YOU ARE THE APOCALYPSE
Born of the U.S. government’s 1928 raid on the degenerate coastal town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, the covert agency known as Delta Green opposes the forces of darkness with honor but without glory. Delta Green agents fight to save humanity from unnatural horrors—often at a shattering personal cost.
In Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the players are those agents. They fight to keep terrors from beyond space and time from infecting the world and claiming human lives and sanity. The Handler is the game moderator who creates and interprets their world, presents the unnatural horror that they investigate, and describes the awful aftermath of their sacrifices.
WELCOME TO DELTA GREEN
People come to Delta Green for many different reasons. They may like to weave a story, fashion a mystery, or devise some new horror. Whatever the reasons, in the end, that creation is never simple. When all the layers of the investigation are pulled back, more often than not, what is revealed is the stark nothingness of infinity.
Consider this overview a mandate.
Delta Green is about the end of humanity.
You may make it seem to be about other things from time to time. About family. About life. About the things that make us human. It has all these things, but that’s not what it’s about.
It lies.
Delta Green is about three people killed in a stand-off in the Mojave desert, bang, bang, bang, and a box that contained a single ingot of unknown metal labeled “SURFACE SAMPLE BUCKET 1.”
Delta Green is about piecing together the string of NASA suicides and realizing that ER10911 is on a collision course with the Earth in 19 months. That your mother and father and sister and her sons have 19 months to live. That the world will be scraped clean by fire...unless....
Delta Green is about an agent, broken and mad with her screaming two-year-old strapped in the car seat, speeding away from a burning house where her husband’s corpse cooks—because it wasn’t her husband, it was something else.
Delta Green is not about love.
Delta Green is not about safety.
Delta Green is not about reason.
Delta Green is about humanity’s true place in the universe.
And that place is nowhere. We are ticks boiling on a mote in a sea of nothing, and we will no more take to the stars than we will cure the ills that destroy us. Our existence is a clock winding down. When the hour strikes, entities with true consequence will sweep us away with an unconscious flick, scouring the globe clean for their limitless—infinite—plans.
Delta Green is not about stats or weapons or killing the beast. Delta Green is about lying to your players until their Agents realize the truth. That humanity was not the first and will not be the last denizen of this world. That the Earth is haunted, and we are not even the ghosts. We are merely their shadows.
Welcome.
CONTRIBUTOR: DENNIS DETWILLER
Since the 1990's, I've produced writing, art, layout and design material for lots of games, video games, card games, comic books, books and more. You may know my work from the [PROTOTYPE] video game series, from DeathSpank!, or Necropolis, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Rooftop Run. Or from Magic: The Gathering, or any of my independent projects launched under Arc Dream Publishing.
But my focus here is Delta Green.
It's one of the first things I ever worked on, it's one of the finest things I've ever worked on, and it's one of my most beloved properties, even today. Both the core book and the sequel Delta Green: Countdown remain among the highest rated RPG products on RPGnet for years. With Delta Green, we've won fifteen Ennies and four Origins awards for gaming excellence.
Tons of people still pitch in and show up when we roll something out for Delta Green, and for that, I'm extremely grateful and lucky, but I want to do more. Delta Green is one of those rare concepts for which I never run out of ideas. I could write and draw for Delta Green indefinitely and always feel fulfilled. And that's what I want to do. Every dollar here is one step closer to that.
Keep the conspiracy alive!
CONTRIBUTOR: SHANE IVEY
Sometime in 1990 or 1991, still in college, I discovered The Unspeakable Oath issue 3 in a hobby shop. Sometime in 1992, I received The Unspeakable Oath issue 7 and had the misfortune to read its keystone scenario, "Convergence," the first appearance of Delta Green. I was planning to go to law school and hoped to become a federal agent. Delta Green used the U.S. federal government as a lens for the cosmic horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. Had they written it just for me?
I am not a federal agent. Or a lawyer. I run Arc Dream Publishing. I publish Delta Green. I cowrote Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and have won many awards for it. I have written many Delta Green scenarios and am constantly working on new Delta Green books. I do not think that I can escape. I write other things from time to time: a new edition of Godlike, a Western game called Brimstone about the terrors of the American frontier, an RPG adaptation of The Black Company—all slowly cohere. I wrote a few D&D scenarios set in an Iron Age antiquity. I published Wild Talents, Monsters and Other Childish Things, Puppetland, and Better Angels. I resurrected The Unspeakable Oath for a while and shambled it about, a gruesome revenant. Over the years I worked in magazines, newspapers, and board games. But mostly I publish and write for Delta Green. They did not write it just for me. Perhaps I was written just for it. I do not think I can escape.
CONTRIBUTOR: CALEB STOKES
I came to Delta Green both early and late. I didn't even start playing TTRPGs until my late twenties, not to mention writing and recording them. Once I broke the seal, Delta Green was the third RPG I ever played, in the third week of my TTRPG experience. Put mildly, the game left an impression.
Afterwards, I became a frequent contributor at Ross Payton’s Role Playing Public Radio, my introduction to gaming and one of the foundational actual-play podcasts. It was the popularity of these APs that prompted the publication of my first written scenarios, one of which was Delta Green's Lover in the Ice. I've since gotten in so deep that I run my own RPG publishing company, Hebanon Games.
I now have over a decade of game design experience creating horror games. I designed and published the game line Red Markets. I've also freelanced for companies like Atomic Overmind Press and Posthuman Studios. I've edited, and posted thousands of hours of gaming content, recording nearly every hour I've ever spent playing RPGs.
But Delta Green always calls me back. It was the AP campaign of God's Teeth that saw that book published, and I've been writing books and recording audio for Arc Dream ever since. I tell myself all sorts of stories about how Dead Channels came to be – a humble accident, a shrewd business decision, a fated destiny – but my post-hoc rationalizations change by the day. The only thing I know for certain is that, compared to all the games I've tried since, Delta Green sunk it's hooks into me. Deeper than anything else.