Delta Green: The War on Cosmic Terror

So Sanity checks. You have to roll under your sanity, and you succeed. So does that mean with some things, like Cults and the less strange mythos creatures, players will not lose much sanity at all, since it's pretty rare to roll a 00? Or am I missing something?
Yup, sometimes SAN loss will be a 0 or maybe a D3 if its a fairly mundane horror.
 
So on the skill increases, why did seventh edition change from 6th on how often it happens? 6th says the Keeper "may prompt" a player to put an experience check next to the skill, but 7th says that anytime a skill is successfully used the player "should check" the experience box.

Doesn't that mean that over the course of a session a player will get a chance to roll on every skill they use, and it incentivizes players to try to do as much as they can and make rolls happen?

Or was the change just so players had more chances to increase, since until you get over 50% it's not going to succeed more often than not?
 
So Sanity checks. You have to roll under your sanity, and you succeed. So does that mean with some things, like Cults and the less strange mythos creatures, players will not lose much sanity at all, since it's pretty rare to roll a 00? Or am I missing something?

Characters don't start with 99 sanity. Your sanity starts at POW x 5 by default at character creation, and can be modified by your introduction to the unnatural.

Your maximum sanity is 99 minus your unnatural skill so it is technically possible to have 99 sanity, but its pretty unlikely.
 
Characters don't start with 99 sanity. Your sanity starts at POW x 5 by default at character creation, and can be modified by your introduction to the unnatural.

Your maximum sanity is 99 minus your unnatural skill so it is technically possible to have 99 sanity, but its pretty unlikely.
Oh, I didn't catch that in his original post.

Also somewhere I saw a really niffty chart tracking different types of Sanity Loss from mundane (murder, missing loved one) to horrific.
 
I'm gonna run a scenario on the Night at the Opera discord in less than a day. The agents will be staking out an unnatural hotspot for a week. They'll have to contend with nosy neighbours and strange hauntings. Wish me luck.
 
Has anybody of you used the gumshoe book for delta green?
No, but Fall of Delta Green is a version of the game set in the 60s using the Gumshoe rules by Ken Hite. Pelgrane site here. That should give you some ideas on how to use the Gumshoe mechanics for Delta Green, if that's what you are looking for.

Also: I just saw Overlord. I loved it, but its a movie that I'm pretty sure was made specifically for me. It is exactly a Delta Green scenario set during WW2. If anyone is looking for inspiration or examples of how to do that, then it's a good one. The movie finished half an hour ago, and I already thought of two modern day DG adventures that use it as backstory.
 
And our Halloween interlude has concluded.

Pluses
  • Entire team survived, sanity intact.
  • Group tackled cultist before he could do the throat slitting sacrifice to the gods blah de blah. Flamethrowers did nothing to the idol, but luckily we got the sacrifices out, leading to...
  • Buried the evil mushroom idol in hydrochloric acid until it was gone.
  • Managed to murder the actual cultists before the rest of the team could stop me. Air in a syringe, embolism. Told them it was a side effect of how far gone they were combined with the anti-fungal stuff.
Minuses
  • March Industries probably has the fungus.
  • Clean up was sloppy. Too many eyewitnesses. Did enough spinning that it was fine. It was okay. Had to credit a dead cultist who was suitably photogenic in life as the hero of the whole thing.
Things That Weren't Addressed
  • What the fuck was up with those mushrooms. Who created them?
It's probably best we don't find out.
 
So I recently got seriously into Delta Green. Bought the Agent's and Handler's Guides, and it was downhill from there. I got my hands on the first edition books, went through them in an evening each, and I've talked myself into running a Delta Green one shot/introduction for my partner and my best friend sometime after the semester ends, but before Christmas. Unlike D&D, I don't have to worry about something like "necessary classes" or my players getting killed/losing their minds/disappearing from reality cause that's Delta Green, baby!

I'll be running Last Things Last for them, as is, though with a couple more hooks found within Baughman's personal Green Box, aside from the Karotechia reference, just in case I run another session for them in the future. Since Baughman was an active DG agent around the time the Group was disbanded, I'm definitely putting in references to Operation OBSIDIAN, and maybe some other Vietnam ops. It'll be interesting if they keep this stuff or hand it over to the Program.

