Delta Green: Lovecraftian Horror & Conspiracy

What brings a party of characters together and what keeps them together? It can often be glossed over for the sake of expediency, but when you sit down and consider a group of two to six strangers saving the world together, or whatever the theme or genre of a game might be.

With Call of Cthulhu in particular it can strain the limits of credibility that, say, a banker, a dilettante, an ex-soldier, and a shop owner are battling the cosmic horrors together, and doubly so if one or several of them should perish and replacement investigators have to be recruited.

That’s where Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, and John Scott Tynes come in with Delta Green.

Originally starting life as a supplementary sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu 5th edition in 1999, Delta Green as a setting casts the characters (called Agents) as members of an illegal conspiracy operating within the US Government which exists to combat and contain unnatural phenomena and keep it from exposure to the public. This immediately and neatly solves all issues pertaining to why the characters do this, and anything surrounding replacement characters: it is literally the job they’re there to do.

More recently, Delta Green has been released as a standalone game by Arc Dream Publishing in 2018, separating itself from Call of Cthulhu as a gameline completely.

The standalone edition, with Detwiller, Tynes, and Glancy working on it as well as Shane Ivey and Greg Stolze, was released as two books; the Agent’s Handbook, which contains all the rules surrounding making characters, the Sanity mechanics, combat, equipment, and information on common Federal Agencies that Agents are often recruited from. The second book, The Handler’s Guide, is intended for Gamesmasters (called the Handler), and contains a broad overview of Delta Green’s operational history and formation, the Unnatural, which is Delta Green’s take on the  Cthulhu Mythos, and guidance for writing campaigns.

Mechanics wise, Delta Green retains the d100 resolution method, and is largely skill based as with regular Call of Cthulhu. Unlike Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green abandoned the Resistance table from older Call of Cthulhu, and went in a different direction to 7th edition with its success levels: it employs a blackjack system. What this means is the player wants to roll as high as possible without going over their target number, whatever it might be. Matched successes (ie, 11, 22, 33, etc) are Criticals, and matched failure are Fumbles. Opposed checks are resolved the same way: the higher number wins. Criticals beat regular successes. While this system has been employed by a few different games by now, like Mothership, Delta Green is the first such instance of it I ever saw, and for my money it’s the most elegant, efficient d100 based resolution method out there, and has become my preferred system of choice. This isn’t a slight on Call of Cthulhu at all, it’s a matter of simple preference.

Additionally, it simplifies some of the characteristics, truncating them down to Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Charisma (changed from Appearance), and drops Size and Education completely. Similarly, the skill list is slightly reduced, with some skills included more militarily themed for the setting, such as SIGINT, and Military Science.

The Sanity mechanics will be familiar to anyone versed in Call of Cthulhu, which runs on a scale from 1 to 99, with Temporary Insanity occurring when a character loses 5 or more Sanity at once. The Sanity mechanics have also been given what I feel is a much needed update, and design influences from Unknown Armies (a game that Detwiller, Ivey, and Stolze worked on previously) are present. Sanity loss is divided into three broad types; Violence, Helplessness and the Unnatural. Characters can adapt to violence and helplessness, by losing Sanity to either type of stimulus three times without going Temporarily Insane, after which they’ll always lose the minimum value to that type of loss, but lose some Charisma when adapting to violence as their empathy suffers, or Power when adapting to helplessness as their sense of drive suffers. Where the unnatural is concerned, there can be no adaptation. Temporary Insanity has been updated as well, from a randomly rolled table of outcomes to one of three possibilities: Flight, Fight, or Freeze, with which outcome likely being decided, or discussed by player and Handler. Indefinite Insanity has been changed into a system of Breaking Points and Disorders; in short, when characters are made, part of establishing Sanity is setting up a character’s Breaking Point: initially, this will be their starting Sanity minus their Power, ie, with a Power of 10, their initial Sanity will be 50, and their Breaking Point 40. Once they lose enough Sanity to hit their Breaking Point, they gain a Disorder (this could be an Addiction, PTSD, Depression, Fugue States, etc), and set their new Breaking Point as their current Sanity minus their current Power. While realism isn’t (and probably shouldn’t be) the focus of a tabletop game, I personally find this method to have more verisimilitude, though your mileage may vary.

Combat is fairly straightforward: Agents have one action with an assumed few meters of movement per turn, and act in order of Dexterity. As the average Agent has about 10-12 HP, and the average firearm does 1d10 damage, this is a high lethality combat game.

