Delta Green is a modern day horror game that cast players as members of a conspiracy inside the United States government. They use the countries’ vast resources to investigate and battle elements of the Cthulhu Mythos. They also moust confront the cost of their vigiiance with scenes at home watching as the things they fight for slowly, but inevitably, slip away.

Humble Bundle is currently hosting a collection of several books to raise money for Covenant House. The bundle is available through June 22nd, 2024. Here are some of the outstanding titles in the collection, though everything included is worth checking out.

This latest season (thought only 2 episodes in) seems to lean heavily in the cosmic horror direction. So far it feels like it could be a really cool Delta Green mission. Maybe they'll find a way to explain all the weirdness away, but for now I'm loving the mystery.

Minor spoilers: The end of the first episode and beginning of the second really set the tone.

If you're looking to get started with Delta Green, round out your PDF collection or just support the creators & their charity, Arc Dream has put an excellent mix of books up on Bundle of Holding.

If you're looking to just play and were waiting for the right moment to pick up the player tools, for $7.95 you can pick up the following in the Agent Bundle to get started:

• Delta Green Agent's Handbook
• The Complex
• Agent Dossiers

However if you want to go deeper and run your own games, then you can upgrade to the Handler Bundle for about $40 and get all of these:

• Delta Green Handler's Guide
• Delta Green: The Conspiracy
• Delta Green: The Labyrinth
• Iconoclasts
• Impossible Landscapes
• ARCHINT
• Delta Green Handler's Screen

All told, about $186 worth of PDFs

Rachel Ivey made several packs of digital assets (logos, graphics, etc.) that someone could quickly bash together in their favorite imaging app to create realistic props for their campaigns. And now they are on Bundle of Holding. Regularly $60 but are going here for only about $20.

So I just very recently uncovered this podcast (presumably because I've been living under a rock). And I have to say, it's different, but really well done. It's a lot less a bunch of friends sitting around joking and throwing dice, and much more improv-actors telling a story set around several different Delta Green RPGs. They clean up their table-talk and rework some gameplay/conversation to add to the dramatic effect. Once I got used to their format, I find I really like it.

I've been thinking about how SAN rolls work in Delta Green (and its predecessor, Call of Cthulhu). Sanity represents a character's connection to humanity - human culture, human beings, human science, and of course, human morality. It is determined by POW, which represents willpower. Sanity is lost through confrontation with forces that reveal how all these things are lies. Impossible entities and events, nauseating cruelty and violence, the realization of helplessness, and so on.

All this makes sense to me. The game mechanics line up with the abstract ideas they represent. Where things change is when we get into rolling for SAN.

The same statistic that determines security in the human narrative is used to diminish itself. Mechanically, the lower a character's SAN is, the faster they lose what little they have left. While there's a certain grim logic in that, I think it has a flaw, and have been thinking of an alternative approach.

In Lovecraft's work, it is not confidence in humanity that acts as a defense against the reality of the cosmos, but dumb ignorance. This is displayed many times, but I'll stick to using a single quote from Pickman's Model to showcase this:

"If there are any ghosts here, they’re the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts—the ghosts of beings highly organised enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw."

I think it's all well and good to roll SAN to resist helplessness and violence, but the Unnatural is a different story. It only really breaks people who were clever enough to know the meaning of what they saw or experienced.

The change I'm thinking of making here is rolling INT instead of SAN when faced with the Unnatural. Perhaps INT at +20%. A failed INT roll would equate to a successful SAN roll.

For example, If an Agent sees a ghoul and fails their INT roll they lose no SAN - it's just a freaky animal to them. An Agent who succeeds grasps that this creature was human once. They fully understand the implications of its terrible existence.

Does anyone have any feedback on this. Is it a change I should implement? Is my logic sound? Should I buff INT (maybe making higher INT lead to more skill improvements during the aftermath of an op, or making learning new skills easier during home scenes) to make up for the fact that having high INT is now liable to drive an Agent insane?

So where does everyone like to draw inspiration from for their DG games/Investigators or even NPCs?

True Detective, X-Files, great TV shows. The SCP Wiki has some good inspiration. I used to peruse/listen to the occasional interesting looking conspiracy websites/podcasts, when they're just weird and less political.

Where do you all like to draw inspiration from?

