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Well, after having run a few (kinda sorta) Delta Green one shot scenarios, I’ve now finally gotten around to reading the core book. I was pretty familiar with the general game/world setup before, having read all the DG novels and short stories – but still, this was very much worth reading. I can easily understand why people went “whoah!” when this was first published, and why the original print run sold out: this is Cthulhu updated to the modern age, dripping with conspiracy, paranoia and a sense of doom. The whole tone here is “push back the darkness one more day”, and it picks up a lot of cues from cold war spy stories. Burned-out people trying to keep themselves alive and sane by whatever means necessary, fighting an invisible war that most other people around them are (happily) blind to.

The basic tone and setup is reminiscent of The X-Files (though frequently much grimmer), but it’s not a copy; Delta Green preceeded X-Files by about a year, and was born from the writers wanting a modern Cthulhu game in which the PCs actually had a reason to stick together.

This new edition of the game is hardbound and is double-statted for BRP/d20, but it otherwise identical to the original as far as I know. It contains info on the basic game setup and details on the main groups, most of which are hostile to Delta Green. The second half of the book contains three scenarios: the startup scenario Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, the (in)famously deadly Convergence, and a longer mini-campaign titled The New Age. All are very good, though I’d hesistate to run Convergence other than as a one-shot, it’s ridiculouly dangerous even for a Cthuhu scenario and should result in an extremely likely total party kill (not “possible”, but “almost certain”). You have been warned.

The book ends up with a big infodump on U.S. government agencies (I had no idea there were so many, the alphabet soup here can make your head spin). Extremely nice detail if you want to add a degree of realistic detail to your game, and should be useful as a resource for other games, too.

There have been some claims that Delta Green doesn’t really work in the post-9/11 U.S., with the tighter scrutiny on federal agency ops and anti-terrorist paranoia which makes a cell operation like Delta Green look precisely like a terrorist operation. Which it is, in many regards. I’m not sure about all that – government agencies are massive things with typically low efficiencies and lots of obfuscation and layers, it doesn’t strain my sense of disbelief to have “shadow ops” still going on under official pretenses. Also, some have said that the X-Files/UFO elements of DG are “outdated”… and I’m not sure I agree on that, either. The Grey/MJ-12 thing is only one small part of the game, and the fact that terrorists have replaced UFOs in the public landscape doesn’t mean that you can’t still use UFO mythology. It might be even more effective in a game, now, since we’re well past the X-Files boom.

In short: I don’t really see any problems in running Delta Green set in a modern U.S. – and if you do happen to have a problem, you can always set your game in pre-9/11 times. Problem solved. I’ve gotten the impression that a “New Millennium” DG sourcebook is one idea the writers have been bouncing around, so we might even get an “official” version of the “DG in 2000s” thing some day.

This is a truly excellent book, and its reputation of being one of the best game expansion books ever published is well-deserved. The amount of new, weird and disturbing ideas here is off the scale, it’s a magic blend of Cthulhu, film noir, Cold War spy stories, X-Files and many other ingredients. I can’t really recommend this book and game highly enough.