BLEEDING DARKNESS

A scenario by Fee Fi Fo Fin

PART TWO

EVENTS

The scenario follows a rough timeline that can be disturbed by the agents. Below are a few of these events, as well as some others that are likely to happen as the game goes on.

Contacting the Doctor

To get access to the priest's corpse, the agents are going to have to meet with Dr. Monpierre. Dr. Monpierre's situation is quite delicate, and while she's a valuable asset to Delta Green's investigation, she's also under extreme risk. Agent NANCY takes the threat against her and her family deadly seriously, and emphasizes that securing the safety of her and her family is vital to securing her cooperation.

Monpierre and NANCY's line of communication has been, and still is, email, and although this is good enough for written messages, the agents won't be able to attend the autopsy through an email chain, and its not like Zoom video calls are really possible yet. They'll have to attend in person, and it'll be important to make sure they, and Dr. Monpierre, avoid detection.

Let this be an opportunity for your agents to flex their tradecraft muscles and come up with ways of throwing off Monpierre's stalker. Someone who looks into Nikola Oliveira can discover that he's actually the lead detective assigned to Szary's case, and can arrange for them (if they're a federal agent) and Oliveira to meet to discuss the case (and have it just-so-happen that their meeting lines up with when the rest of the agents are meeting with Monpierre). Agents can also coordinate one agent to stay on "lookout" when they interact with Dr. Monpierre to watch for spies.

Moving Monpierre's family out of New York, while challenging, can put them outside the reach of Oliveira. It'll be up to the agents to come up with the resources and cover to make this happen. Doing it with Monpierre might be easier to explain, though that comes with the question of who takes care of the corpse. No one else in the medical examiner's office is a Friendly, and so the agents are going to have to fudge some paperwork for their parent agency to get a hold of it. If the agents don't suggest anything with regards to Dr. Monpierre's family, she decides to take her daughter out of school for the week citing an infection, warning her not to leave the apartment. If the scenario goes longer than a week, or if danger rears its head near Monpierre's home, she flies her daughter to relatives living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Some agents might want a more permanent solution to the spy problem: Killing Oliveira is an extreme option, but one that definitely eliminates the threat on Dr. Monpierre's life for the duration of the operation. Of course, the NYPD are going to respond severely to the death / disappearance of one of their own, and if they know the agents were in contact with him, they'll have questions for them. They won't immediately suspect that federal agents shot and killed a police officer, but the agents did sloppy work covering up their tracks, it might just lead there. If the agents arrest Oliveira, he's tight-lipped, but if they kidnap him and/or torture him, it's a different story. After some "coercion" he blabs about having been hired to cover up the Priest's death. He was asked to by his contact with the Five Families, who was doing a favour for somebody from Club Apocalypse. He knows nothing about Satariano or the Coming Flood.

Blackmailing Oliveira is possible, though given the time-table for the operation, the agents are more likely going to have to rely on "planting" their kompromat on Oliveira than finding it themselves. The old "I put a CD full of illegal porn under your bed, go look for it, and when you find it, just wonder where I hid the over six discs"-trick usually works, but be creative.

New York's Finest

The agent's cover as an FBI organized crime task force will let them get access to the NYPD's report on Szary's murder. Good Law and Bureaucracy skills will be needed by the agents to get the NYPD to not drag its knuckles on getting you their report. Any law enforcement agent worth their salt can tell within minutes of reading the report that this is capital "S" sloppy police work, and it smacks of a cover-up job by Oliveira.

There are some good clues they can glean from what the NYPD have. The coat that Szary was wearing the night he died is logged in evidence and notably, if it's checked for fingerprints, there are some on the left shoulder. If they're ran, they come back as belonging to Brian Caron (See "Amber Rowe's Apartment).

The New York Police aren't overtly hostile to the Agents, but they're not very welcoming. As far as anyone knows, the case was open and shut and the agents are sticking the nose in their business for nothinng. They react very poorly to insinuations of corruption in their department, and most refuse to testify against their fellow officers. (Persuade at -40% to find one willing).

Father Szary Stirs

12:00 AM Thursday, Casimir Szary will stir to life for twenty minutes. He'll do the same the next night for two hours, and the night after that for good.

In this state, Szary is confused and his mind is foggy. He rambles and sometimes loses his train of thought like someone in the mid-stages of dementia. It takes him minutes to answer most questions that aren't "who are you" and "where are you" and "what year is it". His answers are somewhat more coherent on Night 2 than Night 1, but not by much.

He'll spend a great deal of time on Night 1 rambling about Amber Rowe and the Exorcism. Example:

"Ross... Peter... It's back, Father, it's...Back and its coming for her, it wants her, I think. It wants something. A body. I don't know... Amber, little Amber, she's all grown up now Peter... What's happened to me? Is this Hell? I need the notes, I need the book."

On the second night, he'll be lucid enough that, with some difficulty, he can talk about his experience with the exorcism and how the phrase "Nyogtha" that the graverobbers were reported as uttering reminded him of it. He'll talk about his investigation, Amber Rowe, Gabrielle Gleeson, and connecting to Mark Satariano about getting Peter Ross' notes. He refuses the notion that Mark Satariano had a hand in his murder. He believes his "unlife" is someting done to him by god, and that he'll be kept in this state until his "mission" is complete.

Szary Under the Microscope

Agents that take a sample of Szary's tissues can examine them under a microscope to understand what's happening to him. If none of the agents can do this, then A-Cell can arrange for them to mail it to them in a CDC cannister to a friendly for examination. If do the work themselves, they get results in a few hours; going through Delta Green can take days. the result is the same: They learn that the "black rings" moving across Szary's body are really some sory of enourmous, single-cell organism like a mold that's breaking down and feeding on Szary's tissue to make more of itself. What's fascinating is that it appears this organism is then programming programming old tissue to recombine itself to imitate the form and function of the consumed tissue, even replicating complex structures like the heart, lungs, and brain. Notably, these new "tissues" have the appearance of death, but are actually alive.

