On the Eve of the Masquerade

07 Aug, 2026

A Review of Impossible Landscapes for Delta Green that is really a review of the Person I Was when I first read it

According to my DriveThruRPG purchase history, I first saw The Sign in April of 2021. My life wasn't in a good place. In the few months of 2020 prior to the lock-down I had systematically set fire to pretty much every aspect of my life--personally, romantically, and professionally.

I dumped my then-girlfriend for reasons I can't really articulate. I told my friends that there was something about her teeth that gave me what the kids nowadays would call "the ick," but we all know that that wasn't the real reason. Work wasn't great. I had been teaching at this school for two years now, and through a combination of incompetence and chronic inability to read a room I managed to burn every bridge I had. Then, my housing situation got complicated. My roommate left suddenly with little notice to live with their soon-to-be-wife¹ and I was left holding the bill on our downtown apartment for the remainder of our lease.

To save a buck, I broke my lease and decided to move into my buddy's-little-brother's house--a rich kid who right out of high school was able to buy property I still can't even dream of affording.

And then COVID happened.

My Night World

Hazy is the word I would use to describe my memory that move. One thing I remember--the boxes. I was sleeping with a mortician at the time, and he offered to hook me up with boxes from his work. When he brought them over to help me pack, I took them and asked him to leave.² My folks were coming over with their truck, and I wasn't out to them. I'm still not, actually. It's just never come up. And so, alone, I packed up my life in boxes labelled with the tools of death--formaldehyde, body bags, bleach, mint concentrate, and open tubes with a needle on one end to drip dead blood down an open drain.

When I moved in, I had a room in a house in a suburb on the north side of town. I walked a lot during that time. Nowhere in particular--lock-down was still on, after all--I just needed to be anywhere else but in my own head. So many podcasts and audiobooks--I can't imagine having the time to listen to as many as I did, but I did it somehow.³

Work went even more downhill. I was non-renewed that year, and so headed into the first summer of COVID flat broke, benefits cut, and with no promises of future employment. I spent the next school year sitting in that room, smoking weed, playing too much Final Fantasy XIV, trolling Grindr, going on long walks, and occasionally going out to sub for real teachers who had actual jobs.

The Sign

I don't really know why I decided to buy Impossible Landscapes. It was very expensive at launch, as Delta Green campaigns tend to be, and as I had said before I was flat broke. I think it was the free time I had at work? I was subbing for teachers who had extended sick leaves due to catching COVID, and many of them taught online classes.

Lots of those classes were online. Could I work from home? Absolutely not. Instead, I had to descend into the bowels of the physically largest school in the province--to the second sub-basement level where they had set up the Online Teachers in the sound-proof recording booths of the school's music program--in order to go on a webcam and speak to a sea of muted anime avatars about whatever the teacher wanted me to pretend to care about that day.

At the time, I was very into Call of Cthulhu. I fucking loved that Trad shit. I scoured my local game stores for any module I could find and read them all with the dedication of a scholar at Miskatonic. I watched Seth Skorkowsky with a parasocial devotion riveled only by my ongoing videotic affair with The McElroys--soon to be broken by the worst season of a podcast I had ever listened to.⁴ I didn't really get what made Delta Green different aside from the vaguely X-Files set-dressing, but I needed something to read while those anime-avatar students pretended to get work done virtually in order to stay sane.

And so one night, on my shitty work-issued Chromebook, I cracked open the PDF for Impossible Landscapes. That night changed my life.

We Gotta Talk about Abby

As I've said before,⁵ the characters of Impossible Landscapes are what really stood out to me. While we don't get much in the text explicitly about what drives Abigail Wright to descend fully and utterly into the embrace of the Yellow King, there's enough to sketch the picture in our minds.

