Lovecraftian cosmic terror meets the War on Terror. The award-winning RPG setting comes thundering back in a new Cthulhu Mythos game.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
AMA, S&S, and the Nameless City
almost 7 years ago
– Tue, May 09, 2017 at 08:49:14 PM
Shane Ivey here. In today's update: status report; Ask Us Anything; ChupacabraCon; Sigil & Sign; an excerpt.
Status Report
We're still closing in on the end of the massive manuscript for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, aka the Case Officer's Handbook. We will send its unedited portions to editing next week, and its edited portions to layout the week after that. Somewhere in there, we'll provide the full draft to KS backers who requested the Case Officer's Handbook in their rewards.
I'll be at ChupacabraCon in Round Rock, Texas, this Friday and Saturday. I'll be speaking on panels about gaming and maybe running a little Delta Green. If you're at Chupa, find me and say hi.
Sigil & Sign
Our friends at Cubicle 7 and Make Believe Games are running a Kickstarter for a new kind of Lovecraftian RPG: Sigil & Sign, where you play servants of the Old Ones. Our own Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze are among the contributors. They are well past their core goal and have nearly two more weeks to add stretch goals. Check it out!
Sigil & Sign
A Delta Green Excerpt: Irem and the Nameless City
The legendary, pre-Islamic Arabian city “Irem of the Pillars” appears in the Quran and the Thousand and One Nights, both of which describe its sudden destruction by Allah for the impiety of its inhabitants. Later mythographers located Irem variously in the interior of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Oman. A 1991 expedition identified an Iron Age frankincense trading fort at al-Shisr in Oman as Irem (or “Ubar”) after discovering its eight towers, fallen into a sinkhole some time around 400 CE. Alhazredic legend connects Irem to a prehuman “Nameless City” inhabited by ghostly reptiles, implying that the Adites of Irem somehow destroyed it. Alhazred supposedly composed the first couplet of the Necronomicon (“That is not dead,” etc.) dreaming of the Nameless City while in the ruins of Irem. Given the scale of NRO DELTA and other MAJESTIC operations in Saudi Arabia and Oman in 1990 and 1991 under cover of Gulf War deployments, it is conceivable that MAJESTIC discovered one or both sites. Follow-up operations by Delta Green during the Second Gulf War proved frustratingly indecisive, leading some officers to suspect that former MAJESTIC officials altered previously-collected intelligence in the confusion of the MAJESTIC War.
Prisoner testimony from the 1907 St. Bernard Parish raid places Irem near or at the center of the global Cthulhu cult.
Miskatonic professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee may have entered Irem or the Nameless City in 1911, while under Yithian possession.
The writings of occultist Randolph Carter describe Irem as a city on the border between reality and the Outside, with a mighty hand sculpted on the keystone of its main arch. Carter implies that Yog-Sothoth dwells there.
The 19th Baron Northam mounted an expedition to the Nameless City in 1921 and returned to London a shattered wreck, seemingly decades older.
A 1930 letter by Harry St. John Philby recounts his conversation with an old man in Yemen who had seen Irem in the al-Dahna desert in central Saudi Arabia, and worshiped there at underground shrines of Nug and Yeb. Philby himself mounted an expedition into the Rub’ al-Khali in 1932, and insisted that the Wabar meteor crater represented the remains of Irem. Philby may have been trying to throw later explorers off the scent of the true Irem.
Philby’s son Kim may have compromised a PISCES mission to the Wabar/Irem site (Operation CALDERA) in 1948.
Stephen Alzis once mentioned, on tape, that his birthplace was a “city of pillars,” though, when pressed, he either could not or would not recall the name.
Delta Green does not know whether Irem and the Nameless City are the same place, two separate dimensional extensions overlapping in one geographical locus, or two different haunted Arabian ruins. The Rub’ al-Khali desert could easily conceal more than one such site.
Hypergeometry: Feeding the Hunger
almost 7 years ago
– Thu, May 04, 2017 at 12:00:53 PM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Why Agents can't have nice things
about 7 years ago
– Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 11:57:34 PM
I posted this note on my personal Facebook feed a few days ago. It was a throwaway post for friends, not part of the book or anything. But it proved popular. If you didn't already read it there, maybe you'll enjoy it here.
