#delta green the conspiracy

[agentgrange]

There's a section in Delta Green: The Conspiracy where they offhandedly say that the Simba rebels in the Congo were going to do a Karotechia-style ritual to rip the world apart and America had to help the fucking Belgians put them down to stop it from happening. I low-key felt nauseous after reading it. ArcDream writes some of the best scenarios I've read for Call of Cthulhu, but some of their shit is grossly ignorant, and it stands out so much next to any of their good writing.

That reference seems to be offhandedly mentioning Operation Kurtz from Fall of Delta Green. I think it does an ever so slightly better job in Fall of Delta Green at establishing the context behind the operation than just "lol communists unleashed a death god and the Belgians are the good guys."

Of course Fall of Delta Green fails to mention that those 'European mercenaries out for revenge" historically almost certainly would have been--

In fact to be honest both versions of Delta Green make zero mention of Operation Paperclip and seem insist that Delta Green would have only ever fought Nazis. Only The Conspiracy though makes a point of stressing how Delta Green works with Mossad to fight the Karotechia working for those *damn* Nassarists in the "Arab-Israeli Wars." (They use the word "Arab" and "jihad" several times but the words "Palestinian" and "intifadah" are never used once.)

Then again what do you expect from the same book that gives us such hits as "the anti-fascists in the global south were stupid to accept Soviet support because actually the Soviets and the Nazis were allies. The Soviets were only cynically pretending to be anti-imperialists by jumping on the bandwagon. America were the REAL anti-imperialists because the OSS helped make the Indochinese resistance groups! Once they joined the Soviets they stopped being anti-fascist and just became anti-colonialist!"

[nights-at-the-opera]

Found a new type of guy.

[disgruntledexplainer]

[majortomiscominghome]

I am having a Pepe Silvia moment over Delta Green lore, which is also badly mixing with one of my all time favorite movies The Death Of Stalin.

[edenisodd]

Delta green oc, based off of a roleplaying game I played a one shot of. Basic summary is Xfiles but eldritch dangers only. This is Zeb Burns, he’s a CIA fuck. I hate him and love him at the same time. I wanted to create a problematic character, a poor little meow meow of my own. He just cares about getting the job done when others get hung up on their morals… also he wears Hawaiian shirts and cheap sunglasses most of the time.

[whereismywizardhat]

Brain wants the absolute comedy of a Delta Green cell geared up for battling the servants of Glaaki or some other mythos weirdness running straight into a wall because they accidentally stumbled upon Kindred nonsense.

[lazytoadgod]

The Program is just the bastard-child of Majestic. The Outlaws are the ones keeping Delta Green alive. And faithful to its original mission, we are gonna burn each of your world-threatening labs to the ground.

i want to be an agent of the Program.

i will be arrested for embezzling government funds. i would see and do the most horrific things imaginable and go home to shout at my flatmates. i’ll have a glock with one bullet under my bed. i would go to the opera every other week. i am also more likely to meet the mi go, deep ones, and the great race of yith.

i wish i was a delta green agent :(

[wittyno]

My thoughts on seasons one and two of the x-files.

Background: I knew nothing about the plot of the x-files before starting the show. I knew I would like it because I love Delta Green, which is just the x-files as a TTRPG and I knew Joel McHale loves it and proposed to his wife while watching it. I watched the first season about six or so months ago. I really liked it but life got busy and I wanted to give it the attention it deserves. I just watched season 2. yay

Here are some random thoughts

- that pilot is fire. It’s so fucking good. It hooks you in right away. It feels like a classic of the genre. The I lost time idea is done so well and not in a over the top way.

- this show is way more visceral than I thought it would be. Maybe because I’ve seen so much current cop-focused shows but this show grips you way better than any of the current copaganda on the market. It’s an actual drama not just pretending to be one.

