Delta Green is a role-playing game from Arc Dream Publishing about a secretive organization tasked with protecting the United States from paranormal and alien threats. The setting combines the 1920s Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft with modern conspiracy fiction. It originated in 1992 as a setting for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, created by Adam Scott Glancy, Dennis Detwiller, and John Scott Tynes, a.k.a. the Delta Green Partnership, of the Seattle gaming house Pagan Publishing.
In 2016 the Agent's Handbook was released, followed by the Handler's Guide in 2018, giving the game its first standalone rule books. In 2018 Arc Dream also partnered with Pelgrane Press on a prequel game set in the 1960s. It is named The Fall of DELTA GREEN and uses the Gumshoe System.
Beyond the tabletop role-playing game, Delta Green has also spawned a line of fiction, including novels, anthologies, and short-story collections published since 1998 that expand the setting and mythology.
Premise Delta Green is a contemporary setting, starting in the mid-1990s, with intermittent updates thereafter. The game revolves around a fictitious secret organization, created by the U.S. Government following the covert raid on the town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts mentioned in H. P. Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth. The organization takes its name from its World War II-era codename.
Delta Green agents work undercover through other U.S. government agencies, recruiting across a wide range including the FBI, ATF, CIA, CDC, DEA and the U.S. Military. It appears to have "gone rogue" somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s, following a disastrous operation in Cambodia and a "deal" struck by Reagan-era rivals in Majestic-12, ostensibly with "Greys". Delta Green combats not only incursions by entities from the Cthulhu Mythos, but also secret conspiracies and rogue organizations that seek to exploit Mythos entities, artifacts, and knowledge for political, military, or occult ends.
The 2016 edition advances the history to the 2010s. In 2001, the September 11 attacks greatly affect the Intelligence Community, including Delta Green and MAJESTIC-12. Majestic was weakened and destroyed, while Delta Green has been brought back into the government fold, given a budget and official standing, using the war on terror as a cover to their operation. There's also a group of old guard agents that were opposed to the restructure of Delta Green, preferring to maintain the old conspiracy running, forming their own splinter group known as "The Outlaws", as opposed to the official "Program".
The Fall of Delta Green, on the other hand, is a spin-off set during the 1960s, focusing on Delta Green's operations during the Cold War, in particular in Indochina and the Vietnam War, before the fateful operation that led to the original disbandment of the organization.
The group was introduced in the seventh issue of The Unspeakable Oath, a Call of Cthulhu fanzine created by Pagan Publishing, in early 1993. Four years later, the Delta Green supplement appeared and spawned a number of its own supplements and novels. The premise is similar to The X-Files (although the original incarnation of Delta Green preceded The X-Files by almost a year). Both draw on federal alphabet soup folklore, UFO conspiracy theories, cryptids and other modern legends, with Delta Green further weaving them through the lenses the Cthulhu Mythos. The aforementioned MAJESTIC-12 links the Cthulhu Mythos with UFO conspiracy folklore, incorporating themes such as Men in Black, Roswell incident, black helicopters, and government cover-ups through its alliance with the "Grey aliens", who are ultimately agents or disguises of Lovecraft's Mi-Go—who are, in turn, also responsible for many UFO sightings, alien abduction and cattle mutilation. The Karotechia (whose name derive from the real-life SS Hexenkartothek project) is an international network of former Nazi occultists, who escaped through Die Spinne and the ODESSA organization, seeking to establish a Fourth Reich through Mythos magic. The Cult of Transcendence is an Illuminati-like network of secret societies overseen by Nyarlathotep who seek control and moral decay of society.
Following the publication of the standalone role-playing game in 2016, the setting shifted away from many of the Ufology and Cold War conspiracy motifs that characterized the original supplements. While organizations such as MAJESTIC-12 and the Karotechia remained part of the setting's history, newer publications placed greater emphasis on contemporary institutions, social fragmentation and human actors whose ambitions are enabled by contact with the Cthulhu Mythos. The supplement The Labyrinth (2020), for example, introduces antagonistic organizations inspired by contemporary social phenomena, such as the Sowers, an extremist Christian fundamentalist movement empowered by "Azazel", a mask of Nyarlathotep, rooted in the economic decline of the American Rust Belt; New Life Fertility, a biotechnology company catering to ultra-wealthy elites through Mythos-influenced eugenistic reproductive services; the Lonely, a decentralized network of socially isolated individuals supernaturally radicalized through online communities; and the Prana Sodality, a wellness movement and healing cult built around supernatural phenomena.
The Delta Green supplement lays the groundwork for organized investigations into paranormal crime and horror, setting up the initial plot and providing players with their motivations and the resources they need to carry out their tasks. It also provides a source of replacements for characters who go mad or are killed. Canonical materials revolve around threats from the Cthulhu Mythos, but the framework is very flexible. Delta Green agents typically know little about the Mythos. While the scenarios and written material is centered around the United States, there are possibilities for international games too. Delta Green: Countdown introduced counterparts in the United Kingdom and Russia, called PISCES and GRU SV-8 respectively, as well as real-life international law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while Targets of Opportunity introduced the Canadian M-EPIC.
