Visiting Haystack, Oregon in Delta Green
I've run Luke Gearing's Haystack, Oregon. twice now in Delta Green. The first time was for five players across two sessions; the second time was for three players in a single session.
I enjoyed the scenario both times I ran it, though I encountered a few snags that slowed the game down and detracted from the overall experience. I now feel familiar enough with the module to provide guidance and suggestions to other GMs looking to bring it to their tables. Spoilers for the module follow.
The Brief
I really recommend printing out the print out from the brief. It might've just been how I communicated it to my players, but I saw a lot of confusion about specific details in the note after only reading it out loud.
As an extreme example, my first group of players heard "Close any business he may have opened" after the line about Poacher going there on unofficial business and thought he opened a barber shop or something. It was very funny, but it's the kind of unintentional red herring that just bogs down the game and wastes time.
I preferred to act out the transcript of the phone call, but you might want to print that out as well. I think it's less essential players understand everything that happened in that sequence as much as it is important they understand Poacher's cover is blown and he's hurt, if not already dead.
The Town
The module as written doesn't provide a map. You can figure out the general idea of the town and the surrounding environment from reading it over a few times, but a very relevant question at the table will be "How long does it take to get from Point A to Point B here?" and "If we do something suspicious, how long will it take for the sheriff/the cultists/etc to show up?"
One helpful lesson I've learned as a GM is to provide players an overview of the town or location they're exploring in an organic, diegetic way beyond handing them a map.
I forgot to do this the first time I ran Haystack, which hurt the play experience: When the players heard about the old canning factory, they had no reference as to where it was or what it was because I had failed to mention it or put it into context of the surrounding environment.
The second time I ran it, I described the town as a C-shape hugging the Pacific Ocean. The road into town from the south is elevated on a hill, so players were able to see the old canning factory, the harbour, and both motels when they arrived. The road in leads past the harbour, meaning the first thing the players see is a group of day laborers milling around and hoping for work. This reinforces how desolate Haystack is and how desperate the people who live there are while also providing an opportunity to introduce NPCs like Charlie Howard and Frankie Mason.
Another thing about the town is that it's very unclear what anyone does when they're not being impoverished townspeople or cultists. When you run an investigation module set in a small town, players will often think to check out a local bar or a diner. Haystack lacks both of those features as written. While I think that contributes to the desperate, abandoned vibe the module is going for, it makes it harder for players to find any surface area that can serve as a launching point for the investigation.
I personally haven't found a satisfying answer to this problem yet. The first time I ran Haystack, I created a diner where a few of the NPCs passed through, but this introduced another red herring that slowed the session down (a player went into the bathroom to look for anything suspicious, of which there wasn't anything, because I added the diner myself and decided the owner wasn't part of the cult). The second time, the players made a beeline for the Waterfront Motel after talking to Charlie Howard and didn't really need to do much else to get the investigation going.
The characters in Haystack
The point about the map and the importance of establishing a sense of place ties into how certain characters do or don't integrate into the module.
One example is the sheriff. There's no mention of the his office in town, so you need to intentionally inject him into the scenario for your players to come across him. Players might think to go to the local authorities early in their investigation, but if they're trying to maintain cover (Delta Green in 1990 was a government conspiracy, and flashing an FBI badge only gets you so far when a cult is involved), it's a less appealing approach.
The same thing happened with Frankie Mason. My players just never stuck around the harbour long enough to run into him, nor they did think to go looking for the harbour master. One solution is to have the sheriff pull over Frankie Mason for a DIU or find him asleep in his car by the harbour as the PCs roll into town. Otherwise, the sheriff might only show up if the players get into trouble, precluding him from steering them toward the manor.
Speaking of the manor, it's a pretty easy fix to have other NPCs mention it if players ask about someone from out of town. "You mean those kids squatting at the manor?" It creates another layer of redundancy if your players don't end up running into the sheriff or Erin Wallace (who is definitely not related to the Wallaces who own Joe's Motel).
The Hydrean Order
It could also be helpful to establish the size of the Hydrean Order. As written, it consists of at least 16 + d6 unnamed NPCs (the six guarding the factory, the 10 on the Lucky, and the d6 that will join Imogen if she flees) in addition to the ones identified by name. My players in the second session ended up getting into a shoot out at the Waterfront Motel. Callum Marsh called for backup, and the players wanted to hit the canning factory while the guards were looking for them. But were the guards gone? Are there enough cultists that when reinforcements are sent out, the patrol around the canning factory is maintained? There probably are! I liked the idea enough that I halved the number of guards still on duty when the PCs got to the canning factory, but it's the kind of detail you should probably decide ahead of time.
The mystery
As written, there's no way for the players to discover what's really going on in Haystack (unless they end up interrogating a mi-go, which is feasible, maybe? I don't think of the fungi from Yuggoth as particularly chatty, but maybe I'm wrong). That is OK in my eyes because that sort of unknowable truth is thematically appropriate to Delta Green and appears in other modules. The mystery in "Last Things Last" functions in a similar way, for examples.
With that in mind, the actual questions left for them to answer are:
- Who attacked Poacher and where?
- Why did they attack him/what do they have to hide?
- Is he alive, and if so, where?
This worked well at the table for me. Once again, the main thing to watch out for are small details that you should decide on ahead of time.
One of them is "How did Poacher get to Haystack?" One of my players in the second session said they wanted to look for out-of-state plates in the parking lots by the motels. It's a good question, and I said there was a car with California plates in front of the Waterfront Motel, but you might also decide that Poacher took the bus mentioned in Charlie Howard's write up. Either one is fine, but it's a good detail to nail down ahead of time.
A small inconsistency that I caught: the note in Poacher's room mentions "no sign of Poacher." The intent is clearly that these are Poacher's notes, so I make sure to remove this whenever my players find the notes.