- Season 1 is 24 episodes and season 2 is 25 episodes long. That’s an insane schedule. Not just by today‘s standard but just in general. I watched most of it on Freevee, which gives you little trivia about each episode, which is fun. It also means I know the horrifying fact that only two weeks after giving birth Gillian Anderson went back to work on this show. That’s probably just the tip of the iceberg.

- even for TV Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny are very good looking. The choice to cast Boy Scout looking ass David Duchovny as the primary believer in the supernatural is so smart. Anyone else and he might come off as scary. The reason „am I spooky?“ is so funny is because the obvious answer is „no, not even a little“.

- because this show is so good. I can absolutely see how people who are already conspiracy-minded individual could take this show and really run with it. That’s not a criticism or a reason to not watch the show. It’s also not the fault of the creators nor a call to not make this type of art. I don’t even think this is a American History X type blunder. It’s just a warning. If you start believing in stuff like this to maybe take a break.

- the genetic memory episode is stupid. Also Phineas Gage lived a pretty normal life after his accident. He didn’t become violent. That’s not how the brain works.

- Scully gets kidnapped at least three times in season 2, which is too many. Even in a season with 25 episodes that’s too many. I know, the first one was because Gillian Anderson was pregnant but come on.

- while it is still copaganda and has some of those traits (choking suspects), it feels less like it because it pitches our FBI Heroes against impossible things and overwhelming forces (both human and extraterrestrial).

- it does a good job of balancing its insane runtime without overstaying its welcome. The middle of the season doesn’t sag or stagnate because they put mid-season finale.

- I like how often Mulder and Scully loose. Usually the military comes and covers it up or the evidence disappears and I like that. It gives the show a weight most cop show is don’t. Most cop shows, they either find, convict, or kill the suspect. It usually ends „well“, at least according to the rules of the show. Some of that happens here but more often than not. More innocent people get hurt. I like it because it shows the true overwhelming nature of what a job fighting the occult and extraterrestrial would look like.

- as for the political stuff. I think it’s important to remember that this show started airing in 1992 so you have to balance any sort of unsavory remarks or storylines against the age of the show. On the whole it actually does a pretty good job so far. As far as I can tell, at least.

- additionally you have to remember that in this world aliens are real and already among us. Spirits and other occult and extraterrestrials exist. The way you handle that is going to be different than we would in the real world. Especially with episodes like Calusari.

- the tech. So many examples on how old this show is. The big ones are the cars obviously, any sort of use or lack of use of the internet, and anything to do with phones. No texts, the prominent use of answering machines, hell I haven’t heard anyone talking about screening calls in over a decade. but the one I hadn’t thought of was flashlights. Flashlights have come a long way in the last 30-odd years.

- scully is a doctor of everything. Pathologist? Yes! Immunologist? Yes! She just keeps calling herself a medical doctor, which is technically true but is insane. Her knowledge base is just as wide as the writers need it to be and just as inaccurate to fit the plot. Honestly? Good for her! Woman in STEM.

- it’s also nice to see double breasted suits again. I feel like they are due for a come back. Though not some of those hairstyles. The only reason Dana looks good in hers is because she’s played by Gillian Anderson.

- that intro is doing the most. I love it so much. We don’t do intro like that anymore. It explains the entire premise of the show. With visuals and everything.

- yes, of course I ship them.

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played DELTA GREEN ?

By Adam Scott Glancy, Dennis Detwiller and John Scott Tynes

Call of Cthulhu style threats are real, and deadly. You are part of a secret government conspiracy to stop the threat. X-Files meets Call of Cthulhu meets CSI. Set in the 2010s or 1990s or even Vietnam end of the Summer of Love era

[anim-ttrpgs]

what kind of lore is Eureka working with, gimme the rundown

Well, as mentioned in a previous post, Eureka is essentially half setting-agnostic, with the intention of being able to run anything from the present day all the way back to the mid-1800s. It could do zombie apocalypse, 1930s Noir, Wild West, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Cthulhu modules, Delta Green modules, SCP Foundation, Monster of the Week modules, etc.