In layman's terms: It's eating Szary's corpse, but then replacing it. After a few days of this, it will completely replace Szary's entire body.

Cremation

Agents that realize may choose to cremate Szary. They'll quickly discover the essence of Nyogtha - the stuff that's replacing Szary - is basically immune to fire. The cremation oven burns away whatever's left of the original Szary and leaves behind the essence of Nyogtha, which appears like dendroids and half-formed human structures made from slick, black jelly. Doing this to Szary severely slows the recombination process, but doesn't stop it.

If the Agents cremate Szary on Wednesday night, roll a 1D6+1. The die roll is how many days from Wednesday it now will take for "Szary" to reconstitute. If the Agents do this on Thursday, roll a 1D4, and if the agents do it on Friday, roll a 1D2.

Dealing with what remains is up to the agents.

A-Cell's Special Sauce

If the agents sent a tissue sample to A-Cell for study, in 1D3 days, A-Cell has a package couriered to them that contains a VHS tape and 1D4 vials of a bone-white powder. The VHS tape contains a robotic voice and text that explains the powder, referred to as "The HELSINKI Formula" is a chemical reagent that has proven to work when deployed against certain alien intelligences in the past. The video then switches to a demonstration of a masked figure in a CDC biohazard suit administering the HELSINKI formula to whatever sample of Szary the Agents sent. As soon as the formula touches it, the tissue reverts to its liquid state and appears to boil and take on a thicker, sludgier appearance, which the narrator confirms is inert.

The video advises the agents that the formula can be used against Szary or other creatures like him to kill them should conventional weapons fail. A-Cell advises that they have limited samples of the HELSINKI formula, so they are to be used sparingly. They also tell you that the HELSINKI formula contains illegal materials, it cannot fall into the hands of the authority and should not be taken across state or national borders.

Agents can also get this if they request help dealing with a partially cremated Szary and send a sample for study. Though if you want to speed things up, have A-Cell tell them to bring a sample to Dr. Jensen Wu at the AMNH and consult with him. Wu produces a few vials on it and tests a pinch of it on Szary before handing them over.

The Flood Convenes

If the agents get suspicious of Mark Satariano, they might decide to watch him for a while. On Thursday, the other members of the Coming Flood arrive at St. Augustine Roman Catholic Church and follow Satariano to his office, then to the archives room. All come with briefcases. They leave one in Satariano's office, and the others in archives room.

Agents that try to follow them into the archives room will need to pass stealth checks to avoid the attention of the Thralls. They won't find the cultists, but they will find their coats and affairs around the lectern with the Gowdie Shape resting on it. If they're detected by the Thralls, the Thralls try to smother or otherwise incapacitate them nonlethally. Even if confronted with lethal violence by the Agents,

The Burglary

On the 12th of March, 1999, the Coming Flood makes their first attempt to capture Amber Rowe. From Satariano's conversation with Casimir Szary, and a strained communion with the spirit of Abigail Prinn, he has learned that Abigail Prinn desires to inhabit Rowe's body as was promised to her by Rowe's parents nineteen years ago. Satariano discloses this to the Flood and on the evening of the twelfth, they make their move.

At around 4:15PM. Satariano and his cohort get into a car and drive to Rowe's address. They drive around the block a few times before parking, and Satariano gets out. He goes into a rainforest cafe across the street from Rowe's apartment, buys a black coffee, and then enters the bathroom with his briefcase. In the bathroom, he orders his thrall to animate and don its clothes. He then leaves the bathroom and gets into the car and casts Exchange Personalities on his Thrall successfully. Once they know it's worked, they start driving around the neighborhood. Satariano sits in the backseat of the car seemingly asleep.

A few minutes after the spell's been cast, Satariano's Thrall exits the rainforest cafe with the briefcase and crosses the street to Rowe's apartment. He goes into an alleyway and, checking to make sure he isn't being watched, climbs atop a dumpster and vaults onto the fire escape and begins to scale it. Once he's on the roof, he enters the building through the roof access by liquefying himself and squeezing under the door before unlocking it from the inside. From there, it proceeds down the stairs to the third floor, where Rowe's apartment is. It tries the door first, then knocks, and when it gets no answer, it finally tries to open it by slamming its body against it. From there it begins tossing the room and searching for Rowe, or signs of her. One of Rowe's neighbors, Vlad Waters, hears the commotion and comes over to find the Thrall, believing it to be a homeless man. The Thrall ignores Waters until he threatens to call the police, at which point it barges at him, forcing him back into his apartment, before ditching the apartment building and hiding (and liquifying itself) behind a dumpster. Satariano reverts back into his own body and has his cabal take him to the alleyway to retrieve the Thrall. He coaxes it into its briefcase and takes it with him.

If the agents interrupt the thrall before it enters the apartment, it takes little notice. It ignores gunshots with only minor annoyance and works its way to Rowe's apartment. Only if its at threat of being captured does it begin to resist. Under Satariano's control the Thrall has no particular regard for its well-being, and if its intruded on while tossing Rowe's apartment, it ducks to the nearest window and flings itself from it into the alleyway below, it then reconstitutes and dashes down the alley and hides in a nearby restaurant bathroom, dumpster, or elsewhere, hiding inside the briefcase to be picked up by the cabal.

Detective Oliveira Makes His Move

If the cabal have good reason to think that Monpierre blabbed, or the agents were un-cautious in approaching / contacting her multiple times, therefore tipping Oliveira off that she's blabbing, he will make his move to silence her.

His wrath doesn't come all at once. He won't go on a rampage and annihilate the doctor's entire family, he sticks to his initial threat - and goes after her daughter, Penelope first. Of course, this becomes more difficult as Dr. Monpierre's paranoia (or the agent's advice) has driven her to quartering her daughter away. Of course, Penelope isn't content to just while away the weekend in her home, especially when she has a boyfriend she could be seeing, and so at some point, she'll try to slip out. If the dominoes have fallen such that Oliveira is looking to make an example of her, tragedy strikes.

