‘SOON, YOU WILL BE READY

TO MEET CAPRUS...’
“Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River . . .
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze . . . ”

John Denver - Take Me Home, Country Roads

A toxic, unnatural poison is eating away at the soul of a town. A

new form of life grows and gestates, forgotten in the poisonous
dark. Rotten secrets lurk behind a facade of lies – a small push,
and the veneer of normality will come crashing down, a vast con-
spiracy crushing all those caught beneath.

Tainted Waters is an Operation designed to continue the story of

New Life Fertility, from The Labyrinth sourcebook. This is best
played as a followup to a previous mission, Tenebris Capra.
This is an unofficial fan-made scenario released non-commercially for Delta Green: The Role-
playing game
 Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . 4
Exposure . . . . . . . . 7
Thomas Wellbetter . . . . . . . . 9
The E.P.A. . . . . . . . . 13
Petersville . . . . . . . . 21
Events . . . . . . . . 31
Farmer Joeseph Tennant . . . . . . . . 37
Venron Medical Processing . . . . . . . . 44
The Facility . . . . . . . . 48
Sub-basement 1 . . . . . . . . 55
Strughold Mining Company . . . . . . . . 61
Ambush At Strughold . . . . . . . . 63
Contamination . . . . . . . . 66

Characters . . . . . . . . 68
Scenario Timeline . . . . . . . . 74
Appendix - Handouts . . . . . . . . 75
A scenario for Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game
Written by Neil Spurr
The intellectual property known as Delta Green is ™ and © the Delta
Green Partnership, which has licensed its use here. The contents of this
scenario are © Neil Spurr, excepting those elements that are compo-
nents of the Delta Green intellectual property. This is an unofficial fan
created piece released free of charge and non-commercially. Editing &
Page design by Neil Spurr. Updated November 2021 v.10
Introduction
It is October 13th, 2021. Two days ago was the funer-
al of a man named Thomas Wellbetter. According to
eyewitnesses, during an otherwise quiet and solemn
ceremony in central Philadelphia, the congregation
was interrupted during prayers to the deceased by
something unexplainable - the noise of liquid spat-
tering loudly upon the marble floor of the church,
leaking from the coffin. A gray, oily sludge had begun
pouring out of the wooden joints.
Alarmed, the priest and funeral director quick-
ly removed the casket to the rear of the building to
avoid any further upset to the family. Upon opening it
to examine the source of the leak, they were shocked
to discover the body of the man inside had vanished
and been replaced by a foul-smelling, swirling mass of
warm gray goo.
Funeral Director Andrew Potts swore blind to
local police that he had placed the body, whole and
intact, inside the casket only the night before. Two
of his assistants who were eye-witnesses to this event
during preparations for the ceremony confirmed his
statement. Yet during the intervening twelve hours,
an entire human corpse had somehow dissolved into
nothing more than twenty gallons of stinking oily
sludge.
4
A sample of the gray sludge was first passed to the
local Philadelphia police department. Analysis baf-
fled police lab technicians and the city FBI field
office was called in to deploy their more advanced
forensics expertise.
Detailed analysis by FBI experts showed
a complete and total breakdown of the cellular
components of the man’s body. Much to the
surprise of the chief FBI pathologist, the sample
contained only swirling scraps of decomposing
human genetic material. The liquid appeared to be
an undifferentiated cellular slurry. Yet only a few
days before, the man in question, a Mr Thom-
as Wellbetter, had been alive. What could have
caused this type of unprecedented decomposition
was completely unknown.
A sample of this report was intercepted by
a Delta Green friendly who works inside the Phil-
adelphia Field Office. Recognizing the significance
of the somewhat dry details contained within the
lengthy report, he passed it on through restricted
channels to a contact within The Program. The
Director of Intelligence deemed it worthy for in-
vestigation and has dispatched a team to uncover
the source of the event.
This is where your Agents step in.
What’s Going On?
Thomas Wellbetter was exposed to a toxic chemical
slurry of unnatural origin that forever altered his
body and doomed him to a slow, agonizing death.
Four months ago, on what he thought was a routine
inspection for his job as an investigations officer with
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Wellbet-
ter found himself in the rural Appalachian town of
Petersville, West Virginia.
Following up a series of complaints from a
local lawyer, his curiosity was piqued when he dis-
covered minute but unusual chemical traces in the
groundwater. Over the course of a weekend, he
tracked down their origin to a small section of marsh-
land east of the town. He discovered a large concrete
pipe discharging effluent into the marsh – a pipe lead-
ing from a nearby industrial processing facility owned
by a company called Venron Medical Processing.
Determined to gather proof, he donned PPE
and waded out to the pipe to begin scraping samples
of white crusty scum from the damp interior surface.
By pure bad luck, Wellbetter was standing right in the
mouth of the pipe as a toxic and deadly discharge of
highly concentrated contaminants was flushed from
the plant. Wellbetter was swept off his feet by a wave
of soapy scum and dumped a few meters away by the
force of the flow.
Initially unharmed and unbothered, Wellbet-
ter cursed his luck and shook off his wet clothes. He
gathered up a final sample of this new discharge and
labeled it. Checking the discharge with a portable
chemical kit, Wellbetter found nothing immediately
unusual or harmful and thought himself clear of any
contamination.
However, the unnatural chemical contained
within the industrial wash was already seeping into
his pores and his bloodstream, forever altering his
DNA and setting in motion not only a slow death, but
an unnatural and permanent decomposition.
Three days later, Wellbetter signed off sick
from work complaining of headaches and nausea. He
never returned. Four months after that, he was dead.
A Doomed Town
The town of Petersville is being slowly poisoned by
the same toxic waste that killed Thomas Wellbetter.
For over a decade, the processing facility owned by
5
Venron Medical has been dumping this malignant
runoff into the marshlands around the town.
The marshlands in turn feed into the small
Creek river, from which almost all of the nearby
farms draw their water. This water grows the corn,
wheat and other crops in the farmlands that surround
the town, and is given to the animals in the many cat-
tle ranches and chicken farms that also dot the nearby
countryside. And in turn, the people of the town eat
the animals.
Venron Medical Processing is a small industri-
al facility which specializes in the sterilization, clean-
ing and repair of medical equipment. It is a family run
firm which for the last decade has been exclusively
providing its services to a single customer – New Life
Fertility. (See The Labyrynth for full details on New
Life.)
Venron cleans and repairs much of the med-
ical and fertility equipment used by New Life – test
tubes, pipettes, beakers, autoclaves, microscopes, petri
dishes, glassware as well as the equipment used for
growing and implanting New Life fertilized eggs into
selected mothers. The Cybelle has a state of the art lab
aboard for the fertilization procedures, but lacks the
space for much of the supporting work – such as the
cleaning and replacement of medical items. This work
is outsourced to Venron. Every month, a container of
used equipment is packed up and shipped to Venron
for processing. The items are washed, cleaned and
sterilized before either being returned to The Cybelle
or disposed of.
However, unknown to any within New Life
or Venron, minute traces of the unnatural Lac Ma-
ternum fluid survive and are altered by the chemical
cleaning process. For over a decade this discharge has
been washed away into the rivers of Petersville. This
much diluted liquid, containing only minuscule traces
of the Lac Maternum, has been slowly accumulating
in the food chain of the surrounding area, building up
inside the plants, animals and eventually the towns-
folk themselves.
Much like toxic mercury can build up inside
bigger species of fish and travel up the food chain
when they consume smaller species, so the long-lived
molecules of the chemically altered Lac Maternum
have been building up inside the human population,
slowly and irretrievably corrupting the populace.
Briefing
The Agents have been contacted by a
courier who disappears before a signature can
be offered, hand delivering a plain brown
envelope to each of them as they leave their
place of work that evening. Inside is a simple
flier, advertising a sporting goods sale at
Greene’s Golf Emporium. The address is a
bandstand in a park in central Philadelphia at
3pm the next day. They recognize it as a
summons from The Program. They must make
their way there immediately.
On arriving at the park and congregating
at the bandstand the next day, a tired man in a
gray trenchcoat approaches, chain-smoking his
way through a pack of cigarettes. This is Agent
Fulhurst, a Delta Green case officer with a decade’s
worth of experience. Operation GOD HAMMER
has been launched.
Without any preamble and between hacking
coughs, Agent Fulhurst briefs the Agents in a raspy
voice on the ‘Introduction’ information given above
and then lists the objectives of their investigation,
handing over a plain plastic folder.

Δ Determine the cause of decomposition of Mr Well-
better
Δ Uncover either the scientific or unnatural explana-
tion for this rapid and bizarre decay
Δ Cover up the incident and ensure there is no fur-
ther risk of public exposure
Δ Do not allow Philadelphia law enforcement to expose
your activities
The FBI report into the matter has been buried by
The Program and the Philadelphia FBI office has
been assured a specialist team from Washington is
now leading on the case. This is of course, a complete
fabrication and no such team exists.
Local police remain baffled. No serious crime
has been committed. They have no suspects to charge
with body-snatching, with it apparently being a
‘natural’ event. Delta Green currently has no further
information on the man nor his recent activities other
than what is given in the briefing pack handed over
to the Agents - a copy of his death certificate and a
photograph. This is all the Agents have to work with.
6
Fulhurst also explains that the Agents are being
assigned to a fictitious FBI team from the Criminal
Investigative Division (CID). The FBI has jurisdic-
tion in investigating the suspicious deaths of Federal
Agents, including those from within the EPA. If no
Agents are Federal Agents, The Program will supply
fake IDs with the investigator’s real names. These will
not stand up to anything but the briefest scrutiny.
Agents can now review the man’s death certif-
icate (pass HANDOUT #1 to the players).
Summary of Key Information
Name - Thomas F. Wellbetter
Age – 36
Date of death - 4th October 2021
Cause of death – Terminal cancer
Residence – 34 Chestnut Hills Road, Philadelphia
Marital Status – Married
Occupation – Supervisory Environmental Specialist,
Region 3 Philadelphia Office, EPA
Attending Physician at time of death – Dr Ernest
Severidge
This scenario is very much an open ended investiga-
tion. The Agents have been given little to work with
and must decide their own avenues of investigation.
The first task will be to build up a profile of the man
in question and determine what he has been involved
in that may have let to his unusual condition.
Agent Fulhurst has little further information
to give, but will answer the following questions -
Is there a deadline on this case?
Whatever caused this must still be out there. You must
make sure the same thing does not happen to other
members of the public, or even worse – yourselves.
Who was the man?
Thomas Wellbetter was a mid-level government em-
ployee with an unremarkable history. He had never
been arrested and had lived his entire life within the
United States.
Has Delta Green ever encountered anything like this
before?
No. The Director of Intelligence has confirmed there
are no reports in The Program’s extensive files which
match this type of phenomenon. Whatever you are
dealing with, it is brand new.
How can we contact you again?
Dead drop at this location, followed by a meeting 24
hours later.
How should we start the investigation?
Review the death certificate for leads. Build up a pro-
file of who he was and go from there. What was the
man up to in the last year which might have caused
this?
Can we gain access to the body/samples?
The dissolved body was resealed into the coffin and
buried at the conclusion of his funeral. The samples
taken by the police were eventually handed over to
the Philadelphia FBI. They are still in their lab. The
paper trail for your fake task force should be enough
to secure a meeting with the FBI lead pathologist
there, but don’t overstay your welcome or invite any
suspicion.
7
Exposure
Throughout this mission, New Life Fertility may
slowly come to be aware of the Agent’s actions,
impacts and goals. This is measured through a game
mechanism called the ‘Exposure Rating’. The higher
the rating goes, the more the Agents are exposed and
the more New Life learns about them. As the Han-
dler, you should keep a secret track of this rating.
The exposure rating correlates as to how se-
riously New Life takes the threat of the Agents. If the
exposure rating is low, New Life will see the Agents as
minor law enforcement interference. If the exposure
rating is high, the Agents will be seen as a deadly and
serious threat, to be dealt with via extreme prejudice.
If the Agents are careless and practice poor
operational security, their Exposure Rating will go
up. If the Agents are cautious and cover their tracks
during their investigations, their Exposure Rating will
remain low.
In gameplay terms, the Exposure Rating has
a direct effect on how difficult a later event in the
scenario will be – the ambush at the Strughold docu-
ment storage facility, when New Life deploy a team of
Wrecking Crew (see The Labyrynth for details) to try
and eliminate the Agents. See that section further on
in this mission for more details.
The magnitude of this event is correlated to
the number of Agents participating in this mission. In
the table below the following key is used :
Agentsx1 : This means the number of Wrecking Crew
is equal to the total number of Agents on the mission.
Note – this does not mean the number of Agents who
have traveled to investigate the Strughold facility.
It means the total number of player Agents in your
game. For example, the team decides to split up and
send only a portion of its Agents to investigate the
Strughold location. If so, they will be facing the full
force of the Wrecking Crew on their own – unless
their fellow Agents can get there in time to back them
up.
Agentsx1.5 : This means the number of Wrecking
Crew is equal to one and a half the number of player
Agents in your game, rounded up.
Agentsx2 : This means the number of Wrecking Crew
is equal to double the number of player Agents in
your game
For example – Cell M has a total of four player
Agents assigned to Operation GOD HAMMER. By
the time they uncover the Strughold storage facility,
they have secretly accumulated an Exposure Rating
of 7. They decide to send Agent Malcolm and Agent
Morning to the seemingly quiet and abandoned
Strughold location for a cautious investigation. If
they manage to open the vault door inside, they will
soon be faced with a Wrecking Crew team numbering
Agentsx1.5, according to the table below.
Since the total number of players in your
game is four, this means Agents Malcolm and Morn-
ing will find themselves confronted by six heavily
armed Wrecking Crew members.
The Exposure Rating includes triggers from a previ-
ous mission, Tenebris Capra. If your players did not
play this mission, the Exposure Rating for this game
should begin at +2
8
Exposure Triggers
The Handler should keep track of the Exposure Rat-
ing using the following list as the game progresses.
Keep this information secret from your players.
Triggers from Tenebris Capra
Noah Quinn managed to plant bugs in the Agent’s
rooms and learn their names : +1
Noah Quinn successfully interrogated an Agent : +2
Noah Quinn was not stopped, apprehended or killed
in Part 1 and was able to do a full report : +1
Any Agent was arrested in Tenebris Capra : +1
Any Agent used their real name, ID or personal credit
card in Part 1 : +1
Wendy Dumas lived through the scenario and is able
to identify any Agents by their face : +1
Wendy Dumas was killed by the Agents in suspicious
or obvious circumstances : +2
Triggers from Tainted Waters
Agents give their real names to any official person in
Petersville – police, mayor or doctor : +1
Any Agents are arrested in Petersville : +1
Agents use their personal credit cards in Petersville :
+1
Agents tell Sheriff Novaks they are suspicious of Ven-
ron : +2
Agents leave any clues that they have broken into
Doctor Offerman’s files : +1
Agents kill or “disappear” Whittaker Yates, or any of
his replacements : +2
Agents capture or kidnap Whittaker Yates and subse-
quently release him, or he escapes : +2
Agents raid Venron and any are killed, captured, or
leave evidence behind : +1
The Handler should feel free to adjust the Exposure
Rating as they see fit, if their Agents do anything par-
ticularly inspired or foolish. The numbers above are
merely a guide.
Thomas Wellbetter
Up until four months ago, Thomas Wellbetter had
been a healthy man. He never smoked, and rarely
drank. He was part of a bicycle club that did long
rides every Sunday. He liked to hike. He took his
young daughter to the playpark. All this began to end
one Tuesday afternoon in July, when he was forced to
leave his office complaining of nausea and migraine.
Two days later, he was confined to bed by the symp-
toms, and two days after that, his wife forced him to
go to the doctor.
After a brief consultation followed by a biop-
sy, his doctor somberly informed him that he was in
the advanced stages of full blown and terminal lymph
and bone cancer. There was no cure. Any treatment
they could give him would be purely palliative.
A few short months after that he died of
aggressive lymph cancer, which had metastasized and
spread throughout his body, leaving his entire skeletal
structure and most of his organs riddled with ugly
clumps of cancerous cells.
The disease that killed him did not give him
any peace in death. Unknown to any, cellular growth
continued even after he expired, his cells and mole-
cules now changing even further. His body continued
to liquify down to a rotten gray goo at a rapid rate –
9
which then began leaking out of the coffin during his
own funeral ceremony.
Wellbetter was a senior investigative specialist
working for the Environmental Protection Agency.
He had been employed with them for over nine years
and had studied a Master’s degree in environmental
science at Cornell university.
What his doctor found extra baffling about
Wellbetter’s case is that the man had a full company
medical only six months prior – including cancer
screening – where nothing was found. Anyone learn-
ing this information after reading his death certificate
with a Medicine skill of 30% or more knows this
speed of cancer growth is extremely unusual, if not
impossible. It raced through the man in less than
four months. The truth is, in his work as an EPA
investigator, Thomas was exposed to the source of an
extremely toxic contamination lying at the heart of
the community of Petersville, West Virginia – a source
that is not of this earth.
The Funeral Parlor
Potts & Sons Funeral Parlor can be located on the
outskirts of northern Philadelphia and is run by a Mr
Andrew Potts, a kind and rather portly man in his fif-
ties. He can be interviewed and swears blind that the
body was placed into the coffin at 8pm the evening
before the ceremony. HUMINT rolls will reveal he
was unnerved by something that he has not disclosed
to the police.
If Persuade is used or badges pulled, he will
admit, despite his line of work and generally strong
stomach, that something was disturbing about the
man’s corpse. Large tumors and growths bulged out
from the man’s body in great lumps, including from
his face, eyes and neck. It was no surprise the funeral
was closed-casket - he barely resembled a man. If this
information is cross-checked with Wellbetter’s doctor,
his doctor will say these were not present when the
man died. Anyone with Medicine or Biology skill will
realize this means cell growth or activity continued
after death - which should obviously be impossible.
There was no sign of a break-in at the funeral
parlor and their CCTV system caught nothing – the
tapes can be reviewed.
Curious Agents might think to unearth the
body for a closer look. Potts won’t allow this without
an exhumation order from the city police chief,
no matter the credentials the Agents reveal. This
will take a call to the Philadelphia Superintendent’s
office and a successful Law roll. A fumble indicates
the superintendent becomes suspicious of the request
and sends his own team to track down the Agents for
answers and to keep an eye on the cemetery.
If Agents can’t or won’t get an exhumation
order, a Persuade roll combined with a sizable bribe
(an Unusual expense) will convince Potts to look the
other way, and he will even agree to one of his men
helping to dig up the body, if the Agents think to ask.
If the Agents cannot convince Potts but are
still determined to unearth the corpse of Thomas
Wellbetter, they must sneak in at night. They can
hotwire one of the small diggers kept on site with a
Mechanics or Electronics skill of 30%, or they can
hire one for the day from a local firm. Using it will
take a Heavy Machinery roll at +20% to complete
the task quickly enough so that nobody notices. A
failure will mean they take so long that either Potts or
other member of staff arrives and spots the intruders,
hurriedly calling the police.
When the Agents finally crack open the
casket, they may be disappointed – there is almost
nothing inside. Only a few small, wet traces of gray
ooze are left in the corners. Most of it seems to have
seeped out into the ground or somehow evaporated.
Taking samples of this ooze and analyzing it will pro-
duce the same results as that held in the FBI office.
The Sample
A small sample of the gooey remains of Thomas Well-
better is currently being analyzed by Dr Cyril Wright,
Chief Pathologist of the Philadelphia FBI field office.
One of his assistants is a Delta Green friendly. If no
Agent is a Federal employee, Delta Green can arrange
to have this Friendly gain access for them to visit the
lab when Dr Wright is away. The Friendly is under
strict instructions not to interact with the Agents.
The lab techs at the FBI office have never seen
anything like it. As far as they can tell, it is some kind
of undifferentiated cellular slurry. It contains rem-
nants of human cells, proteins, enzymes and DNA.
Almost all of these molecules and structures have
broken down in some manner. Even the DNA base
pairs themselves are beginning to degrade. They don’t
believe the substance is toxic or harmful - just disgust-
ing.
10
Agents are welcome to examine the sample. An Agent
with a Medicine, Forensics or a similar skill of 40% or
more will realize that this type of cellular breakdown
is far beyond what should be possible in the time-
frame by normal biological and bacterial processes
in nature. The sheer speed and efficacy of the break-
down is unprecedented. This costs 0/1 SAN from
the baffling unnatural implications. They also find
no evidence of foreign bacteria, viruses or other cells
– this is odd in itself, as normally the human body is
covered inside and out with billions of normal, harm-
less natural microscopic organisms. The goo consists
of nothing except the pure liquefied remains of Mr
Wellbetter – as if his body has been put through a
biological blender and everything else removed or
purged. If any Agent has Medicine 70%, Biology 60%
or Genetics 50%, or a roll in any of those succeeds,
the Agent can determine extremely faint traces of
some kind of unidentifiable, novel biological molecule
within the slurry – the structure is unlike anything
they have seen before and defies both analysis and de-
scription. It is at such low concentrations no further
examination is possible.
The Family
Thomas Wellbetter left behind in his passing a wife
and young daughter. His wife, Anna, is still griev-
ing over the sudden degeneration and death of her
husband. She has not truly grasped the strange fact of
his subsequent decomposition – she will be little help
to the Agents in that regard, although with careful
considerate questioning and law enforcement creden-
tials, she will shed some light on his condition prior
to his death.
Anna Wellbetter lives in a large three bedroom
detached house in the upmarket Philadelphia area of
Chestnut Hills, with her young six year old daughter,
Emily. Anna has dark circles under her eyes from long
nights of grief-filled sleeplessness. She can offer few
insights into Wellbetter’s death and his rapid decline.
He simply came home from work one day complain-
ing of feeling ill. She can fill in any gaps they might
have missed from his doctor regarding the progres-
sion of his condition. She can also explain his back-
ground and general health before the illness. She can
rule out many strange things that the Agents might
think to question – genetic quirks, exposure to radia-
tion or experimental drugs and so forth.
Anna can explain the course and rapid onset of his
cancer symptoms and diagnosis. Anna can also con-
firm the name of the doctor who treated Thomas and
where he worked. Neither herself nor their daughter
had any similar symptoms. A HUMINT skill of 30%
or more can tell the grief from Anna is genuine.
With a Persuade skill of 40% or more, or
a roll at +20%, they can tease out the details that
Thomas had been working out of state on some com-
pany business the weekend before he fell ill. He spent
most of his working life in the Philadelphia office, but
occasionally traveled to one of the other states that
Region 3 covers. He would lead on investigative trips
– often on his own or with a small team, looking into
possible breaches of environmental law. She cannot
remember where he went on his last trip, although
she says someone at his workplace would know.
Anna is still deeply upset. Any clumsiness or
heavy handed questioning from Agents will result in
her expelling them from her house. She is sick of po-
lice trying to ‘help.’ She will not allow them to look
around or go through Thomas’s belongings. If Agents
break in and search the house, they might
find his travel receipts in his home office,
indicating his last work trip was to a town called
Petersville, in West Virginia, four months ago –
shortly before the onset of his symptoms.
Anna will not allow anyone to talk to
her daughter, who is upstairs in her bedroom.
Cunning Agents can snatch a few words with
the young girl if they make an excuse to leave
the room, such as to go to the bathroom. Little
Emily Wellbetter is brave and forthright – she is
not put off talking to the ‘policemen’ and she
understands that her daddy was very sick and
has passed away. She says she has to be strong
for her mom, who she hears crying at night.
Emily will answer one or two questions before
her mom notices and reminds her she should be
in her room, and not to bother the detectives.
Emily doesn’t know anything about his
unusual decomposition and doesn’t understand
if asked. But if questioned about anything
strange or any odd behavior she might have wit-
nessed, she will pause briefly, before whispering
that ‘Sometimes daddy got angry and confused.
He forgot who he was. One time in the hospital
he tried to hurt mommy. Mommy wouldn’t let me see
11
him on his own after that.’ This was a symptom of the
amyloid plaques in his brain, which began affecting
his behavior.
Hobbies and Interests
Wellbetter was a keen cyclist. Up until his illness he
rode every weekend with his club, covering up to 6
hours of riding in a day. He was a fit man. He read
books on World War Two and cars. He wasn’t par-
ticular religious. He had never been diagnosed with
any serious illness before. His life was mundane and
unremarkable.
Medical History
Agents can visit Wellbetter’s physician at Kindred
Hospital, North East Philadelphia - the death cer-
tificate has his name and the address. This is where
Wellbetter spent the last few months of his life. Flash-
ing badges or using a Law skill of 30% or more will
allow them to get pertinent details and an interview
from the doctor. Dr Severidge will report that Well-
better’s illness onset was rapid and terminal - the man
seemed to fall apart before his eyes. He was a healthy
young man in his late thirties with no previous illness
or record of disease. His blood pressure and test
results from a company medical (that included cancer
screening) six months prior had all been normal. He
initially came to Dr Severidge in July, complaining of
headaches and sickness. They eventually ran blood
tests which gave concerning results – sending him for
a biopsy, they then found multiple large tumorous
growths throughout his spleen, stomach, liver, heart,
lungs and brain.
His entire body was riddled with cancer. There was
no possibility of chemotherapy treatment – any med-
icine was purely palliative by that stage. For the last
six weeks of his life, Wellbetter had been a permanent
resident of the hospital, unable to leave his bed. If
cross-checked with the statement from the funeral
parlor director, Dr Severidge will confirm Wellbet-
ter died with no growths or external protrusions on
his body – differing from what the funeral director
observed.
Dr Severidge can explain Wellbetter also
suffered from what he will tactfully call ‘behavioral
complications’ towards the end of his life. These were
brought on by significant brain
degeneration. A HUMINT skill of 40%
or more can tell he is being evasive with
the truth to protect the family. If pushed, he will say
Wellbetter became angry, confused
and occasionally violent. He often
had to be restrained and sedated, and
on two particularly unpleasant
occasions, he tried to harm those
close to him, including his young
daughter and wife.
12
Amyloid Plaques
Observant players might have noticed the reference to
‘amyloid plaques’ on Wellbetter’s death certificate, or
they might be able to get this information out of Dr
Severidge during the interview. Multiple plaques were
found riddled in Wellbetter’s brain during his autopsy.
Severidge will not give out this full autopsy report to
any except next of kin or law enforcement. It de-
scribes in detail the lumps of aggressive cancer found
throughout his organs, but also a very unusual find –
his brain was suffering from multiple clumps of these
so called ‘amyloid plaques’. Severidge has nagging
suspicions that it was not even the cancer that killed
him in the end – it was brain damage caused by the
plaques. How these came to be in his body, the doctor
cannot explain.
This finding was unexpected. Anyone with a Medi-
cine or Biology skill of 40% or more will know this
is highly unusual and unrelated to cancer. This Agent
will also know the information on plaques given on
the page before, or Agents can ask Dr Severidge.
The E.P.A.
Agents will discover from Wellbetter’s death certif-
icate that he was employed by the Environmental
Protection Agency. Speaking to his wife will allow
them to gather further details. Wellbetter worked for
the Philadelphia Regional EPA Office, also known as
Region 3 Mid-Atlantic. Wellbetter was employed in
the Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Divi-
sion as a senior inspector, and much of his work was
taken up with field inspections and investigations into
developing enforcement cases.
Agents can get an overview of the EPA and its man-
date from page 161 of The Agent’s Handbook.
Agents will no doubt want to uncover what
Wellbetter had recently been working on. This will
involve a trip to his office. It is located at 1650 Arch
Street, downtown Philadelphia.
Getting access to his work records at the EPA
is not easy. His boss, Assistant Director Stuart Myers,
has had heavy pressure put on him from a senior EPA
board member in Washington to quash this problem
and make sure the investigation goes no further. The
EPA board member in turn has had significant politi-
cal pressure applied to him by a member of congress
13
representing West Virginia, who in turn is under the
influence of James Dassinger himself. The discoveries
made by Wellbetter are being buried within the crush-
ing bureaucracy of a powerful government depart-
ment. The Agents have a small window of opportu-
nity to unearth a few scraps of pertinent information
before the last remnants of Wellbetter are swept away
forever. His final investigation before he was signed
off sick from work was in a small rural town named
Petersville, West Virginia. It was there that he met his
doom. There are two methods by which Agents can
access the EPA offices in central Philadelphia – either
through official channels or unofficial entry.
Official Channels
Agents are free to concoct an official reason to visit
the office and investigate Wellbetter’s death. If they
put in a phonecall to the office, they will eventually
be put through to a man named Assistant Director
Stuart Myers. He runs
the Philadelphia office
and was Wellbetter’s
boss before he died. If
they mention they are
Federal Agents investi
gating Wellbetter’s
death, he will invite
them to the office for a
face-to-face. With a
successful Bureaucracy
roll they can cover their
paper trail with a con
vincing enough expla
nation to stop Assistant
Director Myers from
probing any further into their backgrounds. With a
fail, Myers will track down their official job titles and
history, and put in a call to their bosses when they
leave. This will have professional repercussions on
their day jobs.
Myers is an obsequious corporate toad full of
his own self-importance. He exists in the middle layer
of government bureaucracy like a burrowing parasite
and will do anything to keep his job and the petty
amount of power he has as an EPA Deputy Director.
He appears helpful and friendly but will smother the
Agents with bland corporate buzzwords and meaning-
less drivel, attempting to sound important and
knowledgeable while imparting no real information.
Myers is under strict instruction from his sen-
ior director in Washington to bury the Petersville case
and keep any investigation of Wellbetter’s death away
from the EPA. The official line is that Wellbetter’s
death was a tragic illness that no one saw coming. His
inspection into Petersville was routine and conclud-
ed the town was completely safe and warranted no
further investigation.
In truth, Myers has no knowledge of what
is occurring in Petersville and no awareness of the
Unnatural – he is simply doing what he is told like a
good lackey.
Myers will agree to a brief meeting with the
Agents in order to placate them and keep them from
investigating the matter any further. Wearing a cheap,
ill-fitting suit, he appears helpful and respectful, but a
HUMINT roll will reveal he is stressed by the Agents
meeting with him. Beads of sweat roll down his fore-
head during conversation. It is clear he is trying to
get them to go away. Myers can explain the mandate
of the EPA, and the kind of work Wellbetter and his
team was involved in. He will mention that Wellbetter
worked here on the 10th floor with other colleagues.
After a perfunctory ten minute chat, Myers is
suddenly called away. He asks the Agents to sign out
when they leave. Agents have a window here to inves-
tigate the office a bit further, although there are many
areas that are off limits due to their swipe card access.
If the Agents ask or demand to see the details
of Wellbetter’s last case, Myers will happily hand
over digital copies of the files, on a USB stick he has
already prepared in his desk drawer. Examination
shows the files are brief and reveal little. Wellbetter
traveled to the town of Petersville, West Virginia four
months in June ago for a short three day inspection.
Everything appears mundane and routine. He de-
termined that there was no sign of any pollution or
contamination in the town and that there was nothing
further to investigate. The EPA listed the source of
the complaint as a small law firm in Cincinnati, called
Taft & Hollister. There is no record of what the origi-
nal complaint was about.
Savvy Agents may think it was a little too
easy to get hold of this official report – and they are
right. Myers is only too eager to hand it over, as it
has been heavily doctored to ensure no one follows
up on Wellbetter’s investigations. These are not the
14
real case files. They have been hastily edited to look
like Wellbetter’s official report, which has since been
deleted. These fake case files were created by Myers
under instruction from his Director to ensure the case
remained buried.
Anyone with a Forensics skill of 50% or a
Computer Science skill of 40% or more taking the
time to examine these files will realize they have been
subject to heavy digital edits at some point.
Anyone specifically stating that they want to
dig deeper and succeeding at a roll in either of these
two skills can also discern that a large chunk of data
is missing and that the timestamps for the edits don’t
match – many changes were made during the time
Wellbetter was supposed to have been signed off from
work in hospital. He would not have had access to
the government login system during this time. Only
someone with very high grade official access could
have gotten into the system to make changes. Who
this might have been remains a mystery. If Myers is
challenged with this information, he will feign igno-
rance.
Speaking To Colleagues
Either after the interview with Myers or before,
Agents will be led through the 10th floor of the
building, where Wellbetter used to work. Myers will
point out his old team. It is a typical open plan office,
with half-cubicles and rows upon rows of unassigned
floating desks, where people with laptops make
headphone Skype calls and tap away at reports and
spreadsheets.
Speaking to people on the floor will reveal
a number of employees who knew Wellbetter and
worked closely with him. They are happy to talk to
investigators. Myers knows it would be foolish and
too obvious to try and stop any ‘FBI’ officials from
speaking to them.
Wellbetter’s work was reassigned to some-
one relatively quickly and all traces of the man seem
to have vanished – an entire employment history
erased with a few strokes of a keyboard - but one of
the former colleagues below will insensitively and
casually complain to Agents that facilities staff still
haven’t cleared out Wellbetter’s locker, which they
are annoyed at. Locker space is at a premium in the
cramped office.

