Delta Green: Inside the "Jack Frost" Revisions (Patreon)

Sometimes a scenario unfolds pretty much the way you want it to. You see it all in your head and you get it on paper (on the screen, anyway) and playtesting helps to smooth over the rough spots and reassure you, yes, this is good. 

And sometimes a scenario is a gigantic pain the ass.

I wrote "Jack Frost" over 20 years ago and it sat on my hard drive ever since. I announced a revised edition, converted to the Delta Green RPG, as a reward in the DGRPG Kickstarter a few years ago. It's already written! All you have to do is give it a once-over and convert some stat blocks.

Well.

The thing is, I've had 20 years more experience now. My approach to writing scenarios has changed. And Jack Frost even from the beginning explicitly featured a Majestic-12 operation going askew. We have further developed the way Majestic-12 operates since then. And most importantly, I gave Jack Frost a new round of playtesting. And that helped reveal the crack in the heart of the crystal.

SPOILER WARNING. If you think you might be a player in a run of "Jack Frost," quit reading now.

So. This is a sprawling scenario. It sprawls in ways that I didn't bother to think about 20 years ago but that we can't let go today. With Delta Green we pride ourselves on following the ramifications of weird events as they would affect the human world. 

MAJESTIC detects a weird atmospheric event. It conducts a preliminary investigation to confirm there's something alien going on. It sends a response team to isolate the event and investigate it for later exploitation. That's the basic outline. But every one of those three items needs to be broken down by what happened so it will make sense for the Handler when the players ask questions.  Who exactly detected the event? How? What did they detect? Why did it arouse interest? Who conducted the preliminary investigation? When? How? What happened? Who organized the response team? How did it assemble? Where did its components come from? What happens when strangers encounter it at work? In the last couple of months I've gone through the manuscript from the beginning to help the Handler make sense of all that.

"Jack Frost" was a 30,000-words mini-campaign hiding in a 20,000-word manuscript.

The sprawling nature of the adventure, the large number of moving parts, made it fun to give the players temporary roles as NPCs here and there. Sometimes that was when a single player character was off on an investigation while the rest were in the lab. Sometimes NPCs got into something due to player action and I thought it would be more fun to let the players experience it directly. I did all that on instinct in play. The players LOVED it. But that was nowhere in the manuscript. So it had to go in. Along with guidelines for less experienced Handlers to help less experienced players manage alternate characters.

And there is a huge amount of information right from the beginning. That required careful management. The initial briefing to introduce the operation, the NPCs and security measures was intricate enough. I had to move as much of the technical briefing, the science stuff, into a separate scene so the players could start getting their bearings together in character.

Most critically, "Jack Frost" is an incursion without a solution. That was deliberate. I wanted the players to experience that sometimes their characters are meddling in dangers where pluck and grit aren't enough. That has to be handled SO CAREFULLY at the table. It's possible to get players inside their characters' heads at a moment of realizing the vast bleak emptiness that they struggle against. It's also possible to leave players so frustrated that they don't give a shit. I spent the last couple of months exploring the core events in the middle of "Jack Frost" and ways the players might work around them, learning interesting details and reducing harm until they come to the realization that there is something here appalling beyond understanding.

So with a lot of work "Jack Frost" has gone from "Hey, I remember that being kind of cool" to "Oh, I HATE this" to "Ah, this is pretty cool after all!" Which is good. That last reaction is what I'm after. That's how I felt about "Observer Effect" and "Extremophilia," which were also thorny and felt kind of bleh until the pieces clicked. I hope that's a good sign for "Jack Frost."

Check out the attached manuscript and pregens and see.