The phone call from "Provost"

What Provost will answer (if asked)

• "What was wrong with the transmission?" — "The radar reported a contact that our people say cannot be an aircraft. That is all the detail that exists."
• "What about the deputy?" — "Marcus Vance. Local, well-liked, Army signals before the county. Recover him if you can. He cannot simply disappear — the town would look for him. Neither can you."
• "Support?" — "There is a green box at the co-ordinates I'm about to give you." (Cold-weather kit, thermite charge, breaching tools, one encrypted VHF set per Agent — draw from the Field Equipment compendium as they wish, within reason.)
• "What if it's… one of those?" — a pause. "Then priority one is the data, and priority four covers the rest."

What Provost will NOT answer

• Anything about prior events on Sable Ridge (he genuinely knows only the 1978 survey report — buried).
• Anything about A-Cell, other cells, or what happens to Agnes-type witnesses afterward. "Ask me no questions tonight."

Mission (priority order)

1. Erase unnatural data — the on-site log drive AND the FAA remote cloud backups.
2. Recover or terminate Deputy Vance.
3. Secure the facility.
4. Cover it up as a catastrophic severe-weather generator failure.

Cover identities

FAA/NWS credentials (real, issued tonight, will not survive a determined callback after 48 hrs). The county has been told a specialist team is inbound; the substation will not interfere — mostly because its one deputy is the missing man.

Getting there — beats on the road

• The drive: 4+ hours into deepening snow. Radio stations thin out; the last one is a preacher, then static. Let a player fiddle with the dial. Let the static almost resolve into rhythm once.
• Corliss Notch (optional stop, ~15 min): the diner is open late, half the town awake — worried about Vance. Seeds if they stop: Ruth the cook says "the Whistle's been singing all week"; a trapper (Whit) mutters that the Petrie boys' truck is still up there running; teenager Cody Aldous stares at the Agents and says nothing (he deleted his livestream). HUMINT everyone here is frightened in a way they can't name. These are the faces they'll meet again at the Crossing.
• The winter gate at Ridge Road: chained — and the chain is already cut. (Vance had a key. Someone else didn't.)

Player handouts

Foundry journals ①–⑤: A-Cell memo · ME-07 fact sheet · regional map · county newspaper · escalation timeline · Vance/Rostova dossiers. Give ①–④ before the drive; ⑤ works well AT the diner.

Environment — the cold clock

The compound, piece by piece

• Gate & fence line: gate open, no forcing. Forty metres north, the chain-link is burst outward — wire splayed like a flower. Search no tool marks; the wire was pushed.
• The yard: one set of vehicle tracks in (the cruiser), softening under new snow. A second, older set (Rostova's contractor truck, parked behind the building, cold and buried).
• Equipment building: concrete, one steel door (unlocked — Rostova's keycard is still in the reader), the caged bulb, the unsteady generator hum through the wall. Like breathing with a catch in it.
• The dome: no ground-level entrance — access is the ladder inside the equipment building. Standing at its foot, Alertness: the hum isn't coming from the dome. It's coming from everywhere, faintly, like the air itself is carrying it.

The cruiser

Optional dread beats (d6, sprinkle 1–2)

Pacing: nothing attacks here. Let them clear the compound tactically, feel clever, get cold. The building's hum draws them inside → Scene 2.

Layout

• Server racks (north wall) — four bays, all alive, all hot; the room should be warm. It isn't.
• Main console (centre) — Rostova at it. Login is open under her keycard; no hacking needed to begin.
• Backup generator (east corner) — diesel, running rough. Heavy Machinery: it's been running for days on bad fuel mix; it could be killed from here in seconds. (Remember for the climax.)
• Ladder (west corner) — up into the dome. Cold air breathes DOWN it. Ozone and scorched copper.

Dr. Rostova — the body

The console — tiered digging

Optional beat

While they work: every radio they carry clicks, together, twice. If anyone answers — "say again, over" — the static answers back in rhythm. That Agent has been noticed: they're the first name Agnes speaks at the Crossing.

When they head up the ladder or back outside → run Scene 2.5.

Trigger: the Agents leave the equipment building for the dome, or try to drive back down. Headlights crest the road at mile 9; under the wind, a dozen human voices humming the six-second loop in unison. A jackknifed log truck blocks the road; vehicles cluster, doors open, engines running.

