CSC Campaign Report, Part 1: Delta Green Player's Guide

From fall of last year into the spring of this year (a lifetime ago), I ran a real-life Delta Green campaign for some folks I found through the local ttrpg discord. It was a great time, one of the strings of tabletop gaming I have ever had, followed by a year of bad to worse to disastrous that has made it very difficult to actually post anything about it.

In a downright anomalous turn of events, I ended up taking very good notes and writing up after-action reports for most of the sessions, and when combined with the player's guide I'd made I ended up with an extremely solid reference doc.

It is long overdue to be shared, and so, to stave off the dark with one more night at the opera, here's the adventures of CSC Team. It'll be posted here in parts, both so it's not everything at once and to give me time to shore up the parts that didn't get written or were in need of editing. I'll end things with a blank template version of my notes for folks to use for their own games.

Text in [brackets] is editorial I've added later. The rest is as I laid it out in the master document.

CSC Campaign Index

• Player guide
• Green Box
• Library
• NPCs and Anomalies 
• Operation 1: LAST THINGS LAST
  
• Operation 2: ROOM FOR SECONDS
  
• Operation 3: SPEEDY DELIVERY
• Side-Op: MAGINOT
• Operation 4: UNICORN MEAT

 

Delta Green Player’s Guide

Your Mission

• Locate and identify the threat.
• Neutralize the threat.
• Cover your tracks. Leave no trace.
• Take care of loose ends.

Making a Character

Guides for making characters are found in the Need to Know quickstart rules. A trove of premade characters can be found here, and a character generator is freely available here. If you’d like some optional flavor to kickstart your character, roll on the table below. The homebrew profession blue-collar worker is also available.

For the purposes of starting up a new campaign, all of your PCs are newly inducted to Delta Green, having either skills or experience deemed a useful asset. You will have had some minor encounter with the unnatural - you saw something you weren’t supposed to, you were in the orbit of an operation, you knew someone in a cult, and so on. You don’t have to come up with one right away. (There’s also a table at the end)

Your characters have never met before. You were all approached with an offer, and for whatever reason, you chose to accept. You were told to wait; your handler would reach out when it was time to go to work.

On Safety

Delta Green is a horror game, and so can potentially include a wide variety of sensitive subjects that people might not want to deal with. My preferred safety tool is Lines and Veils - Lines being topics that are never broached, and Veils being topics that are dealt with off-screen or by implication. My typical operating procedure is:

• Torture and sexual assault are not going to be encountered “on-screen”; they might be mentioned as having previously occurred either directly or through implication. PCs will often find themselves dealing with the aftermath of horrific events.
• Violence, flesh-horror, terrible wizards, and absurdist horror are all on the table.

If there’s something you definitely want behind a line or veil, or if at any point in the session I’ve made you uncomfortable as a player, let me know (by whatever means you wish) and I’ll adjust things.

Tips and Tricks

• Delta Green is a game about ordinary people in way over their heads in desperate circumstances they barely understand. Lean into it!
• It’s likely that your characters will sustain major injury, die, go mad from accumulated insight, or undergo some manner of horrific transformation. Lean into it!
• You only need to roll if the outcome is in question (high-pressure, imminent danger, time crunch, etc): if it’s something your character can just do normally and the situation isn’t intense, you can just do the thing.
• A long-term conditions from reaching a breaking points isn’t “going crazy”: it’s your brain trying to keep itself alive by whatever means it needs to.
• Double zeros is a critical failure.

House Rules

[Several of these were taken from the Night @ the Opera master doc, and the Nice Number is swiped from PTBP]

• Skill Advancement - All PCs get 5 skill points at the end of a session. They can be applied to any non-Unnatural skill.
• Fight, Flight, Freeze - When you lose 5 or more SAN at once, choose one of these responses. If you would like it to be random, rank them most to least likely, and roll d6: 1-3 is most likely response, then 4-5 for second, and 6 for third.
• Revised Unnatural Skill
• Players start with 1% Unnatural
• Players who fail a SAN check (unnatural sources only) gain +1% Unnatural. This cannot raise the Unnatural skill higher than the maximum SAN loss (i.e a failed 0/1d6 SAN check will not grant +1% if the PC’s Unnatural is 6 or more)
• You can roll Unnatural to try and gain insight into the unknown. It can be rolled in conjunction with another skill (succeeding at both gives you both the mundane and unnatural information)
• Succeeding at the Unnatural check raises the skill by +1d4% (this is not a good thing: remember, your SAN can never be higher than 99 minus your Unnatural)
• If your Unnatural exceeds one of your Breaking Points, you can permanently ignore a disorder.
• Narrative Ammunition - Reloads only occur on critical failures or after Long Spray
• Gun to a Knife Fight - You cannot get a bonus to Firearms rolls in hand-to-hand range.
• Death’s Door - If you are dropped to exactly 0 HP by a non-lethality attack, you can make a CON x 5 roll to stay alive and remain stable.
• Push Yourself - You can spend 1d4 WP to reroll a failed check (but not a fumble) - failing the reroll is automatically a critical failure.
• The Nice Number - 69 is always a critical success.

What Do People Know?

(This is a little change from the presumed default setting of Delta Green. It’s not going to change anything major, but it is good to keep in mind.)

The mainstreaming of the Internet in the 1990s made a full masquerade impossible to maintain, but by the same token made it equally difficult to get accurate information on the supernatural. The web of a million lies is a tireless engine of misinformation; Facebook has done more to hide the unnatural from the public than the US intelligence apparatus could in a thousand years.

