The expanded core rulebook for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game is nearly complete. Developers Dennis Detwiller and Shane Ivey are finalizing the text now. Here’s a teaser from “The Schism,” a chapter by Adam Scott Glancy and Shane Ivey about the shape of modern-day Delta Green.
The Program
The Security Studies Group. Yellow Combine. Petrel Hill. Threshold Curve. Silver See. The official name has changed eighteen times since 2002. Every time it changes, the paper trail leading to its true activities becomes more muddled. With each change, a new, Top Secret special-access program grants continuing clearance to activities and intelligence that no American employee can confess or confirm.
Insiders call it “the Program.” Its headquarters—and its carefully compartmentalized laboratories, hangars, and personnel scattered throughout the government and private sector—allow it the pretense of legitimacy. But the Program’s leaders long ago determined that its work is too important to be restricted by the Constitution. The Program, for all its access and influence, is as criminal an enterprise as all the conspiracies and blacker-than-black military projects that came before it.
The Program’s people are warned never to let outsiders hear its true name: Delta Green.
Officially, the Program (whatever its current name) is dedicated to the acquisition and study of foreign technology. The documents that authorize it say nothing about the unnatural, or about the explicit criminality at the Program’s heart. The Program’s true purpose is stated goes back to Delta Green’s founding in 1942:
- To gather intelligence on unnatural phenomena.
- To protect the citizens of the United States from threats originating with unnatural phenomena.
- To maintain the security of the United States against unnatural threats.
Only the means and methods have changed. At least, that’s what the Program’s leaders tell themselves. Some agents might hold lingering doubts about how their superiors are executing that mission. They may especially wonder about one essential, never-answered question: “In the long run, are we only making the problem worse?”
—Excerpted from Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game
