Great mission but like all missions they could have put in more ways to push the game forward.

Impossible Landscapes continues Arc Dream Publishing's tradition of setting the bar higher and higher for each of their new products. This campaign is intricate, thought-provoking and horrifying, while also telling a very compelling story that your players will talk about for years to come. Excellently written, lavishly and equally excellently illustrated and illuminated; this is the epitome of what we ought to expect from published scenarios and campaigns.

Fear is fractal, and your world is a lie.

Far better than the original scenario and a tad tighter with far more art than the original (which had none).

It also removes the Dimensional Shambler from the original scenario and tightens the focus a bit, and adds a hell of a ton of quality of life improvements like a table of SAN values so you don't need to roll for everyone in the base. If you need more pregens you can grab the original Poker Night which is still on DrivethruRPG.

As for the scenario it's decent. My players weren't the biggest fans of it but that may have been down to my alterations rather than the scenario's fault. It's set in the 90's, it's got a pretty decent amount of combat, and creative players may get a lot out of it.

It's solid for a one shot but starting a campaign with it might be a tad tough.

Pretty much essential if you want to give your players the full swath of the US Government for options. This is close as you can come to an "Expansion pack" to the Agent's Handbook and is something you can hand your players. $10 feels like the perfect price for something like this honestly.

Have a player who wants to play an armed park ranger? With this you can! It even has an incredibly helpful page showing what pages all of the agencies are between this and the Agent's Handbook.

Yeah it's as good as people say it is.

Just snip off the scenario at the end with a PDF Snipper tool and you're good to have rules to give your players when they play.

It's a bit like The Haunting in that it's clearly meant to be customized. Can't wait for the roll20 version that I hope is still coming out.

Quite possibly the best quickstart I have ever gotten from a rules explanation standpoint! The adventure itself might not be the strongest, but given it is an intro, and the pricing (pwyw) it's good. Overall, an extreemly good product, and a great game overall! Also worth noting that I have since also purchased the physical version of this product that comes with the GM screen, as well as the slipcase core set, and one of the scenario books!

The new Delta Green series from Arc Dream has redefined the production standards for RPGs. Taking what was already a popular and exciting setting and then upping it to the next level in terms of artwork, layout, design . . . all intended to enhance the feel and mood of the game.

Impossible Landscapes takes this to another level still. It was already a complex and advanced way to treat Hastur, Carcosa and the King in Yellow besides being 'just another tentacled beastie' . . . the existing Delta Green take on this part of the mythos was to portray it as a subtle cancer on reality: an example of surreal horror as normality and rationality starts to crumble and give way. The book itself treads a narrow path between a game supplement and evocative manual, the very design of which starts to mirror the breakdown of reality as players progress through the campaign. Hints of madness almost creep off the page with the marginal scribbles and the disturbing artwork from Dennis Detwiller, that can be both photo-realistic and chillingly surreal.

It's a monster of a supplement (figuratively and literally) and you can tell that many, many weeks of effort, sweat and tears have been poured into it to update the ideas and original adventure (Night Floors) into the polished format and integrate with the other material. And in reading through you are drawn into the weird, fictive half-life that the survivors and refugees from Carcosa are drawn into. A bit like Arthur Machen in 'Baghdad', or Samuel Beckett's Malloy and Malone, there's a slight worry that after too much reading you'll start to see these characters pop up in real life, or merge into eachother. If DG were real, this book would be categorised as hazardous and there would be cells chasing down copies for eradication.

The bar got set high by the Agent's Manual, then blown out of the park by the Handler's Guide. This is going to be one of those supplements that people remember as being a milestone for RPGs, let alone the particular system it's written for.

I love the mythos around Howard Chamber’s The King in Yellow, and I love Delta Green, so when I found out about this campaign I was pretty damn excited. So does Impossible Landscapes live up to the hype? Is it Delta Green’s version of Masks of Nyarlathotep? The short answer is yes. This book is nothing short of amazing and if you like Delta Green you should buy this book immediately.

I’m the kind of person who reads RPG books for fun, even modules that I have no intention of running. I’ve read quite a few books for many different RPGs, and I feel pretty comfortable saying that Impossible Landscapes is probably my favorite RPG module of all time. It’s sprawling, ambitious, horrifying, and most importantly, creative as hell. It explores and expands upon the Carcosa mythos more deeply than any other piece of media I’ve seen, while at the same time respecting Chamber’s original vision.

Impossible Landscapes is broken into 4 interconnected segments. The introduction, set in 1995, is a reimagining of an older scenario which sees the Agents looking into the disappearance of a young artist in New York City. From there, the action jumps forward to 2015, where the same Agents are once again enlisted by Delta Green, this time to look into some disappearances at a psychiatric facility in Boston. Without going into too much detail, this sets the Agents on a journey of surreal horror and madness as they discover the true nature of reality.

