Delta Green: Running Through Apocalypse Protocol

I’ve been meaning to run my presumed default DG setting (which is more or less a version of Lighthouse’s).through Tariq Ali’s “Apocalypse Protocol” (as featured in Whispers of the Dead vol. 3) for a while now, might as well get it done.

Here’s how it works: you get four questions about how the apocalypse has shaken out. The answers you choose bump a value up and down between Very Low and Very High in one of 5 categories, then you tally those values up and the final result tells you how much to adjust the PC skills associated with that category.

1. Resource Scarcity - How hard is it to get stuff? (Requisitions & Spending Your Own Money)
2. Social Instability - How functional is everything? (Bureaucracy and Law)
3. Mythos Knowledge - How easy is it for the lay population to learn about the Unnatural? (Unnatural and Occult)
4. Exposure - How much does the public know about anti-mythos orgs? (Stealth and Disguise)
5. Supernatural Hostility - How dangerous are unnatural entities towards the general populace? (Survival and Alertness)

Going higher than +2 is a human extinction event; going lower than -2 gets DG an Ally with potentially better odds of survival than they do.
 
I really like this system: it’s open-ended enough that you can plug basically whatever scenario you might want into it (the article itself provides several example apocalypses, plus how you can chain them together), and even if you don’t use the skill modifications the questions push you towards “how is the world is different and how does this affect the players?” You could easily drum up your own questions, alternative answers to the questions provided, or even adjust the skills so long as you have [+1, +1, -2]  for the first question and [+1, -1] for the rest.
 
The one modification I’d make out of the box is the Mythos Knowledge category, since the Occult and Unnatural skills are opposed to each other in Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu. But the only tweak needed to address that is have one go down if the other goes up and treat the stat as the accuracy of Mythos knowledge, rather than its prevalence - high Unnatural, low Occult means that pre-existing occult traditions have taken a hit in the face of magic that actually works, high Occult low Unnatural means that any legitimate information out there is drowning in rampant bullshit.
 
Preamble over.
 

1. Is the apocalypse mundane or supernatural?

• Mundane
• SI +1, RS +1, MK -2

The slow apocalypse of the 21st century rolls on. Child-abusing billionaires set the world on fire and watch the burn with a shit-eating grin. Every year things are just a little bit worse. Every summer is the new hottest on record. Every quarter your paycheck buys less. Every election the fascists take more power. Some motherfucker invented an infinite pornography machine that crashed the global economy. There’s still a Super Bowl, but ad spots go for cheap nowadays. There hasn’t been a new model of iphone for five years. You keep your ration booklet in your pocket, in case the app goes down. The revolution is always tomorrow.
 

2. Will humanity fight or embrace the supernatural?

• Embrace
• MK +1, SH -1

Of course they embrace it. Wouldn’t you, when everything else has failed? Something needs to bridge the gap. People dabble in the supernatural out of spite, love, greed, desperation, ideology, stupidity, all the usual reasons. Sometimes it works out: a lot of the time it doesn’t. New religious movements spring up like mushrooms after rain.
 
The thing about the supernatural is that there’s no such thing as the supernatural: there’s natural, preternatural, and shit someone made up. Maybe you’ll never know enough to turn the preternatural into the everyday natural, because there’s not enough data or because there’s not enough computational power between your ears.
 
Humanity already drastically overestimates its ability to control the infinite fractal complexity of the world around them. Wading into uncharted waters is like playing Mao with a loaded gun, but when there are no other options…
 

3. Will mundane state actors survive or be destroyed?

• Survive
• SI -1, RS+1

Apocalypse necessitates revelation: the veil comes down, the mask comes off, so it's better to say  that mundane state actors have changed. An organization might keep the same name but they might not really be the same group, or maybe they’re just revealing what they’ve always been.
 
There are international and intranational wars, pockets of violent anarchy and feuding warlord fiefs. Nation-states that exist on paper often lack the ability to enforce their laws across all of their claimed territory. But by that same token there are those places where the boot that once oppressed has lifted at last, even for a moment.
 