TEAM SUPERVISOR - ANDREA HUTCHINS
Andrea worked under Wellbetter as his deputy.
Wellbetter was a good boss and she was saddened by
his illness and death. He seemed very interested and
concerned about his last investigation, yet when she
read the report he filed, it claimed nothing untoward.
If the Agents did not get a copy of the edited report
from Myers, Hutchins can also give them one.
One unusual detail that she remembers is
that Wellbetter called her outside of work hours one
weekend, while he was on investigation in Petersville
- something that he never normally did. She didn’t
answer the call as she was at her son’s soccer game at
the time. She deleted the message, but she remembers
he was agitated and excited about something he had
found on the outskirts of town.
FRANK DOBDON - I.T. SPECIALIST
Dobson is the inhouse tech specialist for the team. He
handles all IT and support requests. He cannot recall
anything odd about Wellbetter. The man was pretty
computer savvy and didn’t usually need his help for
anything – he occasionally put in acquisition forms
for specific scientific equipment. He can confirm
that when Wellbetter was signed off sick, he tempo-
rarily restricted his government account – it would
not have been possible for Wellbetter to log into the
system whilst he was being treated for his illness at
the hospital. If asked to check for anything unusual
on his system, Dobson can see Wellbetter requested
a mandate for a search warrant for an area of private
property in Petersville, but the name and address has
since been scrubbed from the records. Dobson cannot
explain why or how this could have been deleted.
HENRY BRANDT - SENIOR INVESTIGATOR
Brandt worked as Wellbetter’s counterpart in another
team. They had been colleagues for two years. Brandt
can confirm Wellbetter was an effective, competent
investigator. It would have been unlikely he would
have missed any signs of contamination or pollution
during an investigation. Wellbetter was experienced
and careful – an asset to the EPA. He remembers
Wellbetter had asked to borrow some equipment from
his team after he returned from his last field trip - a
chemical sniffer and a portable contaminant analyzer,
but he left work sick before he could ever use these
15
items. Agents might be able to requisition them with
some persuasion.
SARAH GRINGRICH - JUNIOR EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Sarah is a junior member of staff and worked as Well-
better’s PA until her recent promotion. She arranged
the expenses for Wellbetter’s trip to Petersville. She
can show the expense report to the Agents, which will
give them details of the motel he stayed at and what
he bought on his government credit card. This will
give the Agents more clues as to Wellbetter’s move-
ments around the town.
Sarah got on well with her boss. He was kind
and helpful to younger staff. She had been due to go
through his old case files as part of her duties, but
right before she did so an unexpected promotion
came out of the blue and moved her away from that
team before she could review any of his papers. She’s
unsure what happened to them – possibly they are in
still in his locker or got moved down to storage.
MAC BERKINS - JANITOR
Mac is the janitor, an African-American man in his
early 60s with a fuzzy gray beard. He can be spotted
slowly pottering around the floor, emptying waste
bins and cleaning meeting room windows. If Agents
stop to speak to him, he will scratch his beard and
recall he was the one who cleared out Wellbetter’s
desk. Some papers still remain in the basement down-
stairs, waiting to be shredded. He didn’t get around
to checking his locker yet. Berkins will also mention
the following - ‘Funny thing . . . his office been sat
all messy-like, full of stuff, since he died. Only got the
call to clean it up today, before you arrived. Guess
they wanted to look tidy for the Feds, heh!’
Agents inspecting the papers will find most of
them have already been fed into the shredder – but
a few paper receipts still exist, detailing his expens-
es across a weekend in a town called ‘Petersville, W.
Virginia.’ They will also find his locker key.
Wellbetter’s Locker
There are some interesting clues to be had in Wellbet-
ter’s personal locker. The corporate entity of the EPA
has overlooked the physical paper trail, thinking that
removing all digital files was enough. EPA investiga-
tion data is never supposed to be committed to paper,
but sometimes old habits die hard.
The locker can be jimmied open with a tool of some
kind, or Agents can request a key from facilities staff
if they flash a badge. Amongst reams of paper and
other junk, inside is a labeled tourist map of the town
of Petersville, West Virginia, along with a scribbled
note taped to it which reads -
- Arsenic/lead(?)
- PFAS??
- Prions??? (!)
Offerman lying!!
There is also a small plastic vial taped to the
note. The vial is labeled ‘Purity Control’ and partially
filled with a blue liquid. You can now give Handout
#2 to the players.
Surveillance
Suspicious agents who discover the altering of the
EPA report might suspect Myers or put him under
surveillance. He will refuse to divulge any further in-
formation without consulting his superiors. He is not
16
afraid of the FBI – he knows he has the full backing
of his director in his actions to edit the Petersville
report. He knows nothing of New Life or Venron. He
is merely a patsy.
Very thorough Agents who think to bug his
office or home might catch him having a panicked
phone call with his boss, the EPA Director of Region
3. There will be vague allusions to political inter-
ference from a West Virginian senator, although no
names will be spoken over the phone. Myers, initial-
ly stressed, will be calmed by the conversation, and
assured that he did the right thing. A SIGINT roll will
enable an Agent to extract more detailed audio from
the conversation - Myers will be advised to take down
the names of the “FBI Agents” and pass them on to
his director, who says he will arrange a face-to-face
with his FBI counterpart, who will quickly discover
the so called ‘task force’ is a paper tiger that shouldn’t
exist - someone has been tampering with FBI human
resources files. The real FBI might be waiting to speak
to the Agents if they ever return to chase up Myers
from this point.
Purity Control
The small plastic vial labeled ‘Purity Control’ is a
sample of the waste Lac Maternum effluent washed
from the discharge pipe at Venron in Petersville.
Wellbetter collected this after he had been drenched
by the stuff. It has sat forgotten inside his locker ever
since Wellbetter signed off sick from work. It is an
exceedingly dangerous substance.
No one at the EPA will know what it is and
the words ‘Purity Control’ do not mean anything to
the staff. If Myers catches the Agents with it, he will
immediately try to confiscate it as EPA property. If
they refuse, he will call security and they might have
to make a hasty retreat of the building.
Researching the phrase will reveal nothing,
and Agents with Science skills won’t know what it
refers to either. In truth, ‘Purity Control’ is the code-
name Venron uses for all deliveries from The Cybelle
– Wellbetter sneaked a glance at a delivery manifest
whilst touring the plant and became suspicious of the
phrase, correctly linking it to the waste discharge.
Agents with Biology, Genetics, Chemistry,
Medicine skills or similar will be able to examine the
sample if they have access to lab equipment. If an
Agent succeeds at a roll in any of these skills, a few
hours of initial analysis will give them all of the infor-
mation below. Otherwise, give them the information
up to the maximum value of their skill.
20% - It is some kind of biological sample, with a
very unusual molecular structure. It defies further
analysis. It appears to be mixed in with diluted clean-
ing fluids.
40% - It is an extremely unusual biological sample.
The molecule is clearly organic in nature, but defies
normal rules of chemistry. There are several portions
of the sample which cannot be identified with any
tools available. The cleaning fluids are industrial in
nature.
60% - The molecule is not static – it is continual-
ly changing and subtly altering both its shape and
molecular composition, rotating through different
possibilities, some of which appear to break the laws
17
of chemistry and thermodynamics. This shouldn’t be
possible. More tests should be run. SAN loss 0/1 for
the unnatural implications. You are also able to deter-
mine the exact mix and makeup of the cleaning fluids.
80% - What you are looking at includes a 5th and
6th nucleotide base pair (all earthly DNA, from the
smallest virus to the largest mammal, contains only
4 nucleotides, A,T,C and G). It exists nowhere in
nature, or at least nothing like it has ever been seen in
known science before. It is remarkable and beautiful.
If only you had more time to study it . . . much could
be learned. SAN 0/4 loss for the massive ground-
breaking implications.
If Agents are able to determine the exact mixture of
cleaning fluids, perhaps by calling a company that
makes them or asking an expert in the industry, they
will discover they are part of a typical mix used in the
processing and sterilization of medical supplies and
equipment.
If Agents specifically state they want to con-
tinue to run further tests after this initial analysis,
they will find the sample is exceedingly toxic. It spon-
taneously causes runaway cascades of uncontrolled
cellular division in petri dish bacteria samples. Can-
cerous clumps and tumors begin to form within hours
and days in living test organisms such as rats and
mice. It is an extremely powerful carcinogen. Anyone
with Science of 40% or more will be stunned by the
speed of the chemical. Regular strong carcinogens like
asbestos or tobacco usually take years or decades to
have an effect. This is the equivalent of putting your
hand into a nuclear reactor.
The Serum Globule
Without extremely careful handling, this sample poses
an additional deadly threat to any who examine it.
Whilst kept bottled up in the airtight vial it remains
harmless, but exposing it to fresh oxygen will begin
a growth cascade resulting in a metamorphosis into a
serum globule. Over the course of 12 hours, the sam-
ple will congeal, harden and grow into a fist size blob
of semi-translucent, faintly blue ooze.
Agents with a Biology related skill can study
the sample during this time and discern rapid and un-
controlled cellular division occurring at a phenomenal
rate, even in the absence of any growth medium or
foodstuff. This is baffling. It may be the early warning the assault costs 1/1D4 SAN.
Agents need to destroy or contain the specimen be- If the Agents lack the skills required to analyze
fore it grows any further. NPC scientists won’t be as the sample, they might think instead to find a friendly
careful, letting their curiosity get the better of them. scientist (perhaps at the FBI field office) to help them.
If kept at room temperature, it will eventu- They will lose contact with them a short time after
ally become motile, lashing out at nearby biological they return an initial report. The Friendly will be
entities (such as curious human researchers) with thin consumed by the globule, and turned into a mindless
plastic tendrils, seeking out nostrils and mouths, and avatar, hunting for further human brains – another
violently attempting to wriggle inside as it launches loose end to tie up.
itself into the face of the victim. If they instead send the sample to Delta
It is sticky and strong. The target has two Green, they will get a hasty warning two days later –
turns at an opposed STR roll, against the globule’s the substance is deadly, and under no circumstances
STR of 14, to remove the squirming horror from must you expose yourself to it. All traces of it must be
their face before it secures itself tight enough to destroyed. No further information is forthcoming.
wriggle a pseudopod into their brain stem. Anyone
present may also try to help with a STR roll of their The Toxic & The Deadly
own. Removing the globule in this manner costs 1D4
damage as teeth are ripped out and sinuses shredded. Once the contents of Wellbetter’s locker are discov-
Failure, and the target will soon be killed, as ered, Agents might be curious about the words listed
the globule begins to insinuate itself inside the brain on the scrap of paper inside.
cavity, quickly consuming the entire cerebellum as it Agents with a Medicine, Biology or other
burrows in. The target collapses into unconsciousness. related skill of 40% or more will know the follow-
A Surgery roll, performed within thirty minutes, will ing information. Other Agents can find these details
allow a quick and dirty attempt at removing the skull out from a few hours of internet research, or by the
cap, a desperate chance to remove the globule from players researching it themselves. If Agents state they
the inside. are researching these terms, give them Handouts #3
A success, and the disgusting slime can be below.
sliced out with minimal damage, although the Agent
will spend months in hospital recovering and will
forever lose 1D6 INT from the brain damage
caused by the globule. A failure, and the
clumsy removal reduces the Agent to a
permanent vegetative state, with an INT of 0.
Their career in Delta Green is over.
If this emergency surgery is not
performed, the victim will have their brain
quickly dissolved and consumed. The globule
will take over autonomous neural functions.
It’s only goal is to violently seek out further
brains to consume. It has all the skills and
knowledge of the victim, but is unable to
communicate. If the victim can somehow be
subdued and scanned, the inside of their
cranium reveals no brain tissue left – only a
squirming, urchin-shaped mass, which
dissolves as soon as it is “killed” or exposed
to air. Surviving a serum globule attack costs
1/1D8 SAN from the unnatural. Witnessing
18
 Prions
Prions are incredibly dangerous biological molecules - infectious, unusual proteins. Prions infect, warp
and degrade other proteins, simply by existing. Prions have the ability to transmit their misfolded shape
onto normal variants of the same protein - essentially, a form of disease vector ten thousand times larg-
er than a virus – and much more deadly.

Prions are also incredibly, almost preternaturally, resilient. They have been known to infect
patients undergoing surgery via medical tools previously used on prion-infected patients that have since
been through sterilization procedures. Since prions are not ‘alive’ in the traditional sense, they cannot
be ‘killed’ – they are immune to levels of heat, radiation and chemicals that would destroy typical bac-
teria or viruses. They can easily survive unscathed through boiling water, medical sterilization, ionizing
x-ray radiation and immersion in formaldehyde. It takes boiling the prion in a concentrated solution
of industrial strength sodium hydroxide using pressurized steam autoclaves, to finally break down and
destroy the toxic protein, rendering it inert.

Prions are most infamous for causing the disease Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)
in cattle, also known as ‘Mad Cow disease’ and the related human version Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
(CJD), both of which which were major health scares in the United Kingdom during the early 1990s,
resulting in almost 200 hundred people dying and millions of cattle being slaughtered. Both illness-
es cause fatal neurodegenerative disorders, whereby brain cells begin to die off in massive numbers,
eventually leading to the microscopic appearance of “holes” in the brain, physical brain degradation,
insanity and eventual death. There is no cure.

Prion diseases can be transmitted to humans by eating contaminated food. The highest risk is believed
to be from eating the brain, spinal cord, or digestive tract.

Kuru

Agents with an Anthropology skill of 40% or
more, or a related Biology skill of 50%, or a roll in
either at +20% or who succeed at an INTx5 roll
while researching the above, will recall or come
across a condition known as ‘Kuru’, a very rare,
incurable and fatal neurodegenerative disorder
that was formerly common among the Fore
tribes-people of Papa New Guinea. man body. They simply accumulate forever in the food chain.
It is also known as the ‘laughing sickness’
due to the pathological bursts of laughter which
are a symptom of the disease. It is now widely
accepted that Kuru was transmitted among
members of the tribe via funeral cannibalism.
Deceased family members were traditionally
cooked and eaten, which was thought to help
free the spirit of the dead.
The epidemic likely started when a
villager spontaneously developed
Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and died. When
villagers then ate the brain, they contracted the
disease, and it was then spread to other villagers
who in turn ate their infected brains many years later
during subsequent funerals.
PFAS
Agents with 30% in an Environmental Science or 40% in Chem-
istry or similar will know the following. This information can
also be gained from speaking to a member of the EPA, or with
two or three hours research on the internet.
PFAS (perfluorinated alkylated substances) are synthet-
ic industrial compounds known as ‘forever chemicals’ because
they don’t break down in the natural environment or the hu-
PFAS are used to make stain-resistant fabrics and carpets,
water-repellent clothing, nonstick cookware, and hundreds of
other common products. The compounds can seep into water
from factories, landfills, and other sources.
In the 1940s and 50s, they were considered ‘inert
molecules’ that were harmless and could not interact with bio-
logical systems. However, the corporations that produced them
have known since the 1970s, and the EPA knows now, that
there are definite links between exposure to PFAS and many
different health problems: thyroid disease, liver damage,
hormone disruption, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and
testicular and kidney cancers. Research has also linked some
PFAS to learning disabilities in children.
Under heavy corporate pressure, the EPA has still not
set an enforceable legal limit for PFAS in drinking water.