But the other half is where the basis for supernatural player characters comes from. This half is actually heavily based on the lore of my own horror-comedy literary work, working-titled American Vampire, which follows eventful ‘life’ of an eight-hundred-year-old vampire named Yvette as she navigates life in the 1990s and 21st century after nearly a hundred years in hibernation, and finally, finally accepts and embraces her own vampirism. The lore and tone are so similar that Eureka could almost be called an American Vampire TTRPG. (But it cant be called that, the name American Vampire has already been taken by another literary work.)

Here is the lore that Eureka and American Vampire share:

the background of this lore is a normal, everyday contemporary setting. The ‘real world’, not some other planet or completely alternate universe.

There are real supernatural creatures and people, but there is no ‘masquerade’. No worldwide global conspiracy/pact binds supernatural creatures to secrecy.

There is no secret worldwide vampire government or even a vampire community, supernatural creatures cant even usually pick each other out in a crowd.

Despite there being no worldwide agreement to keep all of this a secret, belief in vampires or ghosts or werewolves or anything of the sort is still widely considered baseless superstition. This is partially because actual supernatural creatures are so incredibly rare that 95% of people will never meet one in their lifetime, and even a supernatural person may never meet another of their kind. In American Vampire there’s canonically only, like, about one-hundred vampires in the entire United States. Also, on an individual level, the vast majority of supernatural people have a pretty serious incentive to keep their own identity a secret because they, like, eat people. If they admitted that to the world then at best they would get arrested.

The other reason the existence of supernatural monsters remains widely unknown is because people who do encounter this kind of thing tend to rationalize it and find normal explanations for it. If you saw somebody with huge fangs in real life, you’d probably assume that they got them surgically done instead of assuming they’re a real vampire. In fact, Yvette in American Vampire is “out” to the world by the mid-2010s. She does almost nothing to hide her vampirism, and is even a mid-level career streamer, all with the “gimmick” that she claims to be a real vampire. People tend to think she’s just acting, or that she’s just completely delusional. Many other supernatural creatures live similar lives, working normal jobs, wearing a hat to cover up their horns or sunglasses to hide their weird eyes, and only revealing their true nature to very close friends, if anyone at all.

Monsters are magical and rarely adhere to modern scientific understanding. And most importantly, they have magical weaknesses. The most interesting thing about a monster is usually their weaknesses, and the most interesting, challenging, and fun thing about playing a monster in Eureka is trying to work around those weaknesses while keeping one’s true nature a secret, even from the other party members and their players.

Supernatural player characters in Eureka must be hidden from everyone except for the player that is playing them and the game master. You aren’t supposed to tell anyone else at the table. There are gameplay consequences for if a monster gets discovered, even by other monsters, and it usually involves a lot of Composure damage. (Composure is like an emotional HP system in Eureka, and you lose points of composure from extreme fear and/or stress. It is NOT, however, a sanity system.)

This Composure damage also affects other monsters because, like I said above, monsters eat normal people, but 99% of a monster’s friends are also going to be normal people. You may never even consider eating your buddies, but this guy would chow down on them without a second thought, he’s got to go!

Of course, you could play Eureka without this monster character lore, especially if you wanted to use it for, say, a completely contemporary murder mystery on a train where none of the mystery solvers are secretly vampires, and Eureka works perfectly fine for that, its core gameplay is designed to be able to totally stand on its own, but we have found that the possibility of any party member being something horrible in disguise can really spice up just about any mystery.

Last minute note in case it wasn’t clear: The party members that are secretly monsters are not usually opposed to the main goals of the party, they aren’t secret villains, they’re protagonists just like everybody else, and they want to solve this mystery just as badly. They just have to do it with the added risk that somebody might notice they don’t cast a shadow.