Gameplay The original 1997 edition of Delta Green was a sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu; as such, it used the Basic Role-Playing system that Call of Cthulhu had.
The 2016 standalone edition takes the percentile dice of Basic Role-Playing and Call of Cthulhu mechanics, and introduces modifications adapted for the setting. Player Characters are called "Agents" and the Game Masters "Handlers".
Sanity is rolled when characters meet unnatural horrors, as well as in violent situations and moments when the Agents feel helpless. Agents can "adapt" to violence and helplessness after failed Sanity checks, but excessive loss of Sanity can result in agents developing mental disorders. Delta Green introduces the concept of Bonds, which are the friends and family of the Agents, and Motivations, the reasons why the Agents fight. The latter serves as a character-expanding tool for players and a sanity-regulation mechanic, as they can be used to halve the SAN loss. At the point of their relationship with bonds, if the relationship points fall, the connection with the bond will be crossed out. With the bond mechanics, the Home scenes are also introduced. These are between-mission vignettes of the Agents' everyday lives. They can be about building relationships with bonds, investigating the unnatural, or going to the therapists, among others.
Gear and equipment can be requisitioned from the government organizations under which the Agent works, through the use of the Bureaucracy skill, with more expensive and advanced equipment increasing the difficulty of the roll. A failure might result in the Agent getting fired, blacklisted, or even arrested. Items can also be purchased using the Agent's personal wealth, though this can risk the Agent's relationship with their bonds.
Combat was also streamlined to be quicker, more tactical, and deadly. The main combat mechanic introduced is Lethality, weapons that deal damage above 2d10 have a "lethality rating" from 10% to 90%, if the percentile roll is below the rating the targeted enemy dies instantly; otherwise, the damage dealt is the sum of the percentile dice.
The Fall of Delta Green uses Pelgrane Press' own Gumshoe System that is also used in their other games such as The Esoterrorists, Fear Itself and Trail of Cthulhu. Unlike the standard D100/BRP system that both Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green use, in which many actions are subject to D100 rolls to determine outcome, the Gumshoe system emphasizes getting characters from scene to scene quickly, gathering clues and interpreting them using minimal rolls of a 6-sided die.
Fall of Delta Green also introduces new mechanics for the Gumshoe formula, adapting the new rules introduced by the standalone edition of Delta Green: Bonds and Motivations complement the sanity system (Itself based on the one used in Trail of Cthulhu), adaptation to SAN loss was included, Revelation works similarly to the "traumatic background" in Delta Green's character creation and a few new abilities were added, most prominently was the ability of "Agency" to represent the capability of the Player Character to manipulate their employing agency's (Such as the CIA, MACV-SOG or the Federal Bureau of Narcotics) resources in their investigations.
History The setting was first introduced in 1992 in the seventh issue of The Unspeakable Oath, Pagan Publishing's Call of Cthulhu fanzine, in the scenario Convergence, which would be later republished in the first Delta Green sourcebook. The scenario introduced Delta Green as a loose organization within the U.S. government dedicated to secretly fight the creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos. Convergence was also followed by a sequel named Transference published in Volume 2 Issue 2 of the Cyberpunk 2020 fanzine The Interface, although later published material disregards this scenario.
Pagan Publishing would then expand the setting resulting in the publishing of the Delta Green sourcebook in 1997. This was followed an additional sourcebook in 1999 titled Delta Green: Countdown.
On May 1, 2006, the Pagan Publishing homepage was updated with an announcement describing the reasons for the delay of the new release of Delta Green, and stating that the d20 edition of the game should be available in time for Gen Con Indy. While there were a few show copies available there were no copies available for sale to the public as most of them were "still being shipped from China". As of May 2007 the book, which is a reprint of the 1997 book with the addition of D20 stats, was finally reprinted and was available in stores.
A hardback compilation of the three Delta Green Eyes Only chapbooks, along with additional material, was released in November 2007. The book was published in cooperation with Arc Dream Publishing. The entire 1,000 copy print run was sold out by February 2008. The hardback edition of Delta Green: Eyes Only was a finalist for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Supplement of 2007. A softback version of the compilation followed in September 2008 and is available to retail distribution.
Pagan Publishing and Arc Dream Publishing began work in mid-2008 on a new sourcebook, Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity, which was released as a limited-edition hardback in June 2010, to be followed by a softcover retail edition.http://www.arcdream.com/upcoming.php ArcDream's Upcoming Pagehttp://www.arcdream.com/store/product.php?id=9999 Arc Dream Publishing Online Store As of August 2011 the entire 1,000-copy print run of the hardback limited edition was sold out. In August 2011, Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity won silver (2nd place) Ennie Awards for Best Writing and Best Adventure.