Roleplaying game sourcebook, originally published by
Pagan Publishing in the mid-1990s for
Chaosium's "
Call of Cthulhu"
roleplaying game. Written by
Dennis Detwiller,
Adam Scott Glancy, and
John Tynes. It has been one of the most
acclaimed RPGs in years, both for its
engrossing story and its
masterful writing. It is
recommended for anyone who likes
roleplaying games and for anyone who likes
Lovecraftian horror.
While
traditional Call of Cthulhu games concentrate on the
eldritch horrors of
H. P. Lovecraft, "Delta Green" modernizes the
Cthulhu Mythos and combines
Lovecraftian horror with a
modern theme of
paranoid conspiracy theory. The players generally play federal law enforcement officers or espionage agents working for a secret government conspiracy known unofficially as "Delta Green" and dedicated to fighting alien threats.
The extraordinarily
grim background posits that
humanity has done all the hard work for the
Great Old Ones that want to
rise from their
eternal slumbers and
scrape the Earth clean of our kind -- we have been steadily
regressing to a baser state and willingly growing more
receptive to the
madness and
despair that the Mythos offers. As a
species, we can already see what awaits us --
global slaughter -- but we just don't care. The Great Old Ones have already won, and all we have to do is
sit back and watch the show.
Not everyone has given up, of course. Delta Green knows that the Mythos exists and does what it can to stop the
chaos, though they know it's almost certainly too late to prevent
the end of the world. But they are
opposed on many different fronts -- the
Mi-Go,
fungal horrors from
outer space, who engineered the
Roswell UFO crash to
study and
harvest us;
Majestic-12, the
Men in Black who sold us out to the
aliens in exchange for
technology and
power; the
Karotechia,
sorcerous Nazis trying to
resurrect, both
figuratively and
literally, the
Third Reich; the
Fate, a
New York criminal syndicate which uses the Mythos to commit
crimes; the
Shans, mind-controlling
insects which are slowly taking over the
British government; the
Skoptsi, a
degenerate Russian cult worshipping a
horrifying deity; the
surreal,
nihilistic forces of
entropy and
madness embodied in
the King in Yellow and the
Hastur Mythos; and far too many more...