Project NEMESIS

Login

Total Users

	2510 registered
	0 today
	0 this week
	57 this month
	Last: RacerDawg

Home

Delta Green

Delta Green Post 9/11

Written by James Haughton, Viktor Eikman, David Tormsen

Tuesday, 06 November 2007

"The greatest fear of all is the fear of the Unknown". That's what horror gaming and particularly Call of Cthulhu is all about. In that light, pre-millenial DG's main meta-plot has definitely become dated, because the horror is no longer unknown.

Secret quasi-military, quasi-private organizations (MJ-12 and its spinoffs) taking the law into their own hands? We've seen it on the news (Halliburton, Blackwater, Wakenhut et al).

Mysterious alien abductions involving strange surgical procedures? Not really very terrifying in the light of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" torture program – at least the Mi-Go are aliens whom we have no reason to expect will behave humanely.

Mysterious collaborations between the high levels of government and those who are supposedly our enemies? Whether or not you believe it, the understanding that the CIA and various past administrations armed and trained Al-Quaeda and the Taliban (to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, and stop them making trouble in Saudi Arabia) is now widespread.

Strange, secret cults lurking just down the road, trying to kill us all by summoning horrible monsters? Substitute "making home-made dirty bombs" with "summoning horrible monsters" and you've got "home-grown terror", as seen particularly in the UK, in a nutshell.

All of these things are still horrifying. But, with the possible exception of the last, they're horrifying in daylight. We have names, dates, places, facts. We no longer need the myths of the mythos to tell us that we do these things to ourselves. It's not the fear of the unknown any more.

So the old tropes aren't going to work so well in summoning existential terror. Of course, we could just go back to more traditional CoC cult-busting, which works fine with terrorist cells. We can even chuck in some swarthy arabs to keep HPL spinning happily in his grave. But that strikes me as too easy, too clichéd, to be blunt. It's the lazy way, it means taking the game backwards rather than forwards.

What then is the new threat, the new menace that's going to keep us awake at night? Looking over the list, a few prominent themes that keep popping up spring to mind.

1) Zombies. Don't laugh. Zombie movies are big these days. Zombies are a great symbol – mindless consumerism, environmental threats (strange diseases caused by human genetic/ecological meddling in particular) and Xtian rising from the dead themes, all chained together in one rotting, drooling, shambling package.

2) The unknown in our midst. I think most people find the "home-grown terrorists", the idea that the kids down the road might suddenly pick up a gun and shoot their classmates or put together a bomb and blow up the local subway, or that the kids might be kidnapped and molested then put on the internet by some normal-seeming neighbour, far more frightening than a bunch of middle-eastern fanatics. We know that they're the enemy. We don't know who on "our" side is really on "their" side.

DG has always done an excellent job of pulling that "back to Psycho" card, and it's a wonderful card. However, keep in mind that tropes like religious hysteria contradict it. To really get the unknown-in-our-midst vibe, your enemy must be (similar to) you, not (for instance) an Xtian fanatic. Connecting this with abuse of power instead, Bush is scary because he's a regular guy, in exactly the wrong place for a regular guy.

That's true as far as the openly Xtian fanatics go. The one's were all scared of at the moment, IMHO, is the secret fanatics, the ones who just look and act normal and then suddenly go and bomb the subway for Allah, or an abortion clinic for Jesus, or a Federal Govt building for Freedom, or shoot their classmates for hitler, etc. What is great about the Shan as the principal new metaphor/foe for DG is that they provide a driver for that kind of hidden fanaticism, as opposed to MJ-12 and the greys where the enemy (the greys) are an external threat.