19
 Arsenic & Lead
Arsenic is a toxic heavy metal used in pres-
sure-treated lumber and several other industrial
processes. In agriculture, it is used to kill insects
on cotton and other crops. Smelting copper and
burning coal create arsenic as a byproduct. It can
enter water through natural deposits or industrial
or agricultural pollution.
It has been linked to cancer, as well as lowered
IQ in children. A 2014 study in the journal Envi-
ronmental Health found an association between
water with arsenic of 5 ppb or greater and a five-
to six-point IQ reduction in children.
Lead poisoning can include abdominal pain,
constipation, headaches, irritability, memory
problems, infertility, and tingling in the hands
and feet. It causes almost 10% of intellectual
disability of otherwise unknown cause and can
result in behavioral problems. Some of the effects
are permanent and in severe cases anemia,
seizures, coma, or death may occur.
Exposure to lead can occur by contaminated air,
water, dust, food, or consumer products.
Unofficial Entry
Agents might instead decide to try a covert investiga-
tion of the EPA offices. Getting into any government
building is extremely difficult and risky. All govern-
ment offices in the US have high security. There are
overlapping CCTV cameras, 24 hour armed pa-
trolling guards and keycard gated access on all interi-
or and exterior doors. Attempting to break-in without
inside help will almost certainly result in alarms being
raised, unless the Agents can concoct a particularly
devious plan. Simply crowbarring open a door or
smashing a window late at night will quickly result
in three or four security personnel descending on the
source of the silent alarm.
In the heightened state of danger to gov-
ernment employees in post-election insurrectionist
America, the guards will almost certainly shoot first
and ask questions later if they come across masked
and possibly armed men inside the building.
A better bet would be forging or stealing a
pass and disguising oneself as a current employee, but
even this would be difficult.
20
Building Access
The EPA Region 3 Philadelphia Office is located on
floors 1 through 16 of the building. They are open
weekdays from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm, with limited
access to offices after hours and on weekends. Mem-
bers of the public can drop in to see the EPA multime-
dia exhibits, or environmental, school and university
groups can arrange tours that include, if requested,
a learning experience on any environmental topic of
their choice presented by an EPA expert.
People over the age of 13 visiting EPA’s
Philadelphia Office need to have a valid photo iden-
tification to enter (no exceptions). All visitors will be
screened by passing through a stationary magnetom-
eter (metal detector). Their items will be screened by
passing through an X-Ray machine.
Visitors will be escorted by an EPA Employ-
ee while in EPA space at all times, unless otherwise
arranged. Individuals representing any State, Local, or
Federal Law Enforcement Organizations considered
to be officially ‘on-duty’ with the proper credentials
will be permitted into EPA space.
It will require a Stealth roll to slip away from
the EPA employee taking them around the exhibits,
and this is only possible if in a group. A failure indi-
cates the employee notices or a security guard stops
them from taking ‘a wrong turn.’
Once free from their host however, anyone
with a suit and a badge will find it relatively easy to
move around a corporate office. Although most doors
operate on a swipe card, employees routinely leave
them open for colleagues. No one challenges people
who look like they are on official business or walking
about with a purpose and a visitors pass.
Hacking
Any Agent with a Computer Science skill of 20% or
more knows it is extremely difficult to gain access to
a government network such as the EPAs. They run on
secure cloud servers with double-encryption logins
using PGP keys, which are impossible to hack exter-
nally using current technology. Almost the only way
in is to have physical access to a government laptop
and either knowing the login password or forcing an
employee to enter their login details.
The only other options would be a long-run-
ning and extremely time consuming campaign of
spear-phishing to government email accounts, hoping
that someone bites – this is not something that is fea-
sible during a game timeline. A second option, equally
risky, is to gain physical access to the EPA servers in
whatever vast datacentre they are kept at – which will
be an entirely different building somewhere else in
the country, run by Amazon or Google.
If by some miracle Agents identify this loca-
tion, they could plant a backdoor software program
using a USB drive directly into the network. This re-
quires entering the building unnoticed, followed by a
Stealth roll to gain access by slipping past security and
then a Computer Science roll to install and activate
the backdoor program without it being noticed. A
failure will involve either discovery by physical securi-
ty personnel or IT security blocking the program and
reverse-tracing the malicious entry back to the Agent’s
own location. The NSA would be very interested in
any hostile incursions into a government network.
No Leads?
If Agents are hapless or unimaginative enough to fail
to secure the information showing Wellbetter’s last
inspection location, as they leave the EPA building
one of his concerned colleagues will run after them
and quietly slip them the folder from his locker with
the map and other details – but not the purity control
sample. A few days later, this employee will be fired
from her job, on an apparently unrelated matter, and
a serum-globule infected scientist will run rampant
at an EPA lab, requiring urgent clean up from your
player Agents.
Wellbetter’s Trail
Thomas Wellbetter arrived in Petersville four months
ago, on what he thought would be a routine work as-
signment. He expected to find a local industrial plant
with faulty equipment, or perhaps at most violating a
few State codes on purpose to avoid recycling costs.
Instead he found madness and death.
Wellbetter spent three days in Petersville,
scouting out the surrounding farmland. His initial
investigations made him uneasy – something was not
quite right about the town. Disease incidence was
high and unusual in scope. A number of farms had
quite literally shriveled and died, yet others were ex-
periencing record crop yields and unprecedented an-
imal births. Wellbetter began a concentric and careful
21
soil and water sample analysis. He eventually deter-
mined some kind of unidentifiable toxin or pathogen
was being released into the local river – he thought he
might have a scandal as big as Flint, Michigan on his
hands.
His analysis eventually led him to an effluent
pipe that ran deep underground from the sub-base-
ment of the Venron processing facility. He assumed
the company was illegally dumping some kind of in-
dustrial waste on the side for extra profit. Determined
to expose them, he began taking detailed samples of
run-off from the pipe and the small section of river it
drained into.
The Truth
Petersville has been slowly poisoned for over a decade
by unnatural toxic waste. Minute traces of chemically
altered Lac Maternum have seeped into the ground-
water from the effluent run-off of a nearby industrial
facility owned by a company named Venron Medical
Processing.
Venron own a plant on the outskirts of town
that specializes in cleaning and sterilizing medical
equipment. For over a decade they have been con-
tracted by New Life Fertility to clean, repair and re-
turn the medical equipment, glass and waste used and
produced aboard the Cybelle. Venron is also owned
and operated by a young 1st Generation New Life
spawn called Whittaker Yates, who has recently taken
over control of operations from his father, who died
in mysterious circumstances
Petersville
The town of Petersville is rotting. A malignant poison
is quite literally eating away at the town’s soul, doom-
ing its inhabitants to sickness, insanity and death. Per-
haps worse than that, the corruption spreads through
the complicity and collusion of those who should be
in a position to protect the vulnerable – the mayor,
the police, the doctor and the people themselves. A
conspiracy of silence will ensure the doom of hun-
dreds, unless the Agents can destroy the source of the
unnatural corruption that is sickening the town.
The townsfolk of Petersville know nothing of
the unnatural, Shub-niggurath, or the Lac Maternum.
They have never heard the name New Life Fertility,
much less James or Mary Dassinger. They are ordi-
nary Americans, mostly loving, kind, God-fearing,
family-oriented individuals. They care about their
town. They are proud to have survived the bad times
and prouder still of Petersville’s resurgence and
growth. Most of small town Appalachia is destitute
and prone to suffering from drug-addiction and other
social ills. Not so Petersville.
What the population are guilty of, for the most part,
is an unspoken willingness to ignore the truth and
turn a blind eye. The deaths, the disappearances, the
mental breakdowns, and even the occasional dis-
solving corpse – which are mostly covered up by Dr
Offerman or Sheriff Novaks. They are complicit in a
blanket of silence that masks a horrible reality. stalls for the tourists to visit. To the south of the town
Those townsfolk that have dared to speak
up in the past, such as local farmer Joe Tennant, are
shunned and ostracized. They are ignored, labeled as
troublemakers, activists, or left-wing environmental
socialists and looked down upon as wanting to ruin
the good reputation of the town. They either then
fall into line or decide to leave. There is no longer
any spine of dissent left among the populace. When a
beloved relative suddenly loses their mind and tries to
drive a pair of scissors into their husband’s eyeball, or
when three generations of an entire family succumb
to brain tumors within a week, it is just one of those
unfortunate things - prayers are said, the incident is
quickly forgotten, and the town moves on.
The Agents themselves won’t be affected by
the minute traces of Lac Maternum present in the
22
food, water and air in Petersville, apart from possibly
some strange dreams. It takes years of exposure and
build-up before the body is permanently affected.
However, if any of them is exposed to the concen-
trated version of this chemical slurry like Thomas
Wellbetter was, then they run a very real risk. See the
section on CONTAMINATION, below.
Clear Waters, Clean Streets
To the outside visitor, Petersville seems a vibrant
and thriving rural mountain town of bold colors
and happy folk. The streets throng during the
regular Sunday farmers market. Clean houses line
pristine streets, star-spangled flags flutter in the
dappled color of mid-autumn and happy chil
dren laugh and play in the safety and security of
this picturesque waterside town. A population
boom over the last decade has revitalized the area,
along with the growth of local farming and the
boon of tourism to this idyllic piece of postcard
America.
Petersville has a population of a few thousand
and sits nestled at the foot of snow-capped Mount
Langworthy in West Virginia, a popular hiking
destination. The cool, clear waters of Lake Arun
form the western shoreline, fed by the Creek River to
the east. Campgrounds and holiday homes surround
the lake, which is always busy with sailing and kay-
aking, fishing and families. The bustling marina is the
heart of the town, with boardwalks lined with fish
restaurants and plenty of bars, craft shops and food
lie the crop fields and dairy farms. The town is well
known in the County for producing fine food – fresh
fish, artisan cheeses and award winning steaks.
Scratch a little deeper and disturbing trends
lurk just beneath the surface. The high birth rate
masks a dark truth of stillborns, infant deformities
and a local cancer rate ten times that the national
average. People sicken and die almost as fast as they
are born.
Yet no one talks of this. The town stays quiet.
Those that go poking a little too far into the truth
find themselves ostracized and outcast, quickly mov-
ing on or never settling at all.
Avenues Of Investigation
The town of Petersville provides an open world lo-
cation for Agents to explore and gather information
at their own pace. There are two primary methods
for them to do this – the first is to physically visit
locations and people, and the second is background
research.
Hitting The Books
Agents can dig into the official medical records of
the town, kept on both County and CDC databases,
overseen by a CDC sub-agency named the National
Centre for Health Statistics. Federal Agents, doctors
and law enforcement can request access to these, oth-
erwise an FOI request, taking a week and a Bureau-
cracy roll, is needed.
The data on the town makes for interesting
reading. Death rates for all ages are running way
above the national average at an excess that cannot
be explained by random variance, but no explanation
is given. The files detailing many of the deaths are
either blank or listed as ‘natural causes.’
Anyone with a Bureaucracy or Medicine skill
of 40% or more spending a few hours poring over
these Excel sheets can discern these troubling gaps in
the information and that the increase in the death rate
began sometime after 2012. Succeeding at a Bureau-
cracy or INT roll will also reveal that whoever has
been submitting the data has been leaving things out
on purpose. Detailed medical information is missing.
The death rates also indicate a large number of new-
borns are dying or being stillborn, again from listings
only as ‘natural causes.’ Birth rates are also up in the
town, explaining the population boom – they strange-
ly almost match the death rates. Agents with 50% in
Law, Medicine or Bureaucracy will know that this
type of data is usually signed off by the senior doctor
of the area.
Town History
Most Agents will want to conduct at least a curso-
ry background check into the town and its history.
Agents can comb through local online newspaper
archives, guidebooks, the town library or internet
searches. A History roll at +20% or an INT roll and
an hour or two of research will bring up all of the
information below. A failed roll will produce only the
23
non-italic text. If Agents ask for further details from
the Tourist Office, Druanna Williams there can fill in
the blanks.
Petersville - A Town Resurgant
Petersville is a small rural town in isolated and
mountainous McDowell County, West Virginia. The
population was 3,273 as of the 2018 census. White
settlers founded a small village here in the 18th
century following the American Revolutionary War.
It remained a thriving but small mining and farming
community for much for the 19th and early 20th
century. It enjoyed a boom in population and wealth
in the post-war years as coal mining continued to be
the employment mainstay.
The town began a series of declines in the
1970s. First the coal industry collapsed, then farms
shriveled and died, becoming difficult to operate
profitably, made worse by the various national finan-
cial crisis. Many households were foreclosed and the
population plummeted. With no nearby urban areas,
work was almost impossible to find. There were re-
ports of families dying from malnutrition. Unemploy-
ment ran higher than 50%. The 2008 financial crash
was thought to be the death kneel of the town, with it
close to being declared bankrupt by the County.
Somehow, the town survived the hard times
and regrew its former strength in the early 2010’s.
The population boomed again, farming took off once
more and the town became locally renowned for its
bountiful crops and prize-winning diary calves. The
lake became a popular fishing spot, boasting several
national records in fish sizes for salmon and trout.
Today the town remains both a farming hub and well
known beauty spot for West Virginians, and the town
goes from strength to strength.
Although the coal never came back, the area
was boosted by the construction in 2012 of a light in-
dustrial facility just east of the town, which bolstered
local employment. The company also privately subsi-
dized a public relation campaign to improve the towns
image, with many tourists flocking to picturesque
Petersville for a rural getaway in subsequent years.
Since 2016, a number of farms have once
again ran into trouble, with crop yields falling and
animals being sold or slaughtered due to “production
problems”. Other farms however remain solvent, going
going from strength to strength with award-winning
yields and prize animals.
Anyone with History or Anthropology above 20%
knows that many rural Appalachian towns, especially
those with a mining history, are often disproportion-
ately poor and even destitute compared to the rest
of the country. Petersville seems to have somehow
bucked this trend.
Local Rumors
Agents can spend time hitting the streets and visiting
local businesses. By speaking to bar staff, diners, walk-
ers, locals out drinking coffee or just having a beer
at a bar themselves, they might overhear one of the
rumors below. The Handler should also feel free to
weave any of these statements into general conversa-
tions. None of these provide concrete clues, but might
be enough to set a chain of investigation in motion, or
provide general anxiety to the Agent’s lives.
‘Ya don’t want to go near the Tennant farm. It’s a
bad place. Bad business. No one’s seen his wife in six
months, she just vanished. Strange fella, old Joe. And
there are noises, sometimes . . . you can hear screams
. . . coming from the barn. Something ain’t right with
his cattle.’
‘Ol’ Albert Meeks caught himself a whopper last week,
lake trout with a 6 ft span. Biggest darn fish I ever
seen. Told Bert he should give the Guinness World Re-
cord boys a call, gotta be worth looking into. Absolute
monster it was. And good eating too!’
‘It’s a quiet town, nothing much happens, ‘tho last
month I heard Martha Franks stabbed her husband in
the eye with a pair of scissors, before crashing their car
into a tree. Who woulda thought. I heard they had to
section her.’
‘Coupl’a hikers went missing last month in the Creek
backwoods. Got turned aroun’ and lost, had to camp
out for a week till they found their way back out. But
that’s not the funny part – when they came out again,
they babbling nonsense, hollerin’ and screamin’ they
were. That’s the problem with city tourists – not ready
for the real countryside. If yer headin’ out that way
yerself, make sure yer prepared.’
24
‘Harvest time coming up soon. My cousin’s mess o’
pumpkin patch been ruined – whole crop, just rotten.
Happened almost overnight. Disgusting it was, field
all full of black slimy husks. And the flies! Thousands
of ‘em. Don’t even know where they come from this
time of year.’
Local News
Agents can browse the web for local newspaper
articles of interest from The Petersville Herald, the
tiny local paper with a staff of two. Each hour spent
will turn up one of the articles below – either roll a
die to randomly select an article from the table, or
select one yourself if you feel the Agents need a nudge
in a certain direction. A successful INT roll will also
reveal some further pertinent information, highlight-
ed in italics. If the Agents instead request to search
for something specific (For example “I want to search
for news articles involving the town mayor”) and it
appears in the list below, feel free to give them that
information directly without a roll. You can give these
articles to your players as handouts if and when they
research them.
Around Town
Agents will no doubt want to spend time physically
investigating the town, either by walking around or
going directly to the locations listed on the tourist
map from Wellbetter’s locker. There are many poten-
tial locations to visit. Not all provide clues.
Testing The Waters
Scientifically minded Agents might want to collect
water and soil samples from around the town and
lake, in an effort to follow up on Wellbetter’s re-
search. They will need an appropriate analyzing
machine. Federal Agents can get one from the EPA
with a Bureaucracy roll, or buy one with an Unusual
Expense.
They will initially find nothing except slight-
ly elevated hormone levels in Lake Arun. These are
caused by run-off from the multiple diary farms and
chicken ranches that line the town. Checking with an
expert will reveal these levels are high, but within
25
normal limits. If any Agent spends half a day care-
fully analyzing the samples with lab equipment and
succeeds at a Science related roll, they can detect very
faint traces of an unusual biological molecule in the
parts-per-million range, which is defying any further
attempt at analysis. It matches the Purity Control
sample, although much lower in concentration. The
highest levels are found in the lake and even higher
in the Creek river, although the molecule is present in
everything – the soil, the food and the town’s drink-
ing water.
The Mayor’s Office
Located in a small but beautiful 1880s period style
stone building, Mayor Garry Vaughn has been in
charge since 2016. Vaughn is mortally afraid of
scandal and his greatest fear is having any kind of
environmental concern revealed to the public. He
is a nervous man with no backbone. Digging into
the Mayor’s election campaign and reading through
publicly available filings, an Accounting roll will
reveal he received numerous ‘campaign contributions’
from Whittaker Yates, the young business magnate
who owns Venron. These payments were large and
not formally declared, probably breaking local county
campaign spending laws.
He has seen the medical records held by Dr
Offerman and has buried his head in the sand, per-
forming a remarkable feat of double-think to ensure
he never has to contemplate the awful truth of real-
ity. He works closely with Police Chief Novaks and
will turn to him for help and support on almost any
subject. If any of the Agents try to discuss Venron or
possible pollution concerns with Vaughn, he will nod
and smile, appearing to take them seriously, before re-
porting them immediately to Novaks, who will begin
to have them followed.
If Agents demand the mayor closes down the
town, the lake, or Venron itself, he will cite potential
crippling economic harm and refuse. If confronted
with undeniable truth of the unnatural pollution, he
will mentally shut down, and refuse to engage, blus-
tering his way through any conversation in increasing
levels of panic. He might be found dead later, having
shot himself with a pistol.
Vaughn never met Thomas Wellbetter and
knows nothing of his visit. He will be alarmed to
learn the EPA were ever paying attention to the town.
26
If he thinks the Agents are following up or they say
they are from the FBI, he will take great pains to
show them around – personally guiding them around
the marina, buying them a fish supper, etc, in a very
obvious attempt to butter them up. This would be a
good time to deploy something from the ‘Events’ list
below.
Petersville Police Dept.
The local police are overseen by Sheriff John Novaks,
a bald, fleshy man in his mid 50s who wears a hat and
frequently dabs at his jowls with a white handker-
chief. Novaks is soft-spoken, kindly and with a line in
self-deprecating humor, but beneath this facade is an
iron rod of steel which has ruled over Petersville like
a tyrant for almost 20 years.
The Department is small, with only six sworn
full time deputies, all of them hand-picked by Novaks
for loyalty. None will betray him. The police have
a close connection to the townsfolk and there is a
strong sense of community policing. Residents will
report anything strange directly to Novaks.
Novaks, whilst not exactly a racist, manag-
es to hate most outsiders with equal contempt. His
biggest ire is reserved for what he considers the scum
currently poisoning America – liberals, socialists, the
‘woke brigade’ and others of a left-leaning intent.
Included among this are any ‘environmental do-good-
ers’ who would sacrifice the prosperity and wealth of
Petersville in an ignorant attempt to dig up dirt on the
town.
Novaks remembers the bad times – he remem-
bers when the town was shriveling up like a dead dog
in the sun. He remembers local children going hun-
gry, mothers with malnutrition, lines of men at the
side of the interstate holding pathetic cardboard signs
looking for work. He remembers the empty houses
and the foreclosure signs. He has sworn to himself
that Petersville will never return to those days.
Spending time digging into police reports and
crime news, either online or with the local paper,
will reveal that the town has very low levels of crime
and no drug problems to note. This overall quiet is
strangely interspersed with extreme outbreaks of ran-
dom violence by single individuals, usually resulting
in deaths of others – beatings, stabbings, bludgeonings
and shootings. These crimes appear unrelated, and
there never appears to be a solid motive behind them.
If asked about the town, Novaks will leave these sor-
did details out, saying only that the place is so quiet
he says he doesn’t even wear his sidearm.
‘Town is quiet, not much crime, peaceful, nice place
to live. Popular with tourists for fishing, hunting and
hiking. Nothing unusual except for a local farmer,
name of Joe Tennant. Firstly, much of his diary farm
has shut down and there’s a suspicion he’s been cull-
ing his own cattle, but for what reason, who knows.
Secondly, his wife gone missing and hasn’t been seen
for nearly six months - Tennant says she’s staying with
family out of state. Tennant’s a recluse. Been a public
nuisance in town for many years. Got a history of
violence and intimidation. He’s fired shotgun rounds
at local youths who’ve tried to sneak onto his property
before. A known heavy drinker. Off the record? I think
he might have killed his wife for insurance money,
or beat her to death in a drunken rage. But I got no
evidence and can’t get a warrant to search his house or
his property.’
Novaks will be immediately suspicious of any Fed-
eral activity. He is on the direct payroll of Venron to
watch out for such things, and essentially acts as their
private security force. He will commit an officer to
discretely follow the Agents if they ever introduce
themselves to him. But Novaks is not some country
rube – he is smart and canny. He will appear to be
helpful and offer no direct obstruction to the Agents.
He will even play along, admitting he knew Thomas
Wellbetter was in town. Thomas had contacted him
and Novaks is smart enough not to lie about such
things. He doesn’t know where Wellbetter went dur-
ing his investigations.
He will allude that there was some kind of
angry confrontation between Wellbetter and Joe
Tennant, a local farmer – this is a lie. Novaks will
secretly hope he can arrange a shootout between
Agents and the paranoid Tennant, potentially wiping
out at least one of his problems. Novaks will oppose
all HUMINT rolls against him with his own Persuade
skill. If an Agent manages to succeed, they realize No-
vaks is extremely canny and covering something up.
If they physically trail Novaks for a day or two, they
might find him meeting with Venron owner Whittak-
er Yates at the local golf course or on a fishing boat,
to discuss ‘the problem with our Washington friends.’
27
Petersville Health Clinic
This clinic is a privately run operation that serves
the whole of Petersville. It is a clean, bright building,
filled with plants and pictures drawn by local school-
children. Smiling nurses deal with a busy inpatient
area packed with people. If the Agents arrive asking
to speak to someone in charge, they are directed to
Dr Offerman. He is an African-American man in his
early 60s, with short, graying hair, a kindly smile and
prone to chuckling at his own jokes.
Dr Offerman is deeply complicit in the health
scandal engulfing the town and has been for years.
Venron pay him significant kickbacks and fund the
clinic. He also has a strong dependence on over-the-
counter opioids, which he steals from the clinic phar-
macy. A Psychotherapy or Pharmacy skill of 30% or
more, or a Criminology skill of 50%, will recognize
the signs of substance dependence upon him, possibly
opioid – faint hand tremors, occasional confusion and
constricted pupils.
Dr Offerman will listen carefully and somb-
erly to any concerns from the Agents. He will assure
them that the town is in mostly perfect health, but
he will not provide records, citing patient confiden-
tiality. Apart from a few sailing accidents or farming
mishaps, little happens – the Agents, looking at the
congested reception area, might not believe him.
Offerman has buried the medical records of the town
– the trail of cancers, madness and death. They tell
a tale of a sick citizenry dying faster and faster each
year. The cancer rate is ten times the national average.
His records are filled with patients reporting tumors,
bone cancer, swollen and rotten lymph nodes and
crippling neurodegenerative disorders. Something is
poisoning the populace.
The files also indicate most of the townsfolk
with these conditions are having their health insur-
ance paid for by the same 3rd party insurance compa-
ny. With an Accounting roll, an Agent can trace these
payments to a shell corporation, owned in turn by a
company called Venron Medical Processing.
If Agents confront Offerman with this evidence,
or perhaps after researching the CDC records on the
town, he will clam up and ask them to leave. He will re-
fuse access to his archives, becoming furious and locking
the door, ranting about oppressive government interfer-
ence and citing patient-doctor confidentiality. If Agents
obtain a warrant or barge in, Offerman might panic
and call Novaks for support.
If Agents want to obtain access to these files
quietly, they could break in after hours or bribe a sec-
retary or nurse. Cybertheft won’t work as Offerman
keeps his records non-digitized. They can discover
the truth of the death rates in these paper files kept
in the clinic. In addition, anyone with a Medicine or
Pharmacy of 20% or more reviewing these files will
discover Offerman’s prescription routine long ago
crossed the line and is downright criminally negligent.
He routinely gives out extra strength opioids such as
Fentanyl (ten times more potent than morphine and
a significant contributor to the opioid epidemic in
the US) to the townsfolk for even the most minor of
ailments. He is systemically doping the entire town
into compliance. The reason the town has no drug
crime is because Offerman is giving the drugs out for
free to almost anyone who asks. Offerman will say he
doesn’t recall meeting Thomas Wellbetter – but that
he probably would have said the same thing to any
EPA agent that he is telling them. The town is clean,
healthy, and going through a population boom. In
reality, Wellbetter figured out that Offermans’ reas-
surances and records were lies – hence the scrawled
note found in his EPA locker.
If asked about anything strange or unusual
within the town, Offerman will think for a moment,
before conspiratorially whispering he thinks some-
thing might have happened to Annabelle Tennant, a
longtime patient of his and wife of Joe Tennant. She
had been prescribed some strong medication for a
neurological condition, but hasn’t been into the clinic
for six months, and Joe has since stopped collecting
the prescriptions. He recommends speaking to the
Sheriff.
The Patients
Observant Agents might notice how busy the waiting
area is at the clinic. If they spend some time speaking
to these members of the public, they might learn a
few symptoms. People claim to be suffering delusions,
hallucinations, weight loss, aggression and repetitive
speech. Some patients also claim difficulties sleeping
and memory problems, along with issues like stutter-
ing or word repetition. Several describe disturbing
hallucinatory dreams, or waking auditory hallucina-
tions.
28
A small number of patients have presented
transient ‘Capgras delusion’, a psychiatric disorder in
which a person believes someone close to them has
been replaced by an impostor. If questioned, one of
the nurses can say - ‘It’s quite disturbing because, for
instance, a patient could tell his wife “Sorry ma’am
you cannot get in bed, I’m a married man” and even if
the wife gives her name, he’d say “Well . . .you’re not
the real one.”’
The Tourist Office
Manned by a kindly local lady named Druanna Wil-
liams, an intense but friendly woman who cannot stop
smiling. She is in her early 30s and overly welcoming
to the point of smothering. She seems to know a lot
more than she tells. ‘Gee whizz, I think you’ll real-
ly like it here. Some of you might decide to stay . . .
forever!’ she says, with a smile ear-to-ear. Later, she
might turn up outside the Agent’s motel late at night,
with additional information, or become obsessed with
one Agent and begin stalking them around town.
An Agent with Psychotherapy of 30% or more
detects signs of tightly controlled irrationality – she
is like a coiled spring, ready to unwind explosively at
any moment. She already has amyloid plaques devel-
oping in her brain. Druanna can give the town history
detailed above, if asked. She can also confirm the map
they acquired from Wellbetter’s locker came from her
shop. She will say Lake Arun is a popular beauty spot
and walkers love the Creek Woodlands, a large area
of forest, scrubland and marshes to the east and south
east of town, just past the farming belt. If asked about
Thomas Wellbetter and shown his photo, she will
remember the man. She can recall he was interested
in the surrounding farmlands, especially to the east,
said he wanted to start taking some samples of the
soil from out that way.
She can mark on a tourist map the locations of the
farms around of Petersville, although half of them
are abandoned and closed these days. Give HAND-
OUT#4 to the Agents. They may notice a ring of
abandoned farms around the industrial area to the
south-east. If Agents ask what these buildings are,
Druanna will explain they belong to a company called
Venron Medical, which employs people from the
town.
Lake View Campgrounds
A popular tourist spot, with a wide range of camping
facilities, ranging from basic tents to large RVs to
upmarket luxury yurts with their own electricity. The
site is nestled on the quiet northern side of the lake,
under a canopy of oak trees.
At this time of year, the campsite is not full,
but still relatively busy. The trees are bare, naked
branches scratching against each other in the cold
October wind. There is little to see at this location –
Agents can potter about speaking to tourists, but this
is a dead end.
Lake Arun Marina
A beautiful waterfront stretch, this is the busiest part
of town, sitting at the far end of Main Street, a mile
long boardwalk with jetties and small piers giving
wonderful views of the lake, lined with cafes, bars
and seafood restaurants. This is the main tourist strip,
although its equally popular with locals. Even at this
time of year the water is busy with sailors and anglers
of all kinds, and the residents sit huddled up against
the cold outside on wooden benches, taking in the
view and drinking coffees. Agents can hire boats here,
or speak to locals who are into their fishing.
If Agents visit this area, it is a good time to deploy an
Event from the Events List below.
Motel Woodside
An upmarket location near the lake shoreline, with
individual, pastel colored three-star cabins. Wellbetter
stayed here during his time in Petersville.
Speaking to the manager, the Agents can ask him
to check his records and he can confirm the dates
Wellbetter lodged with them. The room he stayed in
has since been cleaned and reused many times, and
Agents will find no further clues there. The manager
will remember Wellbetter asked her about hiring a car
– saying he wanted to visit some of the farms south
29
and east of town. Speaking to the motel owner might
also reveal some Town Rumors.
Creek Woodlands
The Creek Woodlands are a wide selection of for-
ested walking trails south and east of the town, past
the farming belt. Driving there, the Agents will first
go past many working chicken, wheat and diary
farms, then later pass even more that are abandoned
and closed. Wheat stalks dry and splinter in the sun,
pumpkins sit rotting unattended in fields, empty and
weed-infested barns stand idle, broken and cracked
windows looking out from abandoned farmsteads.
The small Creek River flows past all of these farms.
The woodlands themselves are popular with hik-
ers. They are extensive and without good cellphone
coverage. Going into them unprepared is unwise – its
easy to get lost in the winding trails, and there are
bear and bobcat in this isolated area. The Tourist
Office can give advice on all of this.
If Agents state they want to explore the woods
or follow the creek, and succeed at a Navigate roll,
they can follow the small river for a few hours as it
winds its way through the hilly forest and find the
concrete standpipe running from the Venron facili-
ty that Wellbetter also found, with a slow trickle of
white foam seeping out from it.
If Agents prepare for their woodlands excur-
sion by buying maps, compasses and getting advice
from the locals or the tourist office, they can add
+20% to their roll. Farmer Tennant can also guide
them here if he has been convinced to help them.
Agents with 20% or more in Pilot – Small Boat can
hire a boat from the marina to sail right up the river
in only an hour or two. No Navigate roll is then
needed then to find the pipe.
If they fail the Navigate roll, play out one event from
the Creek Woodlands Events list below – Handler’s
choice, or roll a 1D6 to choose. They can try the roll
again after 3 hours. On a critical failure, or if they
stay out until dusk, they get so lost they must spend
the night in the woods. A Survival roll is needed from
the Agent with the highest skill in the group, or each
member loses 1D6 HP from exposure at this cold
time of year, and 1D8 WP from bad sleep. Camping
equipment/tents will add +20% to this roll. It is im-
possible to navigate the dense and confusing woods at
night.
The Effluent Pipe
Agents who embark on this trek through the
woodlands to follow the Creek river in an effort
to locate the source of the pollution, by
retracing Wellbetter’s steps, and who succeed
at the required Navigation roll, will eventually
come across an effluent pipe. The pipe is a large
concrete tube jutting out from a mound of earth, big
enough for a human to walk upright in, if slightly
stooped over. A thin scum of white foam trickles out
into the Creek river. Searching the area around the
pipe will reveal embedded in the mud near the bank a
cracked pair of sunglasses, a clipboard and a pen with
the EPA logo on it. Succeeding at the Search roll will
also reveal a high-tide watermark inside the pipe. It
is clear from this that at times there must be a much
higher flow than the current trickle.
Taking samples here will reveal the highest
concentration of the unknown biological molecule
found yet. Checking an online mapping tool or fol-
lowing the pipe overground for an hour will reveal
it runs directly toward an isolated industrial facility.
See the section on Venron, below. The pipe also offers
an alternative route inside the Venron facility, which
avoids the guard patrols and problems of swipe card
access – but requires the Agents to make their way
past the unnatural growth in the sub-basement. If any
brave Agents dare to venture up the pipe, they will
eventually find themselves in Sub-basement 1. See
that section further on for details.
Creek Woodlands Events
1. Animal encounter (black bear or bobcat, aggres-
sive)
The Agents are surprised by a large mammal cross-
ing the path ahead of them. The animal is agitated
and aggressive. This is unusual – they usually avoid
humans and don’t stray this close to the paths. The
creature’s behavior has been affected by a lifetime
of Lac Maternum contamination. Unless all Agents
immediately say they are slowly backing off, the
Agents must succeed at a Survival roll to know how
to handle the situation, or the animal will catch their
scent and rush them. If they kill the poor creature and
take samples, they can determine it was riddled with
cancerous growths and amyloid plaques.
30
2. Lost!
The Agents get turned around and discover they have
gone in a large loop, wasting a lot of time. They waste
3 hours of time and each lose 1D4-2 HP from dehy-
dration.
3. Deer Carcass
The Agents find a deer carcass at the side of the trail.
It is bloated and rotting. It’s tongue is black and huge,
lolling out of the mouth. The stomach has burst and
white sacs of tumors and pus have leaked out over
the ground. It also seems it was heavily pregnant at
the time – but there is no sign of the calf. Animals
have avoided eating the corpse. It doesn’t appear to
have been killed by predation and shows no sign of
external wounds. Taking samples of it will reveal high
concentrations of the same molecule found in the
‘Purity Control’ sample.
4. Nothing Happens
The Agents make slow progress along the river. Time
passes but nothing of interest occurs. Agents can roll
again if it is not yet dark.
5. Fellow Hikers
The Agents come across a small group of fellow hik-
ers, dressed in outdoor gear. They can provide direc-
tions and tips for following the river, giving a +20%
bonus for the next Navigation roll.
6. Fruit Grove
The Agents come across an abandoned fruit grove,
now overtaken by nature. Extremely large and rotten
fruit, perhaps apples, some double or even triple the
size of normal specimens, are scattered all over the
woodland floor. Wasps and flys are thick in the air,
sucking up the fermenting juices. Follow the same
rules given in the Pumpkin Patch Event later – one
of the Agents is struck by the overwhelming desire to
consume the rotten fruit. Any Agents who are CON-
TAMINATED, or who have already eaten the pump-
kins, automatically fail.
 Events
These random events provide clues, creepy moments and obstacles to the Agents during their
investigation of Petersville. It is up to the Handler to decide when and where to deploy one.

Use them sparingly to spice up the investigation or throw a spanner in the works if needed. Not
every scene or location in Petersville need have something exciting happen. Some Events can
also be used to provide additional information should the Agents have missed it elsewhere. Events
should not be used all at once, and it is quite likely that not all occur during the scenario.

Too Far Gone

At some quiet point in the day, either when Agents are eating in a restaurant somewhere, grab-
bing drinks in a bar or talking to townsfolk to dig up local rumors, a ragged looking man wear-
ing a lumberjack’s hat and checked shirt will angrily stumble into whatever building they are in.
Agents can see the man doesn’t look well, or perhaps he’s drunk. He gets into a heated argu-
ment with another local, which escalates quickly. The ragged man storms out and the situation
appears resolved. A few moments later, the man suddenly returns, having retrieved a small hand
chainsaw from his pickup. It’s already running. Without hesitation, he plunges the spinning blade
into the neck of the man he was previously arguing with, who had returned to his seat with his
family. His body spasms to the ground, the man clutching his shredded neck with a wet gurgling
sound, blood pumping out all over the floor. Nearby children are splashed with gore.

People scream and panic. The man continues ranting and waves the chainsaw around, spraying
blood everywhere. If Agents do nothing, locals quickly rush to restrain him. The man struggles
and thrashes. If Agents move closer or decide to intervene, they see the man has pulsating,
bruise-colored nodules on his neck and arms, and bright red rashes on his face. He is ranting
nonsense and will not calm down.