Now that I'm actually putting together this intro session, I'm naturally thinking about another, different but related project, inspired by early posts in this thread: a DG equivalent organization in Chile. Its roots would be informal, probably lost to time or related to the Chilean Navy ala DG's progenitor, the P-Division. Unfortunately, its "heyday" would be during Pinochet's dictatorship, where they were made an official organization answering directly to Pinochet, drawing members from the Chilean military, DINA/CNI, the Carabineros, and other organizations I can find.

I'm very mindful of not pulling something gross and tasteless, ala World of Darkness tropes of "the unnatural did all the bad things" and "the victims were actually bad so these war crimes were perfectly justified" and other shit like that. I'll most likely cover the other side of the dictatorship as well: student groups, leftist organizations, guerrillas, etc.

I've already got a couple ideas:
- Classic Deep Ones BS, considering Chile's long coastline. I'm thinking of centering a lot of it around a colony that was destroyed on the island of Chiloe, maybe using national myths like the Pincoya (a mermaid/"the personification of the fertility of marine species') and Caleuche (the Chilean version of the Flying Dutchman).

- Finding similarities between Mapuche myths and mythos creatures. I'd prefer to portray the Mapuche as having a positive "misunderstanding" of the unnatural, with long traditions of opposing/shunning it. Of course, their efforts were irreparably ruined by the Spanish, and later the Chileans themselves. Who knows what's been forgotten, and what can be relearned?

- For a modern day ChileDG, there's more to consider: the plight of the Mapuche is a nationally recognized issue. The specter of Pinochet remains, found in certain "anti-terrorism" laws from the dictatorship left untouched after the return to democracy, used against Mapuche activists fighting for the return of ancestral lands.

- The military dictatorship would have no end of self-serving individuals, ala the worst of MAJESTIC-12's Steering Committee. How can they be dealt with when they're made untouchable by their "unwavering loyalty and service"? How long until they discover facets of the unnatural, and use it for their own means?

- The U.S. was in bed with Pinochet, the military junta, and the dictatorship that followed. The CIA played a role in the 1973 coup, and the subsequent organization of intelligence services throughout Latin America for the purposes of finding and eliminating leftist/socialist/communist organizations and their members. Some operations must have been hunts in Chile's neighbors for the unnatural, maybe even skirmishes with their equivalents. Some of these operations might have been the equivalent of hitting two birds with one stone.

- The U.S. actively sent agents into Chile. It is fact that many anti-guerrilla operations saw Chilean commandos deployed with U.S. advisers. How many of them were either DG or MJ-12?

- Chile has its own history with UFOs. Did MJ-12 show any interest?

- A modern ChileDG has to face the consistent, enduring efforts to expose the human rights violations of Pinochet's regime. Names, operations, detention centers, you name it, some of it will be uncovered. How far will the organization go to preserve its secret mission? Will the new democratic government be informed of the unpalatable truth, or enough that it'll shield the group from backlash? Will the old guard be burned in exchange? Will some dare to not go quietly? Will the new blood delve into the group's past to see how far the justification of the unnatural was taken?

- And finally, a potential session for my new gaming group: A Chilean expat, escaping the trials and investigations into the dictatorship following the 1988 plebiscite, brought his personal Green Box equivalent with him. This would be a Last Things Last equivalent, or maybe something approaching Lover in the Ice set in an appropriately Texas disaster, like Hurricane Harvey. Whatever it is, I'll wait to fully develop it.
This is probably the worst time possible to be thinking about this stuff, considering I should be studying for finals, but I figured I'd get this out now, let it rest, and pick it back up in a couple weeks.
 
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Welcome to Delta Green! You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps you to resist the crushing existential despair that knowledge of man's irrelevance to the universe brings.

I've run Last Things Last a few times now, and it is a fantastic little scenario. The central conflict of wanting to know whats in the tank vs. really not wanting to know whats in the tank sets up one of the central ideas of the game really well. I do embellish the structure they give you a little, since its better to give the PCs too much information than too little. If you're interested in running a campaign against the Kariotecha, then I cannot recommend Dead Letter highly enough as a jumping off point. It takes longer to run than most adventures, but that's because there's so much stuff happening. The story gets weirder and more awful the longer it goes on, and then when you think the ride is over you get goddamn Nazis.
 
