Content Warning: This episode features brief descriptions of torture.

Synopsis: Weep Not Manor is considered the nation’s most extreme haunted house. Open only on Halloween night, only invited guests are allowed to experience the terrors inside. It is free, but getting an invitation requires a pre-screening interview. Three participants are about to find out the truth behind the manor.

Caleb – Stefan Maric, a VICE news intern
Birk – Robert “Corpserot” Preston, a grindcore singer
Aaron – Allan “roughing it” Cartwright, a Youtuber.

burner4A woman, blood seeping through her suit, staggers to the door of Red-Talk Phones. A gun is in her hand. She is strong enough to yell out not to bother calling the police. She just needs a clean phone, a burner. It is coming and it would be better if it did not have more victims to attack. The employees of the strip mall huddle behind the counter of Red-Talk Phones.

Burner is a Delta Green scenario in which the PCs are civilians thrown into an Opera without warning. I used Fear Itself (a Gumshoe system) to playtest the engine because I thought it suited the scenario more and I wanted to introduce one of the players, Shaun, to Gumshoe.

Burner won second place in the 2015 Delta Green Shotgun Scenario contest. You can read all of the entries here, including the winner Die Nachtbruder.

 

Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.An earthquake links a group of survivors together. If not for a seemingly miraculous event, they should have all died. Drawn to a mysterious professor who seems to know how and why they were saved, the survivors agree to follow him on a trip to a strange city. The city was built by visionaries but has been forgotten by history. Where is it? What secrets lurk within? The survivors know they must answer these questions or the they will never find peace. But once inside, the survivors find that leaving the city may be impossible. What price will they pay to find a way out?