As title. I'm running a very March Technologies game right now, and I'd love greater detail on Majestic and its post-Accord splintering. Is the Deep State book still in production? Just delayed? Cancelled?

For me, way back in the early times of 2015, a friend mentioned how much she loved playing Call of Cthulhu in college. A group of us now adults decided we'd try and get a game or two together, and I somehow became the Keeper. In an effort to get myself up to speed on DM'ing (after a looong dry spell) I started listening to Actual Plays, and at the time, the biggest one was RPPR.

At that point, they were adapting Chaosium rules to Delta Green a bit, but there was also bubbling interest in the re-release of Delta Green by Arc Dream. I was focused on CoC content, but I very quickly got into the DG stuff they were playing. I barely missed the original Kickstarter but have made it into all the rest and have a little bookshelf I'm proud of.

How about everyone else?

Their second season of Impossible Landscapes just started, the previous season was some of the best content they have ever put out

There is now artwork and a pre-order link up on backerit. Additionally Rachel Ivey posted about it in the Facebook group. Explicitly stating "Please don't ask when it will be released to the public."

That said, Caleb, the author, has been play testing it on his Patreon for months now so between those two signs, if I were divining tea leaves I'd say we're getting close.

And if you don't know about this scenario, do yourself a favor and go poking around for it. The original Actual Play was one of my all-time favorites.

I'm a player in an Impossible Landscapes campaign (so no spoilers!), and I've learnt that there's a tarot deck that was made for this. Does anyone know whether you can still get it anywhere, or whether it'll be sold again in the future?

Brief Overview

There are multiple sources of information for Delta Green, and most of these are common knowledge if you're already a fan of the game. But I thought I would compile them all into a single post to get things started.

Official Delta Green website

Wikipedia Entry

Lastly, if you're looking for a layman's description of what the setting is like, it can best be described as a conspiracy within the US Government willing to use extra-judicial means to keep the world safe from unnatural threats. There are other-national offshoots, there are conspiracies within conspiracies.

I always describe it as, Men in Black if it were a violent, R-Rated crime-drama or X-Files if it were all about the Cigarette Smoking Man.

While not a DG inspired series, as far as I'm aware. True Detective Season 1 starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson is an excellent, engaging primer on how the stories hit.

Links to the creators/maintainers

This may not be comprehensive, but the following people either have/had a strong hand in the creation of the Delta Green Lore, or are working to maintain/embellish it.

Dennis Detweiler patreon
Adam Scott Glancy
Shane Ivey patreon
Caleb Stokes patreon
John Scott Tynes website

Podcasts

The Greenbox Podcast
The Rancor's Brothel *Site was down when I tried to post this, but they have several episodes set in the DG mythos
RPPR Actual Plays featuring Delta Green

Handler Tools

The Fairfield Project Fairfield Project is a collection of "ideas" for Delta Green Handlers. There are everything from objects/items, shady groups, and shotgun scenarios available here to boost one's creativity. Most of this information revolves around "The Outlaw Years" of Delta Green (a point in time in which DG was officially disbanded, yet the agents were still operating very much outside the law.

"The Delta Green Wiki" or "The New Fairfield Project" Similar to The Fairfield Project, the Delta Green Wiki is an offshoot wiki that is primarily focused on the timeline after DG has reformed as a branch of the government with slightly better access to resources than the Outlaw Years.

The Green Box Generator A "Green Box" is a storage cache (historically a nondescript storage unit) of items that would be useful to Agents when going through a scenario, and provided by the Handler as a means to provide them with interesting/useful/quirky/dangerous artifacts. The Green Box Generator aids a Handler in creating a list of interesting items to populate a Green Box with.

The Scenario Database Maintained by our own @blaborb this is a fairly comprehensive database of of 649 (at the time of this writing) DG scenarios in print/out of print/shotgun scenarios/etc. with tags, voting and links.

Kickstarter Reward Report A link from Arc Dream's main website where they are keeping a loose record of what is released and what's on the horizon. No exact dates in most cases, but they do try to give you an idea of how far along each project may be.

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This was my first attempt at starting a post to the community. I would love to add more to this, and enrich/maintain better links as time goes on. Please feel free to update or correct me in the comments, and I will make an effort to expand upon this post. -Thanks!