Playing Delta Green

Players come to Delta Green for all kinds of reasons. They’re eager to solve a mystery, kill a villain, or destroy a monster. These outcomes are never simple. Sometimes even seeing the threat in a Delta Green operation is enough to annihilate a group of Agents.

So consider this overview a warning.

Delta Green is about fear.

It may seem to be about other things from time to time. About manipulation. About power. About control. It has all these things, but that’s not what it’s about.

It lies.

Delta Green is about an agent, alone and off the record, breaking into an old woman’s house in Brooklyn because, for a split-second, she cast the shadow of a hunched, monstrous thing with jaws like a jackal.

Delta Green is about two women who pulled off the heist of the Mayan Codex from the American Museum of Natural History—an operation six months in the planning—only to burn it in a pyre of gasoline and wood in an abandoned field, mourning their lost teammates who it drove to madness.

Delta Green is about watching from the Blackhawk jumpseat as something bigger than the forest snatches your strike team’s helicopters from the air like flies.

Delta Green is not about guns.
Delta Green is not about a bug hunt.
Delta Green is not about understanding.
Delta Green is about the end.

The end of everything. Your family, everyone you know, your country, all life on Earth. It’s about the end of everything and your place in it. Because you’ll end, too. That’s what the fear is about. That’s what the game is about.

It’s not about winning and it’s not about advancement and it’s not about the best weapon or the most clever plan. Delta Green is about the end of everything— and how much of it you’ll live to see.

Welcome.

The Fundamentals

The mission sounds simple: Save lives, neutralize unnatural threats, and conceal the threats so they can’t harm anyone again. In practice, it is never that simple. There are many types of Delta Green operations but they all share the following qualities.

Investigation and Uncertainty
Delta Green is a call to action against forces of the unnatural. First, it is an investigation to discover the nature of a threat, searching for clues and interviewing witnesses and victims. If the threat is unnatural, the operation shifts to removing that threat with as little public notice as possible. Just like a real-world intelligence operation, a Delta Green op is fraught with uncertainty. Absolute clarity is never an option, but the mission must be completed.

Suspense and Horror
Approaching the unnatural—forces that defy physics and human comprehension—is never comfortable, especially if you’ve faced it before. You never get used to it. It can’t be understood in the conventional sense. The anticipation of uncovering the rotten core of an operation is both a lure and a poison. The horrors that surround the unnatural are beyond even the most hardened agents. Yet someone must confront them. Physical threats are only half the equation of a Delta Green op. The mental toll of confronting the impossible is real and crippling. Few agents last long.

Violence and Moral Choices
When the world falls away and the moment comes for violence, Delta Green agents can’t afford to hesitate. Emergencies require split-second calls of questionable morality that may haunt agents for the rest of their lives. Sacrificing one innocent life for the survival of humanity might be an easier transaction for some than for others. Sometimes violence is worse than useless because you’re up against something that transcends reality itself. It’s hard to tell the difference until the bullets are flying.

Sanity and Comprehension
Human existence is a struggle for understanding. The unnatural is that which the human brain cannot understand. The unnatural in all its forms is an abyss that consumes people whole, drawing them over the edge into insanity. It’s a trap that will never stop attracting us. Wise agents quickly learn to let understanding go, except for the few facts required to survive.

Keeping Secrets
Even within the pressurized folds of Delta Green there are secrets. Agents must keep operations from their family, their jobs, and, worse, from other agents. There is safety in ignorance. Agents are truly alone in a world that’s not nearly as well understood as the rank and file of humanity believe it to be.

Personal and Professional Consequences
The impact of these secrets can be devastating. Divorce, job loss, lawsuits, criminal prosecution, or worse. You are part of a conspiracy. You will be expected to break every law and personal code to perform the mission and, just as important, to cover it up. There is no quarter taken or given. If you are arrested or humiliated in the media, nobody from the group can help. And if you reveal the group’s secrets, no matter the circumstances, you become the operation.

How the Game is Played

Like Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green is based around a percentile system - Skill and Statistic checks are always made against the relevant value by rolling 1D100. Damage, both physical and mental, is determined by a variety of dice, from a D2 to a D100 or more.

Your Agent in the Game
A player takes the role of a Delta Green Agent and describes how that Agent confronts unnatural horrors. What can your character do in a Delta Green mission? Agents’ abilities are measured with statistics that define broad capabilities, like Strength, Intelligence, or Charisma; and by skills that describe specific training, like Unarmed Combat, History, or Persuade.

The higher the value of a statistic or a skill, the more effective it is. Often simply knowing your Agent has a specific skill tells the person running the game whether the Agent can accomplish a goal. When things are desperate and unpredictable, you roll dice—to see whether your Agent has the Strength to push open a locked door or can Persuade the axe-wielding maniac to let the Agent live.

When things harm your Agent, we measure it in derived attributes: Hit Points, Willpower Points, and Sanity Points.

We also measure the strength of your Agent’s relationships with the most important people in his or her life with Bonds, which keep your Agent sane, but deteriorate as your Agent suffers trauma.

The Handler
One player does not play an Agent but takes the role of the Handler who controls the game. (Handler's Note: That's me, Santouche, hello!) The Handler creates the mystery that the Agents investigate. The Handler takes the role of everyone in the game the Agents meet (called non-player characters or NPCs), describes the situations they find themselves in, and determines if dice are rolled, which dice are rolled, and why. The Handler is the narrator, director, and referee; he or she shapes the world and how the rules work so the players can explore and experience it.

As a player, you describe your Agent’s decisions, choices, and reactions to the fictional world. The Handler is responsible for bringing that world to life, creating the secrets you’re trying to uncover, and ensuring the game’s mood and suspense through a thousand factors that you can’t know or control.

The Handler’s word is law. His or her decisions are final. This style of gaming is falling out of favor with the emergence of "indie games", but in a game about fear, this conception is absolutely critical.