Weighing in at 34 pages (36 with the front and back cover), Delta Green: Archint is a collection of eleven artifacts suitable as a centerpiece or macguffin that a scenario can be built around. Not for the lazy Case Officer, as some effort would be needed to incorporate these items of mutual interest into an existing operational framework.

Most of these artifact writeups were first available in a more unpolished format on Dennis Detwiller's patreon, some dating back a few years before publication. My expectations for ARCHINT were not fully met, as I was hoping for more tradecraft and an overview of the global trade in illicit art and cultural artifacts.

The sort of thing I wanted to see more of would be like the account from Hot Art by Joshua Knelman where Chinese artifacts are auctioned off from a rogue digsite run by corrupt archeologists. As each item is dug up and dusted off, it is immediately placed for auction via online streaming. The buyers are selected by invitation only, and the items are never entered into any academic catalog and will never have a legal provenance (record of origin and ownership).

That having been said, ARCHINT continues and maintains the Delta Green tradition of quality authorship where Conspiracy Horror mutates into disturbing Personal Horror. In conclusion, Shane Ivey is a piker and a maroon. EXCELSIOR!

Purchased as a PDF (My first review ever so please be gentle)

This is a 34 page (Minus the decorated outer and inner covers) tome of occult and extra-terrestrial artefacts.

The book lives up to the High standard of publishing, research and writing that we associate with all Arc Dream Publishing products. 

Written and laid out in a clear and easy to follow and find format, each of the artefacts is given a detailed background within the world of Delta Green. Followed by its respective in-game effects and stats.

having said that, the written background and details of the objects are written in such a way that they are flexible in the sense that they can be changed to fit into a handler’s storyline with ease or are provided with several story hooks on how to include them.

The artefacts themselves are an eclectic and eccentric collection reflective of the mythos itself. They range from truly extraterrestrial items, to what could be deemed to be pure mythos to the simple empowered/touched/corrupted by the unnatural.

Representing different parts of the mythos as well as geographical and time periods, ranging from pre-Columbian Peru, colonial India’s northern frontier to 19th England.

If there was anything negative to say about the book, at only 34 pages and listing 11 artefacts 2 have already featured in other published scenarios, it’s a slim tome.

But that may be more of a personal and typical RPG’er moan always wanting more

Overall, the book achieves its goals to provide premade objects, but also a starting point to create your own.

I would recommend buying it.

9/10

Fantastic collection of artifacts to throw into a Delta Green game. Two from prior scenarios but the ones that aren't are lavishly detailed and deconstructed. There's some clever design in here like the Brixton Shard having very few SAN checks require for its use since... well... using it is going to require SAN checks from Violence anyway. The Gowdie Shape is probably my favorite with The Kurville Executable and blood of the feeder coming in second and third. ALL Of these artifacts practically scream to make ops around them or to be found wrapped in plastic in a green box. At least two have potential links to groups from other supplements, and one from a forthcoming supplement. There's also some clever visual design like each artifact having slightly different colored pages, only really noticable if you flip through the PDF. It's excellent across the board and varies from "That would be a clever way to involve this entity/group" to "Oh my god that would horrible if it got out and could easily be an op". You get detailed histories and some gorgeous artwork (The Gowdie Shape illustration might be my favorite piece in all of the art for the line so far). Very few of them scream immediate death trap in a way that your Agents wouldn't feel like they knew better. (Not even Blood of the Feeder which comes the closest.) The Brixton Shard in particular feels like the perfect thing to hand to a leader of a small-time cult or occult tinged criminal organization in order to make the final engagement with them much more engaging. Or just a random spree killer. Might throw some of these at my players when I get a chance.

If I had to have a singular nitpick it's such a hilariously minor one. Some of the artwork on the pages crosses pages, but others don't. That's pretty much it and I'm pretty sure there is a graphic design reason for it. That and MORE. There needs to be MORE.

Tynes is a genius for painting characters and places as real and mundane, and then filling those places with human charm, and finally, using that backdrop to deliver extremely effective gut punches. I truly hope he decides to write more fiction

Seems to be missing the "Agent Creation", "Comat", and "Sanity" portions the original had, probably why the pdf numbers are a little whacky

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. You could probably run a few games with just this and some decent homebrew.

The scenario at the back has the chance to become the new "The Haunting" in all honesty.

Collection of stories, 1-3 page each. Thought provoking. Can preview them on the author's blog, see if you like 'The end of the end of the world,' "Inside," or "Into the West." Read one a week so you can think about the short before starting the next.

Doesn't get better than this. Beautiful book, great writing, very well thought out. I haven't run it yet but I will soon and I cannot wait.

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.

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.