliberately break down physical reality, come out of crazy old books that tend to give readers nervous breakdowns, and were recorded by people who probably did not have humanity's (let alone America's) best interests in mind. Some case officers take a harder line on that issue than others. In "Iconoclasts," there's a chance that if the Agents call their CO begging for the Elder Sign, they'll get pointed to these sources.
Marco Menarini
I'm curious, how would you frame in game the limits of the elder signs. Like why the Program (who has an R&D group and didn't shy in the past about weponizing the unnatural... Cough cough... Mj12... Cough) doesn't provide elder sign amulets for the strike teams. We know that you can make permanent ones, and I like the fiction of "it's a power from the outside that protect from some creatures, but can attract others like bees to the pollen". What side effect would you consider? Like extensive use makes you twitchy, or for some reason start mutating you into an hybrid fish people, or just modified your DNA in way your first born has some taint traits
