Delta Green
Now we're on to the question: "What does Delta Green want from you?" Nothing short of the rest of your life. Delta Green wants you to pick up where I left off: doing what I've been doing for the last ten years. I've falsified official reports. Lied under oath. Planted evidence. Stolen and destroyed evidence. Stolen and destroyed federal property. Run illegal wiretaps. Abused the power and authority of my office. Gone AWOL. Committed arson, burglary, grand larceny, aggravated assault, battery, and killed. On three of those occasions, what I did was nothing short of cold-blooded murder. And all in the name of doing the jobs nobody else can or will.
Overview
Delta Green is a horror RPG based of off the Call of Cthulhu system. DG shares the Lovecraftian mythos with CoC, but most strongly differs in that it is specifically in modern times (where CoC was typically set in the jazz era).
Player Characters tend to be part of or somehow affiliated with government executive branch agencies (most typically law-enforcement or military) recruited into an officially disbanded clandestine group whose purposes was to investigate and neutralize occult and alien threats. DG is currently organized in a cell structure with 26 cells with three operators active at any one time.
So...basically, a bunch of the 'federales' grouped up to make a highly illegal terrorist organization to fuck up aliens and occultists.
Did I mention that there's a legit government agency called Majestic 12 who are in bed with what they think are aliens? So yeah, terrorists.
Basics
Crunch
Like the system that it is based on, Delta Green is based on the Call of Cthulhu ruleset, with some unique mechanics:
- Lethality rating: Basically, no weapon or attack deals more than 2d10 damage. However, weapons such as cruise missiles have a "lethality rating" of between 10 and 90 percent. If that 2d10/d100 roll is less than the lethality rating, the targeted enemy dies instantly. This saves you from rolling a bucketful of dice to determine exactly how hard you hit that Dark Young with a jury-rigged antitank mine.
- Bonds: Each Agent gets a number of Bonds which depends on their background. Bonds are basically friendships or relationships with NPCs (and potentially PCs) that act as both a character-expanding tool for players and a sanity-regulation mechanic.
- When things go terribly wrong on Nights at the Opera, there is a chance that Agents begin to develop bonds with each other (at the expense of already-existing ones).
- When Agents lose SAN or go temporarily insane, they can spend 1d4 from both Willpower and any Bond to try to repress the madness ("I'm doing this for my kids/wife/friend!"). During between-mission vignettes, the results from this coping mechanism should be played out.
- Some skills and mechanics, like Spot Hidden and Education, have been rolled into other ones.
Fluff
- PCs are generally more capable at combat; but many many things in the DG universe will hand Agents their ass.
- PCs, to a certain extent, can also call upon the resources/influence of the organization they work for
- Depending on their creativity and ability to come up with "mundane" reasons (you've got to be hella good to divert a B-52 wing and convince them that the town filled with worshipers of the Deep Ones is just a mock city they're supposed to make practice bombing runs on.)
- As a PC typically won't have official sanction, this typically involves a lot of lies, inventing evidence, intimidation, and other various tactics to make sure Deputy Fife doesn't make any calls to check your credentials.
- The last point depends on what era you're working in as well.
The Setting
Essentially, the modern world, but where Cthulhu definitely dreams (as opposed to ours where it's only a distinct possibility). Add into that a boat load of secret cults, secret societies, secret governmental agencies, eldritch abominations, a lot of insanity, and you're almost there.
Oh yeah, notice how I didn't say anything about aliens? Yeah, so those "aliens" Majestic-12 are working with, they're just fungoid constructs by one of the many eldritch abominations floating around who are doing nasty things to humans for their own purposes.
If you're Handling a Delta Green game, there are three main eras they can be set in:
The Classic Era (1928-1969)
This is the era where Delta Green is an official organization within the U.S. government, founded after information about the Innsmouth raid makes its way to the Department of Naval Intelligence. Sadly not too many scenarios are set in this era (perhaps due to the overlap with Call of Cthulhu.)
The Cowboy Era (1970-2001)
After the disastrous OBSIDIAN raid, the powers that be disbanded Delta Green. From 1970 to 1994, the organization worked as a "good ol' boys" model, with old agents occasionally getting together to deal with issues. In 1994, former agent Lt. Gen. Reginald Fairfield was assassinated by MJ-12 NRO Delta operatives, which provided the influence to Professor Joseph Camp (Agent ALPHONSE) to create the cell structure that existed from 1994 to 2002.
This is known as the "Cowboy Era" because it basically consists of old Delta Green veterans and new recruits fighting the Mythos without any sort of official sanction.
The New Era (2001-present)
After the September 11 attacks on New York City, the U.S. intelligence community began a major reorganization which saw MJ-12 (which had been struggling to contact the Greys for some time) disgraced and eventually taken over in a coup by Delta Green (detailed in the novel Through a Glass, Darkly.) However, some old-school agents refused to "come in from the cold," so both Program (official) and Group (unofficial) games are possible in this era.
Once the new rulebook comes out, we'll know more.