If the Agents step in and take charge, the man will suddenly break free and attack them. The man
is Andrew Welks, a local logger. He has developed a particularly advanced case of aggressive
and degenerative brain disease caused from many years exposure to the pollutants coming from
Venron and has lost his mind, in a similar manner to Thomas Wellbetter in his final days. Andrew
is quite mad and cannot be reasoned with, but can be restrained or stunned, or incapacitated at
1HP.

Whatever happens, the police quickly arrive and take over the situation. If still alive, Welks is
bundled heavily into the back of a police car and whisked away – an ambulance if not. The
sobbing family quietly leave as their father is covered in a sheet and taken away. The other locals
go back to their drinks and meals as if nothing has happened. The blood is mopped up. Within
moments, everyone is talking and laughing again, the incident forgotten. If the Agents try to ques-
tion anyone about it, they will feign ignorance and claim the man was a local drunk.

If heavy-handed Agents kill the man, the police will be be surprisingly willing to listen to their
side of the story. The Agents will not be charged or even questioned much – local officers mark
it down as a case of self defense. Any Agents with a Law skill of 30% or more will realize the
police are burying the case and not being diligent with the investigation or paperwork.

31
If the Agents decide to follow up and try to gain access to Welks after he has been arrested or
killed, they later find no trace of him. Diligent work can uncover a transfer order to Dr Offerman’s
clinic rather than a County hospital – finding the room he was supposedly moved to, they dis-
cover an empty bed. Succeeding at a Search roll in the room will reveal tiny smears of gray goo
under the bed. The body of Welks dissolved in the same manner as Wellbetter, and the remains
quickly cleaned up by the complicit townsfolk.

I Brought You A Daffodil

Sometime when the Agents are out and about in town, maybe at the Marina, one of them is
approached by a small child who skips up to them. The Agent feels a gentle tugging at their coat
and looks down to see a curious young girl with pigtails. She is holding a daffodil in her hand.
She will speak to the Agent in a sing-song voice. ‘Hello. You’re new here aren’t you? I can tell.
You’re not like the others. Look . . . I brought you a flower. Doesn’t it smell nice?’ The girl then
smiles. The Agent will notice her teeth are almost completely black, as if stained by ink or rot.

The girl has no agenda and is simply curious about the ‘tourists.’ Both she and the flower are
harmless – but the Agents don’t know that.

When The Food Bites Back

Play this event when Agents are near the end of the day or out for food in the town. One of them
orders fish from the menu – a local catch from Lake Arun. As they are halfway through their meal,
they bite down into something hard and crunchy – bigger than a fish bone. Taking the morsel
out of their mouth, at first they think one of their own teeth has dropped out. Upon looking down
into the half-eaten fish, they see that growing inside it are two small sets of human-sized molars,
protruding from the interior flesh. The Agent has already swallowed a few. SAN loss 0/1 for
Helplessness

Too Many Children

If any Agent asks to make an Alertness roll whilst out and about in town, or spends a significant
portion of time conducting observation and surveillance, they notice that there are a large num-
ber of children in town – almost too many. The streets are packed with twins, triplets and even
quadruplets. Large families of identical looking children are everywhere. Not only that, but it
seems almost every other woman is heavily pregnant.

As this thought dawns on the Agent, they realize half a dozen of the children across the street
have stopped moving, and are silently staring directly at them.

32
 The Pumpkin Patch
Exploring the farms outside of town, Agents might drive past a vast pumpkin patch which has a
small crowd of people outside. There are hand-painted signs by the road advertising ‘Pick Ur Own’
for Halloween. The people look concerned and worried. There is a commotion.
Investigating the patch, Agents will find a vast field of foul, rotting husks. An entire crop
of pumpkins has been reduced to blackened, slimy mush. The stench is overpowering. Flies buzz
around in large clouds. The farmer who owns the patch cannot explain it – he says everything was
fine two days ago, and ready for picking.
If Agents walk through the field or decide to take samples, pick the Agent with the lowest
POW and request they make a POWx5 test. On a failure, they are swept with a sudden and over-
whelming urge to eat the rotten pumpkins. They scoop up handfuls of the disgusting mush into their
mouth before they can be stopped. After a few swallows, they suddenly seem to realize what they
are doing, and spend the next five minutes retching up their lunch. They cannot explain the urges
they just felt, merely the compulsion to consume. SAN 0/1 Helplessness for everyone present, and
1/1D4 for the Agent affected.
On a POW success, explain the urge sweeping through them, but that they are able to
suppress the baffling need to eat the revolting pumpkins. Any Agents who have become CONTAMI-
NATED, or who have eaten the rotten fruit in the Wilderness, automatically fail and eat the pumpkin
mush.
We Don’t Serve Your Kind
If the Agents are out speaking to businesses, in a bar or a restaurant, Farmer Joe Tennant may en-
ter. He is a large man in his late 50s, with cold, unblinking eyes, dressed in outdoor clothes, with a
raspy voice and hacking cough. He will be refused service. The owner will tell him in no uncertain
terms to get out. People will get up from their seats and move away from wherever he sits. People
whisper behind his back and cast dark glances. He will get into a heated argument with another
farmer and threats will be made. Eventually, Tennant leaves. He will brush Agents aside and return
to his pickup if they try to talk to him. People will mutter darkly about him.

Trouble With The Law

If the Agents speak to Sheriff Novaks at all and voice to him their suspicious of Venron, or if the
deputy assigned to follow them sees them attempt to break into the facility, a day later, whenever
the Agents return to their vehicle or motel room, they find a police car and two deputies stationed
near it. They are writing up a report. Approaching the Agents, they inform them they are under
arrest for narcotic possession with intent to distribute. They show a large plastic wrap of metham-
phetamine crystal that was found.
This is a setup. The drugs have been planted by the crooked cops in an attempt to intimi-
date and harass the Agents under orders from Sheriff Novaks, who has had them followed. (Agents
can spot this tail only if they ask to look for it and make an Alertness roll.) If the Agents argue with
the cops or refuse to comply, they will be subjected to pepper spray and batons. Aggressive agents
might escalate things further. Attempted Law arguments will automatically fail and might provoke
the cops to violence.
If Agents submit and comply, they will all be hauled down to the station and locked up for
24 hours, their fingerprints and photos taken and their bosses called. This won’t be too much of a
problem unless any Agent is already a wanted fugitive for previous crimes - any outstanding war-
rants or details will be found. Illegal weapons will be confiscated.

33
 Stay Outta Our Town
Unless Agents make their presence in the town secret, they return to their motel rooms or cars one
night to find them vandalized. Windows have been smashed, tires slashed, items thrown about or
ruined with spray paint. This can escalate on subsequent evenings. A car or room might even be
firebombed at night with a Molotov cocktail. Paint might be daubed on the inside of their rooms
with the words “GET OUT FEDS”. A severed and rotting cows head can be found in their shower
(SAN roll 0/1 for violence.) This is intimidation from the locals. It has worked before to scare off
journalists and activists.

Strange Dreams
On the 2nd or 3rd night that the Agents spend in Petersville, pick the Agent with the lowest POW
score. Ask them to make a POW roll. On a success, they have surreal but fading dreams of some-
thing vast, grasping and straining at them, reaching down from a great height. There is a wet,
musty smell, vaguely fungal. The background is black, with pin-pricks of faint white light – they
might be stars.
On a failure, the dreams are terrifying and bold. The thing from the stars manages to
reach them, wrapping around their body and throat, inserting itself inside their mouth and nose.
What’s worse, the Agent finds themselves welcoming this warm embrace of suffocation and
death. The Agent suddenly wakes up with a start, their heart missing a beat. Their face was
simply buried in their pillow, and they are gasping for breath. They lose 1/1D4 SAN from the
disturbing dream and have troubled sleep for the rest of the night, losing 1D6 WP.

The Cull
If Agents drive around the farmlands outside of town, they might come across a huge blaze. They
can smell the smoke and the sweet taste of roasting meat long before they see the fire. As they
drive closer, the smell changes, becoming sickly and overpowering. Agents must make a CONx5
roll or retch at the stench, bringing up their lunch. Those that fail the roll cannot go any further
towards the pyre, unless they spend a SAN point. A giant pyramid of stacked bodies of cattle has
been constructed in a large field. More bodies are being fed into it by a forklift truck from a large
pile being dumped out of a trailer. There must be hundreds. Some are clearly still alive – thrash-
ing and screaming as they are dumped into the inferno. The cries are hideous. If the Agents pull
into the field and speak to the farmers, they are given short shrift. Dead-eyed men with weathered
faces stare them down. If asked about the bonfire of flesh, they get a brief explanation. ‘Bad
blood. Whole herd had ta go. They weren’t right.’ Agents will get little else out of
them. If they take tissue samples from some corpses, which will involve getting
close to the inferno and possible burns, they will be
able to find cases of advanced
tumors and amyloid
plaques in the brains.

34
 The Vagrant
Somewhere in town, a man in rags will accost the Agents. He is filthy, covered in dirt and he
stinks. The man seems half-crazed, babbling nonsensically at them, flailing about and pawing
at the Agents with his filth-encrusted hands. He smells like a mixture between manure and rotten
animals. He is thin, with a matted beard and clearly hasn’t washed in years.
He tries to grab an Agent. If they stop to listen, he will begin to gabble on, flecks of spittle
hitting the Agent in the face as he rants. This costs them -20% for all social skills for the rest of the
day due to the stench, unless they go change their clothes and have a shower.
‘Don’ go lookin’ boy, don’t go searchin’! If ya look too hard you might FIND it.’ he says,
bursting into a fit of giggles. ‘And the problem is, when ya finds it, it finds you back.’
If the Agents have previously found the newspaper article and photograph on the missing
mayor, allow them an INTx5 or Alertness roll. A success, and they will recognize the man as the
long-lost mayor, albeit greatly changed from his photo. He has lost about 50 lbs and looks like he
has aged 20 years due to his harsh lifestyle on the streets. If they fail, say that he looks familiar,
but they can’t quite place him. Henry was driven to insanity in 2017 after witnessing the gestat-
ing flesh-sac underneath the Venron plant, and then being contaminated by Lac Maternum slurry
during his visit. A HUMINT skill of 40% or more will indicate the man is suffering from a mental
disorder of some sort. A Psychotherapy skill of 30% or more identifies it is from suppressed men-
tal trauma from an extreme shock. Talking to him for a few minutes will reveal he is undergoing
some kind of manic/depressive cycle, one minute laughing and giggling, the next sobbing into
his sleeve and making dire warnings.
On a successful Psychotherapy roll, an Agent is able to get a few moments of lucidity
out of the man. ‘I saw it! In the basement, I knew they were hiding something . . . I snuck up that
tunnel, I . . . the eyes . . . it had too many eyes . . . under the plant . . . it was old Yates, still
alive! And then they flush it, into the groundwater! Everyone, everywhere, drinking it, eating it . .
. inside all of us. Inside you too soon. The EPA man, he tried to find it . . . he found too much!’
If they fail, or continue to try to talk to him without the skill, they get only more babbling
nonsense such as - ‘The crabs . . . did ya see the crabs?? They too darn big! Why does no one
do nothing about the crabs?! The witches jelly, I call it . . . tastes good . . . until it starts tasting
YOU!’
And Stay Down
Some point after meeting The Vagrant, perhaps a day or so later, the Agents pass by the mouth
of an alleyway in town. They can hear cries of pain and a scuffle. They see a filthy man on the
floor, being struck and beaten by two police officers with their nightsticks. They are shouting at
him as he cries pathetically for mercy. Agents recognize the man on the ground as the Vagrant
they previously met.
If Agents Stealth closer, they can hear some of the following – ‘What did we TELL you
about talking to out-of-towners? Keep your damn mouth shut Henry, or next time we’ll cave your
face in.’ They finish by giving him a boot to the stomach, and he coughs up blood.
If Agents try to intervene or approach, the police will say they are simply cautioning the
man for trespassing and public begging. Anyone with Law or HUMINT 30% can tell this is a bra-
zen lie. If the Agents demand the police stop the beating, there will be a tense moment where the
officers look like they are about to draw their sidearms – before silently complying and walking
away.
Henry Winthropp will thank the Agents if they intervene. If they speak kindly to him or
help him with First Aid, he will mumble through broken teeth that the officers should have more
respect for an ex-mayor – he then might pass on some clues about Venron and what’s going on

35
in the town, before stopping himself from going any further with ‘in the basement . . . in the
barrel . . . he’s not dead . . . but not alive.’ He will scurry away in fear should the Agents attempt
any further interrogation.
Active Shooter
Agents hear the unmistakable crack of semi-automatic gunfire, followed swiftly by screams. Step-
ping out into the street, they see people flowing out of a high-school across the road, panicked
and running for their lives. Some are bleeding, others stumble and fall.
Behind them, a teenage boy dressed in black, wearing a face mask, baseball cap and
carrying a backpack, leans out of the main school doors. He is holding an AR-15 rifle and taking
careful aim, picking off fleeing targets.
The boy is Erik Hendley, a pupil at the school. Hendley’s brain is nothing more than a
pulpy mass of tumors and plaques, held together by a few remnants of normal gray matter. He
has no agenda, ideology, or even real plan. He is suffering severe delusions and aggression from
his neurogenerative disease and he has decided to end his life via suicide by police.
Agents are free to deal with the active shooter as they wish. Police and ambulance ser-
vices won’t arrive for many more minutes. He may retreat into the school and take a classroom
hostage if he starts receiving hostile fire.
Entering the school in pursuit, Agents will find dead bodies of staff and students in the
entrance atrium and blood smears on the plexi-glass of the admin office. Gunfire will ring out
from the cafeteria. Screaming students will panic and randomly run past the Agents in the corri-
dors and hallways, adding to the confusion. Bodies lie slumped on the cafeteria tables in pools of
blood. Panicked or injured students whimper and sob underneath tables or behind plastic bins.
Succeeding at First Aid rolls will allow Agents to stabilize the wounded students outside,
for an award of 1 SAN. Failure, and they will bleed out in the Agent’s arms, costing 0/1D4
Helplessness. If Agents hide and do nothing, all present must lose 0/1D4 from Helplessness as
they watch more innocent schoolchildren be gunned down before the town police arrive.
Digging into the boy’s background later, they can find he used to work weekends as a
farm hand at Wandsworth chicken ranch, which is only a few miles downriver from the Venron
facility. If they go to the farm, they will find it ruined and abandoned, and see the large Venron
facility pumping out white vapor in the distance.
If killed, the boy’s body will dissolve in the same manner as Andrew Welks, within 24
hours. If somehow captured alive, he dies from ‘natural causes’ within a few days in jail.

36
 Farmer Joseph Tennant
For 25 years, Joe Tennant has run a small but prof-
itable dairy farm in the meadowlands south of Pe-
tersville. He suffered as many others did during the
decline of the town in the 90s and early 00s, but he
struggled on through, just about able to make ends
meet - until Venron Processing opened its doors. For
the past decade, run-off from the processing plant has
polluted the small stream that surrounds his farm and
fed his crops and cattle.
Tennant has watched his entire herd succumb to the
toxic unnatural contaminants flowing through the
Petersville groundwater. His cows sickened and died
of digestive cancers, tumors so large that they would
protrude from the the gut lining and mouth. Many
cows turned aggressive and mad, having to be put
down. Even worse, his own wife also succumbed to
the poison. She now clings on to a painful half-life,
rotting away inside the house.
Joe tried everything he could to get help, but
at every corner he was blocked and stymied – the
mayor fobbed him off, the police chief never took
him seriously and County inquiries went missing or
were never returned. Many of his friends in other
farms died from similar diseases or went bankrupt
and moved away from the area.
Joe increased his campaigning and soon be-
came the town pariah, viewed as a troublemaker. He
37
was shunned by many of the townsfolk for his out-
spoken criticism of Venron and their industrial prac-
tices – but with no proof, no one wanted to believe
that the company that had helped save Petersville
from economic ruin was also killing it.
After multiple years of letdowns and betray-
als, Tennant is extremely mistrustful of all authority
figures and the government. After his lawyer’s myste-
rious death, he is also openly paranoid about the local
police and Venron.
He rarely leaves the farm except to drive to town
once a week for supplies. He believes soon that gov-
ernment forces will try an assault on his property.
Approaching The Farm
If Agents approach the farm during the daytime hop-
ing to talk to him, they will find him pottering about
a ruined barn carrying out repairs, or chopping wood.
A man of few words, he will be blunt and dismiss-
ive in any interactions with the Agents. Although he
briefly met Thomas Wellbetter, he will not discuss this
interaction with the Agents, and will answer none of
their questions. He will tell the Agents in no uncertain
terms to get off his property, and to stay away from
Petersville.
If the Agents are caught sneaking around his farm at
night, Tennant will flash a light at them and give them
one curt warning to leave. If they do not retreat, he
will open fire with his shotgun from the porch of his
house. If the Agents are caught inside his farmhouse
or his barn, he will give the trespassers no warning
before he shoots. He assumes they are killers sent by
Venron to finally silence him.
Offical Questioning
Tennant doesn’t care if the Agents flash badges. He
will laugh off any mention of the FBI, calling them
‘Boy scouts in suits’. Even with an official signed war-
rant, he will not allow entry into his house and will
attempt to defend himself. Tennant won’t back down
during a firefight unless he is incapacitated or killed.
If it looks like he is going to lose, he will retreat to
his bedroom and quickly barricade the door. If the
Agents try to break it down, he will pull out his wife
from under the bed, put one barrel of shot in her
brain and the second barrel in his. Agents can only
de-escalate the situation if they leave or if they yell
out that they are investigating Venron.
If Agents head straight to the farm as their
first stop in Petersville, it is unlikely they will have
gathered enough detail about the town to know of
Venron or their facility. It may take further investi-
gative work to gather enough clues. The only way
Tennant can be brought onside is if the Agents make
explicit references to Venron and what they are up
to. If they express belief that Venron is poisoning the
town and that they intend to put a stop to it, Tennant
will lower his gun and begin to listen. If they ask for
his help, he will wearily allow them to come inside
and make them coffee. He will explain his situation
and his background, as well as his years of failed
attempts to have Venron investigated through offi-
cial channels. He will not show the Agents his wife,
although he will admit she is very sick. If the Agents
ask for more proof of Venron’s misdoings, he will
give them the box of new
videotapes he had planned to
send to Ruff. If they ask if he has
anything else, he will also
reluctantly show them the cow in
the barn. The cow will go mad at
the sight of the Agents, and break
free from its restraints. It will
attack the Agents for a single
round, before Tennant shoots it
dead with his shotgun. Tennant
38
can explain - ‘Muh animals get them welts, them dead
eyes. Charge at me, crazy like.’ He will show them the
river and the bleached stones that lie within it, caused
by the run-off ‘From that damn plant.’
If the Agents claim they are going to stop Venron,
Tennant will give them two pieces of advice – first,
don’t trust the owner, Whittaker Yates. And secondly,
that the young EPA fella, Thomas, thought they might
be dumping illegal waste from an overflow pipe.
Perhaps following the path of the Creek river through
the woods will reveal something. If Persuaded to help,
Tennant will also show them the way, negating the
need for the Navigation rolls later on.
Agents can arrange for medical treatment of
his wife with an Unusual expense. This will earn them
bonus SAN points at the end of the scenario.
The Farm Buildings
Tennant’s farm is a sprawling, multi-acre affair of
barns, outbuildings, wooden sheds and the main
farmhouse, a large, three story structure of ancient
timbers and slate rooftiles. Rotten and dried weeds
infest the property, which has slowly fallen into ruin.
Broken down pickups and tractors lie rusted and rot-
ted around the area. The farm itself was clearly once
a large, thriving business. Now it is silent and emp-
ty, slowly wasting away. The small Creek river runs
across the side of the farm.
Agents spending some time observing the
property will see a large man wearing rubber boots
and a canvas coat pottering around, half-heatedly
conducting repairs, chopping wood or running minor
errands. Looking at the wide field directly to the rear
of the house, Agents can clearly see dozens upon doz-
ens of mounds of dirt. Some look freshly dug.
If Agents sneak onto the fields to unearth some
mounds at night or when Tennant is away, they find
no bodies – only moist puddles of gray ooze, slowly
seeping back into the earth.
All of the barns seem empty, gates rattling in
the wind against empty stalls. One barn is still fully
enclosed and locked, with a padlocked sliding entry-
way.
Sneaking Around
The cold autumn air whistles through abandoned
stalls and outhouses. The farm is silent. No animals
can be heard. If Agents spend a portion of time silent-
ly observing, every so often they can hear a guttural
moan of either pain or laughter coming from inside
the remaining locked barn. The Agents are more like-
ly to hear this noise at night.
Sneaking onto the farm will be a surprisingly
risky option for Agents. Tennant is extremely para-
noid and convinced that at some point either the local
police or Venron themselves will arrange for him to
have an ‘accident.’ He has prepared traps around his
farm to warn him of intruders and dissuade any who
might enter the farm house.
There are warning signs advising people
to stay away from the private property all around.
Tripwires set up around the exterior of the farm line
all the entrances – Tennant resets these every day at
dusk. If Agents are attempting to move around the
farm at night, every five minutes select a random
Agent to make an Alertness roll. On a fail, they trip a
wire, and a bucket of rusty bolts or plastic bag full of
empty tin cans clatter down off a nearby roof, echo-
ing loudly around the deserted farm yard. A few mo-
ments later, the porchlight will come on, and Tennant
will shove the door open, double-barreled shotgun
in hand, bellowing into the night. He will open fire
at any intruders he sees, unless the Agents hide. On
a success, the Agent notices the thin wire just in time
and can safely step over it.
The Barn
If the Agents break the lock (with a crowbar or
bolt-cutters at STR 13 or higher) or pick it, they can
enter the main central barn. Inside is the last remain-
ing heifer from Tennant’s dairy herd. The poor cow
has been horribly transformed by years of exposure to
the diluted Lac Maternum, but yet somehow stub-
39
bornly clings to life. Tennant is keeping it alive as he
experiments with treatments on it to see if he can find
a method to cure his wife. It is tied up in a central
stall. Agents entering the barn can see little in the
darkness. The air smells of sweet, wet rot. Dried hay
crunches underfoot. If they listen carefully, they can
hear heavy, rasping breathing coming from a closed
stall at the far end of the barn. As they approach it,
they hear a pitiful, morose moaning, as something
large and heavy stirs beyond the door. Opening the
stall door will reveal the hideous creature.
The ruined cow is a blasphemy against na-
ture. A second, rudimentary head is protruding out of
the side of its neck, lolling pathetically. The creature
squirms and thrashes, drool peeling from its heavy
lips, mad black eyes spinning in their sockets. The ud-
ders are hugely bloated and ripe, a bloody pus contin-
ually dripping from them onto the stall floor, stinking
of spoiled meat.
At the sight of the Agents, the deformed cow
will begin bellowing in panic and straining at the cord
securing it to the wall. The bellowing will quickly at-
tract the attention of Farmer Tennant, who will come
to investigate. The cow might break loose and charge
at the Agents at an opportune time.
If the Agents secure biological samples from
the cow, they will be able to determine it has the same
pattern of cancerous growths and amyloid plaques as
Thomas Wellbetter.
Inside The Farmhouse
Trying to enter the house itself is dangerous. Tennant
has set up rudimentary but quite deadly booby traps
on both the front and back door. If anyone opens
these doors at night (or when Tennant is out of the
house visiting Petersville) and does not specifically ask
to make an Alertness check before stepping through
the dark threshold into the house, the trap will trig-
ger. On a failure, a spring-loaded heavy timber log
embedded with nails and shards of glass will swing
across at head height with crushing force, hitting an-
yone in the doorway in the temple. A Dodge roll will
allow the Agent to duck out of the way just in time. A
failure and the trap will connect, slamming into their
head and costing 2D8 damage. If the Agent survives,
they must also make a CONx5 roll, or lose 2D8 WP
from concussion. This damage can only be mitigated
by armor if the Agent is wearing head protection of
some kind. It is perfectly possible that this deadly
homemade device will kill.
On an Alertness success, Agents notice a thin string of
fishing wire connecting from the top of the door to a
strange looking contraption on a nearby wall, and the
log above ready to swing down. With some ingenuity,
it could be safely disabled.
The doors are locked but can be opened
with a Lockpick roll. A failure indicates the door can
still be opened, but the attempt is obvious and the
lock damaged. Smashing open one of the half-rotten
wooden doors is also possible, but will be noisy. They
are unlocked during the day whilst Tennant is potter-
ing around his farm.
The ground floor windows are also locked
and barricaded with wooden planks, although Agents
can shimmy up a rickety drainpipe with an Athletics
roll to reach the unlocked upper windows. A fall will
cost 1D4 HP.
Ground Floor
If the Agents make it safely inside, they will find a
cluttered farmhouse. It is filled to the brim with all
the accouterments of living in the same place for sev-
eral decades. The ground floor consists of a lounge,
kitchen, dining room, bathroom and narrow set of
stairs leading up.
A single battered lounge chair is
set up in front of an old CRT
television in the main room, next
to a small fire. The upper floor
has bedrooms, attic and a
bathroom. Every so often, one
of the Agents might hear a quiet
moan that wavers between pain
and gentle giggling, coming from
one of the floors above. This is
the wife of Farmer Tennant.
On a counter in the kitchen
they can find the remains of a
meal prepared for one, with a
single set of cutlery and one plate. Searching the
kitchen will reveal that Tennant keeps fleshy organs
preserved in his fridge - giant gall bladders, tumors
and black teeth, wrapped in tin foil. There is a jar
with a hoof inside, curled up and turned in on itself.
The dining room contains many bookshelves filled
40
with volumes from the 70s and 80s on farming
practices, as well as stacks of large cardboard boxes
in one corner. Opening the boxes will reveal them
to be filled with dozens upon dozens of VHS tapes.
Each tape is labeled with a date, going back many
years. Watching these tapes will reveal video evidence
detailing the gradual decline of his herd – diseased
animals, rotting whilst still alive, clumps of cancerous
growths bursting out of their skin, crude home autop-
sies showing twisted and blackened organs, covered in
flies - as well as shots of white foaming scum floating
down the Creek river, coming from an industrial
plant in the far distance.
There is a panning shot of a chain link fence
at dusk, with a sign – VENRON – PRIVATE PROP-
ERTY – KEEP OUT. The plant is visible behind.
The dark, shaky shots show men in overalls carrying
wooden shipping crates into the site. A Search roll
makes out yellow biohazard warning symbols on the
crates.
On one of the boxes filled with tapes is an ad-
dress label written in red pen, made out to Mr. Robert
Ruff, Hollister & Taft, Central Avenue, Cincinnati,
Ohio. There are also a number of dense medical text-
books open on the table, with extensive bookmarks
and handwritten notes. The reader seemed interested
in learning about the causes and potential cures for
various types of cancer. In the downstairs bathroom
in a cabinet, there is an extraordinary range of power-
ful drugs and medicines taking up the shelving space.
Anyone with a Medicine skill of 20% or Pharmacy
skill of 10% will recognize these as some of the
 most powerful painkillers available, some of which
are illegal for the public in the US due to their po-
tency and strength. Scattered amongst them are also
several experimental drugs and alternative medicines,
which supposedly help in the treatment of cancers.
The only thing remotely modern or hi-tech
in the house is a heavy and once-expensive handheld
camcorder, that must’ve been high-end back in the
late 90s, running on old VHS cassettes. It is sat on
the dining room table surrounded by cables and spare
batteries. It has obviously seen a lot of use.
The Bedroom
Tennant keeps his crippled wife locked away, mostly
for what he believes is her own safety. Annabelle is
a thin lady in her mid 50s, and she has been badly
hit by the poisoned runoff from Venron, unlike Joe,
who so far has been relatively unscathed. Her mind is
mostly gone, and her skin has begun to slough off, her
muscles gradually losing their cohesion and dissolv-
ing. Her face is a slumped mess, like a painting that
has run in the rain. She is hideous and cries pitifully,
constantly in agony, unless heavily doped on painkill-
ers. She occasionally bursts into fits of giggles, as a
happy memory sparks across her ruined cerebellum.
She cannot lie without pain on a normal bed,
so Joe keeps her on a special low-lying support trolley
on wheels, which he slides under his own bed at
night-time. She lies there in the dark, her mind noth-
ing more than shattered, broken memories, riding out
waves of pain as the days tick by. Tennant is desper-
ately trying to learn things from medical textbooks to
alleviate her suffering, but he is coming to the con-
clusion that one day soon he will have to feed her an
entire bottle of pills to ensure she suffers no longer.
Tennant is totally mistrustful of Doctor Offer-
man and any authority from the local medical estab-
lishment. If the Agents can convince him they are on
his side, he might allow them to take her to an out of
State hospital for further treatment, which can reduce
her pain and make her remaining days comfortable.
This is worth a +1 SAN reward.
If the Agents open the door to the bedroom
while Tennant is absent, they can hear piteous moans
and wet giggling coming from somewhere inside the
room. Listening carefully will discern the noise from
coming under the bed. Pulling out the rolling trolley,
they see a rotten, wretched creature, who was once a
41
woman. Her muscles have atrophied away, a grossly
swollen head flopping from side to side. She has a
distended mouth hanging like a prolapse, filled with
rotten and broken teeth.
Annabelle will hiss and snap at them for a
few furious seconds, spittle flying from her decaying
lips covering the foremost Agent, before collapsing in
exhaustion, panting wetly. She is too far gone for any
communication and is no threat. Seeing her grossly
distorted form costs 1/1D4 SAN from the Unnatural.
Searching the bedroom, Agents will find a
crumpled letter in a bedside drawer. It is an offer for
an out-of-court settlement, detailing that Mr Ten-
nant is to drop his false and salacious environmental
pollution claims, agreeing to never pursue any further
legal action and to agree to an NDA on the matter, in
exchange for a one-time payment of $2 million. The
offer comes from a company named ‘Venron Medical
Processing’, dated a few weeks before Robert Ruff ’s
death. There is a section at the bottom of the letter
signed by man named Whittaker Yates, and with a
box intended for Joe Tennant’s counter-signature. It
was never signed and never returned.
The Lawyer
The EPA didn’t stumble across Petersville by accident.
They were alerted to the terrible pollution being
disposed of in the town by a smart, capable and brave
man named Robert Ruff. He is now dead, another
victim of New Life’s deadly wall of silence.
Agents might learn of this link through careful
reading of the redacted EPA report, which despite the
heavy editing and cover-up still includes a footnote
reference to this law firm - or they might discover it
later on from speaking to or investigating farmer Joe
Tennant in Petersville itself.
Robert Ruff was a lawyer working for Hollis-
ter & Taft, a boutique firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio,
who specialize in large corporate defense representa-
tion. Robert’s wife Sarah is an acquaintance of Joe
Tennant’s sister from the local Women’s Institute.
Tennant’s requests for help eventually found their
way to Robert, and one day Tennant arrived unan-
nounced at Ruff ’s workplace, still wearing his dirty
farming clothes and rubber boots, clutching a card-
board box full of videotapes. Ruff dismissed Tennant’s
pleas, stating he was a corporate defense attorney –
he usually defended large corporations, not pros-
ecute them. Tennant left, but still handed over the
box. A few weeks later, Ruff watched a tape out of
idle curiosity. What he saw shocked him. The tapes,
dating back over five years, documented the degener-
ative diseases and unusual conditions such as bloated
organs, blackened teeth and pulsating tumors which
had swept through Tennant’s farm animals. It was
damning footage. Ruff called Tennant back at once
and immediately dived into the case.
A few months later, Ruff was preparing his
first meeting with representatives from Venron. He
planned to take them to court for industrial dump-
ing of illegal waste. Venron’s powerful lawyers made
a private settlement offer of $2 million to drop the
case, which Ruff passed on to Tennant. Tennant re-
fused. As Ruff prepared to send evidence to the EPA
and DOJ prior to court action, Venron struck. A pri-
vate ‘fixer’, hired by DRJ, tampered with the brakes
on Ruff ’s car. It plowed into a turnpike at 70mph,
killing him instantly. Everyone thought it a tragic
accident. The case was dropped by his company and
quietly forgotten. The box of videotapes went miss-
ing. Tennant called once or twice, but the firm never
returned his pleas.
The only email on the subject ever issued by
Ruff slowly wormed its way through the churning
EPA bureaucracy, and eventually reached the inbox of
Thomas Wellbetter two months later.
Hollister & Taft
Agents can find Hollister & Taft with a simple inter-
net search and can arrange a meeting with one of the
partners, Mr Hollister, with a little work - although it
might take him a few days to have space in his sched-
ule. They are based in central Cincinnati in an upmar-
ket city location.
Hollister is a partner at the firm and was
Ruff ’s boss. He can explain some of the above,
including that Ruff was preparing a case for possible
breaches of environmental law. The case has since
been dropped. Due to attorney-client privilege, he
says he cannot give out specifics on Ruff ’s case, but
he can confirm it came from a resident of Petersville.
He will not release any further details and there is
nothing in American law that can compel him to do
so. He also thinks Ruff ’s death was simply an awful
accident. A HUMINT roll will reveal Hollister, de-
42
spite his genuine remorse, is secretly relieved at some-
thing. Pushing him on this, he will disclose he was
nervous about the case – he thought Ruff was taking
on more than he could chew. He will let slip that the
defendant had assembled a huge team of expensive
corporate lawyers, far more than they should have
been able to afford, including some real powerhouses
such as Kirkland & Ellis and DRJ Partners. Men-
tion of the name ‘DRJ’ might trigger memories from
Agents who survived the mission Tenebris Capra.
Ruff was a quiet, kind but determined man.
He left behind a young wife – Hollister can give out
her details to investigators that flash badges. Agents
can ask to look at Ruff ’s old office. It is on the first
floor, but has recently been turned over to a new
lawyer, who has already settled in. Nothing of Ruff ’s
remains. The new junior lawyer, if spoken to, lets
slip Ruff often did a lot of work in the archives – a
cramped section of the basement, where physical files
and boxes of evidence relating to cases are kept.
In The Archives
The section Ruff worked in the archive basement is
cluttered. The shelves are packed to the ceiling with
cardboard boxes. Yet, when an Agent picks one up,
they will discover they are all empty. No evidence re-
mains. Everything has been cleaned out, except for an
old TV with a 1990s era videotape machine attached,
and one single box with a scrap of an address label –
for the Tennant farm in Petersville. Searching around
will find a long forgotten tape still inside the machine
– left after the others were removed and destroyed by
the DRJ fixer.
The film was taken by an amateur. The vid-
eotape shows grainy, out of focus shots of horribly
mutilated farm animals, probably cows, inside a dark
barn. It’s difficult to see exactly what is wrong with
them, but they are in obvious distress and pain. The
noise they make is disturbing. The person filming the
creatures is not seen. Another shot shows a dead calf
lying on frosted grass. The calf has a black tongue,
swollen up, with fused and twisted hooves. The last
shot shows an enraged animal suddenly breaking free
and charging the cameraman. The camera is dropped,
and two loud shotgun blasts ring out. The camera
then cuts to black. In addition, any Agents succeeding
at Search roll will find a small listening device duct-
taped to the underside of one of the metal shelves.
Anyone with a SIGINT skill of 20% or more will
recognize it as an extremely top of the range model.
It has been deactivated. This bug was forgotten by the
fixer who tapped Ruff ’s workplace. Any Agents who
found bugs in Tenebris Capra recognize this as the
exact same make and model as the ones found in their
own rooms during that mission