If Oliveira makes the call to go ahead with shooting Penelope, he disguises himself in stolen clothes (including a vest stolen from a hell's angel in NYPD lockup) and uses a Smith and Wesson Model 15 revolver loaded with hollow-points and waits in ambush for her. He hangs out near Monpierre's home and the home of her on-again-off-again boyfriend Dominique Mitchell, a teenager part of a local street gang with a small rap sheet of youth offenses.

If Penelope is still in NYC, and no particularly drastic measures have been made, then one night (at the handler's discretion) she's able to sneak out and make her away across town to meet with Dominique. Oliveira stalks her there, and in front of Dominique's house, he shoots her twice in the back before ditching the revolver and running. If Handlers want some uncertainty, or like deferring to the dice for story, roll Oliveira's firearms to see if he actually manages to hit Penelope, and on a success, a Luck roll to see if he strikes her, or strikes Dominique (on a critical, he shoots both). If he fails his roll, the shooting is a faillure, with Dominique eventually retalliating with his own pistol and potentially wounding Oliveira.

Let this moment serve to escalate the tension of the scenario, and to remind the players that 1. their enemies aren't passively waiting to get busted, and 2. bad tradecraft can have deadly consequences. I do feel that last word is important: consequences . I'd caution just using this moment to bash the players over the the head if so far they've taken practiced strong tradecraft, and the scenario is progressing well on its own.

And on the Third Day

If nothing has been done to neutralize Father Szary, then on March 13th at midnight, Father Casimir Szary reanimates for the final time. He escapes the Kings County Medical Examiner's office, frightening the hell out of the two police officers on watch. Clad in nothing but a stolen NYPD parka, he stumbles through the darkened alleyways of Brooklyn, making his way to Saint Augustine Roman Catholic Church, stealing some clothes by burgling a Salvation Army along the way.

Father Szary will barge into Saint Augustine Roman Catholic, barging into Mark Satariano's office and stirring his dormant thrall, which unlatches itself from its briefcase and alerts its master, while Szary scours the archives room of Saint Augustine frantically for Ross' notes. Satariano awakens and order his Thrall to stall Szary while he summons the Coming Flood. Satariano is confronted by, and overpowers, Satariano's thrall and escapes through a cellar window into the night, unable to locate Ross' notes. He proceeds to Amber Rowe's house, unwittingly pursued by Satariano's Thrall.

As Szary stumbles through the midwinter night, Satariano scrambles and briefs the Coming Flood, before using Exchange Personalities to enter into his Thrall to track Szary to Rowe's apartment. Szary enters but stays only long enough to realize she's gone and to conclude that she must be at Gleeson's. By which point The Flood are now assembled and have begun to tail Szary in their car while Satariano stalks him in his Thrall's body.

Szary eventually comes to Gleeson's apartment and asks to see her and Rowe. Gleeson is baffled and Rowe is horrified. Szary attempts to explain to them what has happened when two occultists of the Coming Flood, Doyle and Satariano (who by now has reverted to his human body), while Sikorsky and Doyle wait in the car outside. Doyle exchanges personalities with Szary (while Doyle' own body is restrained by a Thrall) and commands Szary to murder Gleeson and kidnap Rowe by allowing Satariano to cast her into the Gowdie Shape. The priests leave and return to Saint Augustine, where they convene in the basement at around 5 in the morning.

The Black Sabbath

The priests spend much of Saturday resting after their late night. They spend of the next recuperating and planning for their final ritual to bind Abigail Prinn to Amber Rowe's body. Contacts are cashed in with The Fate, and if the Amici Domitiani are part of this scenario, them too. The plan is for the ritual to happen near sundown at around 5:00 PM.

The Fate's support comes in the form of a gaggle of Adepts and a Lord, potentially Anton Merriweather. They linger in the pews of Saint Augustine while the Flood convene in the archives room to begin their ritual. If its the Amici Domitiani, its a 4-5 NYPD officers (If you want it to be truly random, make it 1D4 Adepts for the Fate, and 2D3 NYPD officers for the A.D). Their orders are to stop the agents from intervening in the ritual by any means necessary.

While it is possible for the Agents to brute force this encounter and fight their way through it, that's definitely the more dangerous option. Besides the danger of fighting a Lord of The Fate or 4-5 armed police officers, you have the threat of NYPD police response, which would come running to reports of a shooting at a church. Agents can expect patrol officers outside within 3-5 minutes, and NYPD SWAT on sight within 15-20 minutes. Sneaking in during the ritual is possible, the church has numerous entrances and exits throughout, including some high windows for especially crafty agents, though a confrontation with the Coming Flood is more than likely to end in gunfire, requiring a quick escape.

There is room for diplomacy here. Agents that wander into the church and are confronted by the Flood's friends (from either The Fate or the A.D) can manage to talk their way through the security and get unrestricted access to The Flood (unrestricted except for the four Thralls in the basement). Of course, this will require the agents to be canny to the desires and fears of whom they're addressing. Anton Merriweather is a feckless psychopath who sees nothing wrong with murder to accrue power. He is however, out for himself, and is receptive to agents who look to wheel-and-deal with him. He could be talked into double-crossing The Coming Flood if it means he gets to keep the Gowdie Shape for himself at the end of it. The Amici Domitiani are not so easily persuaded by business, and depending on your take, might not even know that much about the unnatural. While unreceptive to "diplomacy", they do respond to threats. Credible threats of being overpowered in a fight, while not enough to send them running, bolsters the Agent's attempts at coercion. This is the especially true if the agents back up their threats with a display of supernatural power: in that case, the A.D's goons are liable to shit their britches and head for the nearest exit.

Your Agents' best bets are either to arrest / kill the occultists of the Coming Flood before the ritual. Even arresting or kidnapping one occultist can delay the ritual until they're free. Which, while not a permanent solution, can buy the agents that valuable, valuable resource called time.

During this time, Szary is in a stupor, confused and afraid in the lightless archives of the church. If confronted in combat, agents that have confronted him before can persuade him to fight on their behalf.