4. Will anti-mythos orgs appeal to the public or covertly reorganize themselves?

• Appeal to the public
• Ex +1, SH -1

This is something that’s always mildly bugged me about Delta Green (and the rest of this genre, for that matter); in order for things to remain secret enough that real-world history is unaltered, every single incident needs to be handled perfectly. The monster never survives, the wizard never gets away, the vector never spreads, there are never any witnesses, photographs, video footage, nothing. Nothing ever happens in a crowded location. Nothing ever happens in a country without an anti-Mythos org, and there is just so much shit happening in the States alone.

If you want supernatural incidents to be secret, they have to be both rare and low-impact. Otherwise the option is resorting to wide-scale magic (hello SCP wiki). 

Covert ops make sense when you’re playing as Cowboys trying to avoid MAJESTIC stomping your heads in, but if you’re playing as the Program (i.e., from a position of power)... shit, man. You can run the conspiracy in broad daylight and suffer no consequences.

And then on top of all that, the Mythos (or whatever supernatural force de jure is at play) is an excuse. It’s an infinite fractal boogeyman. It’s a goose that can lay golden eggs for the ruling class faster than a Cadbury production line. Pick a target demographic, make some unsubstantiated claims, use a complicit media machine to whip the public into a frenzy and casually throw out an anonymous tip line for people to rat on their neighbors. 

If you think for a picosecond that parties within the United States government, in the wake of 9/11, would not loudly weaponize the existence of al-Azif as part of anti-Islamic fearmongering I have not one but two bridges in Brooklyn to sell you. 

And on the flip side, for any organization that isn’t irredeemably evil / for timelines when Mythos knowledge is high, going public means you can educate that public as a form of damage mitigation. Cat’s out of the bag, so Elmo's gonna be teaching kids about how to recognize a Color out of Space.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk 

Final Tally

• Resource Scarcity +2
• Worldwide economic depression brought about by a cascade of drearily predictable and utterly stupid factors.
• Requisitions: -20%, new defaults -20% (Standard & Unusual), -40% (Major), -60% (Extreme)
• Spending Your Own Money: -20%, new defaults -20% to Standard, Unusual, & Major expenses 
• Social Instability +0
• A different flavor of chaos. The pieces have been shuffled around a bit. But it's 202█, that's just how life is now.
• Bureaucracy: No change, default remains 10%
• Law: No change, default remains 0% 
• Mythos Knowledge -1
• Accurate information is hard to come by. Government suppression, a weakened press, rampant AI-hallucination, and cults feeding their own misunderstandings of their objects of worship have rendered much of the information available highly suspect, if not totally worthless. A few reliable sources are out there, but they’re often either limited access or difficult to find unless someone already in the know points you in the right direction.
• New religious movements, however, are fucking everywhere. 
• Unnatural: -10%, default remains 0%
• Occult: + 10%, new default 20% 
• Exposure +1
• Anti-mythos organizations have to operate with at least some public facing side. This doesn’t mean that they are necessarily accountable to the public (many of them still involve masked men in unmarked vans, but that’s policing in the 21st century for you.), but it does mean they usually have some oversight on paper. It also means that there are a decent number of NGO mythos orgs out there.
•  Stealth: -10%, new default 0%
•  Disguise: -10%, new default 0%  
• Supernatural Hostility -2
• This doesn’t mean that Mythos hazards have stopped being hazardous, but represents both a wider range of the Unnatural (i.e. not all of it is hazardous, most of it is just weird) and a much better understanding of how not to get killed by it. Knowing about tigers doesn’t intrinsically make the tiger less dangerous, but it can help you in avoiding circumstances where a tiger puts you in danger. Once folks are getting Darwin Awarded live on tiktok, people will start start taking some basic precautions.
• Survival: +20%, new default 30%
• Alertness: +20%, new default 40%  

More vibes than lore, but that's why I like this system. The blanks can get filled in as needed. Would love to see what other people have done with it.