3) Religious hysteria. Whether Xtian or Islamist, the number of people willing to believe and do hideous things for their religion seems to be at an all-time high. There's a fairly legitimate suspicion that a lot of the middle east isn't driven by any form of quasi-rational realpolitick but by prophecies about what has to be done to ensure the Second Coming (or the almighty Caliphate/ The eternal kingdom of Zion /etc). That's immanentizing the eschaton, people, and it's a no-no. The prospect that people with power are trying to bring about the end of the world is scary enough in this universe. In the DG-verse, it's a lot worse. Which leads into

4) Abuse of power. Although its not as existentially scary, the way governments, in particular the current White House, has centralized power in the name of "national security" legitimately worries a lot of people. The idea that this or some future administration could stage a coup using their new powers is farfetched, but not nearly as unthinkable as it once was. And now it's not "we don't trust the govt" but "we have no option but to trust the govt", because who else is going to keep us safe from terror? If they abuse their power again, what can we do? Like Zombies, we have to shamble along to the beat of the big drum.

5) We're being hung separately rather than hanging together. Most people realize that the world is facing genuine global threats. Climate change is the big one, but lots of other world-spanning environmental issues (disease, food supply, etc, see 1, hordes of zombies) seem to be coming to a head these days, and yet the major powers (Russia, US, China, Europe – with the curious exception of Britain who seem to be playing all ends against the middle) are becoming steadily more belligerent and less co-operative with each other. People feel helpless and want to do something, but don't know what. Hence the popularity of "grassroots" politics like moveon.org and getup.org that promise you can do something by clicking a mouse (yeah, right).

Now, I'm not going to suggest that all these things are caused by Mythos threats. I am going to suggest that some elements of the Mythos lend themselves more easily to use by desperate, ambitious, unscrupulous people driven by these factors than others. How do we pick them? One way, indulged in by this list all the time, is to look at the mistakes, the things which seem odd, which don't really fit with realpolitik or indeed reality, round the edges of the big things.

Here's a few, culled from the current US administration.

Strange failures of intelligence: The whole WMD thing. In particular, an obsession with probably non-existent nukes. This ties into:
An inquisitorial attitude. "Guilty until proven innocent". Now, there are justice systems which run quite effectively on an inquisitorial/roman law basis (eg france), but it's an odd tack for the US to take in the way it formulates law and approaches foreign policy.
An irrational attachment to torture. There's never been any evidence that it works as an interrogation (as opposed to fear and suppression of rebellion) tool, and indulging in it has squandered a lot of international good will.
Unilateralism: Similarly, squandering lots of international good will without really getting anything to show for it.
Religious zealotry and pre-millenialism (see above).
A decided interest in space flight and space-based weaponry (missile defence) that seems a) at odds with an anti-science attitude (see 5), b) not much use against the kind of low-level improvised terror that caused 9/11, and c) guaranteed to piss off other power blocks (see 4).

Now, who do we know who
a) Likes torture.
b) Is religiously fanatical
c) Wants to bring about the end of the world, preferably with nukes
d) Wants to get into space
e) Makes no compromises, never surrenders or negotiates
f) Infiltrates Intelligence agencies and military forces, and privatizes their functions
g) Can turn normal people into Zombies and/or secret cells of fanatic terrorists?

Shan_sm A free trepanation to the first person with the right answer, and a bonus pickled herring for fingering the European organization which will back them every step of the way.

So, lets agree with ASG that the MJ-12/Delta Green rivalry is yesterday's story and due to be wrapped up. Hell, given the way things are going in "for a glass darkly", much of MJ-12 has been reduced to smoking holes in the ground.

DG agents are not on top of things. Their organization is just enough to save their asses when they wouldn't be able to do it themselves, provided they themselves do not screw up. Therefore, the player characters remain in the spotlight and have interesting, multi-faceted problems that players can relate to. Merging MJ-12 and DG, maybe even if MJ-12 is weakened, Facility-12 is a melted pit of nothing and the Greys have all gone home, turns DG from "little brother" (as Ross actually thinks of them in TaGD) into Big Brother.