43
 Venron Medical
Processing
Venron is a commercial provider of sterilization,
decontamination and repair services for medical and
surgical instruments. They operate a facility just out-
side of Petersville. For the past ten years, a single cli-
ent has dominated their business - New Life Fertility.
Unknown to any in New Life, the chemical runoff
from the plant contains not only high levels of indus-
trial pollutants from the decontamination process, but
minute traces of Lac Maternum washed away from
the many vials, syringes and other pieces of equip-
ment used aboard the hi-tech labs on the Cybelle. The
chemicals in this runoff mix have interacted in dan-
gerous and unforeseen ways with the unnatural milk
of Shub-Niggurath.
This run-off contains only trace amounts of Lac
Maternum in the parts-per-million range - which
under normal circumstances would do nothing more
than give a few residents very strange dreams. Yet the
toxic and mutagenic effects of the industrial chemicals
have had a profound influence upon this unnatural
molecule. The Lac Maternum has been transformed
into something even more insidious and pervasive.
It seeps into the groundwater which feeds the local
farms and builds up in the food chain, concentrat-
ing itself in the species sat at the very top – humans.
There, the unnatural effect is amplified and magnified
many times over, causing runaway cellular growth
and unrestrained biological activity, as the cosmic
life-force contained within expresses itself in new and
unusual ways. This has led to the cancers, tumors and
neurodegenerative diseases sweeping the town, along
44
with the unnaturally high fertility and birth rates. The
town is trapped in a constantly accelerating cycle of
death and rebirth, which is growing deadlier each
passing year.
The Yates Family
Venron was set up as a spin-off from a university of
Charleston operation by graduate student Albus Yates
in 1982. It was modestly successful and specialized in
services for hospitals and university labs. It eventually
made Albus relatively wealthy. The Yates’ struggled
for many years to conceive children, until they were
approached by a New Life fertility consultant in the
mid 1990s. Albus was enthusiastic and astounded at
the new ‘biotechnology’ on offer, and gladly joined
the waiting list. In early 1996, his son and heir, Whit-
taker Yates, was born.
As the New Life operation
continued to expand after
2010, and the full conver
sion to unnatural worship
occurred, Noreen Macdou
gal began scouring her
contacts for a reliable com
pany that could be brought
into the fold for servicing
their increasing demands
for medical equipment.
She found the perfect can
didate in the Yates family.
In 2012, through funding and loans from New Life,
Venron Medical Processing opened its newest facility
in the remote Appalachian town of Petersville. The
location was chosen specifically for its out of the way
nature and compliant, accepting populace.
Doom Comes To Petersville
With the plant constructed, young Whittaker was fast-
tracked through the New Life hierarchy and quickly
became one of James Dasinger’s proteges, eagerly
accepting the truth of his heritage and grasping the
basics of many hypergeometric rituals. In 2016, when
he came of age at 21, Whittaker was instructed to
wrest control of the company away from his family,
any way that he could. He was also matched with
another New Life child for marriage at this time and
they would go on to produce a 2nd generation son in
early 2019.
Whittaker began by trying to convince his father to
step down and retire early. Albus was having none
of it. He was still a vibrant man in his early 60s and
his work was his life. This produced much friction
within the family. Whittaker’s frustration built, ever
fearful of James Dassinger’s wrath should he fail
in his appointed task. During a particularly heated
engagement late one night at the plant and in a fit
of rage, Whittaker snapped and murdered his father
by drowning him in a barrel of chemical run-off. By
pure bad luck, his mother heard the commotion and
descended the stairs to see what the fuss was about.
Horrified to see her son stuffing the corpse of her
husband into a metal barrel overflowing with chemi-
cals, her screams were cut short as Whittaker blasted
her mind with a hypergeometric incantation designed
to obscure memories. Unfortunately, due to Whittak-
er’s lack of practice and unhinged state of mind, the
ritual struck his mother with such force that it left her
in a permanent semi-vegetative state.
Unplanned and unprepared, Whittaker panicked. He
shoved his father’s corpse into the barrel and hid it
deep within a sub-basement underneath the plant. He
planned to close the plant early the next day and take
the time to properly clean up the mess he had created.
He then drove his catatonic mother to an out of the
way mental asylum, and quickly had her committed.
The Horror In The Basement
Unknown to Whittaker, the concentrated mix of
industrial chemicals and Lac Maternum run-off in
which he drowned his father had a profound effect on
the body. As the fluid choked Albus’ lungs during his
death throes, it triggered a runaway cellular cascade
which was to have shocking results. This Lac Ma-
ternum mix kept his cells alive in a purely biological
sense, leaving his mind utterly destroyed. An initial
burst of unconstrained biological growth overnight
fused his corpse to the barrel and wall behind, a vast
web of growing flesh melding with steel and concrete.
Whittaker was horrified and confused by what
he found the next day. He hid the truth from James
Dassinger and simply reported back that his father
had passed away from natural causes. He had success-
fully taken control of the family firm and remained a
trusted New Life lieutenant. Yet a shred of humanity
still remained, and Whittaker’s guilt consumed him.
45
Every so often, late at night, he still sneaks down into
the sub-basement after hours, to ‘talk’ to the corpse
of his grossly mutated father, whispering to him his
secrets and plans, begging for forgiveness. And in a
voice no one else can hear, the corpse whispers back
– promising very soon a new family member will be
born into this world. Agents might witness this very
thing if they keep Yates under surveillance for long
enough.
To this day, many years later, immersed in the
unnatural runoff, the body of his father undergoes a
slow but permanent process of division and growth.
The cells from Albus Yates have changed, and now
cover vast portions of the walls and ceiling of the
sub-basement, growing like fleshy moss. Whittaker
has no way to remove his father’s vastly corrupted
corpse. He has shut the problem away and buried it
beneath a heavy steel blast door to which only he has
the keys.
Occasionally, he has dumped the bodies of
those who pried too far into his business into the dark
below the facility. These are quickly absorbed into
the growing mass of formless flesh, which is now ripe
with an unnatural life of its own, growing into some-
thing new and abominable, unknown to any. This
new form of life has been gestating for many years.
Sooner or later - or perhaps when disturbed by the
Agents - Whittaker’s revolting new-born brother will
burst forth from the pregnant corpse-cells of his long
dead father.
Whittaker Yates
Yates is the young CEO and owner of Venron Med-
ical Processing. Since taking over the firm from his
murdered father, he has consolidated the business
in a single location – Petersville. He shut down five
other sites, laying off over 200 hundred members of
staff and purged the boardroom. He is now the sole
authority figure at the company and rules it with an
iron grip. Almost all of the work for the company
comes from New Life, who pay them ten times what
the work is worth – easily enough to keep the com-
pany afloat despite the lack of other business. A small
amount from other, mundane sources is done to help
conceal the true nature of their operations. Whittaker
is 25, handsome, rich, charismatic and manipulative.
Most people at the firm (those still with jobs, at least)
trust him implicitly and believe him to be a young,
 go-getting entrepreneur working hard to continuing
his father’s legacy, making tough decisions to keep the
company alive. As a 1st Generation New Life child,
Whittaker is also strong, intelligent and with perfect
good looks. He is able to manipulate and charm peo-
ple with ease and is not afraid to threaten those into
submission who don’t fall prey to his other tactics.
Whittaker has already had a 2nd Generation
baby with his New Life approved wife, Maria. His
son is now 2 years old and is forced to use contact
lenses to hide his goat’s eye pupils when he is in
public. Agents investigating Whittaker’s house in
Charleston might find a box of these custom made
lenses, or even see the baby without them.
Whittaker has been fast-tracked by James
Dassinger and has already learned a few of the more
basic hypergeometric rituals, which have heavily
eroded his grip on reality. Whittaker treads a fine line
between sanity and madness, and his day-to-day life is
currently a struggle to maintain this facade of normal-
cy. Soon, he will meet Caprus for an unholy reunion
– then, the last shreds of his mortal concerns will fall
away and he will truly embrace the Black Goat.
Whittaker is in awe and fear of James
Dassinger. He will do anything to remain in his good
books as one of the chosen. He has not told James
of his father’s mutation, and lives in mortal dread
of James finding out. He knows he can rely on DRJ
Partners to help him with legal troubles, which he has
called upon once or twice in the past.
The Asylum
As well as murdering his own father, Whittaker had
his mother, Elise, committed to a local mental health
facility, the Cranfield Health Asylum, just outside
Charleston, W. Virginia. When Whittaker struck her
with a powerful version of the Obscure Memory ritu-
al, he blasted apart much of her short term memory,
then had her committed. She is not insane, but does
have progressive neuron damage caused by the ritual,
which affects her behavior.
She is kept heavily drugged by corrupt officials and
Whittaker’s plentiful bribes. If Agents gain access to
her, anyone with a Medicine or Pharmacy skill can
tell she is being deliberately kept permanently sedat-
ed. Anyone with a Pharmacy or Psychotherapy skill
of 20% or more will know this is completely unethi-
46
cal and goes against all good mental health practice.
If Agents can rouse her from this drug-induced stupor
for a short time, she will babble and scream about ba-
bies with goat eyes, and that the devil is living inside
her grandson. Succeeding at a Pharmacy or Psycho-
therapy roll will also get a few moments of lucidity
out of her.
‘Whittaker . . . he did something, to my mind . . .I
can’t remember anymore . . . he killed Albus . . .but
he was still talking to him . . . he’s . . . down in the
basement . . .’
She can not be released from the asylum without a
signature from her son.
Life Of A 1st Generation New Life Scion
Yates has led a privileged life of good fortune and
unholy divine blessings. He knows he is destined for
great things, but for now he maintains the facade of
a normal life. He works one or two days a week at
his Venron office, although usually leaves day-to-day
running of the facility to his plant director. He will be
on hand to oversee critical ‘Purity Control’ deliveries
and personally take any documents needed to the
Strughold facility. Most of his time is spent as a man
of easy leisure – he golfs, sails, or spends time with his
newborn son, doting on him and his wife as any good
father would. He might have a clandestine meeting
with the Mayor of Petersville or Police Chief Novaks,
in which they discuss matters of town concern –
which could include activity by the Agents.
He lives in the suburbs of Charleston, the
capital of West Virginia, a 90 minute drive from Pe-
tersville. He has no security other than an alarm and
heavy locks. He has never needed any and the idea of
armed and ruthless clandestine Agents breaking into
his house would never occur to him – until it actually
does. His wife and young son are usually at home.
His son only wears his special contact lenses
outside of the house, or when expecting visitors. If
Agents spend time observing the house with surveil-
lance equipment, they might spot the strange muta-
tion in the child’s eyes, or the parents struggling to
get the unhappy infant to wear the contact lenses.
Every four or five months he travels on ‘busi-
ness’ to Germany. Here he meets with James Dassing-
er and others, to work on his conversion and worship
of Shug-Niggurath. He has already spent time speak-
ing at length with James and has begun his journey
along the path to becoming one of the Thousand
Young. Agents won’t catch him ever speaking to
James on a phone, but they might find more clues
in his house regarding his very specific internation-
al travel – guide and translation books, plane ticket
stubs, old labels on suitcases, and so forth.
Federal Agents or law enforcement might
want to check him out on the national crime data-
base – he has been arrested twice, once for physically
assaulting a worker at the plant, and once for speed-
ing in a remote rural location – near the Strughold
facility. Both charges were dropped. His local law-
yer’s name is listed, but with a Law or Bureaucracy
roll, they can determine the man was actually paid on
retainer from a much larger firm – DRJ Partners.
If they spend a few days following him, he might also
drive to Strughold at some point - see that section for
further details. If Agent’s research his son’s contact
lenses, they can be traced to a boutique manufacturer
who is working under license from a shell company
connected to the New Life Foundation. The contact
lenses are clearly bespoke and designed for a young
infant.
Yate’s Behaviour
Yates is a charismatic, suave twenty-something who
has inherited a fortune and a successful company.
His employees like him and he seems to genuinely
care about his charges, as well as the small, isolated
town that his father inexplicably built the plant near.
He will be helpful to official approaches from any
Federal agencies. His alibis are watertight – thanks
to New Life influence, the EPA angle has been shut
down at a high level, and he has the records to prove
his operation is following all laws and regulations. He
has the quiet arrogance of someone who has never
wanted for anything in their life. He also knows he is
blessed by the Most Holy Mother to become one of
the Chosen. He is above the waffling, brainless cattle
that scurry beneath him. He will treat Agents with
mild amusement, as someone particularly cruel might
treat a rodent trying to escape a trap. If Agents apply
pressure to Yates, threaten him, or let on that they
are working to bring him down, he will start gently
mocking them and their efforts. Yates knows he is
untouchable through official channels. He is shielded
not only by Mary Dassinger’s influence in the gov-
ernment, but by the wide-ranging protection of New
47
Life and their legal partners. Agents should feel a
burning frustration at being unable to pin anything on
him. He will not even bother to see them as a threat.
He will eventually tire of any interactions with them,
returning to his office paperwork or game of golf,
ignoring them until they leave or are escorted away
by security.
However, Yates is no fighter and is unused
to violence. If Agents go hard and fast on him early
before he has time to weave his web of lies and spring
any traps, especially if armed, they may make him
panic and he might reveal some aspects of his opera-
tions to save his own skin. He will not confess to the
real truth behind New Life, but will reveal the loca-
tion of the Strughold facility and how to get in.
Yates will stand up to Agents until the moment
they pull firearms, at which point he will usually blub
pathetically and submit. He will attempt to appear
docile and co-operative, blaming James and New
Life for all the ills on the town, claiming they forced
him to work for them with blackmail and that they
murdered his father. He will spin lies about genetic
experiments and government coverups, whatever he
can do to commit the Agents to paranoia and mis-
takes. He will try his best to trick them into entering
the sub-basement, where he will attempt to lock them
inside.
If captured or held by Agents, he will initially
appear quiet and compliant, until later attempting to
use hypergeometry to escape, especially if he is left
alone or with only a single Agent guarding him. He
will try to use Obscure Memory on a single Agent to
make them forget his presence and how he got away.
The Agent will have nothing but a blank hole in their
mind. If he ever deems the Agents a real threat, he
will use the ritual One Who Passes The Gateways to
reach out into the void and uncover some pertinent
details on them. He will discover their secrets and
their Bonds.
If things escalate, he might send an anonymous email
to an Agent with a video file, showing a Bond going
about their daily life at home, in a shopping mall,
or picking up their children from school. A voice,
which the Agents won’t recognize, demand they back
off their investigation, less an ‘unfortunate accident’
occur to the Bond. This costs 0/1D4 for Helplessness.
Or he might expose the Agents to law enforcement if
any of them are wanted men – Agents on the lam
might find a State police SWAT team smashing down
their motel door. If things get serious, he may even-
tually have a bond kidnapped as leverage (perhaps
dumping them in Sub-basement 1 as bait for a trap,
or calling an individual Agent and attempting to get
them to betray their colleagues in exchange for him
releasing the Bond safely).
Either way, he will report the suspicious
Agents to New Life and add to their Exposure rating.
If cornered, he says he will agree to be handed over to
the local police. If the Agents fall for this ruse, he will
quickly be released in a day or two.
Yates is the only person apart from James
Dassinger who knows the entry code to the Strughold
facility. However, Yates is completely replaceable. He
is no great mastermind and is as much a pawn of New
Life as anyone else. If Agents decide to go kinetic and
remove the ‘threat’ of Yates, he will quickly be re-
placed. If killed, his wife Maria, also a 1st Generation
New Life scion, takes over the running of the plant,
under instruction from James Dassinger. She is much
more incisive, and will not hesitate to come down
hard on the Agents. If she is killed, a powerful mem-
ber of the Thousand Young will show up, perhaps
with a Wrecking Crew escort. No matter how many
heads of the hydra the Agents cut off, New Life will
simply replace and escalate.
Destroying the plant itself is a temporary solu-
tion, at least for Petersville. But if not stopped, New
Life will simply divert their requirements to another
company, and the cycle will start all over again in
another location, perhaps hundreds of miles away.
Agents will never get any real answers unless they
decide to track down whoever or whatever ‘New Life
Fertility’ is, or are.
Venron Today
Venron remains a big source of local employment for
Petersville and is essentially the patron of the town. It
sponsors tourism and public events, as well as secretly
paying for much of the medical expenses incurred by
the sick and dying townsfolk. Almost all high profile
public figures have either been corrupted by money
from Venron, or willingly work alongside them to en-
sure the town remains a beacon of prosperity amidst
the usual poverty of small town Appalachia. Agents
can find a sparse but professional website for the
48
company online, explaining their services and giving
basic background on the Yates family, summarized
below -
‘Venron Medical is an established family business pro-
viding expertise for medical device cleaning, steriliza-
tion and re-processing. Established in 1982 by Albus
Yates, the business expanded and grew, and his son
Whittaker now leads the firm, providing dedicated and
highly specialized solutions for hospitals and private
practices.’
Accounting - Researching the firm’s accounts and
publicly available SEC company filings information
with an Accounting skill of 30% or more will reveal
the firm must have an off-the-books cash flow. It is
turning a large profit yet doesn’t seem to sell much
and offers only very limited services to the wider
market with a tiny customer base. Either someone has
a large account with Venron that is not being record-
ed on any paperwork, or they are actively engaged
in fraud. A successful Accounting roll will also reveal
from the filings that sometime shortly after Albus
Yates died in 2017, his young son took over control
of the firm and shut down all operations except the
Petersville plant, taking sole ownership of the compa-
ny and dissolving the Board.
The Facility
Venron Medical Processing is located about twelve
miles outside of Petersville to the east, past the farm-
ing belt and near the wooded foothills leading to
Mount Langworthy. It is a ten hecatre site located in
an isolated, woodland-surrounded clearing.
External Layout
Agents observing the plant from the outside will
see a single large warehouse-style building, with an
attached office section. It is an imposing industrial
structure, with pipework, vents and fans on the walls
and rooves, and reflective one-way glass covering
every window. It is an ugly eyesore in the middle
of the West Virginia woodlands. A comprehensive
system of large ventilation shafts are wrapped around
the building. White water vapor is being pumped out
of many of these pipes and vent shafts during the day.
The facility is surrounded by a ten foot chain link
fence and bordered on three sides by heavy woods.
To the east, the thin road of Highway 57 runs parallel
to the plant, and turns off past the security portacabin
hut and entranceway. A small concrete shed stands off
to one side of the main plant.
During the day, the car park is half full, and
Agents can see people coming and going around the
buildings. There are 20 to 30 people on site at any
one time. Agents taking the time to view the facility
from the rear will also notice a few fire escape doors
on the far side. There also see a large concrete pipe
running out of the back of the facility and disappear-
ing into the woods.
Facility Routine
There are around ten lab technicians and twenty oth-
er personnel that operate on the site, including HR,
logistics and security. They are generally busy for one
or two weeks per month when the New Life delivery
arrives. The remaining time, the facility is quieter
and staff often work elsewhere in other jobs. Venron
pays very well – almost too well - and Yates looks
after them. When the Agents first arrive in Petersville,
Venron has just taken delivery of the latest batch from
New Life. They will be working to clean and sterilize
the equipment for the next seven days. The plant will
be very busy 8am-5pm during this time, but is quiet
except for security staff during the night.
Gaining Access
The facility is private and not open to the public, and
they do not do tours. Yates is not interested in further
investment or customers and will not meet with any.
He will agree to meet the FBI (or even the EPA again)
as a courtesy, even without a warrant, and explain
how the plant meets all the required legal and envi-
ronmental regulations – with the paperwork to prove
it. He will admit the EPA paid him a visit six months
ago, but that he understands the report showed Ven-
ron were well within legal limits. The only thing the
plant disposes of is chemical cleaning residue, which
is well within EPA and local County tolerances.
Yates will take note of Agent names and badge
details. He will be sure to ask DRJ to begin an inves-
tigation into any ‘FBI’ Agents that come knocking.
If so, a Fixer might be deployed to Petersville as an
additional asset. Being shown around the plant by
Yates will reveal the scientific technicians working in
49
the processing labs, with another dozen or so support
staff and office workers. As far as they are concerned,
this is a regular job. A Persuade roll on someone
might reveal one area of the plant is off limits, due to
safety concerns – sub-basement 1 - or that over the
last three years two employees have vanished, never
to be seen again.
Venron employees are paid well. All are loyal
to Yates. This kind of work is extremely rare in the
poor Appalachian area, and all are grateful for both
their paychecks and the development Venron has
done on the town. Everyone is aware that it is Venron
that has lifted Petersville out of poverty.
Sneaking in as one of the workforce during
the day is difficult and without a disguise will prove
impossible due to the number of people moving about
and the small nature of the facility – everyone knows
everybody else Almost all employees are residents
of Petersville and know each other by sight. Security
will demand to see company photographic ID passes
at the gate. The facility is small enough that search-
ing and entering random rooms will be noticed and
challenged. Any interaction with any staff member
will require a Disguise roll. A failure will result in se-
curity immediately being summoned. Trespassers will
be held for local police, and subsequently arrested.
Agents breaking in at nightime will find things easier
and have better luck.
Ruthless Agents might be able to co-erce or
threaten an employee to drive them in after normal
work hours, by hiding in the back of a vehicle. The
security guard at the gate will attempt a HUMINT
roll to discover the reason for the late night visit – if
he succeeds, he will get out and investigate the car.
Inside The Plant
Careful observation of the plant will reveal several
ways in. Agents can sneak through or over the wire
fence, and either force a door or climb in through the
vents. There are no deliveries (except the once-per-
month trailer from New Life) so climbing aboard the
back of a delivery truck is not possible.
Anyone with Military Science or a background
in law enforcement can tell from observation that the
plant is not heavily defended – there is slightly more
human security than usual at an industrial site, al-
though nothing beyond the realms of the ordinary.
There’s also a few external cameras, wire fencing and
patrols. The guards carry only nightsticks and pistols.
20% in any Military Science and an Agent can clearly
discern that the vents provide an ideal ingress point
to the plant. A Military Science roll will also discern
that the portacabain is probably the nexus of security
on site, owing to the amount of cables snaking out
of it. Taking control or disabling the hut would make
everything else easier. The inside of the plant at night
is quiet and dark, like an abandoned hospital. There
is some residual lighting in the corridors, but most
of the rooms are pitch black. There is a quiet hum
of machinery and a faint smell of industrial chemi-
cals throughout. You may give Handout #5 to your
players once inside - there are maps of the facility on
noticeboards throughout the plant.
The Nightwatchmen
If Agents decide to break and enter during night-time
hours, they will have to deal with the security pres-
ence at Venron.
There are five roaming security guards that
wander in and out of the plant and grounds on
random patrol at night. A sixth, the shift manager,
stays in the exterior security hut. Whenever an Agent
enters a room, secretly roll 1D6. On a 1, a security
guard passes by as the Agent is inside. The Agent must
make an opposed Stealth roll versus the guards Alert-
ness. If the guard wins, he hears a noise or notices the
door is open a crack. He looks inside and flashes his
torch about the room. The guard will now comb the
room, almost certainly spotting them and crying out,
advancing with baton drawn.
Security will initially try to physically detain
intruders. They will call for backup if things escalate,
and they will try to defend themselves with reasona-
ble and appropriate force. They will only draw guns
if they fear for their lives or see other guns come out
first. The facility is large enough that melee combat
won’t draw the attention of any further guards, but
gunfire certainly will. If a guard is heavily outnum-
bered, he might try and make a break for it to the
security hut to raise the alarm. Agents might decide
it easier to pick off the security guards one by one.
It requires a Stealth roll to get near enough to one
to launch a surprise attack. This gives any attack a
+20% bonus and is an automatic critical hit that
cannot be opposed – the Agent can choose to have a
success knock-out a surprised target if using a melee
weapon. This still does normal (critical) damage, but
will also render the target unconscious. There is the
possibility the Agent hits too hard and kills the target
anyway - knocking people out is not an exact science.
Agents with special training in Unarmed Combat
techniques might be able to choke an opponent un-
conscious with no risk of death.
If the Stealth roll fails, the guard turns around
just in time. Combat plays out in normal DEX order.
If guards catch Agents sneaking around or breaking
and entering, they are assumed to be thieves. Yates
has personally briefed his security personnel on the
potential for industrial espionage. They will try to
physically detain intruders and await local police to
come and pick them up. If badges are flashed, espe-
cially by FBI or Federal Agents, security guards will
become confused. Whilst they will no longer try to
detain anyone, unless the players can come up with a
very convincing story AND a Persuade roll at -20%,
they will still call the police and Mr Yates for further
guidance.
Door Access - Exterior
Exterior doors including fire escapes are sturdy and
not easy to break through. They require a magnetic
keycard to unlock, or can be opened from the inside
with a push-button mechanism. The doors are heavy
duty and cannot be smashed, but the magnetic locks
are a weak link – with a combined STR of 20 they
can be forced open, if two or more Agents use a suita-
ble tool for leverage. External windows do not open.
There are silent alarms running to the secu-
rity hut. They can be spotted if Agents simply ask to
check, and either disabled with a Micro-electronics
or similar skill of 40% or more, or simply cut with a
knife - although slicing it in this way will leave evi-
dence that might be noticed later on.
The main entrance leading to the Atrium is
overseen by the security hut and is well lit, although a
Stealth roll or a suitable distraction will allow Agents
to sneak past at night. Two other exterior entrances
can be found – fire escapes on the rear of the build-
ing. Approaching from the rear requires no roll
– there are no lights here. Guards patrol past these
areas every 30 minutes or so with flashlights, and
might notice vandalized alarm cables. Opening the
goods inward and outward rolling garage doors is not
possible from the outside.
 Venron Internal Site Map
Door Access - Interior
All of the interior doors function on a magnetic
keycard system. As such they cannot be lockpicked,
but an Agent with a Micro-Electronics skill or similar
of 60% and with the right equipment can hack the
swipe system by spoofing. The interior magnetic locks
can be prized open with a STR of 12 or more using
a crowbar or similar tool, but this risks attracting the
attention of a patrolling security guard. The doors are
made of either lightweight wood or frosted glass. A
DEX roll is needed to break the seal without making
a sound – a failure, and a loud crack of splintering
51
wood or shattering glass echoes around the silent
facility. Make a secret Luck roll – on a failure, a guard
will arrive to investigate in 1D4 minutes. Each guard
carries a keycard on a lanyard around his neck or on
a belt which opens every door in the facility. There is
also a batch of cards for visitors kept inside the securi-
ty hut. These could be stolen by cunning Agents.
Ventilation Shafts
There is a large collection of external ventilation
ducts wrapped around the outside of the building.
Removing the cover to one of these vents will allow
an Agent to crawl on hands and knees into the duct on it.
system that spreads throughout the plant. The vents
are tight and claustrophobic. Only Agents with STR
Secretary’s Office
12 or lower can fit inside. A wet heat and chemical Searching the room will reveal details of Whittaker
smell assail the Agent’s nostrils, but climbing inside Yates’ itinerary for the next week in a diary inside a
them when the plant isn’t running is harmless. Dur- desk drawer.
ing the day, Agents will see thick white clouds being
pumped out from them. This is mostly steam with a
little sterilization residue.
If an Agent succeeds at a Navigation roll, Mr Yates’ Schedule this
they correctly determine the layout of the plant from week :
glances through vent ducts, and can drop out in Overseeing latest Purity
whichever room they wish. The ducts are high and Control delivery - DONE
require an Athletics roll to climb back into during
stressful situations once inside the plant – such as if Collection of Purity Control
being persuaded by irate security guards. A Naviga- documents and records for
tion failure, and they tumble out randomly in a room personal delivery to Strughold
of the Handler’s choosing. facility - DONE