Another Way Out

If your agents decided to dive into the church without a thought for how to escape the authorities, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons. It won't be impossible for them to escape, but definitely difficult. If you don't feel like roleplaying an entire setpiece (which honestly could take up an entire session) of the agents outmanuevering New York's finest for an entire night after having just killed a cabal of sorcerers, there is a way you can offer them a sour, but tempting get-out-of-jail-free card.

After they've destroyed the Coming Flood, let them hear the sirens above. Once they've had some time to panic, maybe even running upstairs to escape, they encounter Anton Merriweather with a phone in his hands, he pauses his conversation to talk to the agents. He tells the agents he's come to make an offer of behalf of Mr. Alzis: Give him the Gowdie Shape, and they get the time they need to get the fuck out of New York. If they comply, then as soon as the Shape is in his grasp, he leaves. The agents find the city is eerily quiet all of a sudden, and as they go out into the night, no one's around. No cars, no sirens, no people. This is the case until they reach their safehouse, then the streets are as populated as ever. The News eventually are dominated by headlines of the murder of Mark Satariano and the disappearance of three other catholic priests. The news makes national headlines, and the FBI investigates the murder as a possible hate-crime or act of terrorism.

The unspoken caveat The Fate make to this is up to you, though one suggestion is that in the years to come, the agents realize that somehow, the plastic-wrapped corpses of those priests somehow ended up underneath their houses. This likely will not be discovered by the agents, if they've sinced moved houses, it will raise a whole lot of uncomfortable questions for them.

Abby's Back

Consider this the absolute worst-case scenario. This should probably only happen if the agents have been especially bad at investigating the case, impeding the advancement of the Coming Flood's plans, and resolving the situation with Father Szary's remains.

If the ritual detailed in "The Black Sabbath" comes to fruition, it goes badly for everyone. Abigail Prinn inhabits the body of Amber Rowe, and immediately uses hypergeometric power to slaughter the four members of the Coming Flood and enslave their Thralls. She emerges from the Gowdie Shape slick with gore and immediately conducts a ritual to consecrate her new body to Nyogtha, then she escapes, tearing through the church and running out the front door into the night. Any guards / Fate members that were posted in the Church (save for Merriweather) are slaughtered on the way out. Before sunrise, she has kidnapped three homeless people and dragged them to her makeshift shrine, which she's erected in the basement of a closed Laundromat, and brutally murdered them. Each night for the next week, she emerges from her "den" to hunt, killing 4-5 people every night. After about a week of this, she conducts a ritual to summon Nyogtha to Brooklyn, beckoning for her "god" to devour Brooklyn and start the coming of the Great Old Ones.

Unless you really want to, you probably shouldn't let it get so far that she summons Nyogtha (unless your agents are giant dickheads who refuse to participate in the scenario, in which case just have her kill them, then tell them to fuck off lol). If the agents' luck has just been bad, and they're haivng trouble keeping up with Prinn, others might chip in to resolve the crisis. It's in the best interest of The Fate that New York stick around for a few decades longer, and so Alzis might decide to put his fingers on the scale and "help" Delta Green along to resolve their catastrophic fuck-up. The ghoul clans in Brooklyn led by Agramant Page might sense the ritual, and, as religious zealots opposed to Nyogtha's filth contaminating their warrens, they might be compelled to make a move by night to try to kill Prinn.

CLUES AND INVESTIGATIONS

INTERVIEW

As the scenario goes on, and Szary becomes more lucid, he becomes increasingly able to remember things like the events of the Amber Rowe exorcism, his obsession with the "graverobberies" in Brooklyn and its connections to "Nyogtha", his collaboration with Amber Rowe and Gabrielle Gleeson, and eventually his final meeting with Mark Satariano. He refuses to believe that Satariano had a hand in his death.

NEWSPAPERS

Looking up Casimir Szary and Peter Ross' names in Newspaper archives will eventually reveal a newspaper article detailing an exorcism performed at a Brooklyn orphanage on an unnamed little girl. The two priests involved were Szary and Ross. Looking into Ross can reveal his protege and successor was Mark Satariano, the last person Szary spoke to besides Amber Rowe.

SZARY'S CHURCH

Satariano and his clique, as well as Gleeson, all visit Our Lady of Częstochowa-St Casimir Parish (Where Szary preached) to pay their respects. None of his affairs can be found there.

SZARY'S NOTES

Brought by Amber Rowe to Gabrielle Gleeson's apartment, they contain details of Szary's investigations into the graverobberies in Brooklyn and possible "occult satanic powers at play". They also contain his recollections of the 1980 Rowe exorcism.

THE GRAVEROBBERIES

The graverobberies being investigated by Szary was also looked into by the NYPD, but with few leads. The robberies are listed as being without particular motive and have few witnesses. The NYPD aren't ever sure how the robberies are happening, as they can't discern the tool being used to steal the bodies. Some homeless people were interviewed and claimed to have witnessed the robberies, including a few who overheard a "chant" being recited by the robbers that, among other things, includes the utterance of the word "Nye-ogg-thaw". The NYPD's report details that Father Szary and Father Satariano were both consulted over potential "satanic connections", both men denied knowing anything that could help the case.

PERSONS OF INTEREST

MARK SATARIANO

Mark Satariano is the leader of the Coming Flood. He is a Catholic Priest originally born in Brooklyn who moved to Washington D.C. and lived there for many years while studying Theology at Georgetown University. At Georgetown he met his later conspirators in the Coming Flood, Kenneth Sikorsky, Paul Doyle, and Vaughn Schafer. Satariano's early life was characterized by parental neglect, as such he is constantly searching for a cause or figure to "guide" him. This used to be the Catholic church, but the awesome power of the mythos has made his witch's familiar, Sanderis, into his "guide". He does not possess the introspection to understand this about himself, and instead sees The Coming Flood as him embarking on the ultimate and final search for God.