"Some #DeltaGreen players demand to know why their Agents don't get more help and resources. The Program is official now, right? Isn't it swimming in money and authority? I want a gunship and satellite coverage and a SWAT team on standby!
"Why not? Because every request like that involves another dozen or hundred people in your operation—and all their coworkers and families when shit inevitably goes sideways—and your operation is SUPPOSED to be covert.
"Here's a true story [from Top Secret America, by Arkin and Priest]. Case officers probably tell each other stories like this around the campfire.
"In the years just after 9/11, the Department of Defense launched thousands of classified counterterrorism programs. Special-access programs, the purposes of which were considered deadly secrets. Just meaningless code-names on a list. Impossible to figure out.
"Except: The DoD contracted out to get the work done, and the contractors—all carefully vetted for Top Secret security clearances—needed highly skilled employees. The contractors' HR reps posted job openings on sites like Monster.com, like always. To make sure they got the right people, they would post announcements like 'Senior Analytic Support Specialist based in Columbia, Maryland, to work on the following projects: ANCHORY, OCTAVE, PINWALE, ARCVIEW,' and so on.
"Yeah. Anyone interested in cracking open secrets immediately can discern what PINWALE, ANCHORY, and so on involve, and where the work gets done. Wait, there were another five job listings for Project ANCHORY? I wonder what those new details will tell us? You think we can submit a bogus job application and get a call from the subcontractor to fill in the blanks?
"No Wikileaks, no Manning, no Snowden, no hacking. Just a contractor with a job to fill.
"So, no, your Agents don't get awesome toys and support. You don't get lawyers and licenses to kill. You don't get permission or immunity. You get to save lives, and if you get caught you get to take the fall. That's it. If you want to blame somebody, blame America. Because America sucks at keeping secrets. That's why we love it so."
—Shane Ivey
Investigative background preferred; comprehensive life insurance recommended.
Update: Case Officer's Handbook
I'm sorry to say we still don't have a firm release date, but it's still getting closer, day by day.
For the last couple of weeks, Dennis and I have been focusing mainly on the "Entities" chapter, tightening up and consolidating material by other authors and filling in gaps here and there. It is, no surprise, a lot of work. We're not just revisiting stat blocks found in prior Cthulhu Mythos RPGs. We're creating entities from scratch, working from the primary sources: mainly Lovecraft, plus Campbell and Wilson for creations like the Shan and the Lloigor.
We took the same approach to rituals and psychic powers in the Hypergeometry chapter, and to the Great Old Ones in their chapter. These versions of the game's monsters and spells come from the sources that best fit Delta Green's tone and themes, interpreted so they do what we like in play. We hope that makes many of them strange and surprising—even before the Handler takes our advice to change things up so the players never know exactly what's going on.
Here's one threat from the manuscript. Whatever your Agents have been up to, they probably have it coming.
Ye Liveliest Awfulness
“It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.” —H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The dead may be returned to life with the ritual known as Raise from Essential Saltes. But if a corpse has been so destroyed or eaten away as to be incomplete, what returns is a grotesque, immortal monstrosity that one witness called “Nothing butt ye liveliest Awfulness.”
The awfulness is essentially human in structure but horribly malformed and misshapen. It is darkly discolored, perhaps thanks to the infusion of the stuff of Outside powers that were invoked to give it life. Some say its hideous proportions are eerily reminiscent of those powers and the dimensions where they lurk.
Long before the awfulness can be seen, its nauseating stench can be smelled and its unnerving voice can be heard: dismal moanings, mindless whines, yelps and gibberings. The awfulness lurches and flops clumsily across the ground, or flings itself in spasmodic leaps, reaching with twisted limbs.
The awfulness may be returned to ash in the same manner as anyone resurrected in the Raise from Essential Saltes ritual. Cruel sorcerers have been rumored to keep these remnants imprisoned as convenient victims for ritual sacrifice. Whether an awfulness is human enough for that purpose is up to the Handler.
