SHEEPDOGS WITHIN THE EARTH
Last week I ran the first session of SHEEPDOGS WITHIN TH EARTH, a Wolves Upon the Coast game run with no other additions or expansions using Delta Green. The premise is that the PCs are members of the Program and have been tasked with going into the Hollow Earth to find rituals, artifacts, and information to strengthen the Program. I had hoped the session would go well when planning it and it went better than I could have anticipated.
I did not change the stats or material in any way. I ran the normal Wolves monsters, keys, and random encounters. A few times to tie it into the premise of the game I added context or my own sauce, but even when running Wolves RAW that sort of thing is expected to bring the game to life.
The PCs drove a truck through the hole in the earth and got to exploring. Their travels took them to smoldering ruins where bickering gargoyles argued about law, to a massive stone juggernaut snake, to running over a griffon with their truck, and finally meeting with a wolf that tore open the sky and participating in its violent jubilee.
These things would have felt more heroic, literary in a normal Wolves games. These foes would be the targets of boasts, the villages a source of supplies or maybe allies. The agents didn't see it that way. They killed, they interrogated, they forged alliances against threats towards the USA, and they used overwhelming force. It was brutal. At one point an agent used a flashbang to stop what would have been a deadly encounter in Wolves in its tracks by flashing six lizardmen and then one tapping them while they clawed at their ears and eyes.
Nothing about the game felt very heroic or celebratory of the violence within. The most normal character, Laura an anthropologist, acted as an interpreter towards the Latin speakers but was less interested in understanding their culture or history and more focused on making deals that benefited the squad. The rest of the gun luggers tried to gauge threats and then broke into violence as soon as they thought it was needed.
It was an incredible session that did away with the pussy footing around of the heroics of violence that D&D can often fall prey to. It's something I look forward to running again soon and seeing how the party grows in power and what they choose to do to try and seize it.