Mark Satariano is a 38-year-old caucasian man, his brooklyn accent is subtle and he does little to put it on, though it comes out more when he's conversing with fellow brooklynites. He has brown hair and is horseshoe-bald, he also wears a thick moustache. He is slim and of average height but not particularly athletic. For sacrifices and in combat, he uses a replica of Rambo's bowie knife that was surrendered to him by a distraught man who had confessed to contemplating burglarizing his church for drug money.

FATHER MARK SATARIANO

Catholic Priest, Cultist of Nyogtha

STR 10 CON 10 DEX 12 INT 14 POW 12 CHA 13

HP 10 WP 12 SAN 30 BREAKING POINT 24

MOTIVATIONS & DISORDERS: Obsession (The Gowdie Shape)

Obsession (Tsathoggua, identified as the Gnostic Demiurge)

Depersonalization Disorder

Comprehend the mysteries of the universe.

Escaping to the Pleroma will justify everything.

SKILLS: Alertness 50%, Art (Oration) 50%, Athletics 30%, Criminology 40%, History 50%, Melee Weapons 45%, Humint 35%, Occult 80%, Persuade 40%, Unnatural 18%

ATTACKS: Bowie Knife & Claw Hammer 45% Damage 1D6, AP 3

Unarmed 30% Damage 1D4-1

THE GOWDIE SHAPE: Father Satariano is capable of transporting himself into the secret room within the Gowdie Shape by touching the bauble and focusing. Doing so costs him 1 WP and 1 SAN. He appears to vanish, the bauble falling to the ground.

EXCHANGE PERSONALITIES: Satariano’s variant of the ritual ‘Exchange Personalities’ only works on Thralls of Nyogtha, and allows him to possess them for an hour for 4 WP, or for an entire day for 1 POW. The Thrall’s roll to resist the spell automatically fails. While the thrall’s personality is in his body, he moves and speaks very slowly and appears almost in a fugue state.

RITUALS: Brimstone Heart (See Page 47 of The Good Life), Call Forth Those From Outside (Nyogtha), Call Zombie (variant that works on Thralls of Nyogtha), Fascination, Exchange Personalities*, Obscure Memory, One Who Passes the Gateways

COMING FLOOD OCCULTISTS

These are fellow Catholic priests who've been convinced of Satariano's beliefs and are aiding him in his search for "god".

Kenneth Sikorsky is a stocky man with brown hair with a pronounced widow's peak. He has sleepy eyes and speaks slowly and softly. Sikorsky is enthralled by the secrets and mysteries that the Familiar teach him and his peers about, and despite his initial terror at some of the things he was taught and shown, he's become totally obsessed with the occult. Privately, Sikorsky is extremely distraught by Casimir Szary's death: When he was younger, Sikorsky and his family would attend Our Lady of Częstochowa-St. Casimir Parish, and it was Szary that encouraged Sikorsky to take up the priesthood. He is confident that Szary's soul is in heaven, and that he can be forgiven. If he comes to see the hideous unlife Szary lingers in, it will shatter him.

Paul Doyle is a tall and stocky man. He has black hair and is bold except for on his temples, he is tight-lipped and has a serious demeanor. During Boyle's childhood in Boston he was molested by a catholic priest, though only in his adulthood did the reality of what happened to him dawn on him. He has turned to his religion to "soothe" the resentment and fury that seems to be building in him all the time. He eventually identified New York's gay and queer community has an outlet for his hatred, and it was his suggestion that the Flood use the remains of deceased queer people to create Thralls.

Vaughn Schafer is a strongly built man of average height with jet black hair that has begun to grey early at the temples. Schafer had his gay awakening while at Georgetown. He had a brief tryst with a mathematics student at Georgetown who tried to convince him to ditch the priesthood and become a mathematician. He sometimes wonders if that was the better choice. Schafer alternates between bouts of crippling moral anxiety over "how far" things have gone with the Coming Flood, and episodes of an almost religious mania at the mysteries of Nyogtha and Tsathoggua.

COMING FLOOD OCCULTIST (Kenneth Sikorsky, Paul Doyle, and Vaughn Schafer)

Catholic Priests, Cultists of the Thing That Should Not Be.

STR 10 CON 10 DEX 12 INT 14 POW 12 CHA 13

HP 10 WP 12 SAN 30 BREAKING POINT 24

SKILLS: Alertness 50%, Athletics 30%, Melee Weapons 40%, Occult 60%, Unnatural 18%

ATTACKS: Knife 40% Damage 1D6, AP 3

Unarmed 30% Damage 1D4-1

BRIEFCASE: Members of the cult carry around black leather briefcases with combination locks on them. Inside is a compressed thrall of Nyogtha under the control of the cult. Cult members leave these briefcases in unassuming places to spring them onto unsuspecting victims in ambush, or will throw them at interlopers in combat.

EXCHANGE PERSONALITIES: Yohn’s variant of the ritual ‘Exchange Personalities’ only works on Thralls of Nyogtha, and allows him to possess them for an hour for 4 WP, or for an entire day for 1 POW. The Thrall’s roll to resist the spell automatically fails. While the thrall’s personality is in his body, he moves and speaks very slowly and appears almost in a fugue state.

RITUALS: Call Forth Those From Outside (Nyogtha), One Who Passes the Gateways, Obscure Memory, Fascination, Exchange Personalities*

THRALL OF NYOGTHA

Thralls are the remains of human beings reanimated by the foul potency of Nyogtha. Their minds are vacant, dim reflections of their formal selves, though they lack most of their awareness and agency and essentially need to be commanded to do anything. They resemble their former selves in life, though with a greyish complexion to their skin and a vacant, almost "drugged" look on their faces.

Thralls are used as bodyguards and attack dogs by the Coming Flood. The Occultists of the Flood carry them around in briefcases in a liquid, black form along with a small assortment of knives, hammers, and a change of clothes for them to wear. For assignments that require higher thought and skill, the Flood will exchange personalities with their thralls and assume control of their indestructible bodies themselves.

