I love Delta Green and consider it one of the best supplements of the 1990s, and if anything, Countdown is better. However, I also have to admit that the sourcebook -- like its cousin Conspiracy X -- has largely been made irrelevant by current events. 

Yeah, I said it. Irrelevant. It was a product of the X-Files decade, and a certain brand of anti-millenarianism that just doesn't float within the public imagination anymore. And so it doesn't really work as well, today.
The modern world we live in takes as a given that the horrible truths of the Delta Green America are true. Yes, the government is willing to curb or extinguish the rights of Americans. Yes, the government -- when it needs to -- doesn't care about rule of law. Yes, the government is capable of sanctioning torture. And yes, the government is capable of waging war on nothing more than a lie. The Big Secret of Delta Green, that the government is capable of letting someone experiment on American citizens in exchange for a strategic military and economic advantage, is probably something most Americans are now capable of swallowing with little difficulty.

Some years ago, I remember suggesting a CoC campaign based on F. Paul Wilson's "The Keep," where the PCs would be made up of German army personnel and SS officers confronted with the Mythos. The idea was that the PCs became protagonists simply by dint of facing an evil far more cosmic than their own bureaucratic horror. I remember a large outcry about the idea that one would even let one's players play SS officers. They're awful, and some people said that given the evils of the SS, there's no way to protagonize them, and to do so would be in awful taste.

Unfortunately, time has provided me with another opportunity, only this time using the men and women in our intelligence services. If we're willing to use torture in Abu Graib or Gitmo just to stop potential terror attacks, how far would we go when the stakes were the extermination of the human race? If we're willing to argue waterboarding isn't torture, and one of the top shows on television for many seasons utilized torture in prime time as a means of investigation, imagine what we'd be capable of when what we're faced with is the end of the world?

So there's your new Delta Green -- instead of a collection of disorganized cells operating underneath the notice of a powerful military industrial complex (personified by Majestic) you'll have an operation working with full governmental support, forced to make decisions about how much of their own humanity they're willing to sell for the safety of a nation that's given up. You'll have operatives who have to question whether or not the evil they're fighting is greater than the evil they're doing, and if their superiors are willing to match evil for evil in the name of power or paranoid self-defense. Majestic isn't the enemy now -- they're an organization just like DG, equals, soldiers instead of spooks, rivals but not hunters.

Or, to put it another way:

November, 2002

Agent Wallace sat in his superior's office. The desk was cluttered, but behind it wasn't Daniels, his boss, but somebody else, from Homeland Security. Behind Wallace was a thug, wearing khakis and a white polo shirt, sunglasses on even in the dim light of the fluorescents. The Homeland Security guy had the bland good looks of a planner, a thinker, one of the innumerable operators that made up the Bush administration's machinery behind the War on Terror.

Wallace was tense. He'd just returned from a leave of absence, ostensible time off to meet a girlfriend in Seattle. In reality, he'd been in West Virginia, investigating disappearances in a mining community, bloody serial murders that no man could have committed. Wallace was Delta Green, one of a number of covert operatives, part of a top-secret conspiracy bent on protecting America from occult horror.

"I'm Dave Lucas, with DHS." The man behind the desk said. "And I've come to talk to you about your work."

Wallace tensed, sensing motion behind him. His gun was at his desk, locked in a drawer. If the man behind him moved in with a garrote, it would be two-on-one, if Lucas could fight.

"My work?" Wallace said, trying to breathe. Was this man with Majestic? Was this some kind of internal purge?

"Yes. Or more specifically, I'm here to talk to you about Delta Green." Lucas dropped the name like it was a weight.

Wallace tensed. His muscles locked into position, waiting for the thug behind him to move in for the kill. He tried to breathe, and said, "I don't know what you're talking about."

There had to be some way to alert the rest of his cell. Denise, Carl, they were all in trouble, if they hadn't already been removed. Would he have a chance? Or were they even now in meetings just like this?

Lucas smiled. "You wouldn't have heard of it. It was an old classification, long since closed out. We haven't had a use for it in thirty years, since 'Nam."

"What?" Wallace croaked.

Lucas pushed some papers forward. "DHS has been looking for government agents who've had...experiences. About three years ago, you were involved in a case where some inexplicable things happened."