[vintagerpg]

Unknown Armies (1998) is one of many occult underground horror RPGs that emerged in the ‘90s. It was probably most notable at the time because it was the first ground up design by Pagan Publishing’s John Tynes, but there is a lot of substance that 20+ years later it still has a strong following (the third edition was launched via Kickstarter in 2017, bringing in six times the asking price).

The core idea here is that reality is malleable and that people of special temperaments, usually living on the fringes of society and possessing powerful obsessions, can exert a certain amount of control over it (in terms of the percentile skill system, rolls involving obsessions can be flipped if doing so nets a beneficial result — a 73 becomes a 37). Some can tap into those obsession to work magic. Others can come to embody archetypal concepts as avatars, competing against similarly inclined people the world over to fully ascend. Should enough ascended avatars exist at the same time, reality will reset and begin fresh — perhaps better, perhaps worse. As you can imagine, many people have ideas about how (and if) such an event should occur.

Even without the high stakes of occult conspiracies, adepts and avatars live lives on the edge. The same forces that give them power also leave them more vulnerable to madness and dissolution. To account for this, Unknown Armies has what was probably the most robust sanity system at the time. It is split across five meters — violence, unnatural, helplessness, isolation and identity — and actively seeks to decouple the mental strains of living in a supernatural world from portrayals of real world mental illness. That’s a big step in the right direction, and one that would see further development in Trail of Cthulhu, the stand alone Delta Green RPG and other games.

For more on Unknown Armies, you can read the chapter in my book! Holy crap, that is weird to say!

[nights-at-the-opera]

Found another new type of guy.

"Prophet" Amanda Grace warns that America is threatened by advanced “mermaids and water people” and encourages attendees at Trump National Doral Miami to engage them in "hand-to-hand combat".

I may be biased but it very much sounds like she is describing the Deep Ones. I'm sure this is some flavor of antisemitism but still.

[agentgrange]

Hey, I know the core Delta Green team’s politics aren’t all great, but I feel like the take that the take that their work is pro surveillance state is pretty uncharitable. I feel like a core theme of the modern setting is that the horrible actions of agents defending against the unnatural aren’t justified, and you can pretty easily draw that over to real world actions of our government “protecting” us from criminals and terrorists not being worth the human cost of the war on drugs and the war on terror.

I'm definitely a lot more cynical toward ArcDream for a few perhaps overly-specific reasons, and I've struggled to find a way to concisely articulate this vibe I've had about it. I think I'd like to do a more detailed breakdown /retrospective series on the more recent campaign and scenario guide to really get into the weeds of it.

The short of it is that you aren't wrong, but I think a lot of modern Delta Green's issues with the security state comes from this uniquely American idea of being "apolitically anti-authoritarian, anti-big government." It never makes the leap to being anti-imperialist or understanding how all these post-9/11 systems were just the mechanisms of global intervention and counter-insurgency turning inward. Having high speed low drag operators from the Program salting the Hindu Kush canoeing the Kandahar Giant in between skirmishes with the Taliban is badass, but spying on Americans or having those same teams operate domestically is bad. There are things that we do over there that we shouldn't be doing to American citizens over here.

Add to that the fact that the differences between the Outlaws and the Program, which could be fertile ground for saying something interesting, mostly comes down to "do want to play the old way like the 90s version where you have a shoestring budget or do you want to be a kitted out marauder with close air support?" It feels like there's an ideological contradiction at the heart of Delta Green that should imply nuance, but when you go looking for it you'll be hard pressed to find much substance-- hell at times it goes out of its way to distance itself from any idea of a real political conspiracy. Its a game about government conspiracies, that seems embarrassed to talk about government conspiracies. They just want to use it as an aesthetic backdrop to tell a story set in the mythos where you can blow up a Shoggoth with an AT4

