Is the Call of Cthulhu expansion Delta Green worth playing in 2012?
August 3, 2012 4:58 PM   Subscribe

Role-playing geeks: is the Call of Cthulhu Delta Green expansion still worth playing, or is it "too old" to be modern by now?

I'm running some modern-day Call of Cthulhu campaigns and I have thus far loved Secrets of Japan. I want to expand to include the possibility of campaigns outside Japan, and Delta Green seems to be just what I want and highly regarded among CoC enthusiasts. However, most of the reviews I've seen for it are from ten years ago or more. Has anyone tried to run a Delta Green-inspired campaign recently and, if so, do you think the book is still worth investing in in 2012?
posted by deathpanels to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (15 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Came to recommend The Stars Are Right! has a favorite modern CoC adventure tome, and found a review of the 2nd Edition of such that they are running a game of Delta Green in 2005. So that's a bit better than 10 years...

Anyways, The Stars Are Right!'s "Music of the Spheres" scenario is my, hands down, favorite CoC to run and is easily set in the modern (current) world.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:06 PM on August 3, 2012


Response by poster: The "Cthulhu Now!" compendium looks tantalizing, but reviews have led me to believe most of its modern rules updates have already been absorbed into the main rulebook. As such, I'd only really buy it if I saw a scenario I especially wanted to run, and Delta Green seems more interesting if only because I'm a child of the 90s and Delta Green seems to evoke shades of X-Files-style conspiracy.
posted by deathpanels at 5:20 PM on August 3, 2012


Yes, absolutely worth getting. A sourcebook called Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity was released as recently as 2010, so no need to worry about it being hopelessly dated. You'll want Delta Green, Delta Green: Countdown (this is worth it for the Hastur mythos alone), and Targets of Opportunity, at least.
posted by graymouser at 5:54 PM on August 3, 2012


And FWIW if you want a Cthulhu meets X-Files vibe, that is precisely the mark that Delta Green hit, so yeah, you'll want to get the books.
posted by graymouser at 6:00 PM on August 3, 2012


I can't see an issue, it's not like CoC has really changed in the last 10 30 years (although the new edition writers sound like they've had some interesting ideas). I have to say, though, that the modern day CoC/BRP game I really want to play is The Laundry, based on the novels of Metafilter's own cstross. I found Delta Green a little humourless for my taste; I like a dark smile to help the insane gibberings go down.
posted by howfar at 6:39 PM on August 3, 2012


Best answer: Delta Green, the finest RPG supplement ever, is more than worth it. If you are old enough.

See, I emerged from the times that DG describes: black helicopters, alien hybrids, conspiracies involving the Pentagon, the Gnomes of Zurich and the Boy Scouts. The "we're through the mirror here, people!" mindset is important. Look at today through the eyes of the Mythos. If I were to speculate:

Rush Limbaugh is either a shoggoth ("Hey, Mr. Shiny!") or, more likely, a servant of Y'golonac (don't shake hands!).

Barack Obama meets nightly with the Mi-go, to preserve humanity and hope for slightly better approval ratings in the Appalachians.

Mitt Romney has fathered 30 children, on a half-a-dozen wives. Most have been sacrificed to Mighty Cthulhu, for the promise of power.

The "pro-life" movement is secretly backed by The Black Goat of a Thousand Young. She will suffer no constraints.

Jon Stewart, Robert Colbert and Nyarlothotep meet up once a week to drink beer and mock the world.

Delta Green, and the Mythos generally, is not about history or mythology or ideology. It's about what scares you now, today, and gives you the opportunity to act against it. Drones (supposedly thoughtless machines fly above us). The Middle East is, as always, a playground for madness (Why is Israel so intent on extending the settlements? What terrible secrets lie beneath the disputed lands, that they are so intent to occupy? Is Iran refining uranium, or striking unholy bargains with the ancient djinn?). In Louisiana, will school vouchers support the Lord Dagon Charter School?

HPL wrote about the things that troubled him, casting them into the form of the Mythos. This is the core of all true horror: it is disruptive. It transgresses your assumptions. If it hurts you to think about it, then it's a starting point.

The other day, a lot of folks flocked to Chik-Fil-A to devour chicken sandwiches. To what Dark God where these helpless birds sacrificed?
posted by SPrintF at 11:15 PM on August 3, 2012 [12 favorites]


Response by poster: SPrintF, you have hit on exactly what I love about Lovecraftian horror and why playing this game in a modern setting appeals so much to me. Thanks for the tips, I think I will invest in some Delta Green supplements.

BTW: Yikes, graymouser – Countdown is going for $250 on ebay and amazon.
posted by deathpanels at 1:09 AM on August 4, 2012


As SPrintF's answer appeals to you, you may also like Unknown Armies, which is basically a "more generalized case" of modern occult RPGs.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 1:54 AM on August 4, 2012


BTW: Yikes, graymouser – Countdown is going for $250 on ebay and amazon.