Wallace nodded. What was going on?

"We're recruiting these people because as we've ramped up our intelligence activities, we've discovered that the nation's enemies are very interested in what can only be called...occult activity. We discovered the Taliban had been blowing up temples with certain ancient statuary in it, for instance. Elephant gods."

Wallace shuddered, remembering the Indianapolis job. They had no idea what they were getting into, these DHS guys.

"There have been other things. One of the potential 9-11 hijackers had been part of a bizarre Sufi offshoot, but was killed by other members of his cell. China's been stamping out a cult, even doing incursions into North Korea, to get rid of something called Sho-shos." Lucas held Wallace's gaze. "It's a small world, all of a sudden, and we've got to get a leg up on these crazies. So the Director has decided to reactivate the Delta-Green clearance. If you're interested, you'll be part of a new Delta Green sub-agency, tasked with research and investigation. You'll answer to the Director himself."

Wallace, aka Agent Martin, member of the Delta Green conspiracy, found himself relaxing almost against his will in the complete surreality of the situation.

"So...let me get this straight. You want me to join Delta Green?"

"Yes. Absolutely." Lucas said.

The best way to sum up what I'm after here is Jack Bauer, not Herman Himmler. If you sub out "terrorism" for "the Mythos," there's no reason why a campaign around the Jack Bauers of the new Delta Green isn't workable.

The central conflict of the Jack Bauer character is that he's an American everyman thrust into a situation that demands his attention, that compromises both his home life (in S.1-3) and his sanity (esp. in the last S.) And the questions the Jack Bauer character raises -- what is appropriate against an enemy we view as inhuman, is there such a thing as an inhuman enemy, are we inhuman, is our side worth saving, is torture ever ethical -- are questions that are getting asked in all sorts of media, across all sorts of genres. "The Shield" applies it to local law enforcement, so does -- to a lesser extent, and with an eye toward the utter failure of the drug crusade -- the Wire. Law & Order SVU has dedicated several episodes. "Sleeper Cell" dealt with it from the other end, asking if the other side can ever really be monsters -- that there is a fundamental humanity to them even if they're on some level evil-in-the-bone (a theme which could be dealt with all sorts of ways in Lovecraft -- imagine that question being asked of the perennial "other" or "foreigner" in Lovecraft games, the Deep Ones. Wasn't Innsmouth a fundamentally human society despite the mutations of the residents? The original story doesn't have to be played with that much in order to raise some very different questions.)

To put it simply: Is it okay to become a monster in order to battle monsters?

That's the defining question of the decade. And it's reflected in our media the same way that "Who do you trust?" was reflected in the media of the '90s, but where the '90s formulation had a certain ennui, we're embroiled in a potentially never-ending war across the globe against cultures that the average America has chosen to view as alien, different, and antagonistic. In addition the new normal Sanity costs that dealing with the Mythos brings, you're also dealing with the psychological costs that come from being under tension between what you want to do and what you have to do, or what you're told to do. And I suspect it would be a good focus for a DG campaign.

Comments

Add New Search RSS

lord.john.marbury - I like it   | Registered | 2008-05-16 03:03:47 I kinda like this twist. However, I'm afraid that I will not be ever tired of the "Who you can trust?" stuff. Blame it on the eighties/nineties .

IdiotSavant - Alternatively...     | Registered | 2008-05-20 05:25:26 [i]To put it simply: Is it okay to become a monster in order to battle monsters? That's the defining question of the decade. [/i] And it has already been definitively answered by the US government: they're fine with it, thanks. I think there's more interesting ground in taking this scenario and twisting it. After 9/11 the gloves came off. When the US government rcognised (or had revealed to them) the existence of preternatural threats, they decided to do something about it. Their answer was to use the weapon of the enemy against him. Captured Mythos tomes were researched, ancient magics were used in an effort to find the enemy and stop him before he could bring about the end times. Now throw DELTA GREEN into this picture. They have a longstanding suspicion of the Mythos and the use of hypergeometry. When the inevitable happens - the insane operatives, the botched summonings, the calling up that which you can not put down - they are going to want to put a stop to it. Id...

Only registered users can write comments!

Powered by !JoomlaComment 3.12

Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.