Hahaha.

While at GenCon, I got my hands on a copy of "The Fall of Delta Green" by Kenneth Hite (signed!)

So, without further ado: let's review.

Masked Reviews: The Fall of Delta Green

The Fall of Delta Green is interesting because it's a spin-off twice over. On one hand, it is a historical take on the Delta Green franchise, setting itself in the 60s, the height of the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and Vietnam. On the other, it's a fusion of Trails of Cthulhu and Nights Black Agents, borrowing the Cthulhu setting and Sanity/Stability break from one and the Tinker-Tailor-Soldier-Spy backroom paranoia from the other. Needless to say, Kenneth Hite has his work cut out for him.

As a quick overview, let's go over GUMSHOE. The GUMSHOE system is one that is more based around resource management then rolling. Characters divide their skills into General Abilities, which require a 1d6 roll vs a target number and can be boosted by the characters points in the skill which are then spent until the next rest, and Investigative Abilities, which require no rolls but one can spend their points in that to get a more complete answer. General Abilities can work as Investigative Abilities, but the reverse is not true.

Example: Agent Arthur is working reading an autopsy report in a police station. He has Criminology 2, and spends a point, noticing that the rough injuries on the body actually seem to be a sloppy attempt to create the same occult mark as was written in blood on the floor next to the body at it's crime scene. Suddenly, he hears a gunshot. His Firearms 6 allows him to recognize the sound of local law enforcement's service weapon, and he follows the noise to the morgue, his weapon drawn. He sees a morgue tech's corpse in the corner and the dead body he had been investigating menacingly walking towards a rookie cop. He spends two Firearms points and rolls a d6, rolling a 2+2=4. The bullets hit and Arthur rolls a d6, dealing 4 damage to the monster.

Put simply, it's a system that treats your experts as experts, but whose expertise is a well limited by exhaustion. A character can't do battle against the forces of darkness all day at peak performance, by the end their hands will be shaking.

So let's talk about the Fall of Delta Green.

Part 0: Cover
The Book's exterior cover is a Vietnam era soldier marching towards a tentacle that is cutting through a Huey helicopter. The back cover is two bits of flavor text and a real life photograph of Vietnam Protesters. The top flavor text outlines Delta Green in general, starting with the Innsmouth raid. The second outlines this book's specific gimmick, giving a feel for the 1960s setting. The interior covers are in-universe World Maps dated 1960 and 1970 respectively, with markings for known DG assets and known cult activities marked. The 70s map is a much bleaker picture.

In someways, this cover is refreshing compared to other DG stuff. On the other hand, the font for the title isn't my jam. I guess they can't all be winners.

Part I: Character Creation
After a brief interlude explaining the GUMSHOE system, the game moves immediately into character creation. After giving your initial ratings, the book has a little side note on the general racial and sexual make up of the various agencies: Military recruits everyone but has no official female combat personnel, CIA recruits from military and has a 40% female workforce, FBI is white bread men central, LGBTQ people exist but not openly, and it is completely okay to remove any of these limitations if your Handler is okay with it.

The game recommends having every skill represented, and then begins with a two tiered character system. You begin with a points budget dependent on number of players (30 pts for 2, 18 for 5+). Then, you choose your characters military background, adding the skills from that background (Example: Soldier has 4 investigative, Military Science 1 and Survival 1 plus a pick of two more, and 20 general, similarly divided into what you'd expect for a soldier) either twice if they are active duty personnel or to their Department, like the CIA or the FBI or other agencies like the US Marshals or the NSA. The game then gives a small conversion guide if the players want to play as a PISCES agent (DG's UK equivalent) or a DG asset such as an Activist or Gangster.

Next, we have Bonds, which work mostly the same as Bonds do in base DG. Every character starts with 3 Bonds, with a rating equal to 1 higher then your highest Interpersonal ability score (Flattery, Inspiration, Negotiation, Reassurance), with a maximum of 4. When making a Stability test, you can burn points from your Bond pools. This represents the stresses of the job interfering your ability to relate to people. Once a Bond drops to -1, it's gone.

We have one last optional way to add points: Revelation. This is how your character learned of the Supernatural and was marked for DG. Most of them lower Sanity, Stability, or Health, but they are the only way to get skills in Occult, Fringe, or the Unnatural at chargen. Or you can ignore that.