Chemical Storage Golf

This room contains many large plastic barrels and vats
of liquids and industrial chemicals. There are a num- Lunch with Mayor Vaughn
ber labeled ‘Peracetic Acid’. Any Agent with Science Preperations for next trip
of 30% will know this is a high strength acid used in to Germany in a month, for
industrial cleaning. It is usually heavily diluted before conference with Mr Dassinger
being used. Agents without any appropriate skills will - Visa extension, currency etc
still be able to read the labels on the barrels – there
are many highly prominent hazard warning stickers,
featuring acid, burning and danger symbols.

Janitor’s Closet Office - HR Manager

This room contains a collection of industrial mops,
brooms and cleaning products, with janitor uniforms
on hooks. Enterprising Agents might try to fool a
security guard into thinking they are a member of the
cleaning staff working late with a Disguise roll, but it
will only work once. At the back of the room is a set
of bare concrete steps leading down to a heavy metal
door. Behind this lies Sub-Basement 1.
Offices
A selection of open plan desks for support staff,
scattered with paperwork. Agents can piece together
from the various notes, memos and manifests littered
around that Venron are currently very busy and have
recently received a large shipment of work from an
important customer. This work appears to be a regu-
lar, monthly delivery and their entire staff is focused
52
Agents can find personnel files in the cabinets here,
revealing about 30 full time employees. With a Bu-
reaucracy skill of 40%, Agents can discover that two
engineering personnel have vanished over the last
two years. These unfortunates tried to gain access to
sub-basement 1. A successful Bureaucracy roll will
also reveal records and details indicating that the
company law firm is called DRJ Partners and has
represented them on two occasions in the past – once
when Yates was involved with a ‘physical altercation’
with an employee who was subsequently dismissed,
and once when an employee was killed “by faulty
machinery in sub-basement 1”
Office - Engineering Manager
Agents can find a memo from Yates reminding the En-
gineering manager to ensure none of the new hires try
to gain access to Sub-basement 1. It is still off limits
for safety reasons.
Office - Logistics Manager
Agents can find a handwritten note from the Logis-
tics Manager to his secretary, reminding her to issue
a company wide email stating that ‘Staff are under
no circumstances to remove or rearrange the boxes of
paper files received from NLF. These are highly sensi-
tive customer records for Mr Yates ONLY and should
always remain in the Goods Outward office for him to
collect and deliver to Strughold, and NEVER removed,
opened or taken to the labs.’
Processing Labs
These labs are the main working section of the facil-
ity. They contain high pressure chemical and steam
cleaners, large machines which are loaded with med-
ical and surgical devices, for complete sterilization
and disinfection. Surgical tools soak in large chem-
ical-filled sinks. Pumping machines hiss and rumble
as they cycle through their disinfection stages. Water
gushes around inside machines resembling space-age
dishwashers. The room is hot and wet. The room is
divided into three sections for dirty, clean and sterile
work. There is a heavy chemical smell in this large
room. Anyone who has smelt the Purity Control sam-
ple or the chemical run-off coming from the waste
pipe in the wilderness will immediately recognize it as
the same.
The run-off from these machines is then
washed out through gated sluices in the floor, and
sprayed down with distilled water afterwards. The
labs are extensive and look hi-tech. Unused PPE
equipment is kept in lockers near the entrance. Smart
Agents might think to don some before venturing
into Sub-basement 1. Anyone with a Science or
Engineering skill can tell all of the equipment in this
room is top of the range and extremely expensive.
It seems odd that such a small facility in a remote
location has such specialized equipment – there is no
way they could process enough for more than one or
two customers at a time. The runoff from this room
is collected in a vast septic tank in sub-basement 1
below, from where the discharge is gradually released
into the Creek River via the concrete standpipe. Ven-
ron is careful not to release too much at once – they
discharge only a small amount at irregular intervals,
sending a few hundred liters at a time out down the
53
tunnel at high speed. Agents might hear the hiss and
rush of this process from above. Several sections of
the floor are metal mesh and allow run-off from the
cleaning stations to drain away to an area under the
plant.
Device Repair Workshop
Lab benches stretch out in this room covered with
expensive and complicated engineering tools and mi-
croscopes. Many complicated medical devices are in
various states of repair. This looks hi-tech and special-
ized work.
Conference Room
This room is empty. A big circular table and AV
equipment is all that is inside.
Goods Inward
This large loading area consists of bays for trailers to
unload their deliveries to Venron and a floor-to-ceil-
ing sliding garage door to allow them in. There are
two mini-forklifts parked in one corner. There are a
large stack of wooden shipping crates lined up neatly
against one wall. There is a clipboard with a delivery
manifest lying on top of one crate – the shipment is
designated ‘Purity Control’. The shipping address
is missing, but the customer name is given - simply
‘NLF’. The crates have prominent yellow medical
waste warning labels all over them. All of the crates
are still tightly sealed.
Cracking them open will reveal carefully
packaged supplies of medical and surgical equipment
- ultrasound probes, large and specialized-looking
plastic syringes, vitrification devices, biopsy forceps,
small incubators, cryo-preservation equipment and
plastic tubing. It all looks very expensive and hi-tech,
but well used. Many of the items are still covered
in blood, body fluids and other dried contaminants.
They look like butcher’s equipment.
These are the latest batch from New Life due
for cleaning and re-processing. Any Agent with 20%
or more in Medicine or Surgery will recognize all
the equipment is used in fertility and IVF procedures
– the equipment includes embryo transfer syringes.
Taking samples from the organic matter encrusted on
the dirty surgical tools (either from the crates or in
the processing labs) and testing them later will reveal
regular human blood, and with a relevant Science
skill at 60% or more, high trace levels of a biological
molecule very similar to that found in the Purity Con-
trol sample, yet lacking certain characteristics. It is
more stable, less dangerous, doesn’t transform into a
serum globule or display other signs of highly power-
ful mutagenic or carcinogenic properties, although it
still promotes cell division and rapid mitotic growth.
Whatever it is, it is incredibly potent.
With a successful roll in the relevant skill, the
Agent can draw the conclusion that whatever this
molecule is, it is traces of the ‘pure’ version which
remain on the tools, compared with a heavily altered
version found elsewhere and spread throughout Pe-
tersville. It seems whatever cleaning process is under-
taken at the Venron facility is having a dramatic effect
on the molecule and its properties, probably uninten-
tionally.
Goods Outward
The Goods Outward loading bay is currently empty.
A shipment manifest can be found attached to a wall
near the logistics office nearby – the last shipment out
was a small batch of files and boxes sent to ‘Strughold
Mining Company.’ with an address in rural West Vir-
ginia. The boxes were shipped two days ago and were
marked ‘Urgent.’ The delivery was signed for and
made by Yates himself.
External - Security Hut
This is a pre-fabricated green Portacabin. The security
shift manager sits here alone at night, monitoring the
plant and directing his small team, although he is not
particularly alert. It is a cushy but boring job. Other
security members sometimes check in from time to
time for a coffee or a chat. The room contains video
feeds for the external cameras and alarm systems.
During the day it is used to sign in staff and check
passes. Any Agents gaining access to the security ter-
minal inside can disable everything relatively simply.
Accessing the terminal will also reveal the plant has
no interior cameras.
A successful Computer Science or similar roll
will also completely cover up their interference within
the system, hiding their intrusion measures - and they
notice that the alarm system doesn’t automatically
dial out to 911. Instead, it goes to a private number
which can be traced back to DRJ Partners. In a draw
inside the security desk are multiple visitor passes –
54
these can be used to open doors in the facility. With
a Stealth roll and a distraction, Agents could also
achieve both of these objectives without the securi-
ty chief realizing. Wily Agents might also be able to
draw the shift manager out and silently disable all the
alarm systems before he can notice. The inattentive
man won’t realize anything is wrong until the next
time they run an alarm test, which won’t be for days.
Taking over the hut is an option, but comes with
drawbacks. A Stealth roll is required to get close to
the shift manager without him noticing anyone en-
tering the hut, if they want to try to incapacitate him.
Agents can then monitor the cameras and advise the
position of the guards. Lingering too long inside the
hut is also a risk. If the hut is secured, make a Luck
roll every 30 minutes. On a failure, one of the securi-
ty team drops by for a coffee or to rest their legs.
External - Gas Storage (Concrete Shed)
This heavy concrete shed is kept apart from the main
facility for safety reasons. It is filled with oxygen and
hydrogen gas canisters, which are used by Venron to
produce hydrogen peroxide for its cleaning opera-
tions. The shed has danger and warning signs on it.
Agents with skills in either Demolitions or Science
will know these are both highly explosive gases and
could produce enormous destruction if detonated
somehow, perhaps with a fire or other, smaller explo-
sives. If planted strategically around the interior of
the facility, they could easily destroy the entire site.
Yate’s Office / CEO’s Office
This room, the largest of the offices, is obviously an
executive suite. High end and minimalist, with expen-
sive furniture, large desk, AV equipment and tasteful,
high end art on the walls. A nameplate on the mahog-
any desk reads ‘W. Yates – CEO’ A set of keys are in a
small locked security box inside the desk – this can be
smashed open with a heavy implement, but requires a
Luck roll to not alert a guard. The keys are unlabeled
but will open the physical locks on the sub-basement
door.
There is an extremely expensive laptop on top
of the desk, next to some papers. This can be hacked
with a Computer Science roll and access to a brute-
force password cracker. Spending 2D6 hours comb-
ing the computer (halved if the Agent makes a
relevant roll) will show all the files are mundane, ex-
cept a short email from the office of the lawyers DRJ
Partners, confirming that ‘Mr Dassinger has completed
the transfer of ownership. You are now the legal owner
and custodian of the Strughold Mining site.’ Agents
with Computer Science might also think to clone the
data on the hard drive using a USB tool for later anal-
ysis, rather than steal the laptop outright.
Searching the room with 40% or more, or a roll (or
specifically asking to check behind the paintings)
will reveal a small recessed wall safe. Only Yates
knows the combination. It can be Lockpicked with
safe-cracking tools and a roll, or blown open by an
Agent with Demolitions and a small explosive charge.
Explosions will obviously attract guards. A Demoli-
tions roll is required to keep the noise to a minimum.
A success, and the safe is opened with no more than a
loud pop. If the Demolitions roll fails, the safe opens
with a very loud bang and clatter of metal as the safe
door flies off and embeds itself in a wall. On a critical
failure, the items inside are mostly destroyed. 1D4
guards immediately head for the room, fearing some
kind of explosion with pipework or industrial equip-
ment.
Inside the safe are some emergency cash funds
and credit cards ($5,000 in notes), a passport (show-
ing two flights to Germany in the last six months), a
signed letter from the Cranfield Asylum confirming
his mother’s ‘treatment’ and a small, black pocket
book, with a brief handwritten note on the inside cov-
er ‘A little something to help you continue your stud-
ies. Soon you will be ready to meet Caprus - James’
The book is titled Nameless Cults, published
by Golden Goblin in 1909, and is an English transla-
tion of a much older German text called Unausspre-
chlichen Kulten (Unspeakable Cults). See page 163
of The Handler’s Guide for full details. This reprint
promotes itself as a fiction, providing the reader only
with shock value and intrigue – but despite the shod-
dy translation and errors, many aspects of the text
remain true. In the middle of the book is a complete
ritual for Healing Balm (Heilbalsam), which can be
learnt by an Agent. See page 180 of The Handler’s
Guide for full details. This ritual has had annotated
notes on it written by Yates.
This book was given to Yates as a gift by James
Dassinger. Yates is now on his course to the inner cir-
cle of New Life neophytes, and will soon become one
55
of the Thousand Young.
Sub-basement 1
The door to this lower level, hidden behind stacks
of boxes and cleaning equipment at the back of the
janitor’s room, is different from the others in the fa-
cility. It is thickset and heavy, made of steel - like the
entrance to a bunker, with a rotating circular handle.
It not only requires a keycard but is also manually
locked with several different physical locking systems,
requiring either the keys from Yate’s office or a Lock-
pick roll. With a failed roll, it will require another 30
minutes of fiddling with a new technique to attempt
again - and a security guard will appear, curious about
the rattling noise and lights. A fumble and an alarm
will go off. Enterprising Agents can also disable both
locking systems with acid from the chemical storage
room. Anyone with 10% or more in Heavy Machin-
ery can also operate one of the nearby mini-forklifts
to prize open the door. The noise involved will of
course attract attention, with 1D4 guards appearing.
The door is covered in prominent warning labels and
hazard signs – RESTRICTED - DANGER DO NOT
ENTER – ENTRY BY SENIOR APPROVAL ONLY
– NO PERSONNEL ALLOWED – ENTRY RISKS
IMMEDIATE WORKPLACE TERMINATION and
so forth.
Inside The Sub-basement
If Agents manage to open the sub-basement door (or
arrive inside by trekking up the run-off pipe from the
woods) they are greeted by the stench of chemicals
wafting up from below. Buried beneath that is another
deeper, more putrid smell – like rotting meat. The
basement is pitch black. The walls and floor are damp
from condensation.
Heading down the concrete stairs with a flash-
light, Agents can see the large, open plan sub-base-
ment is a dumping ground for unwanted industrial
machines and leftover chemicals – sealed metal bar-
rels, wooden packing crates and plastic tubs line the
walls and clutter the floorspace, leaving only narrow
gaps between them to navigate the huge room. Small
passageways lead out from the far wall and stretch
away deeper underground. Runoff pipes from the labs
above lead down into various collection vats.
 spewing a foul torrent of mil
ky fluid all over the nearest
Agent. The fluid contains
half-formed and misshap
en organs – eyeballs, teeth
and other unidentifiable fleshy
chunks. Being covered in this
foul torrent costs 0/1D4 SAN
roll for Helplessness. They are
allowed a Dodge roll to avoid
the stream. If they fail, they
are covered in a sweet smell
ing, sticky morass. It drips into
their mouth and nostrils – they can’t help but taste it
They can hear a slurping, sludging sound in the dark
as they spit it out – a syrupy flavor with a chemical
– after pausing for a moment, they realize it must be
backwash. Make a secret CONx5 roll at -20%, follow
the water in the pipes above . . . surely?
the rules for Contamination (see section below). If
Exploring the basement further, Agents who Search
they are wearing PPE, make the roll at +20% in-
the area spot far across the room a vaguely human,
stead. After this biological outburst, the corpse goes
suspicious shape covered with plastic sheeting. If
limp and inertly slumps against the wall once more.
removed, they see it is a corpse, slumped in an open
Agents will now be able to hear a wet, organic slap-
chemical barrel against the far wall. The body is mag-
ping sound coming from behind a nearby metal tank.
got-white and decayed, like a melted wax candle - 0/1
Investigating, Agents can find a formless carpet of
SAN roll for violence. Forensics 30% or more, or a
flesh spread out across the floor and into a corner,
roll at +20%, will determine the body has been dead
where it has grown into what can only be described as
for years yet somehow very well preserved. Judging
a prodigious sac of twitching offal.
by the liquid streak lines on the parchment-thin skin
and the fluid still clogged in the nose and mouth, it
looks like the man was drowned in the chemical bar- The Formless Flesh
rel then simply left there. It’s possible the chemicals
This sac is a gigantic pile of spasmodically twitching
have had a hand in the preservation of the body.
half-corpses, heaped each upon the other. This corner
There is a plastic lanyard and keycard with
of the sub-basement has become a landfill of spine,
name-tag still clipped to the rotten suit the corpse
gristle and bone - a mountainous, twitching mass of
is wearing. Reaching for it, they see it says ‘Albus
misshapen flesh, rotund and pulsating, fusing itself
Yates’. This keycard will open the doors in the facil-
together in the darkness. Random body parts sprout
ity. If Agents attempt this forensic examination or
out of it – lengths of spine, wet intestine and bulbous,
otherwise ask to look closer, they notice a number
bruise-colored tumors. SAN roll 1/1D4 for the Unnat-
of things. Firstly, if they have seen a picture of Albus
ural for seeing the sac.
Yates somewhere before, they recognize his deformed
Yates has used the basement as a dumping
face. Secondly, they realize the body is not slumped
ground for all those ‘changed’ by the Venron pollu-
against the wall – it is fused to it. A tumorous, fleshy
tion over the years, as well the bodies of anyone who
mass has grown out of the back of the corpse. Tracing
has stood in his way that he has had to eliminate. The
with their flashlight, they can see the mass has spread
corpses have been eagerly absorbed into the main cen-
upwards all across the far wall – it is vast, and riddled
tral mass originating from his father.
with thick, ropey veins.
If any Agent asks and succeeds at an Alertness
Any Agent who gets close enough to examine
roll, they notice the veins spreading out of the Form-
the body or the lanyard in this way will then witness
less Flesh occasionally twitch - or perhaps they hear
the eyes of the corpse suddenly snap open. It retches
the slurping sound once again, closer this time. It no
violently, gripping onto the side of the barrel,
56
longer sounds like it is coming from the pipes.
If Agents decide to attack or damage the Formless
Flesh, or at the Handlers discretion whenever they
try to exit the sub-basement at any point after the
Formless Flesh has sensed them, they now hear in the
dark a noisome wetness of multiple things unfolding
behind them. Grasping pseudopod-like flesh append-
ages detach from the ceiling and reach for the Agents.
They are flexing, dripping, snaking coils of moist,
cancerous growth, dotted with randomly grown hu-
man mouths, teeth and eyes. They stand between the
Agents and whatever way they came in.
If Agents realize that they are all part of one
vast organism, originating from the body in the barrel
and the pile of offal fused to wall, ceiling and cor-
ner and that the pseudopods are part of it, SAN roll
1/1D6 for the Unnatural. There are enough of these
pseduopods for every Agent present less one (to a
minimum of one) Individual pseudopods have their
own stats, and can be deformed or damaged enough
by regular weapons to render them unable to move
or attack further. But even if destroyed, more will
come and damaged ones will reform, until the Agents
have either fled the sub-basement, destroyed the main
mass of the Formless Flesh, or all been killed. Being
grabbed or assaulted by a pseudopod costs 0/1D4
SAN for violence the first time it occurs.
Agents have three basic options – they can
attempt to destroy the core of the Formless Flesh with
whatever they have to hand, they can break through
the unfolding ranks of pseudopods and attempt to
rush back up the stairs to safety – or they can run
deeper into the dark sub-basement, looking for an
alternative route out.
Fighting The Formless Flesh
See the stats for the creature in the NPC section. In
addition, there are individual pseudopods attacking
the Agents. At the start of the encounter, there is one
less pseudopod than there are Agents, to a minimum
of one. If a pseudopod is destroyed, it will reform or
regrow a turn afterwards (so giving the Agents one
free turn without its presence.). If a pseudopod is de-
stroyed a second time, it will reform once more in the
same manner – except this time along with a duplicate
second pseudopod as well.
Destroying the core of the Formless Flesh
will stop pseudopods from regenerating. Any gunfire
57
will bring the attention of 1D4 guards within a few
minutes. They might try to help the Agents, shoot the
Agents, or even just shut the door and lock them in-
side, depending on how generous or evil the Handler
is feeling.
If Agents stand their ground, they will find
firearms do only half damage to the central mass of
Formless Flesh and firearm lethality rolls automati-
cally fail. Explosives and grenades work normally - it
is possible to blow apart the monstrous mass with
enough bang. However, the backblast of large explo-
sives will also affect anyone still in the basement if
they are too close, requiring Agents to run through
the swirling nest of pseudopods to gain distance. De-
stroying or damaging the ruined corpse of Albus Yates
will have no effect – the creature is a vast, tumorous
organism of unregulated cellular growth, no longer
restricted to one mortal body.
Fire can also damage it, but will be soon
extinguished by the damp, wet conditions and will
only affect the creature for 1 turn. Only something
like a military grade flamethrower or phosphorus
grenade would work properly in the wet conditions
of the basement. Industrial strength acids or solvents
can cause massive damage and easily dissolve most of
the creature – smart Agents might think to bring some
from the chemical storage room above. If grabbed by
a pseudopod, they will need a DEX roll to avoid spill-
ing the chemicals on themselves as well. Another op-
tion is to blow up the plant entirely and collapse the
superstructure onto the basement, burying everything.
This could be done by tampering with the gas canis-
ters in the concrete storage unit or combining them
with regular explosives. See that section for further
details on this option.
Back Up The Stairs
If Agents decide to flee, they must fight one round
against the pseudopods in order to get past them and
escape back up the sub-basement stairs. In addition, if
they want to shut the basement door, they must make
an opposed STR roll versus the pseudopods left in or-
der to close it– the pseudopods will attempt to force
it open and drag one Agent back inside. If they suc-
ceed, or if the pseudopods successfully grab an agent,
they let go and the Agents can then slam the basement
door shut once again. If they fail, they must fight the
pseudopods for one round before trying again.
Security guards will now most likely be on the scene,
either before or just after the door is closed. They
have orders to apprehend anyone who tries to break
into the sub-basement. If Agents forgo closing the
door and decide to just flee the plant entirely, they
will have to contend with security guards trying to
apprehend or slow them down – a most unfortunate
position to be in, as the fleshy tendrils snake up out of
the open basement door and continue to try to drag
people back in, both Agent and security guard alike.