THRALLS OF NYOGTHA

STR 11 CON 11 DEX 9 INT 6 POW 5 CHA 5

HP 10 WP 5 SAN 0 BREAKING POINT N/A

SKILLS: Skills from life based on knowledge, reasoning, or personality are reduced to 10%. Physical skills remain at their pre-thrall levels.

ATTACKS: Unarmed 50%, damage 1D4−1

Various knives and hammers 55% Damage 1D6, AP 3

Smother 50% see SMOTHER

COLD MOLASSES: As thralls are actually a thick, pitchy liquid, canny agents might think back to the hit sci-fi film "The Blob" and decide to experiment with exposing them to the cold to see what happens. Although freezing them solid would take a great deal of time being exposed to extreme cold tempartures, exposing them to temperates near or just below freezing can severely slow them down. A Thrall that's been chilled or frozen takes -20% on all rolls involving physical exertion, including combat.

GLOSSY RESILIENCE: A thrall takes only 1 damage from any mundane attack. All Lethality rolls against it fail. It recovers from all injuries at a rate of 1D4 HP per turn, wounds closing up with a ghastly slurping.

STAKED TORPOR: A thrall is vulnerable to one attack. A stake of organic matter such as wood or bone can pierce their heart—in combat, requiring a called shot that reduces the thrall to zero HP—putting the thrall into a state of torpor. If the stake is removed, in a minute or a century, the thrall revives fully healed. You can burn the staked body, but as soon as the stake itself is consumed by the flames, the thrall heals and returns to life. (Full and rapid incineration of a thrall could conceivably kill it if players come up with something sufficiently clever or desperate.)

COMPRESSION: Thralls of Nyogtha are composed of an alien, nebulous matter that can compress, fold, and reshape itself at will. Thralls of Nyogtha are able to squeeze through narrow passages & compress themselves into extremely small spaces.

SMOTHER: A target grappled by a thrall, even if the target has already acted in that turn, may attempt a single, unopposed DEX test to struggle free. Failure means the victim's face is engulfed with a Smother attack, at which point they begin to suffocate.

SAN LOSS: 0/1D4

SANDERIS

SANDERIS, THE READ REAVER

Keeper of Secrets Yet to Give

STR 7 CON 9 DEX 19 INT 13 POW 15

HP 8 WP 15

SKILLS: Alertness 90%, Dodge 70%, Languages (All) 99%, Occult 95%, Persuade 50%, Search 65%, Stealth 70%, Unarmed Combat 55%, Unnatural 65%.

ATTACKS: Bite 40%, damage 1D4.

Dagger 55%, damage 1D6.

Withering, damage 1D20 to the victim and 3 to

the Reaver.

FAMILIAR: The Reaver can act as an assistant in any ritual that its master or mistress knows. Because it knows all languages, it can help its master or mistress learn a ritual in any language.

GIFT OF THE MASTER: If the Read Reaver sacrifices permanent POW in a ritual, keep a note of its former POW score. It may attempt to regain spent POW once per month by killing a human and drinking the victim’s life-blood. A familiar prefers a helpless, diminutive victim like a child. That allows the familiar to attempt a POW test. If it fails, it regains 1 POW, up to its maximum score.

NIMBLE: Any attack against the Read Reaver is at −20% due to its speed.

RITUALS: Call Forth Those From Outside, Clairvoyance, Elixir of Infinite Space, Fascination, Finding, Infalible Suggestion, Lure the Hungerer, Obscure Memory, Pentagram of Power, Prayer to the Dark Man, Raise From Essential Saltes, The Voorish Sign, Whispers of the Dead, Withering.

SANITY LOSS: 0/1D6 from the unnatural.

ABIGAIL PRINN

If the agents severely shit the bed, and Abigail Prinn is able to shunt her fevered consciousness into the body of Amber Rowe, the result is this: Prinn uses Rowe's body to slaughter the members of The Flood, consuming their brains and memories through castings of Mephitic Memories, then escaping into the night. Rowe's body does not fare well under Prinn's custody. Prinn pushes her vessel to inhuman feats of strength and endurance, and when the body gives out under that stress (as bones splinter and snap, muscles tear, and skin is cut and scraped, Prinn simply uses the essence of Nyogtha to "stitch" herself back together. After only 24 hours, Rowe resembles a twitching, shambling corpse with blotches of sulfurous black purulence pulsing just below the skin, and in some places, poking through in needle-like, shining black barbs.

Prinn's objective is to hunt the streets of New York City and begin finding people she can sacrifice. She will kidnap and murder the homeless, picking up and disappearing as many as four to five each night. She begins erecting a temple to Nyogtha in the basement of a condemned laundromat, decorated in the gore of her victims. Her ultimate objective will be to call Nyogtha to earth and revel with her master in the apocalypse.

ABIGAIL PRINN RETURNED

Matron of the Salem Witch Cult in the body of a 20-something Brooklyn girl.

STR 18 CON 18 DEX 15 INT 12 POW 13

HP 18 WP 13

SKILLS: Alertness 50%, Athletics 65%, Dodge 50%, Stealth 60%, Unarmed Combat 55%

ATTACKS: Tear 55%, damage 1D6+2.

Bite 55%, damage 1D4+2.

DURABLE: Abigail Prinn has imbued the hijacked corpse of Amber Rowe with unearthly resilience. She can carry on despite debilitating pain and disfigurement that would stop even the most resilient human. All Unarmed Combat damage rolls against her inflicts only 1 HP. Knife damage and

firearm damage inflict half HP damage (round up). Lethality attacks against her operate normally.

ENHANCED AGILITY: With a successful Athletics roll, Abigail can tumble, leap, climb and flip in a manner that is so inhuman, it is disturbing to watch (0/1 SAN).