The average person will likely know of a few unexplained events or phenomena; most of these will be complete fictions. Those containing anything legitimate will be filtered through layers of spin doctoring, censure, withheld information, bias, conspiracy theory, and purposefully-seeded inaccuracies. It is extremely unlikely that this average person will have directly experienced it, and even less likely that they have any meaningful understanding of the unnatural. Indeed, people who do have legitimate encounters with the unnatural or come to some cosmic insight are nearly always drowned out by the cacophony of other voices shouting them down (usually for being “incorrect”).

Those few who are truly in-the-know are a reclusive and paranoid lot. The unnatural is dangerous, and it is powerful. It remains in the best interests of the Powers-that-Be to keep a lid on things. The threat of men in a black van is usually enough to keep mouths shut and tomes unread. Usually.

[This was based both on my own preferences for the genre and the Post-Masquerade setting as presented by Tariq Ali in Whispers of the Dead vol 3. If I were to run it again, I would use at least a few of the options presented in "Apocalypse Protocol" setup to get a more Lighthouse-y setup, currently penciled in as:

• Resource Scarcity: High (-10% to Requisition rolls)
• Social Instability: Baseline (+0% Bureaucracy and Law)
• Mythos Knowledge: High (+10% Unnatural and Occult)
  
• Exposure: High (-10% to Stealth and Disguise)
  
• Supernatural Hostility: Low (+10% Survival and Alertness)
  

[General aside, I really, really love this article as a quick and easy way to establish the vibe of a particular setting. It's good stuff.]

How Did You Get Recruited? (optional)

If you’re stuck on how you got here, roll d6 and see what the result sparks.

1. Close Encounter - You saw something up close; your statement was passed on until it reached someone with a green triangle, and they sought you out.
2. Read In - You were or are close to someone in Delta Green. They trusted you enough to bring you into the fold.
3. Friendly - You would help out government suits who need a specialist who doesn’t ask many questions, and you did it well enough that they brought you in.
4. Right Man in the Wrong Place - An operation went screwy and you were dragged into it. When shit hits the fan, you can’t afford to be picky.
5. In the Orbit -  Someone you know was involved with a cult or other group of interest.  You were close enough to the unnatural that DG came knocking.
6. Warm Bodies - You’ve never met with the unnatural, but your file ended up on DGs radar and there was a slot that needed filled.

[I have a expanded set of tables I have yet to finish: need to get on that.]

In-Between Sessions

Good news! Your agent survived their night at the opera. But work has a habit of following you home, in this business, and you’re gonna have to carry that weight.

After each mission, you get the following:

• 5 skill points, which you can distribute among any skills other than Unnatural.
• 1d4 skill points added to every skill that you checked during the mission. Erase any accumulated checks you have.

You also get your choice of one of the below Home Scenes:

Fulfill Responsibilities
Your ordinary obligations and relationships. Roll SAN:

• Success: +1d6 to a Bond
• Critical Success: +1d6 to a Bond, +1 SAN
• Failure: +1 to a Bond
• Critical Failure: Reduce the Bond by 1d4, -1 SAN

Back to Nature
Spending some time on you. Reduce a Bond by 1 point and roll SAN:

• Success: +1d4 SAN
• Critical Success: +4 SAN
• Failure: -1 SAN
• Critical Failure: - 1d4 SAN

Establish a New Bond
Building new bridges. Roll CHA x 5: on success, gain a new bond at ½ your CHA score (ie, if your CHA is 10, the new bond is a 5). Reduce an existing Bond by 1.

Go to Therapy
How much you share will have an impact on this roll. (It’s fiddly, we’ll deal as it comes up.)

• Success: +1d6 SAN
• Critical Success: +6 SAN, remove a Condition if present; gain a Bond with therapist equal to ½ CHA if Condition is removed &  decrease an existing Bond by 1d4
• Failure: +1 SAN (+0 if Luck roll fails)
• Critical Failure: - 1 SAN

It is possible to find a therapist who is In The Know, but that would fall under Personal Motivation and likely have a Clock attached.

Improve Skills or Stats
Choose 2 skills, or 1 skill + 1 stat. Make a check for both: if you roll OVER your skill rating or Stat x 5, you can increase a Skill by 3d6%, or a Stat by 1. Reduce a Bond by 1.

Personal Motivation
A catch-all, for when you have something you want to pursue that doesn’t fall into the other categories. Roll SAN:

• Success: +1 San
• Critical Success: +1d4 SAN
• Critical Failure: -1 SAN
• Reduce a Bond by 1. Whatever you choose to pursue, there will be a development of some sort (we can cross that bridge when we come to it.)

Special Training
Gain a specialization for a skill you already have ie Parachuting, SCUBA diving so on (note: this part of the rules is kind of half-baked, if you want to do it let me know and we can work out something better) Reduce a Bond by 1.

Further Investigation
You devote yourself to following a lead. For this I am swerving away from default Delta Green, so we are in untested waters and this might change as we go on in the campaign.

• For most investigations, I’m going to be using a Clock system from Blades in the Dark (it’s just a pie chart, usually of 2-8 slices - when it’s filled up, the investigation is complete.)
• Multiple players can investigate the same lead
• The number of slices in a pie will be hidden at first: after the first investigation, I’ll reveal how many slices are left.
  

Tell me what you’re aiming to investigate and how you’re approaching it: I’ll call for a check of an appropriate skill. Whatever the result of the roll, you will always learn something meaningful for each completed slice of the investigation clock.

• Success: Investigation clock is increased by 1: + 1d6-3 SAN
• Critical Success: Investigation clock is increased by 2; +1d3 SAN
• Failure: Investigation clock is increased by 1; decrease a Bond by 1
• Critical Failure: Investigation clock is increased by 2; decrease a Bond by 1d4

In cases where you are investigating something that will involve SAN damage, you will take it on all results, according to how bad it happens to be.

**

And there you have it. A solid introduction, if I do say so myself. Tune in next time for that most vital of campaign elements: the green box.