Look, I don't need every piece of media to conform uniquely to my personal politics for me to enjoy it. But for me Fall of Delta Green feels like it walked away with all the more interesting ideas that made the original 90s game compelling, and demonstrates a more clear picture than modern DGs amorphous "spying is bad but so are terrorists and political extremists are also bad. The system is flawed but also you have to work within the system to save the world." Fall of Delta Green revolves around this central idea of "yeah you are a piece of shit, and all this shit catches up to you in 1970. But for 10 years you can do whatever you think you can get away with so don't even bother taking your foot off the gas." It tells you, very explicitly, how the story ends and what all this interventionism is heading towards before you even start the game. Add to that Fall of Delta Green's Grant-Morrison-esque off the rails worldbuilding about syndemes that's not afraid to get really high concept and... I don't know. I just prefer it more, personally.

[airic-fenn]

If youre pissed that WOTC is revoking its old ogl, you might be wanting to boycott them go play other games for a bit.

Now Im not a die-hard expert on all the ttrpgs out there, but there are a few that I particularly like and recommend if you dont know where to start:

• Ryuutama

I love Ryuutama so much. Its a lot simpler than dnd and really gives older japanese rpg video game vibes. Its very cozy fantasy with a heavy focus on adventuring and story telling than on battling. The english translation was actually a kickstarter thing, and it’s also in dire need of more homebrew content because there was supposed to be a translation of the supplement but thats probably never gonna happen anytime soon, if ever.

• Call of Catthulhu

No, I did not spell it wrong. Put simply, Call of Catthulhu is Call of Cthulhu but with cats. You all play cats. Dont let that fool you though, it can get surprisingly tense and gruesome if you play it right. You’ll probably love it if you were a warrior cats kid.

• Delta Green (and CoC in general)

“Modern” (1980’s) setting for (actual) Call of Cthulhu. The CoC games are fun if you like mysteries, conspiracies and yknow. cosmic horror stuff.

• Traveller

A scifi rp where you play a dude in space (an explorer, traveller, soldier or trader). This one is fun because character creation is VERY extensive and is part of the gameplay, but before the story starts. You make roles to determine all of the things that happened to you prior to the adventure like, did you go to university, have you suffered any life-altering injuries to your mind or body bc of some terrible accident, did you accidentally get aged 50 years older by getting zapped through a wormhole? Fun stuff like that. My friend calls it the existential crises rpg.

• Pathfinder

I mention it obligatorily because people tell me its the most like dnd without technically being dnd but I havent played it.

Anyway there are definitely so many more games but those are the ones I’ve played (other than pathfinder) and enjoyed. Feel free to reblog with your own additions to the list.

[saltpillarlicker]

one of my few issues with delta green is that it encourages characters who are feds and cops and such and of course it comes with the territory of being conspiracy fiction i think but yknow as a queer person i personally feel egh on the idea of like playing such a figure and i feel like that might be the case for others.

so i think it would be cooler if you were smaller scale not necessarily small town but like you're a girl on the street or a friendly neighborhood dad or some other down to earth figure with a mundane job who moonlights as like essentially a supernatural hunter. like somewhere between delta green and hunter: the vigil. is it as realistic as cops and feds? no prolly not, and delta green's grounded realism is a big strength of it. but i find it much more compelling. maybe worth experimenting with for a one-shot or something.

[st-just]

Modern Delta Green's leaned pretty hard away from the whole conspiracy theorist labyrinthine Deep State MAJESTIC 12 Illuminati stuff as far as most scenarios go (except insofar as the wreckage and collateral damage from their collapse makes for good inciting incidents). Like it's there and it's referenced, your bosses don't give one shit about you, but the assumed Bad Guys are no longer men in black or NRO DELTA or whatever.

Which means instead it leaning more into like 'weird random cults'. And like, I'm sure it's just the most salient examples being the ones sticking in my head, but this provides a very funny and clear case study of how the implicit politics of your quasi-heroic G-men gunning down a weird incestuous sect of monstrous local notables changes depending on their ethnicity.