Review of the Delta Green community scenario Telling the Bees, written by Charles Perryman for the 2021 shotgun scenario contest.

In-Short: A weird but easy to run little scenario with enough tools to adjust complexity and lethality without much extra work.

Spoiler-lite for Players and Keepers

As a community-written ‘shotgun’ scenario, Telling the Bees is short, bare-bones, and lacking any pretext of ‘production values.’ It is pure game text. While I’ve only played a few shotgun scenarios at the time of writing this (and have only been running Delta Green for a few months overall), compared to many of the others I’ve read, Telling the Bees is among the more structured, while still being open and easily tuneable without much in the way of elaborate scripting. Many shotgun scenarios read as a series of vague ideas that a Handler could build their own scenario around, which isn’t necessarily a negative thing, and can be very effective when done  well. There is a fine balance, and Telling the Bees strikes it. 

A Handler can mostly run the scenario straight from the text without extra work (and I indeed ran it while reading it as I found myself suddenly running Delta Green after making a split second decision to bail on our long-running WFRP campaign, and this was one of only two scenarios I’d played before). Yet, as there are little scripted scenes, every group should have a quite different run of it, as players are given free reign from the start, and the Handlers are given room for their own interpretation of many events and NPC interactions. This also gives Handlers some easy levers to pull to adjust complexity, lethality, and the overall mood, on the fly, once again without needing to put much effort into extra preparation.

There are a few odd mechanical gubbins that don’t quite work as seem intended and a handful sections that are a touch rough around the edges (the intro in particular is a bit flat, but that might be more of a personal recurring issue with DG scenarios in general – as in, get a briefing, head off into investigation, the DG version of CoC’s ‘you meet a guy in his office’ boiler-plate standard issue opening). I chalk these up to a possible lack of playtesting and trying to adhere to a strict word count, with the 1700ish words (including stats) leaving most locations and NPCs with only a sentence or two of description. Keeping a consistent tone is appreciated, though, as quite a few of the shotgun scenarios I read wobbled on, with in-jokes and awkward tone lurches popping up amid informal text. Telling the Bees is straight-faced, weird, and subtly quite horrifying.

Telling the Bees may not be a good first operation for a new DG group, like I did, as while it is a fairly straightforward investigation, it does feel like the intent was to shake up that standard procedure a touch. For a group with a few operations under their belts, Telling the Bee makes for an easy but intriguing little one-shot. Telling the Bees can be found online on the Fairfield Project, Delta Green Wiki, or the original Google Doc (which is probably the easiest to read and/or print out).

Telling the Bees is about space bees, Alzheimer’s, and the Welsh. Joking, sort of, the Welsh only feature tangentially. Space bees with a gestalt consciousness of dementia-ridden Welsh wizards is indeed the scenario’s premise. Centuries ago, a wizard (who was Welsh – not an important point, but one that must be made) struck a deal with some space bees to give his body, and his descendants’ bodies, to the swarm as hosts, in exchange for the swarm preserving his consciousness over generations. Eventually, the wizards’ line died out, but the dementia-ridden consciousness lives on in the oblivious space bee swarm. Super weird, and pretty awful when you think about it for a bit. Or better, if an Agent is stung by one of the space bees, forcing them to directly deal with the weird premise.

As with most DG operations, the party is called to action by a literal call to action through their case officer. In this case, they are to investigate a comatose man in hospital after he made a 9/11 call in which he babbled madly in multiple languages, including a decidedly Mythosy one. This man was unluckily stung by one of the host-less space bees, infecting him with the decaying gestalt consciousness. Your standard investigating can lead the party from there to a handful of locations and NPCs for more information, and eventually to the swarm, now housing itself in two unfortunate beekeepers.

Nothing really fixes the route of investigation, with a couple leads given right off the bat, and in my run the party ended up visiting the ‘final’ location before most of the other places. This worked fine, and I see no reason to force the party towards the initial ‘clues.’ The final confrontation is also completely open, with a whopping two sentences given to it. Again, this works mostly fine, though I wouldn’t mind a little bit more fleshing out of how the space bees may react to certain situations. 

For example, the text suggests the bees can be persuaded to wander off across the cosmos if they are convinced the Welsh wizard’s family line is dead. To make things difficult, the bees don’t understand individuality, death, or apparently any language besides Aklo. That last point is a bit odd, given the bees have been combining their hive-mind with Welsh and English-speaking wizards for two centuries. A fairly easy issue to pave over by simply allowing the hive to communicate in whatever language seems necessary, maybe with Aklo being the clearest way to bypass the dementia wizards and speak directly with the space bees.

Telling the Bees is also one of the few Delta Green, or even CoC scenarios, that leans towards a non-violent solution. It’s a bit difficult to shoot your way through a swarm of bees, much less alien space bees. Players being players, they can of course find a way to murder their way out of anything, but it’s always nice for a scenario to hint towards other courses of less bloody action. I first played through this scenario before running it, and in that run we simply talked the bees into buggering off. In my run, I tipped the scales a bit by following a time-sensitive suggestion to have the current host of the swarm be wandering around in a dementia-haze during the evenings. This puts a large barrier in the way of easy communication, as few parties are likely to come back later when the haze lifts, and even less likely to remain peaceful when bees start bursting out of the beekeepers’ skin.

One potential idea to balance the probabilities of violence with the ease of communication could be to give the beekeeper couple a son or daughter, also infected, who has an opposite schedule as their mother. This way, the party should always encounter one person in a confused daze stumbling around the property, and one that can be talked to. For some added threat, give one of the beekeepers a shotgun.

Outside of that, the only other main suggestion I have would be for Handlers to do their damndest to have an Agent stung by a bee, and to adjust the pace of the sting effects. Once stung, the Agent suffers visions from the wizards’ and bees’ pasts. As written, the hive mind affects the Agent once a day, but the scenario isn’t likely to run that long, and most players would figure out quickly their Agents should remove the stinger to stop the spread of the gestalt-Welsh. Increasing the roll on the effect table to once a scene or once an hour is a good first step, but I would go further by having the gestalt-consciousness be immediately and permanently transferred, but at a very low and very subconscious level. Besides the initial effect once stung, I had the effect table become an option for the Agent during Home scenes, allowing them to dive into the memories for random skill increases but with the risk of SAN losses and increasing the ‘awareness’ of the infection. 

Annoyingly, that Agent died two operations later, but I could see the growing Welsh possession being very fun to play with over a longer campaign.

Overall, a very fun little scenario with lots of opportunities to up the weirdness without the usual bloodshed and trunkfulls dead Agents. Potentially. Telling the Bees can be found online on the Fairfield Project, Delta Green Wiki, or the original Google Doc