Into The Dark

If Agents flee away from the tendrils and deep into
the sub-basement, they stumble blindly further into
the dark tunnels. They can hear a wet, slapping sound
behind them, as more pseudopods unfurl from dark
corners. They must make a Navigate or Search roll to
find an exit in the dark and confusing tunnels. If they
fail, the pseudopods catch up with them for one turn
of combat, whipping out from the dark or dropping
down from unseen corners. After one round of com-
bat, they can try another roll, or return to the main
room with the stairs. If they succeed at their roll, they
come across a circular metal grate in the wall. It can
be removed by hand with a STR roll, or metal cutting
equipment. Each attempt to remove the gate takes
one turn, during which time the pseudopods catch up
with the Agents.
Once Agents remove the grate and stumble
into the damp standpipe beyond, the pseudopods can
no longer reach them. Following this dark tunnel out,
30 minutes of painful stooped trudging will eventu-
ally lead them to the pipe exit in the woods, where
Wellbetter was first infected by the contaminated
slush. See the section ‘The Effluent Pipe’ above. As
they are leaving, there will be a discharge from the
pipe. Agents must make an Athletics roll to avoid be-
ing covered in a wave of foamy scum, diving outside
just in time. Any that fail are covered in the effluent,
and must succeed at a secret Contamination roll,
leaving them at risk of developing a similar condition
as Wellbetter.
The Shambling Fetus
If the Agents finally deal enough damage to blow
apart and ruin the Formless Flesh, they have a mo-
ment’s respite as the pseudopods flop dead to floor,
58
twitching limply. They catch their breath. The danger
appears to be over – until the unholy gestation grow-
ing deep inside the Formless Flesh suddenly bursts
wetly forth, tearing through the skin of the now dead
birthing sac. It is a gigantic, unnatural human fetus
the size of a bear, skinless and half formed, a slug
made of jumbled body parts and organs, crying and
screaming like a human baby. A distended maw hangs
open, wide enough to swallow a man whole.
The Shambling Fetus crawls towards them on
all fours with unholy speed, mewling like a freshly
born infant, an oversized and misshapen head flop-
ping on an ungainly neck. Blood and birthing material
splatters on the ground as it scurries forward. It is
wholly repulsive to the human soul. 1/1D8 SAN for
the Unnatural for anyone who sees it chasing them in
the dark. It attempts to close the gap and consume the
nearest Agent. A weeping umbilical cord trails behind
it. If Agents attempt to escape, it will hunt them down
– it moves faster than a man can run and will quickly
close the distance on one unfortunate soul, tracking
them by scent in the dark if they attempt to hide. If
they try to sprint to safety, every Agent must roll Ath-
letics – the Shambling Fetus will catch up with whoev-
er fails and rolls highest. If no one fails, they make it
to the door just in time to see it barreling up the stairs

Fire Damage in the Sub-basement
Molotov cocktail or other improvised
firebomb – 2D6, one turn only
Dowsing the Formless Flesh or Sham-
bling Fetus in petrol, diesel, or other
flammable liquid and setting alight –
10% lethality for one turn only
Dumping a barrel of industrial acid
onto the target – 20% lethality every
turn
behind them, still mewling pathetically – with just
enough time to slam the door in its horrifying face.
Award +1D6 SAN to each Agent if they destroy both
the Formless Flesh and the Shambling Fetus. They
suffer a 1/1D4 Helplessness loss if they leave either
alive and run away knowing what they have witnessed
and unleashed upon the world.
Aftermath
If Agents unleash the Shambling Fetus but somehow
escape without killing it, it will later disappear from
the sub-basement. It crawls into the dark and out of
the standpipe, vanishing into the nearby woodlands.
Days later, first cattle, then hikers will begin to go
missing as it feeds. It is up to the Agents as to what
they do about this new horror they have unleashed.
The Program will be most displeased with anything
less than total cover-up. If the Agents report it es-
caped and they left it, or fail to report it and The
Program learns about it later after months of strange
disapperences in the Virginia backwoods, they are
likely to become the mission themselves. The Program
does not tolerate failure or incompetence.
59
Let’s Try That Again
If Agents mess up during any infiltration of Venron
and are forced to flee, there will be ramifications if
they return for another attempt – depending on how
clumsy and loud they were. If security simply chase
Agents off without too much violence occurring or
guns coming out, they will put it down to local youths
breaking and entering. Yates will be furious with his
security staff, threatening all of them with immediate
dismissal should such a lapse happen again. All guards
will have +20% for both Alertness and Search for a
week.
If there was genuine violence or gunfire, Yates
will quietly suspect some kind of professional raid
gone wrong. He will inform Chief Novaks of the sit-
uation. If any Agents have interacted with Novaks or
Yates, suspicion will naturally fall on them, especially
if any evidence was recovered – bullet casings, weap-
ons or other physical clues. Physical security will be
doubled and everyone will be on high alert. Alertness
and Search for each guard will increase by 40% for
a week, and Yates buys some shotguns for the armo-
ry in the security hut. Novaks will also step up his
surveillance of the Agents. A deputy will attempt to
trail them at all times, even at night. If he sees them
heading for the Venron plant, police will be ready to
swoop in should they attempt anything. In an emer-
gency, Novaks can call in County police as backup for
his small town force.
If there was a large gunfight, multiple deaths,
or if the creature from the basement was seen or
involved in the deaths of any security, things will be
much more serious. All security on site that survived
the evening will have Obscure Memory cast on them
by Yates. Some will be permanently brain damaged
as a result. As well as the above measures, Yates will
ask New Life for advice – and James Dassinger will
dispatch a Wrecking Crew to provide physical securi-
ty. These men terrify the regular security guards. They
operate out of a spare office inside the facility, and
are active 24/7. Their presence is low key and Agents
returning for another infiltration attempt might be in
for a nasty surprise.
Destroying The Plant
Agents may conclude that the simplest option to stop
the pollution of the town or to eliminate the unnat-
ural threat present in the basement is to completely
obliterate the facility. The plant is small enough that
this could feasibly be achieved using explosives and/
or careful placement and ignition of the gas canisters
found in the concrete storage shed.
Players should be reminded that there are al-
ways some staff on site, including at least half a dozen
innocent security guards even at night, who will un-
doubtedly be killed or severely injured by the destruc-
tion. It is up to the players to determine whether this
sacrifice (and forthcoming SAN rolls) is worth it – or
if there is a method to remove the civilians from the
site somehow. If the Agents go ahead with blowing up
the entire plant with no evacuation plan, roll 2D4 –
that many guards and staff are killed in the explosion.
Those that survive were either far enough away from
the facility on exterior patrol, or somehow avoided
the worst of the shrapnel through sheer luck. Any
deaths will be on the Agent’s heads.
Demolition Repercussions
The steps needed to destroy the plant should not
be taken lightly. The logistics involved are not sim-
ple and would take hours of careful preparation,
even with professional training and explosives - and
lunking heavy gas canisters around the site is sure
to draw the notice of security. A truck bomb loaded
with about 150kg of ANFO and parked in the Goods
In loading bay might also do the trick, if any Agent
has the Demolitions skills to understand the technical
details. If preparations are made during nighttime, as
dawn breaks, early morning staff might start arriving
in their cars. Any explosive destruction will also bring
immediate response from local police and fire servic-
es.
If any Agents are apprehended during the
raid or not prepared with a very quick escape, their
employers will want to know exactly what they were
doing sneaking around an industrial site at night
that was subsequently blown up. County police and
forensics teams will go over the blast site with a fine
toothed comb. Any leftover evidence is very likely to
be found and result in charges for the arrested Agents.
Any sign of domestic terrorism will swiftly draw FBI
60
attention. Agents must also grapple with the implica-
tions of what they have done to the economy of the
town. Without the money from the Venron business,
Petersville will once again begin a inexorable slide
into poverty and desperation. Food banks will spring
up. Evictions will leave people living in tent camps
and filthy trailer parks. A tide of poverty will crash
over the town and drag it down, like so many others.
Other Options
The plant cannot be shut down by legal means. Not
only are Venron ticking all the regulatory boxes, they
have the full power of New Life and DRJ to sty-
mie any legal investigative routes. Pushing the EPA
or DOJ for further involvement will result in years
of legal wrangling. Leaving the plant running and
knowing what it is doing to the entire town will cost
Agents a 1/1D4 SAN roll for Helplessness. Destroying
the plant will award 1 SAN, along with the realization
that another one will just be built, or another compa-
ny engaged to do the same thing for New Life.
Extremely enterprising Agents might be able
to concoct various ruses in evacuating or shutting
the plant down for a short amount of time – turning
up and posing as legitimate EPA Agents, setting off a
nearby forest fire and claiming to be the fire service,
or some other cunning plan. None of these will hold
up to scrutiny for long – perhaps just long enough to
look around the plant and put a plan into motion,
before Whittaker Yates and his full security entourage
return to catch them in the act.
The Strughold Mining
Company
The Strughold Mining Company was for decades
one of the many small mining organizations that
thrived on the deep coal deposits of the West Vir-
ginian hills. When the profits fell and mechanization
and strip mining began to take over in the late 1960s,
the owners were forced into bankruptcy and slowly
shut down all operations. The facility stood idle for
many decades, slowly rotting away as mother nature
reclaimed the land. A buyer for the ruined site was
finally found in the late 00s. Made through a series of
obfuscated shell companies, no one ever find out the
identity of the ultimate client – Mary Dassinger, CEO
of the New Life Foundation.
The underground mine shafts of the long abandoned
Strughold site are used by New Life as a secret long
term storage facility for their medical records and
samples. Always fearful of detection by the govern-
ment or the NSA, James Dassinger long ago decided
to keep as much of the data as
possible that New Life produced
in physical form – continuing the
old habit of Noreen Macdougal in
keeping their records on paper,
rather than computer. This is one
of the reasons why New Life has
so far been able to fly under the
radar of Delta Green - the
Program’s extensive co-opted NSA
web-sniffing algorithms have never
had anything to pick up.
As the New Life operation grew
and expanded rapidly after 2010,
a new secure location was needed
to keep the volumes of paperwork
that the group was producing – the
Cybelle no longer had the capacity required. All the
details of New Life’s thousand upon thousand of
IVF treatments and patients are now filed away into
steel cabinets buried deep within the long-forgotten
Strughold mine.
Every month, when New Life deliver their
latest batch of equipment to be cleaned and processed
by Venron, they also drop off a secure box of plain
manila folders. Within these folders are all the details,
family names and breeding suggestions for the latest
New Life families. Whittaker Yates has been charged
by James Dassinger with personally guarding and
delivering these to the Strughold facility for storage.
Yates feels this is a great honor and privilege, but in
reality, he is little more than a filing clerk.
If Agents spend some time digging through
online company filings with a successful Accountan-
cy roll, they can find that the company that bought
Strughold was merely a shell within a shell. Behind
it as the ultimate owners sits a non-profit pro-choice
fertility health NGO named The New Life Founda-
tion – who’s CEO is a woman named Mary Dassinger.
The Facility
The facility is based deep in the wooded uphills of
West Virginia, around ten miles east of a tiny logging
61
town called Pickens, at the end of a single works
road. It lies within the boundary of the Kumbrabrow
State Forest park, the highest forest in the state.
A winding and lonely unmetalled track leads deep
into the wet woodlands, climbing ever upward.
When it finally opens out into a wide clearing, the
Strughold facility looms above like a hollowed-out
corpse of a structure.The Strughold mining facility
is nothing more than a shattered ten story industrial
building jutting out of a sheer rock face. Most of the
windows are smashed, weeds infest the property and
rusted machinery lies discarded about. The place is in
ruins. The only obvious door to entry is half hanging
off it’s hinges. The exterior of the property is sur-
rounded by a rusting chain link fence, spotted with
plenty of holes and no gate. There are no guards or
physical security. The site is completely empty and
abandoned.
A Search or Survival roll will find faint fresh
footprints on a section of dried dirt leading from the
car park to the facility entrance. These comes from a
man’s shoe, size 10. The heel and toe pattern indi-
cates a professional, smart shoe – perhaps worn by a
businessman. Pushing open the rotting door, visitors
will enter a wide and dark cavernous space where
once the ore was transported out of the mines ready
for compacting and loading. A rusted set of stairs
lead up to many different open-plan catwalk levels.
The interior is criss-crossed with old conveyor belts,
rusted piping, scaffolding and heaps of slag ore, fused
together after many long decades. The facility is silent
except for the faint drip of water and occasional scur-
rying rat. The Agent’s footsteps echo loudly around.
The place looks long abandoned.
Walking up to the third level, the Agents will
come across a heavy, imposing steel door embedded
in the rock face. It is out of place – new and with a
mirror shine. It looks like it might have been installed
only in the last few years, compared to the ruin and
degradation of the rest of the building. An elec-
tronic entry system sits at waist level, with a digital
numberpad and a single red light, powered by some
unseen source. It is the only sign of electrical life in
the entire facility. The source of the power cannot be
traced. The door is blastproof and nothing short of
an anti-tank missile is enough to crack it open. It was
originally manufactured and sold as a vault door for
a home nuclear survival shelter - smaller explosives
and basic home tools won’t even scratch it. Agents
with Micro-electronics of 60% or more can attempt
a roll to hack the door with the right specialist equip-
ment. Anyone skilled in some kind of Engineering at
50% or more and equipped with extremely powerful
industrial tools might also be able to open it. Both op-
tions will take many hours and will alert the Wrecking
Crews (see below) just as entering the key combina-
tion will.
A successful Forensics roll, some powder and
tape will determine the keys pressed on the pad and
lift prints that match Whittaker Yates, but not the
order nor the number of entries required. A further
Luck roll and an hour of trying is required – if this
fails, the exact combination continues to elude the
Agents. Failing these options, the only method most
Agents will have to open the door is to obtain the
keypad number combination from Yates himself. If
Agents kill Yates without learning the number, who-
ever replaces him will also know it. Guessing it and
getting it wrong will have no effect other than the
grating electronic BZZZT of the system denying the
code – although paranoid Agents won’t know that.
The light remains red and the door remains locked.
Upon entering the correct number, the system
will give a single quiet beep, the red light will flick
to green, and a metallic clang will sound out as the
magnetic locks retract with the door silently swinging
open.
62
Inside The Mine
If Agents make it this far, they have truly hit the jack-
pot – although they might not realize it until it is too
late.
Stretching away down the pitch black horizontal
mineshaft in front of them are hundreds of old 1950s
style metal filing cabinets. The cabinets go on and on,
disappearing around a corner. Old minecart rails are
still in place on the ground running between them. A
chain of bare lightbulbs dangle from ancient electrical
cables overhead. A single light switch is near the door.
The abandoned mine is silent and cold.
Opening any of these cabinets will reveal dozens of
alphabetically organized individual manila folders.
Inside the folders are pages upon pages of detailed
medical records for hundreds upon hundreds of peo-
ple. Every single one of them is a record of the same
procedure - an IVF process conducted by a company
stamped with its name at the top of the file - New
Life Fertility. The records detail the mother, the date
of the procedure and the birth of the subsequent
offspring. The records also map out complete family
trees. Each file has a small plastic case the size of a
postage stamp taped to it, with a bio-warning marker
symbol on it. Inside is a tiny sample of biological tis-
sue, floating in formaldehyde for preservation - taken
from each and every mother. Each manila file adds up
to record a vast and complicated breeding program
cross-referencing across all the files – matching the
1st generation children from the IVF procedure with
each other to form suitable life partners. Some have
already married and produced young children for a
2nd generation, which in turn have their own fold-
ers and records. To what end, is not explained in the
files.
The Files
Agents spending an hour or two sifting through these
unsettling records will begin to piece together the
application of this IFV procedure has been going on
since the early 1990s – and then rapidly accelerating
into a vast breeding program since 2010. There must
be tens of thousands of children all over the Unit-
ed States now born to this IVF method, at a 100%
success rate – anyone with a Medicine or Science skill
of 30% or more will know this should be an impos-
sibility - and hundreds more of the 2nd generation
now born to the carefully curated breeding program.
Frequent references are made to a substance called
the Lac Maternum - apparently a key part of the IVF
treatment.
Internet searching or investigation of any of
the family names in the files will reveal one common
factor – all of them are rich and powerful, connected
to the upper echelons of society. Industrial magnates,
senior politicians and businessmen, media moguls, ce-
lebrities, newspaper owners, upcoming tech entrepre-
neurs, powerful banking families, wealthy dynasties
and so on. If Agents think to search for specific names
in the cabinets, they might ask to see if the Dumas
family have a file. They do.
This file will detail the family and break down
the outcome of whatever happened in your version
of the mission Tenebris Capra, along with whatever
conclusions New Life were able to draw about the
Agents and their actions, identities and speculation
on their motives. Agents might even find pictures of
themselves in the files. Handlers should feel free to
adapt this information to whatever occurred in their
game – along with a handwritten note from a “J.D.”
considering the result an unmitigated disaster for the
New Life project regarding the ‘Unauthorized and un-
planned relations resulting in unsanctioned inter-fam-
ily breeding’. The note states that all 1st Generation
siblings should now be identified and separated earli-
er than previously thought to prevent this.
There is also an empty box on a bare steel
table next to the door, apparently part of the latest
delivery from Venron. The box still has the full ship-
63
ping address label intact – the entire delivery came
from Charleston International Airport.
Agents have a brief chance here to deal a
crippling blow to New Life Fertility. If they take swift
action in either securing the files or destroying them,
they will devastate the ability of New Life to co-ordi-
nate much of their future breeding program. Howev-
er, in between the shock of discovery, the time pres-
sure and the upcoming ambush from the Wrecking
Crew, Agents might find they are only able to snatch
one or two files, which will prove poor evidence of
grand conspiracy.
Ambush At Strughold
The events of the mission Tenebris Capra have left
the leadership of New Life on high alert and they
have become somewhat paranoid. They have now
progressed to Stage Two of the escalation given in
The Labyrinth sourcebook. They have begun to hire
and deploy small units of Wrecking Crews around
the United States as security for key locations. One of
these is their document storage facility located deep
within the Strughold Mine. New Life has determined
that the facility should be shut down and moved to
a more secure location. This has not yet taken place,
although a Wrecking Crew detail is on hand to watch
over the facility until the move is finalized. They will
then be charged with guarding the documents as they
are shifted to the new location.
Whittaker Yates, as a trusted lieutenant of
James Dassinger, is now the sole arbiter and custodian
of the Strughold Mining facility, yet even he does not
know of the Wrecking Crew’s existence. Access to
the facility is tightly restricted and if anyone, includ-
ing Yates, operates the security door to the archives
outside of a planned visit, a team of Wrecking Crew
security is immediately dispatched to determine who
it is, alerted by a sensor in the door. A Micro-elec-
tronics skill of 70%, and a succesful roll, will identify
this hidden sensor – but will reveal there is no way to
open the door without triggering it in some form.
This Wrecking Crew is on call and doesn’t
provide round-the-clock security – they simply scram-
ble and arrive should unauthorized access be detect-
ed. This will trigger whenever the Agents decide to
investigate the facility. They are based in a small town
a dozen or so miles away from the mine. For weeks
they have been paid a large amount of money to sim-
ply sit around in a motel ‘on call’ should physical se-
curity be required – they are bored and trigger happy.
The Wrecking Crew Arrives
Whenever Agents breach the vault door into the hid-
den section of the Strughold facility (either by using
the numberpad combination or somehow blowing or
cutting it open), an alert is sent to the leader of the
Strughold Wrecking Crew. He immediately scrambles
his team and they depart in dark-tinted 4x4s at top
speed, armed and ready for action. They race toward
the facility and will arrive at an opportune time at
the Handlers discretion – ideally just after the Agents
have pieced together the vast conspiracy and breeding
program embedded within America’s high society, but
before they have left the site.
The Wrecking Crew is not subtle. They will
screech into the abandoned carpark at full speed,
blocking the exit with their vehicles. The men will
jump out, unholster their weapons, and begin to
carefully advance. Their orders are simple – terminate
anyone who has accessed the facility with extreme
prejudice. They are confident they have the legal cov-
er and lack of witnesses to do so.
Exposure Levels
This encounter depends on the ‘Exposure’ level that
the Agents have secretly accumulated during this mis-
sion and the previous one, Tenebris Capra. Unless the
players have practiced very careful operational secu-
rity, this could be an extremely difficult fight. If the
players have been sloppy, it will be downright deadly. ers, or perhaps they can have a first turn ambush or
How this encounter proceeds is entirely down to your
players, but there are two main options – fight or run.
Even the most hardened of Delta Green operatives
will balk at having to face half a dozen prepared op-
ponents with automatic weapons in a stand-up fight.
Any Agents present can roll Military Science
at +20%. On a failure, all they can determine is that
the men are heavily armed. On a success, their ex-
perience allows them a freeze-frame analysis of the
tactical situation as the Wrecking Crew steps out of
their cars, loads their weapons and begins moving.
The men advance in formation, with good spacing,
checking angles and flanks - they clearly have military
training. They wear forgettable, drab colored civilian
clothing with Kevlar vests. They are hyper-alert and
64
their weapon safeties are already off. These men are
not security guards. They are killers.
Light ‘Em Up
The Wrecking Crew operatives will not engage in any
diplomacy. They are professionals doing a job and
they know exactly what is expected of them. They are
not fazed at having to gun down even Federal Agents.
They might even pretend to be police themselves,
calling to the Agents to draw them out of cover, ask-
ing them to throw down their weapons and come out
with their hands up. If Agents are foolish enough to
fall for this, they deserve everything they get. Anyone
with 30% or more in Law or Military Science, or
with a HUMINT roll, might be able to see through
this ruse and sense something is off with the way the
man handle themselves. Either way, the Crew will
open fire as soon as they see the Agents, and will not
retreat.
Automatic gunfire rings out, the deafening
blasts echoing off the Strughold building. The Wreck-
ing Crew bark curt orders to each other. Magazines
are discarded and reloaded with professional efficien-
cy. Shell casings scatter across the tarmac of the aban-
doned carpark like tinkling confetti. The Strughold
facility is deep in the wooded West Virginia hills and
miles from civilization or proper roads. No one will
hear the gun battle, which might last some time.
Allow the Agents some creative leeway if they
have been careful on their journey to Strughold. Per-
haps they left a sentry outside who can warn the oth-
booby traps go off, if they set up correctly inside the
wrecked remains of the mining facility. Any Special
Operator Agents who have heavy hardware would
find this the perfect time to let rip.
However difficult, it is possible for the players
to win this battle and Agents might be able to interro-
gate a wounded or dying Crew member for location
of their safehouse. Searching one of the Wrecking
Crew cars will reveal a Sat Nav system that still has
their original location programmed in. The driver’s
licenses and other documents on the bodies are all
fake – names of people long since dead, their identi-
ties stolen.
Bug Out
When confronted with an overwhelming force, smart
Agents might decide discretion is the better part of
valor. It is unlikely that two or three lightly armed
Agents are capable of facing a full Wrecking Crew
contingent, especially if their Exposure rating is six or
higher. There are two options for escape – to either
brave a hail of gunfire and try to drive through the
Wrecking Crew blockade, which will lead to a pursuit
and gun battle on the back highways – or to turn tail
and disappear on foot into the thick woodland behind
the facility.
Trying to hide deep in the mine shaft is a
fool’s decision. It is a dead end that goes nowhere,
long since blocked off by a cave-in. The Wrecking
Crew know the door code and will carefully search
the single, long mineshaft with night-vision goggles,
quickly discovering anyone hiding inside. Anyone
there will be trapped with no cover. Their bodies
will then be sealed away, lost forever. The Agents are
never found.
Escape By Car
Agents need a turn to get into their vehicles, then
another turn to drive past the Wrecking Crew block-
ade. The Wrecking Crew will of course be firing
during this time. Anyone driving cannot fire back, but
other Agents can. The Wrecking Crew will pursue the
agents down the lonely forest highway. Agents will
need a successful opposed Drive roll to outpace each
vehicle pursuing them. A fumble results in a crash. If
the Agents do not succeed at their roll, they will be
forced to engage in a turn of combat before trying
again.
Escape By Foot
The only direction to go is to rush into the dark and
hilly backwoods behind the mining facility. Each
Agent must make an opposed Athletics roll against
the Wrecking Crew entity to gain distance. On a
failure, they are stuck in one round of combat before
they can try to get away again. Wrecking Crews won’t
give up even if Agents escape visual sight. They will
continue to scour the woods for hours, especially if
they have tracking dogs or hyper-geometric assis-
tance.
Wrecking Crews will be Searching for the
Agents in this time, using their Alsatian dog’s track
65
skill if they have one. Agents must make individual
opposed Stealth or Survival rolls to avoid detection
and make it deeper into the woods without being
tracked. If Agents fail, they are discovered by a small
group of remaining Wrecking Crew – they can at-
tempt escape again after 1 round of combat, as above.
If both fail, re-roll.
If Agents succeed at this roll, they finally put
enough distance between themselves and their pur-
suers to lose them for good. Agents must now spend
many long hours trekking lost in the woods, probably
without any sort of map or guidance. There is no cell
phone coverage here. Agents must succeed at a Sur-
vival or Navigation roll to finally find a break in the
trees and locate a road. From here they can flag down
a car and make it to the nearest town.
On a failure, four hours pass as the Agents
stumble around in the woods. On a fumble, they
bump into a Wrecking Crew patrol. Agents can try
these rolls as many times as needed, using the high-
est value of their group – unless they have split up.
Agents might find themselves alone, at night, hungry
and without water, supplies or camping equipment,
trying to dodge groups of armed men with sniffer
dogs. Navigating the pitch black tangled pine forest at
night is impossible. Exposure is a real risk at this time
of year – and they know the Wrecking Crews are still
out there, in the dark, hunting for them. A Survival
roll can mitigate this damage.
Perhaps one Agent may decide to stay behind
to delay the Wrecking Crew. If so, they will focus on
him, allowing other Agents to make a break for it
without needing any rolls to escape. However, this
Agent will then be on their own versus a full force of
Wrecking Crew operatives. Obviously, this might play
out to be a heroic sacrifice.
Aftermath
If any Agents survive the ambush by either escaping
or somehow managing to kill or subdue the entire
Wrecking Crew, this is good time to draw this mission
to a close. Several options present themselves.
If escape was successful, the remaining Agents
are probably injured, dehydrated and exhausted from
their deadly chase through the dense West Virginian
woodlands, and are still being hounded by the re-
morseless Wrecking Crew. They need to go ground
and fast. They will no doubt want to call in their
Handler – if they don’t, they will receive a suitable
notification from him that he wants a face-to-face
update on their investigation.
If the Agents somehow came out of the con-
frontation with the Wrecking Crew as the only ones
still standing, they find themselves in the middle of
a slaughter. Half a dozen bodies probably litter the
ground, of unidentified gunmen with fake IDs and
illegal weaponry. Police sirens might be heard in the
distance as someone has finally noticed and called in
the heavy gunfire. They will have to make a quick and
hasty exit from the scene, gathering whatever clues
they can before the local cops arrive to find the killing
zone.
If the Agents all died in the shootout with the
Wrecking Crew, this need not be the end of the cam-
paign. Their case officer will be given the grim task
of assembling a new squad of hastily thrown-together
available Agents. They will be sent to the shootout
scene under the cover of local FBI, to examine and
determine just what the hell was going on in the
middle of nowhere with so much firepower. By the
time they get there, the Strughold facility has already
mysteriously been emptied of all the incriminating
folders and files. None of the local PD guarding the
scene claim to know anything about this.
These events then transition into a final confrontation
against the New Life organisation of your own design,
or perhaps the start of a mini-campaign against them.
Contamination
Throughout this mission, the Handler should keep
track of any Agent exposed to the concentrated
version of the Lac Maternum chemical-swill from the
Venron plant - the main sources being either drenched
by a discharge wash from the effluent pipe, or vomit-
ed upon by a pseudopod or the corpse of Albus Yates
– or indeed, any other devious measure the Handler
can conceive. If any are exposed, they run the risk of
being CONTAMINATED by it.
This manifests differently for every individu-
al. In many ways, Thomas Wellbetter was lucky. He
died a relatively quick death, aided by modern med-
icines and painkillers. He might instead have gone
mad, slaughtering his family as the divine right of the
blessed Star Mother flashed across his ruined brain,
66
or perhaps de-evolved into a squelching blob of hu-
man-sized tumor mass, mindlessly living out his days
in a swampy morass somewhere.
If an Agent is ever covered, touched or
splashed by this chemical mix, you should make a se-
cret CONx5 roll for them at -20%. On a failure, they
have become CONTAMINATED. The exact nature of
this is down to the Handler and can be devised as you
see fit, but below is one example. In any case, what-
ever happens is likely to be extremely gruesome and
disturbing, giving the Agent only a short window of
time to finish the mission before the Contamination
consumes them from the inside out. On a successful
roll, the fortunate Agent is unaffected – this time. If
an Agent is wearing PPE or otherwise protected, their
roll can instead be made at +20%.
The Malignancy
On the first morning after being Contaminated, a
splotch of irritated tissue appears on the palm of the
Agent’s hand. It seems just a mild allergic reaction, a
spray of small faint nodules, but within twenty four
hours the nature of the mark changes — it grows
and spreads. Ask the Agent if they want to inform
their team about it or keep it a secret. The first and
second day this is easy, but after the third day, they
must make a HUMINT roll each time they direct-
ly lie about it or conceal it. To hide the pustules on
the hand from sight also requires a Disguise roll at
+20%.
On the second day, the skin becomes a shiny, off-blue
color and bulges into multiple blister-like pustules. At
this stage, it is noticeable with a successful Search roll
unless it is concealed.
On the third day, when the Agent in question feels
a slight discomfort swallowing and they realize they
are running a fever, they know something is definite-
ly wrong. The pustules on the hand have become a
noticeably large growth.
Progession
The Malignancy progresses like a normal disease,
advancing over time to become more serious.
∆ DAY ONE: The irritation appears on the Agent’s
palm.
∆ DAY TWO: The irritation sprouts to blue pus-
tules (An Agent can hide this with a Disguise roll at
+20%.)
∆ DAY THREE: The Agent has a sore throat, a fever,
and all actions are at -20%.
∆ DAY FOUR: After some brief shooting pains in the
hand, the growth and the hand it is on goes complete-
ly numb. The hand contorts into a strange shape and
occasionally twitches, seemingly under its own power.
∆ DAY FIVE: The Event occurs.
Examination & Treatment
A Medicine skill of 25%+ or a successful roll and a
brief examination by a doctor is enough to state that
the Malignancy is very serious. Any sane doctor will
recommend that the Agent in question should imme-
diately go to the nearest emergency room.
Those Agents that do check themselves into a hospi-
tal find things accelerating at a very swift pace. The
experience moves from a brief examination to several
experienced doctor’s examining the pustules, to sam-
ples, to a hospital bed, an IV, and lots more samples
being taken.
If the Agent with the Malignancy has First Aid
or Medicine skills themselves, they get the feeling
— overhearing conversations on the subject — that
the hospital has no idea what they are dealing with,
only that they think it is fungal in nature; but no one
is sure. Even with a full suite of medical treatment,
the growth progresses through its stages in the same
manner.
The Event
On the fifth day, the Agent wakes from a troubled
sleep to the sound of a low voice whispering foreign
words to them. To their horror, the pustules on their
hand have burst, and small blue-black orifices have
been revealed beneath them, tunneling deep into the
meat of the palm. The orifices are slowly beginning
to resemble the Agent’s own face. These orifices are
working, opening and closing in time with the voice,
but it is clear to the Agent that the voice is only in
their head (1/1D8 SAN Unnatural, for every day the
hand is left in this condition). The words it says are
at first unintelligible and strange, but more and more,
begin to come clear. From here, the voices begin to
direct the Agent to do things . . . terrible things . . . it
takes a SAN roll to ignore the instructions.
Clean-up
Several resolutions present themselves :
67
∆ REMOVE THE ARM: Cutting off the hand before
the fifth day (or even after it) is a possibility, but it
can be a difficult one. With the right motivations,
after the third day doctors will consider removing
the hand (if an Agent wishes to convince doctors to
act, treat this as a Medicine roll +20%) as a solution.
If so, the Agent in question will be sedated and the
hand removed. What horrors follow and the cover-
up required to keep it quiet are up to the Handler
to devise. Those Agents that refuse medical help and
that still wish to remove their hand must succeed at a
0/1D4 SAN helplessness roll, or chicken out (wheth-
er they’re doing it themselves or not). Likewise,
someone doing it for them must make a 0/1D4 SAN
violence roll to carry out the attack. Losing a hand
inflicts 1D6 HP damage and requires a CONx5 roll
or the Agent in question passes out from pain. If the
severed limb is not treated by a medical professional,
a second CONx5 roll must be made; on a fail, the
Agent loses 1 point of CON forever.
∆ TERMINATE THE VECTOR: Teammates of the Agent
in question might decide to take the Agent some-
where quiet and “resolve” the situation themselves,
less it spread. If the infection is reported to Delta
Green, this will become their demand and preferred
option. However, the voices whispering to the Con-
taminated Agent might warn them of this – that there
is a cure, there is a way to be better, something more
– if only the Agent follows its instructions . . .
∆ GO OUT IN A BLAZE OF GLORY: The Agent may
realize their time is up – and what better way than
to go down fighting, wrestling against the insanity
from beyond. The Agent might sacrifice themselves
in a fight (perhaps during the ambush at Strughold
or a later assault on the Cybelle) to buy their fellows
enough time to escape.
∆ UNNATURAL SUCCOR: Maybe the Agents have a
tome or contact with hypergeometric powers. The
cost might be terrible, but perhaps there is a ritual
that can help...in this scenario, the Agents might beg
Whittaker Yates or even James Dassinger himself for
access to the Healing Balm ritual – at the price of
dropping the investigation into New Life – or turning
over one of their fellows...
 Characters
Cyril Wright
- FBI Pathologist
Slight, balding and hawkish in appearance, Wright
has worked as the chief medical pathologist at the
FBI Philadelphia Field Office for six years. He is cool,
calm and analytical, as would be expected from some-
one at the top of this profession. In his long medical
career he has also seen, and conducted autopsies on,
numerous things which for one reason or another,
have been unexplainable. This has left him very open-
minded - something which could be a danger to him
should he be asked to analyze any unnatural samples.
Forensic Pathlogist Cyril Wright
A professional, with a hint of curiosity, age 56
STR 9 CON 11 DEX 13 INT 17 POW 14 CHA 14
HP 11 WP 14 SAN 55 BREAKING POINT 41
Skills: Forensics 70%, Medicine 40%, Biology 60%,
Bureaucracy 50%, Computer Science 30%, Mathe-
matics 40%, Surgery 39%, Firearms 20%, Unarmed
Combat 30%
Adapted to Violence
Attacks:
Glock 19m pistol 20%, damage 1D10
Unarmed 30%, 1D4-1
The Serum Globule
The serum globule is a semi-translucent, faintly blue
blob the size of a small dinner plate. It grows to this
maturity from the Purity Control sample, if ever
opened and left exposed to air and water vapor for
a day or so. It remains inert until it senses a living
creature, before lashing out with whip-like tendrils in
a violent attempt to insert itself into the victims brain
cavity.
Serum Globule
An unnatural plastic predator, age 0
STR 14 CON 5 DEX 14 INT 0 POW 2
HP 3
Skills: Dodge 50%, Stealth 70%
68
Attacks:
Pseudopod Grasp, 65%, Special** – opposed STRx5
roll against target. If target fails to win in two turns,
the Serum Globule will insert itself into the target’s
sinuses and brain stem. Target can avoid attack if
wearing completely enclosed head protection, such as
from a biohazard level 4 suit, or motorbike helmet.
Small: This wriggling horror is both fast and small,
making it very hard to hit. -20% for all attacks against
the globule.
SAN loss: 1/1D4 for the Unnatural for seeing an at-
tack, 1/1D8 for being the target of this attack
Sheriff John Novaks
Sheriff Novaks is a good ol’ boy looking out for his
town. It is essentially his personal fiefdom and he
treats it as such. He is cunning and will not directly
obstruct Agents – although if he gets wind of any
plans to investigate Venron, he will begin making
Agents lives very difficult. He is a bald, sweaty man
with a chewing tobacco habit. As well as hiding
his own motivations, Novaks will attempt his own
HUMINT rolls against the Agents to discern their
plans.
Petersville Sheriff Novaks
Cunning arbiter of warped justice, age 52
STR 12 CON 13 DEX 12 INT 12 POW 15 CHA 15
HP 13 WP 14 SAN 40 BREAKING POINT 20
Skills: Alertness 50%, Bureaucracy 30%, Criminology
30%, Law 30%, Drive 60%, Firearms 50%, Forensics
10%, HUMINT 40%, Persuade 50%, Navigate 40%,
Pilot – Small Boat 40%, Ride 30%, Search 50%, Sur-
vival 30%,
Adapted to Helplessness
Armor: Reinforced Kevlar Vest (4 armor)
Attacks:
Smith & Wesson M&P40 pistol 50%, damage 1D10
Baton 40%, damage 1D6
Unarmed 40%, damage 1D4-1
Dr. Lionel Offerman M.D.
An obseqious, corrupt medical practioner, who has
had his already dubious practices completely warped
by years of bribes from Venron. Hiding behind the
guise of a kindly old doctor, quick to chuckle at him-
self, he does the bidding of Sheriff Novaks in keeping
all complaints about the town’s pollution thoroughly
hidden.
Dr. Offerman
Complicit in many crimes, age 61
STR 9 CON 7 DEX 8 INT 15 POW 7 CHA 16
HP 10 WP 7 SAN 45 BREAKING POINT 33
Disorder - addicted to painkillers
Skills: Medicine 40%, Pharmacy 15%, First Aid 30%,
Bureaucracy 47%, Computer Science 12%, HUMINT
48%, Persuade 50%, Craft – Fishing 35%
Attacks:
Unarmed 20%, damage 1D4-2
Farmer Joe Tennant
Tennant’s face is worn and his hands rough from
many decades working his farm. He wears drab color-
ed work clothes like rubber boots and canvas coats.
Tennant is the town pariah, isolated and shunned
by most of the community. He has waged a hope-
less campaign against Venron for many years as he
watched his farm die around him. A now bitter man
of few words, he still loves his diseased and deformed
wife. He is unafraid of authority figures and has no
time for fools nor the government. He could be a lo-
cal ally to the Agents if they can somehow bring him
onside.
Joe Tennant
A man resigned to his fate, age 61
STR 14 CON 16 DEX 9 INT 10 POW 16 CHA 7
HP 15 WP 14 SAN 30 BREAKING POINT 25
Skills: Alertness 55%, Drive 45%, Firearms 42%,
Craft – Farming 68%, Craft – Veterinary medicine
20%, Heavy Machinery 48%, Pharmacy 8%, Survival
40%
69
Attacks:
Double-barrelled hunting shotgun 47%, damage 2D8.
Can fire both barrels at a single target for an addition-
al 1D8 damage, but will then require a turn reloading.
Superbright MS18 Torch – an extremely powerful
LED torch which can easily dazzle and blind at close
quarters. If shone at an opponent as an action during
combat at night or in a dark enclosed area, the oppo-
nent must make a DEXx5 roll to avoid the glare or be
dazzled and suffer -20% to all rolls for 4 turns. This
has an area of effect equal to 2 metres.
Petersville Police Officer
A typical Petersville Police Deputy
Local boys with a gun and a badge, age 25-45
STR 13 CON 12 DEX 10 INT 10 POW 11 CHA 10
HP 13 WP 11 SAN 60 BREAKING POINT 48
Skills: Alertness 40%, Criminology 10%, Law 20%,
Drive 50%, Firearms 40%, HUMINT 30%, Navigate
30%, Search 40%
Armor: Reinforced Kevlar Vest (4 armor)
Equipment: Cuffs, drivers license scanner, Stinger
spike strips
Attacks:
Smith & Wesson M&P40 pistol 40%, damage 1D10
Remington 870 shotgun, 40%, damage 2D8. Local
police keep shotguns in their patrol cars.
Baton 30%, damage 1D6
Unarmed 40%, damage 1D4-1
Pepper Spray 50%, stun effect
Andrew Welks
This man’s spinal cord and brainstem have been
badly contaminted from exposure to the unnatural
pollution coming from Venron. He is barely able to
function as a human being and is hostile and aggresive
beyond reason or control. He is a ticking time bomb.
Andrew Welks
Local logger driven mad by corruption, age 28
STR 16 CON 7 DEX 10 INT 9 POW 10 CHA 5
HP 20 WP 10 SAN 0
Attacks:
Hand Chainsaw, 40% Lethality 10%
Unarmed, 50%, 1D4
Unnatural Regeneration: Welk’s body is overwhelmed
with rapidly regenerating cancerous cells. This is
killing him but also helps to repair physical wounds at
an unnatural rate. If he is injured for half his current
HP or more but still has at least 1 hit point, tumorous
sacs of flesh suddenly erupt and knit together, closing
the wound. He immediately heals 1D6 damage. See-
ing this costs 0/1 SAN from the unnatural.
Mutated Bovine
The last poor animal on Tennant’s farm, now an
abomination, age 4
STR 28 CON 13 DEX 10 INT 1 HP 21
Skills: Alertness 50%, Dodge 40%
Attacks:
Bite or kick 50%, damage 1D6. Target must roll
CONx5 or be knocked prone.
Charge 40%, damage 1D8. Target will be knocked
prone. This attack cannot be blocked by Unarmed
Combat skills.
Trample 30%, damage Lethality 15%. The cow can
only trample a target that is already prone.
Erik Hendley
A young man driven to acts of violent psychosis by
the corruption plaguing the town. Another victim of
Venron’s unnatural pollution.
Erik Hendley
Teenage school shooter, age 17
STR 11 CON 12 DEX 14 INT 12 POW 9 CHA 8
HP 12 WP 9 SAN 0
Skills: Alertness 20%, Firearms 28%, Unarmed Com-
bat 30%, Drive 25%, Search 30%
Armor: Homemade gun vest with improvised padding
of school textbooks, 2 armor points
Attacks:
AR-15 semi-automatic carbine 28%, damage 1D12
70
AP3
TEC-9 pistol, 28%, damage 1D10
Unarmed, 30%, damage 1D4-1
Whittaker Yates
Yates is a handsome and charismatic young man, tall,
strong and well-tanned, usually dressed in business
casual clothing or designer polo shirts. He is likeable
and self-effacing, even helpful at first, but will quickly
turn on any threat and deploy whatever assets neces-
sary. He is an expert at charming and manipulating
people. Behind this facade of civilisation his mind
teeters on a knife edge of madness - not only from the
depth of revelations behind his true heritage, but the
knowledge of the hidden biological disaster he has
created and left to fester in the basement beneath his
plant. He fears exposure of this to James Dassinger
above all else.
Whittaker Yates
1st Generation New Life scion and charismatic owner
of Venron Medical, age 25
STR 16 CON 18 DEX 15 INT 14 POW 16 CHA 17
HP 17 WP 16 SAN 10 BREAKING POINT 5
Disorder – Totemic Compulsion : Corpse of his father
Disorder – Intermittent explosive disorder
Skills: Accounting 25%, Bureaucracy 30%, Computer
Science 30%, Persuade 70%, HUMINT 40%, Science
(Biotechnology) 15%, Pharmacy 10%, Golf 40%
Attacks: Unarmed 30%, 1D4
Hyper-Geometric Rituals: Obscure Memory, One Who
Passes The Gateways
Venron Security Personnel
Facility Guards
Just picking up a paycheck, age 20-40
STR 12 CON 12 DEX 10 INT 10 POW 9 CHA 10
HP 12 WP 9 SAN 65 BREAKING POINT 56
Skills: Alertness 30%, Firearms 30%, Melee Weapons
40%, Unarmed Combat 40%, First Aid 15%, Search
40%
Armor: None
Attacks:
Glock 22 pistol 30%, damage 1D10
Nightstick 40%, damage 1D6
Unarmed 40%, damage 1D4-1
Equipment: Flashlight, Electronic keycard (allows
access anywhere in the Venron plant), plastic zip ties
for cuffs.
The Formless Flesh
A vast mass of spasmodically squirming, quivering
flesh in the corner of the sub-basement, it is clearly
just one concentrated part of the biological abomina-
tion spread across the walls and ceiling of the room.
Giant purple veins wrap around it and half-formed
human organs drift over its surface. This giant rot-
ten cyst is possessed by a unnameable intelligence
which can sense when it is threatened. If Agents begin
to plan hostile actions, it will react, sending out its
pseduopods to attack.
Formless Flesh
A huge sac of writhing gristle, pregnant with doom
STR n/a CON n/a DEX n/a INT 0 POW n/a
HP 30
Huge: Lethality ratings don’t affect Huge creatures in
the same way they do a human sized target. Instead, if
the Lethality attack succeeds, it does flat HP damage
equal to the Lethality rating.
Immobile: The Formless Flesh cannot move, apart
from the occasional squirming quiver or pulsating
vein.
Pseudopod Spawn: The Formless Flesh will initially
spawn a number of pseudopods, equal to the total
number of Agents present less one, to a minimum of
one. See their entry for further details.
Absorbing Resilience: The Formless Flesh is a giant
sac of corrupted flesh and fluid-filled organs. Putting
a bullet into it is like shooting a swimming pool. It
has no vitals or weak points and can absorb a large
amount of physical damage before real harm comes
to it.
The Formless Flesh takes only half damage from
71
all Firearms, Melee and Unarmed combat, includ-
ing Lethality effects. Fire affects it normally, but is
extinguished after 1 turn due to the wet basement
conditions. Explosives also affect it normally, but will
affect anyone else within the confines of the base-
ment, unless they are outside the blast radius. Acid
and chemicals can cause 20% lethality per turn to the
Flesh if a barrel of such substance is dumped over it.
Once destroyed, the Shambling Fetus will unexpect-
edly burst forth from inside the ruined remains of the
Formless Flesh a turn later, just as Agents are catching
their breath.
SAN loss: 1/1D4 for seeing the Formless Flesh, or
1/1D6 if Agents realize it is part of one vast organism
in the basement.
Fleshy Pseudopod
These pseudopods are composed of human-like flesh
with random splotches of anatomy. Covered in bul-
bous eyes, teeth, ears or limbs, they are ropey tendrils
reaching out like boneless arms. Their structures
have no rhyme or reason. They move with a terrible
fluidity, suggesting the extreme mobility of octopi or
amoebas. Roiling coils of flesh snake out from the
dark, searching for prey.
Fleshy Pseudopod
A writhing mass of tumorous flesh
STR 12 CON 14 DEX 15 INT 0 POW 0
HP 8
Regeneration: Individual pseudopods can be “killed”
by severing them or destroying them with enough
damage. However, they will reform or another will
take its place one turn after, until the central core
of the Formless Flesh is destroyed. The 2nd time a
pseudopod is destroyed, it will reform a turn later
as before, but this time is will split into two, thus
reforming as two separate pseudopods. This process
continues indefinitely, leaving trigger-happy Agents
possibly surrounded and overwhelmed by dozens of
the loathsome tendrils.
Attacks:
Grapple 60%, pins target
Loathsome Spray 45%, Special - the tip of the pseu-
dopod will pucker and retch like a tiny mouth, before
spewing a stream of curdled, rotten smelling liquid
all over an Agent. The Agent can only avoid the spray
with a DODGE roll if they have not yet acted that
turn. The spray contains a mixture of mutated Lac
Maternum and industrial chemicals. Agents covered
by this spray will become CONTAMINATED if they
fail a CONx5 roll at -20%, made in secret. If an
Agent is pinned, this attack cannot be dodged.
Engulf*, Special attack, 1D6+1D4 damage – Only
Grappled targets that are pinned can be Engulfed.
The target must succeed at a STRx5 roll to avoid this
damage, or the pseudopod automatically gets a good
enough grip to start crushing the victim – their wind-
pipe, their ribs, or by flowing down into their mouth
and throat and expanding rapidly from the inside.
This STRx5 roll is at cumulative -20% every turn
thereafter, to a maximum of -40%, if the pseudopod
is not removed.
SAN loss: 1/1D4 for the Unnatural for seeing the
pseudopods, 1/1D4 Violence for being the target of
an attack.
The Shambling Fetus
Born from inside the sac of Formless Flesh, this ge-
netic monstrosity has been gestating for years. A giant
mass of gray, wrinkled and hairless moist newborn
flesh, resembling a deformed human fetus the size of
a grizzly bear, weighing about 200kg. It shuffles on
all fours with terrible speed, oversized head flopping
on an ungainly neck, mewling like a baby, opening a
maw big enough to swallow a man whole.
Shambling Fetus
Unholy brother to Whittaker Yates, freshly born
STR 23 CON 16 DEX 10 INT 1 POW 9
HP 35 WP 9
Skills: Track By Scent 60%, Athletics 99%
Armor: 3 points of thick, wet skin, many inches thick.
Attacks:
Corrosive Mucus 55%, 2D8 damage, melee range
only, automatically hits a pinned target. Dissolves
through armor and destroys it, rendering it useless
after absorbing any damage. Anyone injured by the
mucus suffers terrible burns and scars as their flesh
72
begins to dissolve, losing 1D4 CHA permanently.
(This loss can only occur once). In the aftermath, this
loss of CHA will also cause a SAN loss of 1/1D6 for
Violence.
Grab and Pin 80%, no damage, foetus-creature pins a
target
Swallow 35%, attempts to stuff an Agent into its
distended maw, causing an automatic hit of Corro-
sive Mucus every turn, until the Agent can somehow
slice their way out of its gut, or is freed by his fellow
Agents. The Fetus can only swallow 1 human sized
body at a time. Being swallowed triggers a 1/1D6
Helplessness SAN loss. Anyone who is swallowed
can take no action except to attempt an escape. An
escape is only possible with a melee weapons roll
using a blade or using a firearm with a lethality roll. A
successful roll inflicts damage upon the fetus creature
as normal, and the agent is able to slither out of its
stomach through the hole they made, covered in bile.
Swipe 45%, melee range only, 1D8+2 damage plus
knocks the target prone for one turn
Resilient: This biological disaster is preternaturally
resilient to damage. Lethality rolls automatically fail.
Wrecking Crew Gunman
These dead-eyed men are stone cold killers. They are
a mixed bunch of private military contractors, ex-mil-
itary, overseas guerrillas and foreign mercenaries all
working for good money. They wear drab and unin-
teresting civilian clothing to blend in. All report only
to Duma Jesani and have no idea and no connection
to New Life Fertility. If any are captured alive, they
might describe Jesani or the location of their safe-
house, but nothing more.
Wrecking Crew
Hired gunmen, aged 25-45
STR 14 CON 13 DEX 11 INT 10 POW 11 CHA 8
HP 14 WP 12 SAN 45 BREAKING POINT 34
Adapated to violence
Skills: Firearms 50%, Alertness 40%, Drive 50%,
Dodge 40%, Athletics 50%, Melee Weapons 60%,
Unarmed 50%, Search 30%
Armor: Reinforced Kevlar Vest (4 armor)