STR 26, CON 20, DEX 10, INT 4, POW 6 HP 23, WP 6
ARMOR: See UNFORMED.
SKILLS: Alertness 80%, Athletics 50%.
ATTACKS: Grapple 55%; see RAVENOUS.
AGELESS: The awfulness suffers no ill effects from aging. Presumably it must feed, but some have been known to sit in torpor for years—or centuries, or millennia, or eons; who can say?—with no apparent harm.
RAVENOUS: In any turn after it has a victim pinned in its flailing limbs, the awfulness can tear with its ghastly teeth and suck down flesh and blood, inflicting 2D6 damage. If the awfulness has taken damage, it heals 1 HP for each HP that the victim loses to its feeding.
RAW POWER: The awfulness’ STR test or CON test succeeds on any roll except 100, and is a critical success on matching dice or any roll of 26 or lower for STR, or 20 or lower for CON.
UNFORMED: Slippery and scrabbling, not wholly related to any natural form of life,
the awfulness is difficult to destroy. Any attack against it inflicts only 1 HP damage, except for fire, hypergeometry, or a weapon with Lethality of 20% or more.
SAN LOSS: 1/1D10.
Expanded Briefing Documents
about 7 years ago
– Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 11:04:59 PM
I have reorganized and expanded the Delta Green Briefing Documents. It includes new tools like a "How Did You Get to Delta Green?" page (with a one-roll Incursion Generator), sample professions for Agents and Specialists of "the Program," and a detailed "Personal Pursuits" page with the most essential Home options for easy reference. Download the Briefing Documents here.
The Program Needs You
about 7 years ago
– Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 01:28:56 AM
Excerpted from Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game:
The Security Studies Group. Yellow Combine. Petrel Hill. Threshold Curve. Silver See. The official name has changed eighteen times since 2002. Every time it changes, the paper trail leading to its true activities becomes more muddled. With each change, a new, Top Secret special-access program grants continuing clearance to activities and intelligence that no American employee can confess or confirm.
Insiders call it “the Program.” Its headquarters—and its carefully compartmentalized laboratories, hangars, and personnel scattered throughout the government and private sector—allow it the pretense of legitimacy. But the Program’s leaders long ago determined that its work is too important to be restricted by the Constitution. The Program, for all its access and influence, is as criminal an enterprise as all the conspiracies and blacker-than-black military projects that came before it.
The Program’s people are warned never to let outsiders hear its true name: Delta Green.
Officially, the Program (whatever its current name) is dedicated to the acquisition and study of foreign technology. The documents that authorize it say nothing about the unnatural, or about the explicit criminality at the Program’s heart. The Program’s true purpose is stated goes back to Delta Green’s founding in 1942:
To gather intelligence on unnatural phenomena.
To protect the citizens of the United States from threats originating with unnatural phenomena.
To maintain the security of the United States against unnatural threats.
Only the means and methods have changed. At least, that’s what the Program’s leaders tell themselves. Some agents might hold lingering doubts about how their superiors are executing that mission. They may especially wonder about one essential, never-answered question: “In the long run, are we only making the problem worse?”
Gen Con Handlers and LARP Assistants
Gen Con is the biggest con of the year for us, and we love organizing lots of games. The deadline for submitting events is this Sunday. We need:
GMs to run Delta Green. (Or any of our games, for that matter!) Run any scenario you like, as long as it fits the 4-hour convention game slot. Or if you want to run something longer, go for it. If you need inspiration, review all the resources we've created for GMs.
Assistants and NPCs for the Delta Green LARP. Our old colleague Aaron Vanek is running this event, which will take players outside Gen Con facilities to confront unnatural terrors and deadly betrayal. The LARP will run three times: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from 6pm to midnight. The more helpers we get, the more fun it will be.
Whether you run tabletop games or help with the LARP, you'll get Delta Green souvenirs (lapel pin, patch, T-shirt, challenge coin, even a raid jacket) and "store credit" at the Arc Dream booth. You get a free Gen Con badge if you run enough games.