Part II: Game Rules
The rules overview is fairly standard. GUMSHOE tests generally have a target number of 4, although extremely hard tests can go to 8. If the GM determines a General Test can be done again, the player in question must spend more points then they did previously, otherwise you've shot your bullet. It goes through more scenarios: chases, continued tasks, et cetera, and how to referee them.

Combat has several factors. First off, Surprise. Surprised character drop to the bottom of Initiative and get a penalty. Next, combat goes as such
  • Combatants who are prepared for a fight go before combatants that aren't​
  • Combatants with guns go before melee characters (with further rules for disarming later on)​
  • Combatants go in descending order from their used combat ability (a character with Firearms 4 goes before Firearms 3)​
  • Agents win ties vs human foes and lose ties vs Unnatural creatures​
We get an array of rulings, a list of how weapons work (basically, a regular firearm is considered the baseline for damage, with improvised weapons getting minuses and Big Fucking Guns getting pluses), how Lethality works (If the damage is below the weapon's lethality rating, a human opponent drops to -12 HP instantly and a non-human opponent loses 5 x Lethality rating in HP). Body armor reduces certain damage types, but it's the 60s so no Kevlar yet, good luck. A bunch of other standard "Gun Combat" special options like sniping, and we move on.

We get a list of standard Op4 statblocks: Dogs, Police, Soldiers. Then it moves on to the nasty rules: Napalm, Flamethrowers, Toxins, anything you might encounter from either enemy forces or worse.

Next, Sanity and Stability, which is the Trails of Cthulhu big addition to the CoC formula. Basically, the easy way to explain it is Sanity is your characters ability to believe the comforting lie, while Stability is how good you are at putting up the act. Low Stability characters can recover them with the assistance of your team mates, and adapt to certain (non-Mythos related) traumas like seeing mutilated bodies after enough exposure. Sanity can drop if you hit 0 stability, if you perform magic, or you see one of those things Man Was Not Meant To Know. If sanity reaches 0, game over.

We then get the recovery section. Generally, your pools only regenerate between operations, with some skills regenerating quicker. Stability and Health can be increased on a level up, but Sanity can't, and either way points you put there don't go into your other skills. Then it gets into Vignette's between adventures, which range from "Spend a weekend in Vegas" to "Get fired from your day job because you disappeared for two weeks on a DG op and reappeared with no alibi".

Part III: Items
Fall of Delta Green is a lot like it's source material, in that it is an abstracted game. Most of the time, a good Preparedness roll will get you what you need. That being said, it isn't government work if something isn't missing. The book goes through the list on acquiring non-standard gear, including finding Delta Green caches, requisitioning through their day job (bad idea), buying guns (means your down to shotguns and hunting rifles at best), or make it (because the only thing separating an AR-15 from an automatic M-16 is a pin here or there in the mechanism).

It then gets into more specific rules, Flare Guns, Det Cord, Rifle Grenades, et cetera. It then goes through some tradecraft stuff (did you know aerosol freon turns paper transparent and dissipates without visual trace?). It also warns that the night vision goggles of the era will light up the Agent that uses them like fourth of july to any enemy that can see heat.

Next is vehicles, with some good quips like how the Microbus can hold "Up to 10 hippies"

Next, we see how to use Investigative Abilities during Combat, which can give teams extra, shared pools of points during combat. Things like discovering good ambush points, isolating monsters using bait, et cetera.

Tradecraft is covered next, how to avoid being burned. This section is quite thorough, so much so I feel like I know how to be a spy a little better. It also gets into the nasty stuff, torture and truth serums. It also gets into body disposal, including some wonderful advice like make sure to remove the head and fingers to slow down identification if you're in a rush.

The final section of part III is best practices, including the "Innsmouth Rules".
  • Thou Shalt Not Get Caught (You do not have a Get Away With Whatever I Want Badge)
  • Live Your Cover (Never bring up Delta Green)
  • Always Lie, Except to Us (Don't lie to the program or your partners)
  • Intelligence is Your Weapon (Talk to everyone and get as much info as possible)
  • The Minimum Size of a Team is Two (The enemy can kill and replace you, mind control you, or erase you. Having a partner makes that harder)
  • Don't Kick In The Door (That's where the guns are going to be pointed, make your own way in)
  • Don't Wait For The Whites Of Their Eyes (Surprise is your only advantage, shoot first and shoot often)
  • A Successful Retreat Is A Victory (It's better to retreat then lose a whole team)
  • Trust Your Gut
I should note the last time I played Delta Green our team failed 4, 6, 7, and 8 and the entire team was burned alive by the ghost of a Deep One mind controlling a whole town.