RITUALS: Brimstone Heart, Call Forth Those from Outside (Nyogtha), Changeling Feast, Charnel Meditation, Closing of the Breach (Nyogtha), The Dho-Hna Formula, Exaltation of the Flesh, Exchange Personalities, Fascination, Finding, Mephitic Memories, Prayer to the Dark Man, Speech of Birds and Beasts, Swarm, Withering, The Voorish Sign, Zombie

SAN LOSS: 1/1D6

FATHER CASIMIR SZARY

If Father Casimir Szary is permitted to fully reanimate, he has the same stats as a Thrall of Nyogtha.

GABRIELLE GLEESON

Gleeson moved to Brooklyn from New Brunswick, New Jersey as soon as she was old enough to move out. Within a few years in New York she had discovered a lot about herself, most importantly: how "correct" it felt to be a woman. The feeling of incongruency, incompleteness, that hung over her her whole life was suddenly not so strong the first time she met her roommate's friends, even less so when she put on makeup for the first time and they offered to let her try on some of their clothes. Mom and Dad back in New Brunswick don't know any better and she thinks she prefers it that way (though she knows it can't last forever).

Gleeson started to link up with advocacy groups and started participating, then coordinating, mutual aid around Brooklyn. It's given her an enourmous sense of wholeness and wellbeing to be helping people at the scale that she does. When the vandalism of the graves of people she knew and had tried to help crossed her desk, she immediately took interest, suspecting it to be the work of some Neo-Nazi freaks. She had heard rumours about the Aryan Unions running some freakish "graverobbing" ring in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and elsewhere, and figured this was more of the same. She eventually heard rumours of a Catholic priest who was conducting his own investigation, and before long, he had given her a call to meet and ask her some questions. The thought of sitting across from a catholic fucking priest sounded about as appealing as hara-kiri, but she did it anyway, and found the priests's attitude quite welcoming, and she appreciated his dogged determination. He was tight-lipped about his reasoning, but let on a few things about demonology and satanism, stuff she never believed...

Until Amber Rowe came crying to her at two o'clock in the morning with the priest's notebook, telling her that she had seen a "black thing" impale Father Szary through the chest on the street outside a church. The next morning she saw the news headlines saying that Szary had leapt from the belfry, and that night she read his notes, now things have gone from weird, to bad, to seriously fucking freaky. She has no idea what to do with what she knows, until the agents turn up to ask her questions.

Gabrielle Gleeson is a tall and slim woman with chin-length blonde hair and "vulpine" features. She favours wearing baggy jeans and bomber jackets with a smorgasbord of patches and pins. To the agents, men and women primarily of the military and FBI, they probably might as well be written in Greek, though people of the right background might know them to belong to various gay, lesbian, transgender advocacy groups and "alliances". Gleeson often keeps her hands in her pockets, though agents that she them out will note her knobbly knuckles - the kind you get when you've been in fist fights for most of your life, starting when you're young. Four months ago, someone she had met only once or twice was beaten to death by some skinheads in New Jersey. She made the choice to buy a glock and take it to the range. She's not great with it yet, but she's getting bettter.

GABRIELLE GLEESON

Searching for Answers

STR 10 CON 10 DEX 12 INT 13 POW 13 CHA 14

HP 10 WP 13 SAN 52 BREAKING POINT 39

MOTIVATIONS AND DISORDERS Protect the People Who Need It.

Community will help us, cops won't.

Anxiety Disorder

SKILLS: Alertness 60%, Bureaucracy 60%, Criminology 30%, Computer Science 30%, Firearms 30%, First Aid 35%, HUMINT 55%, Law 25%, Medicine 20%, Persuade 50%, Pharmacy 30%, Stealth 25%, Unarmed 60%
ATTACKS: Glock 30% 1D10

Unarmed 60% Damage 1D4-1

AMBER ROWE

Amber Rowe didn't really remember the exorcism, but she's had the story told to her before, but she remembered nothing of it. She believes it, or rather, she believes something happened to her. For most of her life there was this nagging feeling, like something that was hiding just beyond the walls and sky, some hideous and cruel puppetmaster behind her placid existence.

She never thought much of it, and has tried to go through her life as normally as she could. She worked her way through high school and worked some dead-end jobs saving up for college. When the priest came to her, she had been working as a bicycle courier saving up the last of the money she'll need before she enrolls at Columbia in the Fall.

The priest seemed like a weird distraction at first, but seeing him brought some of the memories back. Hearing about the defiled graves and hearing the name "Nyogtha" brought some of the memories back. Then she watched Szary get impaled through the back by that thing, and they've all come flooding back. She went to the only person she knew was an ally of Szary's, Gleeson, and she's been staying with her ever since. She's terrified to go outside, afraid that the liquid black horror that killed Szary - the same one she saw devour her parents, and saw in her dreams when she was at the Orphanage - will come to get her.

Amber is a redheaded girl that stands around 5 feet, 6 inches. She has a heart-shaped face and has a cyclist's physique. When the agents find her, she's taken to reading and re-reading Szary's notes over and over, looking for answers.

AMBER ROWE

The Vessel

STR 12 CON 12 DEX 12 INT 14 POW 10 CHA 10

HP 12 WP 10 SAN 40 BREAKING POINT 30

MOTIVATIONS AND DISORDERS Lead a Comfortable Life Away From All this Shit.

Cooler Heads Prevail

Depersonalization Disorder

Paranoia

SKILLS: Alertness 45%, Athletics 50%, Dodge 50%, Drive (bike) 70%, Occult 20%, Stealth 45%, Swim 40%, Unarmed Combat 30%, Unnatural 5%
ATTACKS: Kitchen Knife 30% Damage 1D6, AP 3

Unarmed 30% Damage 1D4

MARIETTE MONPIERRE

Dr. Monpierre has it good. A steady job with the Queen's County Coroner's Office, a loving husband with a well-paying managerial position in the NYC Department of Sanitation, a daughter she loves. But everyonce in a while, something bumps against that life, like an empty boat banging into the side of her ship. The first time was the "Chain-Lightning Murders" in Queens three years back: dead people apparently standing up in the middle of the night and killing another, then dying again, only for the new victim to repeat the cycle. This happened three times, and it was then she reconnected with Jean Qualls, an old friend who had moved into working for the FBI. Qualls are two of her associates, another FBI agent and a "consultant" of theirs, sat overnight with Monpierre in the morgue. She'll never forget watching the weird, fleshy little "eel" thing come burrowing out of the john doe's chest (which Qualls and here friends called a "Traveller"), or watching one of Quall's friends go limp, paralyzed for nearly an hour after it stung him. Qualls told her to keep quiet about the whole thing, and indicated she was part of a group that dealt with these sorts of things quietly. She agreed to stay quiet, and agreed to call her if anything new came up.