She's an artist. She lives in an artist's residence known as the Macallistar building. She has an overbearing father--a cop, to boot. The text tells us that others know her as a "fastidious young woman." The only photograph Delta Green has of her is an out of focus Polaroid self-portrait. She has taken the year off work to paint after a successful art show. She has a photograph of her father and her mother--their eyes scratched out. She has read The King in Yellow and is responsible for spreading it through the building. Her apartment is madness--stuffed to the gills with intimate and strange items from other worlds, other times, and other versions of hersef that won't make sense to your players until 10 sessions in to the campaign. She has created an altar, and her influence has opened a gate to The Night Floors, a liminal tumour-space connected to Carcosa which your players are about to spend a lot of time exploring.

Am I reading between the lines when I see in Abby somebody who wanted to set her life on fire?

Obliteration and Self-Immolation

Abigail is far from the only character in the text to desire the oblivion offered by complete and total sublimation to The King in Yellow. Take, for instance, the tragic case of Asa Darabondi; murderous architect and heir apparent to the lost throne of America. Or Emmet Mosbey--former Delta Green Agent lost to the hunt, identity vanished behind his iconic gas mask (no mask?). Or the denizens of the Hotel Broadalbin, who search in vain for the entrance to the Whisper Labyrinth to pop the cork of their Soul Bottles.

Adherents to The King seem to only want one thing--to not exist, or to exist within something so much larger then themselves that they might as well not exist at all--only minor footnotes in the play's astonishingly long Dramatis Personae--and are thus obsessed until the play reaches its inevitable conclusion. As Abigail writes to the players, "the way out is through".

After that? Who can say?

I think that it is this theme which attracted me to Impossible Landscapes more than almost any game module I've ever read. It has this effect on others too, clearly.⁶ I knew that, from the very first morning after that fateful night I first read it, Impossible Landscapes would be my next campaign. I would run it for my table. It would be the best campaign of all time. I felt this inevitability rattling through my bones.

And, of course, I couldn't get the spectre of Abigail Wright out of my head. I felt... something, my life the way it was a the time, about her complete and total surrender to The King--the way she just... sets fire to her life and leaves. You can see this desire in her actions prior to finding The Play too. She quit her job to make a go at being an artist, after all. She has moved far from home. She's taking a risk, even if it is still tethered to her current life. However, once she finds The Play look how boldly she steps out onto that Carcosan stage and embraces this new life. She doesn't tell anyone where she's going; she just does it. What happens after is not her problem, although when the players finally meet her at the Masquerade she does voice a sense of detached sentimentality to her former life--particularly for her father.

But she doesn't leave with the players, no matter how much they might try to get her to leave. She stays and witnesses the total paradoxical oblivion of that final curtain call, even if the players choose not to.

The way out of her confining life was through the play. She put on a mask and believed in it so fully that there ceased to be a mask at all.

I think, at the time I first read the book, I envied her.

Out Was Through

That summer, three months after I first read Impossible Landscapes, I took a risk of my own which turned out to change my life. I registered for the Storytelling Collective's Call of Cthulhu Writing Workshop. That summer I worked on my first module--Thrown Voices⁷. It's a relatively amateurish module all things considered, but I'm still proud of it. In Thrown Voices you can see the start of the player-centric design which I pride myself on. Rather then a plot like most Trad modules, I took inspiration from the OSR and let the players figure out how to deal with Friendly Quince, the mystery's antagonist, on their own.

More important than the module itself, however, is the way that I felt emboldened afterwards to build a real writing practice. Adventure Modules were no longer something I would download from DriveThru or pick up in the store. I could write one--and people would read it. And they might even like it!

I made enough from Voices' sales in the following months after the Workshop to pay for all associated costs. It hit Silver Bestseller, and to this day I have not had to pay for anything on Drivethru--I usually pay in credit from those not-infrequent sales.

This is the start of the journey I've been on for awhile now. The success of Thrown Voices lead me to continue writing and engage in the community. I stopped just watching YouTube videos and started contributing.

• I've written four OSR modules
• I'm the deputy editor of Sprigs and Kindling⁸
• I have a scenario that's going to be published in a real, actual book⁹
• I wrote a blog that Questing Beast featured in a video¹⁰
• I was nominated for an Ennie Award???????????
• I've started GMing professionally
• I've been invited to the Gauntlet Writing Retreat in October

I mean, you're reading this, right? You're not my mom. You're not a close friend (probably). You have no idea who I am, what I look like, or anything else about me. But you're here, reading something I wrote of your own free will. I think that has to count for something.