EVERYTHING AFTER THIS IS SPOILERS
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Part IV: Handlers Eyes Only
This segment I'm going to cover vaguely. It gives backstory from Delta Green's founding to the game's "Present Day", including the current executive committee. It then talks about Delta Green's opposition within the government. You know who I'm talking about.

The opposition also get's a lovely little write up on their agents. Since M has a bigger budget, their agents are the only exception to "Agents win ties" rules for humans, and they have the gear to back it up. This is before they sold out (1970), but the relationship still is strained because of differences of opinion. DG wants to burn all the cult shit, while M... doesn't. It also says if your agents want to merc one of theirs, they better have crossed their Ts and dotted their Is because it will be investigated and they can and will burn you if they smell DG anywhere near the body.

Next up is a timeline, from 1960 to 1970, with both real world and important DG events. This is essentially a plot hooks section, but it works.

Part V: The Unnatural
If you've been wondered why there has been so little talk about the Deep Ones or Cthulhu in this alleged Call of Cthulhu book, it's because it's here. We start with a nice little reassurance that there's a difference between "Skimming" a tome of eldritch lore and actually reading it. However, poring over a Tome may result in Unnatural points. We get a list of tomes that would make Jurgen Leitner proud. Tomes will give Unnatural scores, which lowers the maximum sanity you can have, but they also give investigation points against their subjects or might give Hypergeometry points.

Hypergeometry is magic, and often requires profane rituals. Moving on

Next up, we get a brief history on the hidden world. Conan fans will enjoy the fact Hyperborea is on the list of places. It also gives some advice from creating your own ancient cities and hidden civilizations.

Next up is the unnatural creature rules. Generally, unnatural creatures don't play by them. It can be expected that they'll refresh their skill within 24 hours, and their health recovers at 1d6 per day.

The bestiary goes through the greatest hits of Lovecraft, from the Colour out of Space to Deep Ones, complete with a little side bar on them reminding you that the Fish-Frog Deep Ones aren't the only threat, but also Shark, Crab, Eel, and anything else that makes its home in the ocean. Also, they don't have an upper size limit.

After that, it's make your own monster time because your players will have probably read the books, and who doesn't have some original idea for the uncanny and the unknown.

Next the list of Gods. Cthulhu takes a prominent role, as head priest of the Star Spawn. (Fun Fact, If you want to imagine the size of the creature that the Alert encountered that may or may not be Cthulhu, Sandy Peterson has calculated that the rough guess is about the same ratio as a human to a 28mm mini, being dextrous enough to pick up three sailors in one hand without splattering them and being able to put their eyes over the hull of the Alert while resting in the water).

We move onto oppositional occult organizations: the Cthulhu cult, Karotechia, The Fate, The Cult of Transcendence, et cetera. It also mentions minor cults, like the 11th District Police and the Children of Chorazin.

Part VI: Handler's Handbook
This section gives some advice to the GM on behind the scenes. Generally speaking, Delta Green is fucked, and doesn't know it. You want to keep players on their toes. Be merciless. Humans are the enemy you want to keep your agents pointed at: a monster should be a bomb to drop on players.

Next is a little text insert for interplaying this game with other GUMSHOE games. Nights Black Agents PCs are much stronger, Fear Itself and Trails of Cthulhu PCs are weaker, Esoterrorists are about even (barring occasional Lethality spiking). What the hell are you doing with that Bubblegumshoe book? No. Bad.

Next comes some scenario writing advice. Constructing Cults, Creating Operations, all that jazz. It's generally good advice.

Part VII: Operation Aladdin's Cave
A starting Operation for DG operatives, Aladdin's Cave puts players in Vietnam, trying to recover/destroy an artifact that is also wanted by M. It's a tight adventure, slightly linear, but with a branching path depending on whether the team wants to put it back or bring it into DG custody. Not bad for an intro, although there's a couple TPK possibilities here.