Well, something definitely came up when that priest came back to life and that cop threatened to kill her daughter.

Monpierre fears that this lifestyle might not be for her. She's afraid that the next john doe she has to examine is gonna get up, or worse. Then there's the cop... She's confident that Jean and her friends can take care of things, but what if they can't. It took years before they put Gotti away, what if its years before anything comes of that cop and whoever he's working for? What is her daughter catches that hollow-point he promised before then? It's all beginning to weigh on her.

Dr. Monpierre is a 38-year-old african-american woman. She's eats healthy, and a weekly taekwondo class has kept her more or less in shape. She wears her hair tied behind her head at work, and favours wearing sweaters while in working in the coolness of the morgue under her white coat.

DR. MARIETTE MONPIERRE

The Friendly Coroner

STR 12 CON 10 DEX 12 INT 15 POW 13 CHA 9

HP 11 WP 13 SAN 60 BREAKING POINT 52

MOTIVATIONS AND DISORDERS Using Forensic Science to Enable Justice.

Seeing her Daughter Grow up to be the Woman she knows she is.

Demonstrate competency.

SKILLS: Alertness 30%, Athletics 40%, Criminology 20%, Dodge 35%, First Aid 40%, Forensics 70%, HUMINT 50%, Medicine 50%, Melee Weapons 30%, Occult 30%, Pharmacy 30%, Science (Biology) 60%, Surgery 30%, Unarmed Combat 45%
ATTACKS: Unarmed Combat 45% damage 1D4

Scalpel 30% Damage 1D6+1

NIKOLAS OLIVEIRA

Nick Oliveira of Queens gets this feeling when he flashes the badge. Authority. Invincibility. It's great. A few years ago, some contacts in the force took him to a night of clubbing at Club Apocalypse out in Alphabet City. Weird place, but apparently it's where "it's at". They say guys that run Club Apocalypse run New York City. Whether or not that's the case, they pay good.

Oliveira's made some good cash on the side doing jobs for the five families, occasionally, they ask him a favour on behalf of some friends at Club Apocalypse. Usually its just to file some shoddy paperwork, drag his knuckles on an investigation, feed information to the mob, whatever. This time was weird, but it was exciting.

He listened to the doctor's recordings after he took her tape recorder from her. He heard the voice, the voice of the dead man. At first, he couldn't believe it. He wondered if maybe he was finally going crazy, but he's kept on listening and yeah, the bastard was talking to her. He thinks Club Apocalypse knows more than they let on, and if so, he wants in.

NYPD HOMICIDE DETECTIVE NIKOLAS OLIVEIRA

Corrupt Detective.

STR 12 CON 12 DEX 11 INT 11 POW 13 CHA 13

HP 12 WP 13 SAN 52 BREAKING POINT 39

MOTIVATIONS AND DISORDERS I Am Not To Be Fucked With

Entrance into the Big Boys Club

Borderline Personality Disorder

SKILLS: Accounting 60%, Alertness 50%, Bureaucracy 60%, Criminology 70%, Drive 50%, Firearms

50%, Forensics 50%, HUMINT 60%, Law 70%, Persuade 50%, Search 70%, Unarmed Combat 60%, Unnatural 30%

ATTACKS: Service pistol 50% Damage1D10

Baton 30% Damage 1D4+1

Unarmed 30% Damage 1D4

OPTIONAL: THE AMICI DOMITIANI

But maybe Oliveira isn't just some crooked cop on the mob's retainer. Maybe he's part of something bigger?

A creation of Kenneth Hite from The Fall of Delta Green, the Amici Domitiani are spun up as a Satellite Faction under the control of the Cult of Transcendence. A full writeup of the faction can be found on Page 300 of the "Fall of Delta Green" sourcebook, but to summarize, the Amici Domitiani provide "Backup, cover, funding, alibis, and protection" to cops that go outside the law to brutalize and murder criminals. As the setup for this scenario involves a Delta Green Friendly being threatened by a corrupt cop (and not one of ours), I'm sure you can see where the A.D (or Friends of Dom, as they're sometimes called in the U.S) can slot into this scenario. Det. Oliveira can be a member of A.D, who got connected to the Coming Flood through contacts in The Fate.

Not all play groups and handlers will jive with this, another faction in the mix can derail the investigation and overbloat the scenario if not handled correctly, and some handlers will prefer to keep the scenario focused on The Coming Flood, letting The Fate linger in the background. But, if you want to add another layer of intrigue, and further insulate the Coming Flood with a conspiracy of crooked cops, go for it.

This changes the dynamic of the scenario, as now instead of a single low-level fixer, the Coming Flood have a small cadre of crooked cops and their crooked friends to sic on the agents. Your run-of-the-mill NYPD officer knows he'll be flogged for drawing a gun and shooting a federal agent dead, but the Amici Domitiani have their ways of making even feds lives hell - indirect harassment, surveillance campaigns, SWAT raiding safehouses and motel rooms. If things get real bad, then a drive-by with a drop piece can certainly be arranged, long as they think they can get away with it.

Don't make the players mop up the A.D all in one go, either. Rather, if you do include them in this scenario, let this be their introduction to a new and dangerous enemy, and client of The Fate for them to deal with. Maybe in the next scenario, Oliveira's friends in the NYPD chapter of the A.D come back for reprisals, or your cell leader orders you to probe into this insular cabal that acts as low-level fixers for The Fate.