Yowza. I just checked NobleKnight.com and apparently that's not just an arbitrary number. I've had the books since they first came out, so I haven't really had a reason to look at the prices but that's a bit exorbitant.

Anyway, seconding Unknown Armies. It's sort of a 180 degree different type of horror than Call of Cthulhu, totally drenched in pop culture and entirely humanocentric. But John Tynes's hand is clear in both games and it's all for the better. Also, the second edition (a definite improvement on the first, although I've only played second) is available at less than it originally retailed for, so it's got that going for it.
posted by graymouser at 3:41 AM on August 4, 2012


Turns out you can get Delta Green (here) and Countdown (here) from RPGNow and don't need to mortgage the house for OOP original copies.
posted by graymouser at 5:23 AM on August 4, 2012 [3 favorites]


To fully appreciate Unknown Armies, first read Tim Powers' novel Last Call, which explores the hermetic heart of Las Vegas. You may also want to find the video The Lost Room, which is pretty close in spirit to an Unknown Armies campaign. (You can have power, but it will cost you.)
posted by SPrintF at 9:37 AM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wait... Robert Colbert? *hangs head* Sorry, Steve.
posted by SPrintF at 9:39 AM on August 4, 2012 [1 favorite]


Delta Green is the best RPG supplement of all time. Of all time!

I haven't played in years, but since seeing this question yesterday I've been thinking a lot about how I would update the setting if I were to run DG again. I don't have access to any of the rulebooks (mine are in my brother's care at the other end of the state), so apologies if I get canon details wrong.

Major Delta Green spoilers below!

First of all, I'd kill DELTA GREEN as an organized conspiracy for a while after 9/11. If I recall correctly, DG was mostly an FBI/DoJ outfit with a few oddball military types and some government spooks. MAJESTIC was mostly situated in the military and intelligence communities. Maybe at that point, as the Department of Homeland Security was being set up and intelligence agencies were being streamlined, MAJESTIC decides to get the rag-tag counterconspiracy out of its way... all of the members of A-Cell develop aggressive brain tumors, two DG agents are among those dead in the anthrax attacks, and everyone panics. DG becomes dormant, even as agents stay in informal contact with each other, mostly talking after mutual friends' suicides.

This isn't to say that everything is easy-peasy for MJ-12 after that. (SPOILERS) So, in the DG canon there are these... extraterrestrial entities... that have been in communication with the US government. Every month, they give the Pentagon something called "The Report." This is a guide to all of the military forces in the entire world, and the military advantage the Report provides is part of how the US was able to stare down the Soviet Union and become a major superpower.

Maybe, after decades of total accuracy, the entities start screwing with the Report. Maybe when Mr. Rumsfeld said "We know where the weapons of mass destruction are," it's because he saw the Report (or whatever filtered version they get from MJ-12 for deniability's sake) up on the screen in the situation room a half hour before that press conference. Maybe the entire point of goading the US into invading was to get access to the Iraqi National Museum, and have the most corrupted members of MJ-12 loot the normally-impregnable Special Collections Office, situated in an underground vault; the death, chaos and global unrest was just a bonus.

And then the entities disappear. Maybe they decide "our work here is done," maybe they fuck off to make a deal with the Chinese, maybe the artifacts they stole from the museum invoked gods not even they could handle and they get snuffed. (That's what you get for reading The King in Yellow in the original Bothno-Ugaric, fuckers!) Anyway, this still leaves MJ-12 as the black beating heart of the military-industrial complex, literally rotting from within as its decisionmakers slowly go mad.

Eventually, former DG agents manage to situate themselves in high-level DHS positions, and are once again able to provide the conspiracy with bureaucratic cover they lost after 9/11. They reactivate all former agents (that haven't gone insane or died), identify new field agents who may have seen things out of the ordinary, and start anew by the beginning of the Obama administration.

And that brings us to the present day: a declining empire, a surveillance state, financial turmoil, fighting in the streets. The perfectly Lovecraftian backdrop for an RPG of paranoia and horror.
posted by the_bone at 3:20 PM on August 4, 2012 [2 favorites]


I will buy any Delta Green product published, without question. They simply are excellent. SO my first advise would be to buy without question.

Now, you do know that a new standalone edition is in development that'll bring everything up to the modern day, right?

The seeds of the current status quo in the DG universe can probbaly be figured out from Delta Green: Through a Glass, Darkly , though I would probably work your way through the other material first.

And the Laundry RPG mentioned above has some great material too. Bit lighter in tone and it's own quirky thing though.
posted by Artw at 10:32 PM on August 7, 2012


The Unspeakable Oath podcast is worth a listen if you want to get a feeling for what these guys are like.
posted by Artw at 10:33 PM on August 7, 2012


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