Attacks:
Heckler & Koch UMP submachine gun 50%, damage
1D10, 10% lethality, 50m range, kill radius 1m on
full auto
OR
Heckler & Koch HK416 Carbine with Holo Sight,
50%, damage 1D12 damage, 10% lethality, 100m
range, AP3, kill radius 2m on full auto
HK 45 pistol 50%, damage 1D10
Combat Knife 60%, damage 1D6, AP3
Unarmed 50%, damage 1D4-1

Alsatian Tracking Dog

Sniffing out Agents, age 3
STR 12 CON 13 DEX 12 INT 4 POW 10
HP 13 WP 10

Armor: 1 point of fur and thick skin

Skills: Track by scent 80%

Attacks:
Bite 30%, damage 1D6
Knock down 50%,

Knockdown: If this attack hits, the dog attempts an

opposed STRx5 test against the target. If the dog
succeeds, the target is knocked prone. (Prone targets
must spend a turn standing up before they can move
again)

Track By Scent: A success using this skill allows the

tracking dog to alert the Wrecking Crews to the
hidden presence of any target, track a target through
woodland, or to uncover any nearby hidden explo-
sives.

73
Timeline

1954 Albus Yates is born

1982 Venron Medical Processing is set up by Albus Yates
1996 Albus is approached by New Life. His wife gives birth to
Whittaker Yates nine months later.
2012 A new Venron facility opens in isolated Petersville. Contract
starts with New Life.
2013 Petersville begins to recover from 2008 financial crisis, popula-
tion starts booming
2015 Farms around Petersville begin dying. Joe Tennant begins his
campaign against Venron
2017 Whittaker Yates “kills” his father by pushing him into a vat of
Lac Maternum slurry inside the basement of Venron. He takes over
the firm aged 22. Whittaker’s mother is committed to an asylum
2019 Whittaker Yates’s son is born.
Summer 2020 Joe Tennant first contacts the lawyer Robert Ruff.
January 2021 Ruff finally begins reviewing Tennant’s surveillance
tapes.
March 2021 Ruff contacts the EPA.
June 2021 EPA Agent Thomas Wellbetter travels to Petersville
July 2021 Wellbetter signed off work sick. Ruff assassinated by
unknown DRJ fixer.
Oct 2021 Wellbetter dies and subsequently dissolves into a gray
slurry. Operation GOD HAMMER begins

74
 Appendix - Handouts
Handout 1 - Thomas Wellbetter’s
death certificate
Handout 2 - Contents of Thomas Wellbetter’s
work locker

76
 Handout 3 - Prions & other info

Prions
Prions are incredibly dangerous biological molecules - infectious, unusual proteins. Prions infect, warp
and degrade other proteins, simply by existing. Prions have the ability to transmit their misfolded shape
onto normal variants of the same protein - essentially, a form of disease vector ten thousand times larg-
er than a virus – and much more deadly.

Prions are also incredibly, almost preternaturally, resilient. They have been known to infect
patients undergoing surgery via medical tools previously used on prion-infected patients that have since
been through sterilization procedures. Since prions are not ‘alive’ in the traditional sense, they cannot
be ‘killed’ – they are immune to levels of heat, radiation and chemicals that would destroy typical bac-
teria or viruses. They can easily survive unscathed through boiling water, medical sterilization, ionizing
x-ray radiation and immersion in formaldehyde. It takes boiling the prion in a concentrated solution
of industrial strength sodium hydroxide using pressurized steam autoclaves, to finally break down and
destroy the toxic protein, rendering it inert.

Prions are most infamous for causing the disease Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE)
in cattle, also known as ‘Mad Cow disease’ and the related human version Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
(CJD), both of which which were major health scares in the United Kingdom during the early 1990s,
resulting in almost 200 hundred people dying and millions of cattle being slaughtered. Both illness-
es cause fatal neurodegenerative disorders, whereby brain cells begin to die off in massive numbers,
eventually leading to the microscopic appearance of “holes” in the brain, physical brain degradation,
insanity and eventual death. There is no cure.

Prion diseases can be transmitted to humans by eating contaminated food. The highest risk is believed
to be from eating the brain, spinal cord, or digestive tract.

Arsenic & Lead PFAS

Arsenic is a toxic heavy metal used in pres-
sure-treated lumber and several other industrial
processes. In agriculture, it is used to kill insects
on cotton and other crops. Smelting copper and
burning coal create arsenic as a byproduct. It can
enter water through natural deposits or industrial
or agricultural pollution.
It has been linked to cancer, as well as lowered
IQ in children. A 2014 study in the journal Envi-
ronmental Health found an association between
water with arsenic of 5 ppb or greater and a five-
to six-point IQ reduction in children.
Lead poisoning can include abdominal pain,
constipation, headaches, irritability, memory
problems, infertility, and tingling in the hands
and feet. It causes almost 10% of intellectual
disability of otherwise unknown cause and can
result in behavioral problems. Some of the effects
are permanent and in severe cases anemia,
seizures, coma, or death may occur.
Exposure to lead can occur by contaminated air,
water, dust, food, or consumer products.
Agents with 30% in an Environmental Science or 40% in Chem-
istry or similar will know the following. This information can
also be gained from speaking to a member of the EPA, or with
two or three hours research on the internet.
PFAS (perfluorinated alkylated substances) are synthet-
ic industrial compounds known as ‘forever chemicals’ because
they don’t break down in the natural environment or the hu-
man body. They simply accumulate forever in the food chain.
PFAS are used to make stain-resistant fabrics and carpets,
water-repellent clothing, nonstick cookware, and hundreds of
other common products. The compounds can seep into water
from factories, landfills, and other sources.
In the 1940s and 50s, they were considered ‘inert
molecules’ that were harmless and could not interact with bio-
logical systems. However, the corporations that produced them
have known since the 1970s, and the EPA knows now, that
there are definite links between exposure to PFAS and many
different health problems: thyroid disease, liver damage,
hormone disruption, pregnancy-induced hypertension, and
testicular and kidney cancers. Research has also linked some
PFAS to learning disabilities in children.
Under heavy corporate pressure, the EPA has still not
set an enforceable legal limit for PFAS in drinking water.

77
Handout 4 - Petersville map with farms
highlighted

78
Handout 5 - Venron interior site map

79
 Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the people who sent me kind messages after the publication of my
first mission, Tenebris Capra. I’m glad so many enjoyed it, and your feedback inspired
me to finish this follow-on mission.

The section of this mission entitled ‘The Malignancy’ was inspired and adapted from a
post on Dennis Detwiler’s Patreon called ‘The Growth.’