# Delta Green *Created:* 2024-01-06, *Modified:* 2026-10-18 **Delta Green** is the Mythos dragged into the modern bureaucratic nightmare: a secret US government agency — the same name as the sourcebook that spawned it — that exists to cover up, contain, and kill the things the public must never learn of, and to dispose of the agents who learn too much. Born as a **[[Call of Cthulhu]]** setting, it outgrew its parent and became its own game, published by Arc Dream Publishing (with Pagan Publishing), and it's the Lovecraftian topic's sharpest argument that the real horror is less the tentacled thing than the paperwork. ## Setting Delta Green imagines the American intelligence state secretly at war with the supernatural. Agents — FBI, military, agency personnel pulled into the network — fight the Cthulhu Mythos with guns, bodies, red tape, and plausible denial while keeping the whole operation off the books. The horror is doubled: face the cosmic thing that doesn't care, then come home to a world that demands you smile and not say what you saw. The signature tension is **Bonds** — the civilian relationships (family, friends, handlers) that ground an agent, that the job quietly corrodes. It's the Mythos crossed with *The X-Files*' darker half and a dash of institutional paranoia, and it holds its sanity mechanic's feet to the fire more honestly than most. ## Mechanics Delta Green runs the familiar percentile bones of its **[[Basic Role Playing|Basic Role-Playing]]** ancestry, but its genius is how it re-weights them. - **Percentile skills and characteristics** — the d100, roll-under core carried over from its **Call of Cthulhu** roots, with combat that is fast, lethal, and best avoided. - **Bonds** — the standout. Every agent has a handful of civilian Bonds; spending them in the field is a resource, but letting the job erode them (as it inevitably does) eats away whatever the agent has outside the agency. It's the mechanic that makes "go home to your family" an actual choice with mechanical teeth. - **Sanity and the unnatural** — the modern incarnation tracks Sanity on its own scale and adds **Lethality** ratings to the most catastrophic weapons, so the dice themselves can one-shot an agent — or a monster. - **The Handler** — Delta Green's Keeper, running both the agents' mission and the slow corruption of their home lives. The game's defining pitch is scale: a normal person with a badge and a gun, sent to clean up an apocalypse, then sent home. ## Editions - **1st Edition (1997)** — *Delta Green*, the original sourcebook by **John Tynes, Dennis Detwiller, and Adam Scott Glancy**, published by Pagan Publishing for **Call of Cthulhu** — the scenario setting that turned a one-off into a movement. - **2nd Edition (2016)** — *Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game*, the standalone system by **Dennis Detwiller, Adam Scott Glancy, Shane Ivey, and Greg Stolze** (Arc Dream Publishing), with the **Agent's Handbook** core and a substantial **Handler's Guide** campaign book. Currently published by Arc Dream — a separate game, not Chaosium. ## References - [Delta Green — official site](https://www.delta-green.com/) - [Delta Green — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Green)