Agnes speaks (use these)

Default round-by-round (adjust freely)

The pond (if the Baptism lands)

Ways to win that aren't massacre

• Cut the feed: destroy/snatch Elias's handset (called shot −20%, 6 HP, or grapple Agnes). Chorus dies → the Called wake; the Returned stop mid-stride, turn, and walk back into the pond.
• Deafen her: a flash-bang within 10 m ends the Chorus for good.
• Names: HUMINT + shouting a Petrie's name = that brother hesitates one full round (once each). "DALE! Your mother's porch light is still on!"
• Stealth: the Called barely see; Agnes hears RADIOS, not feet. A blacked-out, radio-silent cell can skirt the treeline entirely (Stealth, group). The Congregation walks on toward the compound behind them — a ticking clock for the climax.
• Run the gauntlet: ram past the log truck (Drive −20% in snow; fail = ditched, 1D4 to all aboard).

Combat trackers

Aftermath

• Freed Called remember a dream of "the most beautiful voice." All five alive: +1 SAN each Agent. They are hypothermic civilians, miles from town, mid-operation — what do the Agents do with them? (Truck keys are in the vehicles. Cody can drive. It costs 20 minutes of the dawn clock to organize.)
• Agnes, freed, keeps asking where Elias went — and once, flat, in the wrong voice: "IT IS ALMOST DONE LEARNING OUR SHAPE." That's the players' warning for Scene 3.
• Every civilian death becomes a named problem in the Cover-Up. Say so out loud at the table when the first gun rises.

Environment

• Total darkness. Their lights are the only light — and each light says exactly where its Agent stands.
• Catwalk: a ring around the dome with two radial spurs to the transmitter mast. Moving faster than careful in the dark: Athletics/DEX×5 or fall — 4 m to the deck, 1D6.
• Frozen metal: bare-hand fine work (wiring, lockpicking, reloading fiddly weapons) −20% without gloves.
• The dish looms overhead, wrong even before the climax — anyone who studies it: it seems very slightly closer each time you look.

Vance at the transmitter — the countdown

Vance's lines (the manual, backward — read them slow)

Fighting him

• Wrench 65%, 1D10+2; two actions per round; your lights don't help or hinder him.
• Restraint (non-lethal): opposed STR (his 17); two Agents together shift the odds. He does not tire. Cuffs hold for 1D4 rounds, then the joints… reconfigure. SAN 0/1D3 for whoever's holding him when they do.
• He attacks only those who interpose. He is trying to finish, not to kill.

Combat tracker

Show Handout ⑧ NOW — not before.

The choice — cut the primary power

Option A — blow the backup generator (outside, below)

• Get there: down the ladder and out — 2 rounds moving fast (catwalk test in the dark), while the Congregation's survivors, if unresolved, are arriving at the fence.
• Do it: Demolitions 40% with the thermite (instant, clean), or improvise — INT×5 + fuel + 2 rounds rigging. The blast: anyone within 5 m, 2D6.
• The generator dies → the transmitter browns out → the Tear snaps back.

Option B — overload the main transformer (inside the dome, beside the Tear)

• One Agent at the transformer cabinet, one full round, no roll to attempt — the roll is surviving it.
• Cost: Lethality 15% electrical discharge (fail the Lethality = 2D10 damage instead), AND the full 1D6/1D20 exposure at arm's length as the Tear turns its whole attention on the hand on the switch.
• Insulated gloves from the cold-weather kit: the 2D10 becomes 1D10. Small mercies are Delta Green's whole budget.

Power dies

• Implosion escape: everyone inside — DEX×5 or Athletics; fail = 1D6 from debris. The catwalk survives; the panels don't.
• Then: ringing silence. Snow falling through the new hole in the world. The hum is gone — and one Agent (highest SAN loss tonight) notices they miss it.

If they fail / flee

The Broadcast completes. The doorway holds open. Sable Ridge becomes a permanent cold spot that swallows Corliss Notch over the winter — 300 people, one radio sermon at a time. A-Cell's after-action call is very quiet. No SAN reward; the next operation is worse, and it is theirs.

The task list (each costs dawn-clock time)

Complications (d6 — roll once if the night went loud)

Sanity rewards

Threat eliminated: +1D4 SAN · all five Called saved alive: +1 each · minus losses from collateral damage or a failed cover-up. The transformer martyr carries the worst of it — if they lived. Broadcast completed: no reward; A-Cell will be back.