Recent Happenings
After a 6 year drought of new rulebooks, Delta Green was relaunched with a highly-successful Kickstarter in late 2015. A new rulebook came out in spring 2016, together with sourcebooks detailing everything from PISCES to the eventual fate of the Fate (apparently Alzis vanished and DG took back New York City; according to Adam Scott Glancy at Gencon 2016 "We're going to basically put The Fate in a knife-fight in the dark").
The game will feature a new custom ruleset, designed to smooth over some of the things CoC never did particularly well (*cough* combat *cough*) and highlight setting themes (you can keep yourself sane by staying connected to things that matter personally, but of course the nature of DG work eats away at these relationships).
The setting is also significantly revised. Majestic 12 is no longer active, having at last been destroyed by Delta Green (although plenty of its splinter groups and factions are still embedded throughout the US government). Read the novel "Through a Glass, Darkly" to get an idea of how this went down. Delta Green has been brought back into the government fold, given a budget and official standing, and now uses the War on Terror as a cover for its battles with the mythos (of course, lots of the old guard are utterly distrustful of the government and refuse to come in from the cold). The result is there are currently two "Delta Green" organizations: the Group (the illegal conspiracy) and the Program (the legal government program.) All in all, it sounds pretty awesome. Once the full rulebook comes out, things will be more clear.
The Big Players
Delta Green
As with any clandestine organization, their history is all kinds of jacked up. DG has existed in some capacity or another since 1928 as a response to the crazy crap found during a raid on a Deep One Cult located at Innsmouth, MA. It is interesting to note that the raid on Innsmouth ended with everything even remotely suspicious being thoroughly dynamited, which remains Delta Green SOP to this day. They changed names a few times and were handed around to various parts of government for a while before they finally coalesced as "Delta Green" which wasn't so much a name for them, but for the classification and access level required to actually know anything about them; however it eventually came to serve as a name, official or not.
During their later years as an official organization, they acted without much of a command structure with people who were in the know just calling each other up anytime they ran across something DG should handle, and then they handled it with little to no oversight. When they screwed up royally in Cambodia during a 1969 raid that resulted in most of the people who participated dying, they finally gave the likes of Majestic 12 and other political enemies an excuse to finally disband them.
This didn't sit well with some portions of DG who quietly got together and said we're going to keep at it. What little oversight and control there was before no longer existed, and as a result many DG operatives executed their self-appointed duties with extreme prejudice. Eventually, one of the DG leaders started looking into MJ-12, pissed them off to the point where they sent their own operatives, DELTA, to assassinate him. This then lead to the decision to reorganize DG into the cell structure used to this day.
Majestic 12
Majestic 12, or MJ-12, was formed in response to the highly publicized Roswell Incident where an alien craft crashed into the deserts of New Mexico. Beyond taking charge of the craft, bodies, and survivor, MJ-12 was responsible for covering the incident up and keeping knowledge of aliens from coming to the attention of the public. It was originally formed with some former members of Delta Green who did not necessarily agree with DG's policy of just destroying everything they came across, wanting to keep some for study and possible use against the USA's enemies. For the most part, DG and MJ-12's responsibilities did not seem to overlap, but from the beginning there was a basic and divisive difference in philosophies.
Over time, MJ-12 managed to finally ended up making contact with what it thought were alien life forms and agreed to cover up their activities on earth in exchange for technology which they slowly filter into the market (making themselves rich) and a vague promise on the part of the Greys (the "aliens") to be put in touch with other intelligent species throughout the galaxy.
The 12 of MJ-12 comes from the 12 members of the steering/oversight committee that runs all of the projects and subprojects that fall in MJ-12's jurisdiction. Each of the 12 members is head of a specific project that relates to either interaction with the Grays, covering up the Grays' activities on earth, and/or exploiting the technological revelations.
Over time, this relationship with the Greys has soured for some members of MJ-12, but they cooperate out of fear of the superior technology that humanity is essentially defenseless against (a nuclear weapon is unable to scratch the material they use to make the hulls of their craft). Other members are blinded by the technological opportunities and opportunities for personal gain.
As MJ-12 is a proper black governmental agency, they have nigh on unlimited access to various resources, be they the finest minds, money, research facilities, etc. They do maintain their own group of operators whose primary task is to use techniques first developed in the CIA's MK-ULTRA and further refined with the "alien" technology and practice to cover up any activity of the Greys. While strongly preferring non-violent means (which are generally less complicated to implement) they can call into play highly capable combat units.
MJ-12 is aware of DG's continued activities, but mostly does not fully consider them a threat. Some members of MJ-12 see DG as a possible way to strike at their enemies within MJ-12 or even possibly the Greys themselves.
The Greys
The Greys are the supposedly alien race who are exploiting the government of the United States of America. They are actually essentially puppets of the Mi-go (an extension of Yuggoth). Long story short, the Mi-go know that all hell is about to break loose because the foretold end times are just around the corner. Among other things, they have a goal to learn everything they can before the get they hell away from the earth (to where remains a question).
