Shane Ivey here with an update from the Delta Green Kickstarter.
Status Report
We’re still closing in on the end of the massive manuscript for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, aka the Case Officer’s Handbook. We will send its unedited portions to editing next week, and its edited portions to layout the week after that. Somewhere in there, we’ll provide the full draft to KS backers who requested the Case Officer’s Handbook in their rewards.
Ask Us Anything
Thanks in part to the enthusiastic folks at /r/DeltaGreenRPG and /r/NightAtTheOpera, Delta Green is May’s Game of the Month at reddit.com/r/rpg! To celebrate, Dennis Detwiller and I will be there TODAY at 2pm Central time. Ask Us Anything!
ChupacabraCon
I’ll be at ChupacabraCon in Round Rock, Texas, this Friday and Saturday. I’ll be speaking on panels about gaming and maybe running a little Delta Green. If you’re at Chupa, find me and say hi.
Sigil & Sign
Our friends at Cubicle 7 and Make Believe Games are running a Kickstarter for a new kind of Lovecraftian RPG: Sigil & Sign, where you play servants of the Old Ones. Our own Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze are among the contributors. They are well past their core goal and have nearly two more weeks to add stretch goals. Check it out!
A Delta Green Excerpt: Irem and the Nameless City
The legendary, pre-Islamic Arabian city “Irem of the Pillars” appears in the Quran and the Thousand and One Nights, both of which describe its sudden destruction by Allah for the impiety of its inhabitants. Later mythographers located Irem variously in the interior of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, or Oman. A 1991 expedition identified an Iron Age frankincense trading fort at al-Shisr in Oman as Irem (or “Ubar”) after discovering its eight towers, fallen into a sinkhole some time around 400 CE. Alhazredic legend connects Irem to a prehuman “Nameless City” inhabited by ghostly reptiles, implying that the Adites of Irem somehow destroyed it. Alhazred supposedly composed the first couplet of the Necronomicon (“That is not dead,” etc.) dreaming of the Nameless City while in the ruins of Irem. Given the scale of NRO DELTA and other MAJESTIC operations in Saudi Arabia and Oman in 1990 and 1991 under cover of Gulf War deployments, it is conceivable that MAJESTIC discovered one or both sites. Follow-up operations by Delta Green during the Second Gulf War proved frustratingly indecisive, leading some officers to suspect that former MAJESTIC officials altered previously-collected intelligence in the confusion of the MAJESTIC War.
- Prisoner testimony from the 1907 St. Bernard Parish raid places Irem near or at the center of the global Cthulhu cult.
- Miskatonic professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee may have entered Irem or the Nameless City in 1911, while under Yithian possession.
- The writings of occultist Randolph Carter describe Irem as a city on the border between reality and the Outside, with a mighty hand sculpted on the keystone of its main arch. Carter implies that Yog-Sothoth dwells there.
- The 19th Baron Northam mounted an expedition to the Nameless City in 1921 and returned to London a shattered wreck, seemingly decades older.
- A 1930 letter by Harry St. John Philby recounts his conversation with an old man in Yemen who had seen Irem in the al-Dahna desert in central Saudi Arabia, and worshiped there at underground shrines of Nug and Yeb. Philby himself mounted an expedition into the Rub’ al-Khali in 1932, and insisted that the Wabar meteor crater represented the remains of Irem. Philby may have been trying to throw later explorers off the scent of the true Irem.
- Philby’s son Kim may have compromised a PISCES mission to the Wabar/Irem site (Operation CALDERA) in 1948.
- Stephen Alzis once mentioned, on tape, that his birthplace was a “city of pillars,” though, when pressed, he either could not or would not recall the name.
Delta Green does not know whether Irem and the Nameless City are the same place, two separate dimensional extensions overlapping in one geographical locus, or two different haunted Arabian ruins. The Rub’ al-Khali desert could easily conceal more than one such site.
—Excerpted from Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. © Dennis Detwiller, Shane Ivey, and the Delta Green Partnership.