This module asks a lot of both the Agents and the Handler. Agents will have to be clever and inventive to solve many of this campaign’s challenges. There’s actually not a ton of combat in Impossible Landscapes, but due to the sheer amount of horrific circumstances and revelations that are thrown at the Agents, PC death and especially insanity is probably going to be very, very common. But for the Handler, this module is nothing short of intimidating, with tons of NPCs, handouts, plot details, and possible encounters to keep track of. And on top of that, there are many cases where the Handler has to keep track of and remember many, many small details at once as they unfold in real time. This is definitely not a scenario for a newer Delta Green Handler.

This is also not a scenario for the squeamish, as it contains disturbing and unsettling scenes and motifs throughout. It never really goes into anything sexual, but there is lots of violence, body horror, psychological horror, and just plain insanity. Just reading Impossible Landscapes is pretty unsettling, and the authors definitely lean into that in some fun ways. There’s a lot of creepy little details in this book that only the Handler will ever see.

My only real complaint with Impossible Landscapes has to do with NPCs. In my opinion, this book doesn’t do a great job when it comes to introducing NPCs to the Handler. It’ll tell you a lot about what they look like (the NPC portraits in this book are fantastic, by the way) and how they interact with the Agents, but it doesn’t really communicate their overall place in the story. There were a lot of times when an NPC would be introduced, seeming to be one type of character, and then like 100 pages later would be revealed to be something completely different. Or an NPC who seemed initially of little importance would suddenly become vital to the story much later, without any warning. These types of twists are fun for the Agents but there’s no reason to throw them at the Handler. I just wanted a few sentences like: “This is so-and-so, right now the Agents think he is [x] but he is actually [y]” or “This NPC might not seem very useful right now, but make sure that you set him up properly because he’s going to be very important later on.”

This is a relatively small complaint though, and overall I can’t recommend this book enough. If you have a Delta Green group you owe it to them and yourself to run this scenario. Impossible Landscapes is a must-buy.

I've read puppetland twice, and ran exactly ONE session of it, it might have been the most difficult session of any RPG I ever ran... it was also fasinating and exapnded my view of what and RPG could be. and for that alone it was worth the price of admition.

An Excellent little two scene play which would be fantastic as a handout for any King in Yellow related games or just as inspiration.

During parts of reading this I actually had fantasies about the potential of running a play of this.

Just finished reading the PDF. This book is fantastic and it feels like a thoroughly encompassing way to get your players mired in a frightening mess. The NPC art is superb and frankly even the normal people have an unsettling look about them. It's clear that even with the deadliness of violent situations, most of the threats to sanity will lose only 1 SAN at a time, making the slip into madness feel slow but inexorable. The linking of curiosity to danger has never been more direct in a COC/Delta Green book.

The plot really shines in a section where players think they have escaped the surreal locations for a second time, only to find themselves still hallucinating under the influence of the King - the example hallucinations are just chilling. Also, the way the author has found to deal with the narrative problem of the players being wanted and caught by mundane law enforcement (not exactly supernaturally scary in their own right) is very clever. The callbacks between different times and places, and spaghetti of connections between NPCs, is incredible.

The only thing it could use but doesn't have is a bibliography or list of influences/references, would be nice to see the recommended stories by Chambers, Borges, etc. in addition to the clear recommendation of a classic public domain demonology text.

There is an appendix of side-character NPC encounters that is worth the price of admission and would fit right into any modern horror/magic setting such as Unknown Armies.

(I reviewed this a couple weeks ago but it was turned into a "Discussion" so here is the review again)

Amazing, mind-bending, a true example of what Delta Green can be!

Amazing campaign, truly horrific and mind-bending, different from anything I have seen in either Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green for that matter. Don't think twice about grabbing a copy of this!!

Angel's Citadel just reviewed this title. Go check it out!

https://angelscitadel.com/2021/03/12/review-better-angels/

Impossible Landscapes is an excellent addition to the new edition of Delta Green. The book itself is gorgeous, packed with evocative illustrations and creepy annotations that really add to a dense and complex campaign. The campaign is superbly crafted. It builds on a revised version of the scenario Night Floors, that first appeared in 1999 Delta Green: Countdown. The three other parts of the campaign revisit the agents involved in that opera years later, in what becomes an inexorable escalation in surreal horror that eventually brings them to the heart of Carcosa. The four scenarios are quite detailed, and Night Floors has been revised and expanded to fit perfectly with the rest of the campaign. I suspect that this campaign will ask a lot of preparation from the GM, if he really wants to do justice to the tone and atmosphere proposed, and if she wants to tie everything up in a creepily effective way (there are a lot of exquisite occasions to do so, with various call backs to other parts of the campaign). The good news is that the GM will have many tools at his or her disposal, with an excellent index, loads of handouts and Static Protocol, a companion to the campaign that assembles in a single, well-structured document, a lot of the background that the Agents will want to explore in the course of the campaign. By the end of it all, you’ll most certainly see the Yellow Sign (and loose a bit of SAN).