To these ends, they had to speed up the research they were doing on humans, but wanted to do such in a way that wouldn't get every government in the world looking for them to kill them. So, they made up the Greys who they control via a strange sort of telepathy and set things up in such a way that they now have the most powerful government on the planet cleaning up their messes willingly for a few trinkets.
Karotechia
Imagine lichs. Make them Nazis. Oh, and there's just three of them, but they've got a lot of underlings. Stick them in South America. You've now got the Karotechia. One has to stay in a fridge, one is a merc who just enjoys being a merc, and one thinks the ghost of Hitler is telling him to start up the 'Fourth Reich', but this time base it off of occultism. The last one is crazy as fuck and the other two are scared to death of him, so they play along.
Deep Ones
Fish people that can breed with humans to make strange hybrids that look human until a certain age when they change and turn into fish people and go off into the water to live with the greater Deep Ones. Ceremonies of worship are orgies of violence and well, orgies. Due to shenanigans by Delta Green, namely setting up pillboxes and landmines, then casting Call Deep Ones, creating a scene that makes the D-Day landings look like a drunken scuffle in the pub car pack, said spell no longer works.
The Cult of Transcendence
Essentially this setting's Illuminati. They started as an occult conspiracy dedicated to secretly ruling the world through magic. This failed repeatedly, so they reorganized as a dedicated cult of Nyarlathotep (who oversees the cult personally). They're run from an extra-dimensional mansion that's kind of located in Switzerland. They also maintain various front organizations throughout the world, secretly influencing mankind to bring about the return of Cthulhu. As people progress up the cult's ladder, they're initiated into more and more of its mysteries, gradually becoming less human, until they turn into generic tentacle monsters. Through its various front organizations, the cult has access to everything from stolen Yithian technology to a massive empire of nightmares carved out of the Earth's Dreamlands. Possibly the most dangerous and evil organization in the DG world.
PISCES
Delta Green's British counterpart, the Paranormal Intelligence Section for Counter-intelligence, Espionage, and Sabotage. It was originally founded during the First World War as MI-13, where they dabbled in psychic talents and ESP, but suffered a severe setback in 1925 when they not only lost most of their budget to a cash-strapped British government but many of their "talents" to a bizarre series of mental collapses, courtesy of a partially awakened Cthulhu.
MI-13's big break came during the Second World War, when the current head, Major David Cornwall, placed a sealed premonition by one of their remaining "talents" as to how the defense of France would go in the hands of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Opened by the latter the day after the evacuation of Dunkirk, the shockingly accurate prediction convinced Churchill that Cornwall and MI-13 were the real deal. Thus PISCES was born, and immediately began work to undermine the Karotechia, who were working feverishly to use supernatural forces to aid the Nazi government. The first joint Delta Green/PISCES operation occurred in 1942, when agents (with the aid of French partisans) were able to sabotage the Karotechia's negotiations with the Deep Ones. Though the two agencies were nominally allies, their radically difference philosophies led to distrust. By the 1960s, Delta Green and Pisces no longer worked together-which turns out to be very fortunate for the former.
In a 1968 raid on the English town of Goatswood, several PISCES agents were infested by the cerebral parasites known as the Shan. Over the next twenty years, the Shan gradually took over the entire network, placing an infested member in charge of PISCES in 1988. Though they only currently control about ten percent of PISCES personnel, it's the ten percent needed to direct the entire organization. Though they still continue counter-Mythos ops, it is for the security of the Shan's hidden temple and their eventual goal of leaving Earth rather than for the safety of England.
GRU SV-8
The Russian counter-paranormal agency, founded after the Red Army found ghoul cults feeding on the corpses of the Russian Civil War. During the Great Patriotic War, they clashed many times with Smersh, the NKVD's paranormal section, as well as destroying Karotechia projects to resurrect the dead. After the war, engaged in a mad scramble to destroy Karotechia information as Smersh tried to collect it. Later released Delta Green operatives who had been captured by the Spetsnaz to destroy Stalin's life-extension projects, and destroyed Smersh in a bloody coup. Since then, have tried to steal things from MJ-12.
Saucer Watch
A UFO research group that actually has some respectability by both being well funded (by some rich heiress who thinks she was abducted) and actually seriously researching reports of UFO activity, with emphasis on the world 'research'. They sometimes stumble on things MJ-12 would rather they didn't.
The Fate
Occultists based in NYC. The Fate are a group of very powerful magic users who contract out to criminal organizations. To those criminal organizations, they are known as The Network (the arm that function as a sort of public face for The Fate). Mostly they do such to have access to professional thieves and other less than legal vectors for acquiring specialty items for their rituals, information and the like. Led by a dude named Stephen Alzis who is rumored to actually be Nyarlathotep. They have a lot of connection as well to a night club in NYC named Club Apocalypse.
Other various cults
At any point some other Cthulhu lore cult (such as the Cult of the Yellow Sign) may pop up and become a headache 'someone' had better deal with. All of the various eldritch powers will most likely make some sort of showing before the final curtain falls for some purpose, overt or not. I mention the cults and not the powers themselves, because mostly the PC interactions will be with the cults...well, anyone sane would hope this to be the case...