Shotgun Scenario Review: Dreams in the Fish House

It has been a while since my last shotgun scenario review, mostly because I've been running my own scenarios. However, recently I got the chance to run Dreams in the Fish House by magnificentophat, so here's a review. There will be spoilers!

The scenario was a submission to the 2018 shotgun scenario contest. It is about a bunch of hippies who are synthesizing an unnatural form of LSD. Anyone taking the drug is able to receive the dream call of Cthulhu. The hippies gave some of the LSD to two Beluga whales in the aquarium that they are working in. Now the aquarium is plagued by strange manifestations, as is the home of the hippies. The Agents get involved when another DG cell vanished in the aquarium after firing automatic weapons at the whales.

The hook is great and its nice to have a scenario about Cthulhu himself. Even though he is the most well-known Mythos creature there are surprisingly few Delta Green scenarios about him. This alone makes the scenario stand out.

The investigative part of this scenario is quite simple. The clues are easy to find and one of the first NPCs the Agents talk to points them towards Dr. Kamaka, one of the people responsible for the unnatural incursion.

But investigation is not the focus of this scenario. The focus is experiencing and interacting with the unnatural phenomena in the aquarium and the hippie house. And these manifestations are a strong point of the scenario. They are varied and thematic. And getting attacked by a carpet shark in a living room is just cool!

There is a potential for combat (for example with the aforementioned shark), but the hippies themselves are not really hostile. In fact, the scenario design discourages indiscriminate use of violence. If the Agents attack the wrong target they might find themselves banished to a strange island. In my run, not a single weapon was fired. Still, all the Agents ended up on the island anyway and we had a short Delta Green beach episode.

Some information that would be useful to run the scenario is unfortunately missing from the scenario text, or at least not explicitly mentioned. For example: where can the Agents find the hippie NPCs, are they at work in the aquarium or at home? It's implied that they are at home because their reaction to a break-in is mentioned, but making this information explicit would be better.

I also had some other questions, for which concrete information would have helped me to run the scenario: Is the closet portal to the island a one-way portal or is adaptation to helplessness the only way to escape? And how did the hippies come up with the unnatural LSD formulation in the first place?

Of course, it's hard for a shotgun scenario to answer all possible questions that a Handler could have. But these were things that came up when I ran the scenario, so if you want to run this as well you have to do some prep and come up with your own answers.

Overall, this is a cool scenario and I had fun while running it. It's a good choice if you want something that is likely non-lethal, but still packed with unnatural weirdness.