One refinement on combat and damage in general that I find to be extremely elegant is Lethality: massive damage, such as from explosives, or the crushing limbs of a titanic horror, isn’t expressed as an ever increasing number of damage dice. Instead, it’s expressed as a percentage. A grenade might be Lethality 15%, for example. When Lethality occurs, percentile dice are rolled, and if the result is equal to or less than the listed Lethality, the target is instantly killed. If the result is higher than the listed Lethality, the sum of both dice in the percentile roll is tallied up and taken as damage instead, which is a fairly high chance of killing a character outright, anyway. Of course, some entities otherworldly might be beyond the effects of Lethality, dangerous as they are.

Another mechanic of Delta Green I have a lot of appreciation for is Bonds, which are an Agent’s most important relationships. These could be parents, spouses, children, church groups, close co-workers, or similar, and are part of the way by which an Agent defines their humanity. Most characters will have 2-3 Bonds, though some might start with more or less. Each Bond has a rating that starts at the Agent’s Charisma. But how this integrates to the genre is quite clever. When a character loses Sanity they might not want to lose a large value at once, or might be close to their Breaking Point. In such situations, the Agent can choose to project the Sanity loss onto their Bond, choosing one of these relationships to suffer part of the loss. 1d4 of the SAN loss will be taken from the Bond’s score instead, and how this deteriorating relationship manifests is up to the player to think about, but the sort of reaction that conspiracy horror implies is likely somewhere on the spectrum of an Agent isolating, becoming secretive, hiding things from their precious relationship. This is about as ludonarratively harmonious as you can hope to be, as Delta Green is as much about how pursuing the defeat of the unnatural is self-destructive as anything else. Though, anecdotally, I’ve often found certain players will instead pick certain of their relationships and refuse to project on them, preferring, for example, to maintain a good marriage as their mind fragments more and more. It’s a recipe for some good roleplay and character development.

Worth commenting on as a corollary to the Bonds mechanic is how Delta Green handles the acquisition of items. Instead of having characters track their money like in many games, or even something abstracted like Credit Rating as a skill  in Call of Cthulhu, there is instead a system of expenses, ranging from Standard though to Extreme. Typically, an Agent will roll their CHAx5 or a skill like Accounting to attempt to requisition items, with a bonus or penalty to the roll based on the rarity of the desired item. But Agents can choose to spend their own money as well, and roll in a similar way to officially requisitioning equipment, but with failures costing them points from close Bonds. Scenes of spouses questioning what the hell the Agent spent $20,000 as they remain tight-lipped basically write themselves.

Without delving too far into the Handler’s guide, as most of it is information that can’t be quickly summarised pertaining to the setting anyway, the way in which Delta Green deals with the Unnatural is worth commenting on. Each individual unnatural entity has its own stat block, as you’d expect, and most have rules specific to them in the form of abilities they can perform, such as a ghoul’s ability to rend and tear. Specificity on individual entities and their capabilities helps differentiate the feel of, say, a hunting horror to a flying polyp. God-like entities are handled in a way that’s arguably the same as handwaving, but then… shouldn’t entities on that scale be treated as such? One of the biggest mistakes any game can make if it wants its gods to be distant, unknowable, and undefeatable is to give them a comprehensible and rigid stat block. Instad, the gods in Delta Green all half, as well as their own abilities, an ability called Fundamental Control, allowing them to manipulate scale, mass, and molecular order at will. Not the kind of thing a smart Agent will want to draw guns on.

Ritual magic, called Hypergeometry in Delta Green, is handled in a not too dissimilar way to Call of Cthulhu, requiring a teacher, a tome, or the intercession of a suitably powerful unnatural entity to access, with each ritual having a complexity rating (Simple, Complex, or Elaborate), with increasingly high levels of time needed to learn the higher up the complexity scale you go. A simple ritual might take a few days to learn, or even a few hours, but an elaborate ritual could take months of study. Much as with Call of Cthulhu though, magic isn’t really meant to fall into the hands of the Agents too much, and is largely a self-immolation when it does, sometimes making the Agent *become* the mission. The cost of every ritual is a degree of Willpower, some Sanity, and perhaps more for especially esoteric rituals.

All in all, Delta Green is a phenomenal game that’s well-earned all of the accolades that have been heaped on to it over the years. The quality of writing and presentation in all Delta Green products has been consistently high and worth the cost of entry.

The Agent’s Handbook and Handler’s Guide are available in PDF through DriveThruRPG for approximately £16 and £24 respectively, though if you wanted to test drive the precepts of the system before spending anything on it, Arc Dream has you covered: a free starter rulebook, called Need To Know, is also available here at DriveThruRPG.