My life has also changed in other, non game related ways.

• I've been with my current partner for four amazing years.
• I've returned from my subruban exile and have an apartment in the best part of my city.
• I've built my career--I'm the Department Head of Secondary English at my site.
• My heath is better--I work out regularly, cycle to work, and attend regular therapy.

I love my life. I love what I do. I love what I make. I love where I live. I love who I live with. I love where I work (political burnout notwithstanding¹¹). Things are great.

So--whatever happened to Abby?¹²

Reflection on the Eve of the Masquerade

I have a confession to make--I haven't yet finished my campaign of Impossible Landscapes. I should be prepping for that, but I can't bring myself to do so.

This book has lived in my brain for years. When I read it, I was a completely different person. I envied Abigail Wright, and her willingness to throw everything away in search of an impossible ideal.

But now--I find her terrifying.

She isn't brave. She's arrogant. She isn't bold. She's callous.

I also find the style of game this is terrifying. I'm just not a trad gamer anymore. I don't want to prep a plot or write a script, or engineer an emotionally meaningful outcome for a game. I don't listen to Actual Play shows as much as I did. I don't watch the YouTubers anymore--my apologies, Seth. I have this finale, this emotional catharsis which has been building in my mind for going on five years now and I'm just not that GM who could make it happen anymore.

I'm someone else.

And maybe I'm afraid, too. In a real way, Impossible Landscapes is kinda the last link in my mind to the person, that arrogant and callous child, who I was pre-pandemic. What happens after the final curtain call? Will I finally be freed of this thread to that past self?

Or, like Abigail, will I find that there is no mask at all?

Fundamentally, though, I think the thing I have to do to finish this is accept something: the game was never about me. It's about the players.

When I first wanted to run this game, I wanted so badly the story I had in my head--the story I had about myself and Abigail Wright. The feelings I had when I read that book back in the April of 2021 is the thing that I wanted so badly to make somebody else feel. But that isn't how games work.

Our game isn't about Abigail and her self-immolation. And its not about me, either.

It's about Agent Kyle, wondering if he will ever see his wife and kids again. It's about Agent O'Sullivan, trying to break the secret of Carcosan Clockwork. It's about Agent Rook, insisting on holding clandestine meetings at Olive Garden. It's about Agent Minnesota, sacrificing herself so Kyle can have the happiness she never could.

It's about a desert eagle with a Garfield Meme¹³ inscribed on the barrel. It's about the sketch of the King in Yellow in a zoot-suit that I keep on my fridge to this day. It's about the stupid 3D Printed Platypus we all roll our dice in. It's about the soup I make before sessions. It's about one of my players sometimes bringing over and folding their laundry¹⁴ because this is the only time in their week when they can sit down.

Games aren't about the ideas, fundamentally. They're about the people and community which form around them.

Midnight

So, I guess that this is the part of the review where I'm supposed to give the book a score or something? Talk about the things I didn't like?

Uh...Well, the annotation motif in the book doesn't really go anywhere--I don't think that I found anything in there that wasn't Bael or Mosbey being edgy.

Part Three was bad. Just straight up--I replaced it almost entirely. Speaking of which, I'd also like to see more characters and plot elements pulled from the King in Yellow stories, which could have fleshed out this section a lot. Only my players know what I mean by that.

And, of course, this book just isn't that usable at the table. Not that I think it needs to be--I wrote a whole essay about that can of worms¹⁵--but there were several points where I could have used just a bit more. Specifically: the Night Floors, the Whisper Labyrinth, and Carcosa.

Well, that's that. I'll go do this prep now.

I'm nervous. I don't know what I'll face in that final session, or how I'll feel after. Once my players finally meet the Abigail Wright who has lived in my head longer then the current version of myself has.

I guess, as Abby says, the only way out is through.

-Peace!

Footnotes