My Submission To The 2023 Night At The Opera Scenario Contest

The 2023 Scenario Contest of the Night At The Opera Discord community has concluded. The winner was ChiefMcClane with his scenario Operation RAGTIME GAL or Size Matters. The People's Choice winners were Point in Time by Rowan and Gnash The Teeth by Dragoleaf. The full list of scenarios can be found here.

I also submitted a scenario, which I called Iron Curtain Call. The following contains spoilers, so don't read further if you want to experience the scenario as a player.

The special thing about the N@TO scenario contest is that a number of prompts are provided. Scenario authors have to select a minimum number of prompts and built there scenario around them. This year there were ten prompts to choose from and every author had to use at least three of them. I chose the following prompts:

• A Cold War
• Overseas Operation
• Traditional Monster

The first two prompts were an easy choice for me, since they are a perfect excuse to do a Cold War spy thriller-type scenario, something I have been thinking about for a while. With divided Berlin I already had a great location in mind.

The third prompt was not as easy to select, since there were several that would have been a good match. I considered Unlikely Allies as well as Neon, Noir and the Seedy Underbelly, both very relevant to the spy theme I was going for. But in the end I opted for Traditional Monster, because this was going to be a Delta Green scenario and it needs some kind of Unnatural threat. So why not make it a creature from German folklore? With the Nachzehrer I found a monster that is sufficiently spooky and underutilized.

The Nachzehrer

Now I had a location, a threat and a general time frame, but what should the "story" of the scenario be? I knew it had to involve the East-West conflict somehow, but I struggled with the details. Some of the things I considered:

• A rogue faction of GRU-SV8 is getting increasingly paranoid in the run-up to the NATO exercise Able Archer 83. They fear a nuclear first strike by the West, which they want to preempt with their own unnatural weapon of mass destruction. The Agents have to stop them.
• The Agents have to get a GRU-SV8 defector out of East Berlin, before he is assassinated by a cell of East German sorcerers.
• GRU-SV8 stole a powerful artifact, the Agents have to follow them into the Eastern bloc and retrieve it.

I started writing notes about a scenario that combined the first two ideas, but it quickly became apparent that this scenario was going to be huge. At one point the plan was that the Agents have to go from West to East Berlin, on to Moscow, and finally to a Soviet closed city.

Writing a long scenario for a contest is not great, because there is a time limit and it is also possible that you exhaust yourself before you are finished and then you have nothing to submit. Also, other people are more likely to read your scenario if it isn't a 60-page tome.

So, I abandoned that idea and instead started working on something that combines ideas two and three. I focused on only a few locations and NPCs, with the goal that the scenario could theoretically be played in one session. After the scenario skeleton was done I spent my time detailing the elements that I already had instead of adding new stuff (e.g. creating the alchemicals table, providing pre-gens, etc.).

I think this approach paid off. My playtest went very well and I received good feedback from the judges. Most seemed to like it and the suggestions for improvement were quite minor (add a map, give additional suggestions for the escape). All in all, I'm quite happy with how the scenario turned out. You can read the scenario here, and don't forget to check out the other contest entries as well!