Everybody loves an underdog. It's a cognitive illusion, since being weaker than MJ-12 can't rationally motivate everything DG agents do. Even so, it's a great source of (tarnished) self-respect and profound (unappreciated) heroism. (Read Heinlein's "Sky Lift" to get a sense of what I think DG agents ought to be, on a thematic level.) There's also the whole corruption thing. If DG gets bigger, better known or more open, the risk of an internal Mythos meltdown grows.

The power/corruption/are we the good guys anymore is where a new source of tension or fear lies! DG might think they've "won the war", but no sooner do they get into a position of power than they realise that the people who are *legitimately* pulling the strings are themselves corrupted by the forces of the mythos, which have taken on a new, more insidious form.

By the time DG wakes up and reactivates the covert cell structure, half the cells might have Shan in their heads. When DG does start acting against the threat, the kinds of actions they have to take, acting against agents of their own government (eg assassinating officials who they believe are possessed) make them indistinguishable (from the outside perspective) from the hidden fanatic and/or the terrorist cell that they are supposed to be fighting against as part of the War on Terror.

They could easily end up in the Phillip K Dick situation of being assigned to investigate/spy upon their own actions. As I speculated, an army of the third eye/Al Quaeda alliance seems quite likely to me. At which point, which side should DG be on?

It's also worth pointing out that DG and players might not be able to tell the difference between the Mi Go and the Shan. One is a large, buzzing, sorcerous/high tech insect thing that removes brains, the other is a small, sorcerous/high tech insect thing that eats brains. DG could well decide that the Shan are a different part of the Mi Go life cycle, or a sub-species, or something. continuity works well.

How about BLUE FLY teams as Friendlies?
Coffey's missions seem pretty much like psychotic operas anyway, there is scope for some unofficial cooperation or aknowledgement. Eventually they might increasingly find their agenda moving closer to that of Delta Green than that of the Steering Committee. If Majestic collapses, former BLUE FLY agents may form the backbone of a revitalised DG.

Bonus points if the tables turn: DG becomes official again, but soon grows so large and overbearing that it is corrupted by the Mythos,while BLUE FLY and surviving pieces of the fallen behemoth that is MJ-12 become the illegal conspiracy working within the government to keep the darkness at bay.

If DG can come into the steering committee level, it should be surprisingly easy to wrap MJ-12 up. The Accord is pretty clearly dead and most of the personnel can be re-"reassigned" back to whatever their legitimate government job was, which is the sort of maneuver DG excels at anyway. The funky weapons can be presented to the White House as the result of various "black budget" research programs, which is basically what they were. Hey, DG/MJ might even be the ones pushing for space-based weapons to fend off any future Grey attack.

Let them push. It doesn't matter a damn when the Insects from Shaggai have crossed the Atlantic and are eating the brains behind the War on Terror. When Euro-Severn Airspace merges with the European Space Agency and the Transcendent arms dealers to sell nukes to countries occupying key points in a pattern that spells Azathoth. When the Army of the Third Eye joins Al Quaeda to assassinate western leaders they claim are possessed by demons, and cell A tells you to stamp their passports, whose side are you on? When the sky is so polluted that the sun can't shine through in certain wavelengths; when new-variant Creuzfeld-Jacobs really hits (we've just seen the test runs; it's made by mincing rebellious young Shan in the brains they occupy) and reduces infectees to cannibalistic worshippers of the Idiot God; when anyone – your friends, your family, your cell mates, cell A – could harbor the enemy inside their head, what good will your super-secret space-based laser cannon do? The more you crack down, the more the fear and loathing of your shiny, new, legitimate badge spreads; the more the fear spreads, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between the "real" enemy and all the other world powers, concerned citizens, and terrorist ratbags you've pissed off as collateral damage; the harder it is to tell the difference, the more you crack down.

Oh, and of course, this will give rise to a directive from A cell which I've been waiting for for a long time:

As of now, all cell members will line their hats or other head coverings with tinfoil, and wear them at all times.

Be seeing you.

Comments

Add New

RSS

Only registered users can write comments!