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Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game

Created by Arc Dream Publishing

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:

The cloud waves break (as do shipping rates)
over 8 years ago – Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 07:46:35 PM

This morning we passed $180K. That makes Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes a reality. Your players will thank you, but their Agents never will.

Investigation and Aftermath

Warning: This brief excerpt reveals a spoiler for the way player-characters fit into this campaign.

Impossible Landscapes features a unique structure. Each player portrays a single agent in two time frames simultaneously: in THE INVESTIGATION, they are agents of Delta Green; in THE AFTERMATH, they are those same agents, sometime later, committed as inmates in a mental hospital seemingly controlled by Delta Green.

They play both timeframes, jumping back and forth at the Handler's whim, one affecting the other. Somewhere between these two points is the unresolved mystery of the campaign, the things they did to end up in the mental hospital, and the horror of connecting all the dots.

This structure is challenging, but it pays huge dividends in increasing the terror players feel, and reinforces the surreal horror that is the King In Yellow.

—Dennis Detwiller, Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes, © 2015

Good news for the UK and Canada

We've worked out arrangements with fulfillment services to reduce delivery costs sharply to backers in Canada and the UK. We have updated the "International Shipping" table on the main project page accordingly. See it here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/f46jzh6iai7pmz1/International%20Shipping.jpg?dl=0

In a nutshell: The built-in shipping and handling cost for each physical book now accounts for most of the delivery costs for the UK and Canada. You'll only need to add a small amount to get each book.

Inspiration for your games

You might have heard us encourage you to run Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and talk about it everywhere in flagrant violation of secrecy protocols. Here are a few recent links to give you ideas.

Keep Fighting

We have two weeks left. If we keep adding backers we can close in on two more massive Delta Green books: Control Group, a campaign of starter scenarios by Greg Stolze, and Deep State, a detailed look at the secret government programs surrounding Delta Green and the diaspora of the Majestic-12 Special Studies Project. If those are funded in this project, Control Group goes into playtesting in January and goes to press in June, and Deep State goes to press in September. Help us make them happen. Keep up the momentum. Keep fighting.

***

Evil never dies. Darkness never retreats. In the cracks and the crevices of our society there are monsters undreamed of by the rank and file of humanity. I’ve been there. I’ve seen them. They exist in the spaces between things, in the folds of existence where we can’t find them. Sometimes they cross over, sometimes they manifest, and all Hell breaks loose. Only this is not Hell, nor Heaven. This is like nothing anyone has ever understood. This is pure evil, pure destruction. This is the apocalypse, and I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail since 1961. They made me retire in 1970 when Cambodia blew up in their faces and they blamed us, but I didn’t stop then and I’m not stopping now. They think I gave it all up that day in the Pentagon when they told me the choice–the only choice–I would be allowed. I took it, and then, like most of us, I made the decision to continue the fight. They thought we were washed up.

They know nothing.

—Maj. Gen. Reginald Fairfield, U.S. Army (ret.), Final Report

All rewards unlocked! More coming
over 8 years ago – Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 10:25:31 PM

Shane Ivey here from Arc Dream. Thanks to today's push you've unlocked all the rewards we penciled in for our recruiting drive! We're putting more plans together now, including a few that I personally am going to LOVE if they come together. 

Here are some of the interviews that have gone online in the last few days:

Keep pushing!

I'm getting the last couple of pieces in place to announce updated and much better shipping estimates for the UK and Canada. If all goes well I can announce those tomorrow. 

In the meantime we're less than $3K away from funding Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes. Can we get there before I have time to compose the next update? The answers lie on the cloud-swept shores of Hali.

Delta Green and Carcosa
over 8 years ago – Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 12:07:52 AM

Excerpted from Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes

Delta Green has confronted the manifestations of Carcosa dating back to the 1950s. Records of such encounters were destroyed lest some snippet escape the page and start the infection all over again. Those in command quickly determined that Carcosa and its attendant manifestations appear to be a cancer of human thought, spread through language, speech, text, and pictures. Sources of the infection were purged with brutal efficiency.

Several living agents have dealt with the terror of Carcosa and survived. But the qualities that helped them survive make it difficult to learn from them; they are universally tight-lipped about what they saw and experienced. 

Fighting unnatural horrors is one thing, confronting the roiling insanity that is Carcosa is another. The otherworldly madness and horror spread by the Old Ones is due to their impossible nature and unknowable methods. Carcosa seems to be a deeper, more insidious manifestation of that impossibility. Some agents who would stand firm against an inhuman monstrosity loping at them from the sea could not tolerate a house that seems to bend and warp around them, changing as they observe it. One seems separate from humanity, a monster; the other appears to warp the deepest and most coveted concepts of humanity: thought, ideas, order.

Carcosa is a name given to the slurry of thought and quantum possibility that exists between man and the Great Old Ones. This runoff pulls human thought into a void and fills the space of possibility with thoughts, dreams and ideas. The collapse of the waveform becomes the dance of multiple waveforms. A thousand outcomes become possible or impossible at once.