I mean, it's an appropriate DG ending, buried alive in a zombie filled VC tunnel by a crazed 'Nam soldier that they trusted with the detonator.

Conclusion
Fall of Delta Green works for a lot of reasons Trails of Cthulhu does. The idea of setting this game during the Program's heydey rather then the wild west that the original DG book or the post reform era of the current RPG is brilliant. It hits the same beats as the Metal Gear Solid games, combining real world history with the rich fiction that has built up around the Cthulhu mythos. It also doesn't wallow in the details, like some games do, on the difference between an AK and an M-16 or even stuff like counting bullets. That's abstract, it doesn't need to be in the game.

I've always had a soft spot for GUMSHOE for how it works, and this game has cemented my love for the engine. It's just good design, and has enough tools that even if you aren't a fan of Cthulhu, you can make your own mythos with a little creativity.

Definitely would recommend this for any fans of Delta Green.
 
For a while, I've been thinking of running a Delta Green campaign loosely based on Black Spot (or Zone Blanche if you're in Europe). Basic premise is the players are all in the sherriff department in this small town with less than 900 people. It is an odd town where electronics fail, everyone has a secret, and the murder rate is 6 times the national average. The campaign starts with a federal agent (FBI or Marshall, most likely) showing up wondering what the heck is up with all of these murders. Everything spirals out from there as all involved slowly realize how much is WRONG with this town.

Things don't get easier when the delta green friendly fed calls in to the program.
 
My next task should be converting Masks of Nyalathotep from CoC to Trails of Cthulhu to Fall of Delta Green.

There's a lot of work there. Luckily, a mostly complete conversion to Trails of Cthulhu exists here (no Peru prologue) straight from Peregrine Press. There was also a Reddit thread last year that pointed out the major conversion problems here.

What they come to:
  • As MoN takes place in the 20s and FoDG takes place in the 60s, all dates on feelies are going to need to be changed.
  • All locations are going to need to be updated to the 60s versions. Some, like Shang-Hai, probably won't be accessible because their deep in Communist territory.
  • Character travel won't take nearly as long, so the cosmic deadline might need to be shortened.
All in all, it's doable, I just need to hit the library on references.

...I should find a spiral notebook. This might take notes.
 
For a while, I've been thinking of running a Delta Green campaign loosely based on Black Spot (or Zone Blanche if you're in Europe). Basic premise is the players are all in the sherriff department in this small town with less than 900 people. It is an odd town where electronics fail, everyone has a secret, and the murder rate is 6 times the national average. The campaign starts with a federal agent (FBI or Marshall, most likely) showing up wondering what the heck is up with all of these murders. Everything spirals out from there as all involved slowly realize how much is WRONG with this town.

Things don't get easier when the delta green friendly fed calls in to the program.

Like an American version of Uzumaki?
 
Okay, I got a working conversion for the timeline, starting in 1952 with the Bloody Tongue cult's first moves, ending with the Total Solar Eclipse on February 4th 1962, which was also convergence event of the interior 5 planets. (And, about a month after the creation of the Navy SEAL program)

Jackson Elias was a DG asset, after witnessing Operation RATION BELT, where Delta Green fought a vampiric cult that was attempting to release the Father of Maggots, a lesser avatar of Nyarlathotep. He attempted to pass on what he knew of the Carlyle Expedition, however his handler within the agency had "retired" to the Ward just days earlier due to Operation LIBRETTO. The delay cost the academic his life, thus kicking off the plot.

New York shouldn't require that much change. The Chelsea is still around, Harlem is still a black neighborhood, the cops are still corrupt (hyuck), and the death penalty is still a few years away from being banned. A couple of the characters might need to be aged up to have served in Korea that were Great War veterans in the original campaign. US involvement in Vietnam doesn't start until December.

Later portions of the adventure might need adjusted, but the opening should be fine.

Next up is feelies. I may replace Jackson's will with a tape recording. I have an old tape recorder or I can record digitally if it's not working.
 
I was thinking of running a delta green one-shot or two if people are interested. Mostly scenarios I've run at cons. Anyone up for some cosmic terror? If so I'll get a thread started in Roleplaying so we can organize something.
 
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