The entity is a place adjacent to ours that perceives through resonance — a signal answered by a signal. It has brushed Sable Ridge forever: the spinning compasses, the ridge that "answers," the 1888 hunting party. For most of history it could only whisper to those who whistled back.

In 2016 the FAA parked a high-power transmitter on the one ridge that half-listened and left it running unattended. Years of steady carrier gave it a stable channel — a door propped wider every night. The phantom returns were it looking back down the beam. The frozen animals and the Petrie brothers were it learning to reach through and feed.

Rostova's servicing tuned the door. The corrupted loop was it learning to speak in our signal — it took her first, then reached down Vance's radio (the one man for miles fluent in signal) and remade him into an instrument: blinded so nothing distracts, wiring the lure to full power.

When players ask…

• "Why doesn't it just come through?" — It can't hold our shape yet. It needs the broadcast at full power to finish the fitting. Tonight is the last fitting.
• "Why the cold?" — Reaching through costs energy; it pulls heat the way we'd pull breath. Where it touches, things freeze from the inside.
• "Can we talk to it?" — It can only say what it has heard. It is a mirror that wants to be a mouth. Anything it "says" is your own words, rearranged, coming back wrong.
• "Why Vance? Why Agnes?" — Fluency. He spoke signal professionally; she has listened longer than anyone alive. It reached for the two best antennas in the county.
• "Is it dead now?" — No. The door is shut. The ridge is still the ridge. Don't rebuild the radar.

Site ME-07 "Sable Ridge"

Corliss Notch (pop. ~310)

General store (only gas for 40 mi) · the Notch Diner · Grange hall · white Congregational church · volunteer FD · two-deputy substation Vance runs alone. Logging town losing its young. Strangers are noticed. The ridge is "the Whistle" — it answers, and if you answer back it draws you into the cold. Locals won't discuss it with outsiders; they just don't go up after dark.

Escalation timeline

Name bank — Corliss Notch

The Called (statted): Cody Aldous (17, gas-station kid) · Ruth Demers (diner cook) · Whit Emmons (trapper) · Gil & Marge Pelletier (feed store).
Everyone else: Pastor Vern Ouellette · Doreen at the store · plow driver Big Mike Thibodeau · warden Sgt. Kathy Cyr (county seat, 90 min away) · schoolteacher Miss Lavoie · Vance's kids: Sam (9) & Ellie (7), with their mother in Bangor.

Sensory bank (steal freely)

• Snow squeaking like styrofoam · breath freezing in eyelashes · the particular silence after an engine dies.
• The hum: felt in molars, in fillings, in an old collarbone break.
• Frost growing in FERNS across glass — always toward the dome.
• The static loop: shh-shh-SHH-shh-shh-shh. Six seconds. Once you've counted it, you can't stop.

Things the static says (sparingly — it can only repeat)

• An Agent's own "say again, over," returned an hour later, flat.
• Rostova: "…where is the gain coming from…"
• Vance, clear as day: "Dispatch, show me 10-23 at the radar site." (He said it at 0455. It kept it.)
• A child's voice from a 1994 broadcast, asking for a song on the county request show.

Tonight's environmental rules

• Cold: no gear — CON×5 per 30 min outside or 1 HP + cumulative −10% fine-motor. With kit: per 2 hrs. Worsens one step per fed round of the Tear.
• Under the ice: CON×5/round, fail 1D6. Rescue: STR×5 to smash through, opposed STR vs 17 to pull free.
• Catwalk in the dark, moving fast: Athletics/DEX×5 or 4 m fall, 1D6.
• Bare hands on frozen metal: −20% fine manipulation.

House rules in play (Delta Green 2)

• Nat 01 → PROVIDENCE · nat 00 → CALAMITY — escalating d6 tables auto-post in chat.
• Ammo auto-decrements; reload from the Equipment tab.
• Apply Damage / Apply SAN buttons on chat cards (armor − AP handled).

The cell is activated ~21:00. First light ~06:40. Tick a box when the table burns real time; the road closes behind snow at dawn — everything unfinished becomes a complication.

FALSE ALARM Handler's Screen · Delta Green 2 · notes & trackers persist in this browser (localStorage). Export moves them to another machine. Delta Green is a trademark of the Delta Green Partnership; fan material.