Similar effects occur in so-called “non-Euclidean” constructions. Some struc-tures left behind by the Old Ones warp spacetime and human perception. This seems to be a fixed effect. Perception shifts depending on location, but rarely seems to “bleed” or “change” beyond that place or artifact. Instead it looks alien and surreal.

Carcosa could be more akin to a feedback loop in reality, a tug of war between an infinite consciousness and a human consciousness both observing a finite reality. Carcosa seems to act and react to human thought, to change and direct itself within human concepts of fear, disorder and chaos. It has catastrophic effects on human sanity.

Attempts to understand Carcosa always fail. Carcosa may appear to become “ordered” for short periods based on agents’ mental fortitude, but this is always a momentary pause in a dance of horrors that swarm the mind. It is like an undertow in the current of thought. At first it seems subtle and easy to resist. But soon the agent is pulled out to sea and realizes the truth. Carcosa envelops human minds like a slug, ingesting and burning them away. All that remains behind are echoes of their thoughts and perceptions, echoes which sometimes last forever.

These powers stand at the tideline between human physics and the roiling world beyond. They are like a parasite of the human mind which consumes and regur-gitates ideas and perceptions, blotting out all reason.

—By Dennis Detwiller, © 2015

Agents and Friendlies

In our social media campaign we're only one retweet away (!) from unlocking another milestone reward, or 5 Facebook shares, or four Google+ followers, or 4 Subreddit subscribers. We might unlock three or four rewards tonight.

Why do we keep pushing you, our backers, to help us spread the word? Because you are the ones people trust! You have far more credibility with your friends and fellow gamers than we strangers ever will. 

So help us spread the word!

Play the game and talk about it. How does it play? You've probably played other Cthulhu Mythos role-playing games. Does the new Delta Green feel any different at the table? Why is it worth backing?

Explore the old books and talk about them. You may be here because something about Delta Green hooked you a long time ago. What was it? What do you look forward to seeing in the new game line? 

Talk about it, encourage newcomers to sign up, and — if you're willing to take this leap of faith — tell them they won't be disappointed.

Delta Green: Impossible Landscapes is less than $6K away. Beyond that we have a complete starter campaign ready for playtesting, a massive sourcebook about the secret government programs surrounding Delta Green, sourcebooks dedicated to World War II and to PISCES, and so much more. 

We want to unlock all these great Delta Green projects, and to do that we need to keep bringing new backers aboard. If you believe in what we're doing and want to see us do even more of it, spread the word!

Thank you for supporting Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. We would not be here without you.

The Mask of Hunaphú, from Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. By Dennis Detwiller, © 2015.
The Mask of Hunaphú, from Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. By Dennis Detwiller, © 2015.

You will see the Yellow Sign
over 8 years ago – Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 07:44:26 PM

Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game hit $170K this morning, which unlocks "I Have Seen the Yellow Sign." That will be a look the challenges of containing the King in Yellow "infection" in the Information Age. It'll be available to all backers soon. 

Our next stretch goal: DELTA GREEN: IMPOSSIBLE LANDSCAPES. A 256-page campaign of scenarios and sourcebook dedicated to Delta Green confronting the King in Yellow. Written by Delta Green co-creator Dennis Detwiller ("Night Floors," "Music from a Darkened Room," Future/Perfect, "Project RAINBOW") with Daniel Harms, Robin D. Laws, and John Scott Tynes. 

It's coming. The shadows lengthen in Carcosa.

Send More Agents

Keep violating Delta Green's secrecy protocols! By sharing Delta Green online you've been unlocking social-media milestones way faster than we can create them. We owe you a host of scenario conversions and audio files. We want to do more, so keep it up. Every new gamer you bring to Delta Green helps us create more books and adventures for it, from Impossible Landscapes to Control Group to Deep State and beyond.

Here's one of those rewards now: "Alphonse's Axioms for Agents," which appeared in The Unspeakable Oath, presented as an in-world email from back in the old days. You can print it out and share with players as a handout if you like.

DOWNLOAD ALPHONSE'S AXIOMS FOR AGENTS HERE.

For Your Consideration

Finally, a few friends of ours have their own Kickstarter projects going. Check them out. 

Be seeing you.

International shipping estimates (and "Kali Ghati" unlocked!)
over 8 years ago – Mon, Oct 12, 2015 at 09:15:46 PM

Since the beginning of this project we've struggled with how to discuss international shipping and handling costs. 

We have been reluctant to give hard numbers because international shipping rates go up frequently. We have been hit hard many times in the past when the amount we had to pay for shipping and handling wound up being thousands of dollars more than we had collected from customers or backers. 

Nevertheless, we've been working nonstop on getting the best possible estimates for international deliveries. 

And here they are!

(I hope they're legible. Kickstarter's compression software plays havoc with text.)

This includes an arrangement with our friends at Editions Sans Detour in France for deliveries to Europe. Most others are through the U.S. Postal Service. We are still talking to people, particularly about U.K. deliveries. If we manage to make arrangements to reduce these estimates further, we will update backers and post the new rates on the project's homepage.

Kali Ghati

We hit $165K, and that unlocks the new playtest draft of the scenario "Kali Ghati" for all backers! We'll send a download link shortly. 

Thank you for supporting Delta Green!