Researching Innsmouth (Patreon)

Excerpted from the upcoming Delta Green scenarios Ex Oblivione and Hourglass, available soon at delta-green.com.

Agents can pursue information on Innsmouth, Massachusetts, according to their skills and contacts.

HISTORY: An Agent with a skill of 50% or higher, or who makes a successful roll, learns that Innsmouth is notable for the government raid that occurred there in February 1928. According to news reports and Massachusetts histories, the town was home to an inbred religious cult which traded in drugs, bootlegging, and worse. It had terrorized the area for decades. Their “church,” called the Esoteric Order of Dagon, was linked to abductions and murders. Finally, after a witness reported a rum-running operation in town, agents from the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) and the Treasury Department raided it, with assistance from Coast Guard and Navy vessels which ran interdiction on boats. They arrested most of the town.

Innsmouth never recovered. It remains a long-overgrown ruin on the shores of Massachusetts, which has taken on a local legendary “ghost town” status. Teenagers still drive into Innsmouth to make out, break what few windows remain, and mark up the abandoned buildings with graffiti. Stories are told of devil worship out on the long-gone reef, and of pacts struck with monsters for gold and treasure from beneath the sea.

OCCULT: An Agent with a skill of 50% or higher, or who makes a successful roll, learns that various conspiracy theories say that the 1928 Innsmouth raid was cover for the outright extermination of immigrants, the homeless, socialists, unionizers, or townfolk who were in league with aliens or demons.

BUREAUCRACY (NAVY): A successful roll by an Agent with extensive Navy connections can reveal several minor things which hint at the bigger picture. First, according to news reports, the federal raid on Innsmouth occurred on 23 FEB 1928. On that date, the Marines reported a dozen or so casualties, suddenly, in various far-flung locations far outside of the United States. Five of those occurred in an attack on a Marine patrol on a coastal road just west of Chinandega, Nicaragua. The Marine Corps reported it as an ambush by rebels fighting the U.S. occupation. There was no pattern to the locations of the other deaths. A second Bureaucracy roll on any one of those names indicates their last location for receiving mail was listed as the Boston Naval Annex—even those killed in places like Nicaragua, whose mail should have been handled someplace farther afield.

PERSUADE (MARINES): A successful roll by an Agent with connections to any high-ranking Marine indicates that the contact has heard the name “Innsmouth.” It is a tall tale that some career Marines pass down from their fathers and grandfathers, about a town in the U.S. overrun by a devil cult which the Marines busted in a hard fight sometime in the 1930s. The Marine doesn’t believe such nonsense, of course.

ASKING THE PROGRAM ABOUT INNSMOUTH

Sending a request up the chain to the Program is met with a solid rebuff. Innsmouth is beyond the scope of the investigation. The Agents are to find the threat and eliminate it. Further prodding might be met with a telephone call from the Director himself. Notably, he is much more expressive in his commands that the agents leave it alone.

ASKING THE OUTLAWS ABOUT INNSMOUTH

Innsmouth is well known to the Outlaws. If the Agents ping A-Cell, it returns a scattered series of reports from different generations. These grant +1 to the Unnatural skill of any Agent reading through them carefully, and reveal the following:

PRISONERS AT YY-II: An Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) subsection called P4 built and ran an Arizona facility called Naval Medicine Annex Yuma, codenamed “YY-II” after its code on surveyor maps: “Yuma-Yucca Lot 2.” Naval Medicine Annex Yuma housed prisoners from a 1928 government raid on Innsmouth. There is nothing more available about P4 in public records or from A-Cell.

NOT ENTIRELY HUMAN: The Innsmouth prisoners held by P4 were...wrong. Some were physically almost identical to human, but most had anomalous biology that could not be readily identified. Some had functioning gills. These creatures are sometimes referred to as “Deep Ones” in the files. P4 added more captives to YY-II after a Marine Corps raid in Nicaragua in 1933.

DELTA GREEN TAKES OVER: At some point between 1939 and 1942, Delta Green took over Deep Ones research from ONI. Three Delta Green “actions” agains the Deep Ones are noted, including something called OPERATION LIFEGUARD, which took place in France near the beginning of America’s involvement in the European war.

NOT CLOSED BUT MOVED: Due to a change in commands (from Delta Green to some other group), YY-II was closed in Arizona and moved to an unknown location in New Mexico. This facility was also called YY-II, or sometimes the ICE CAVE. Also stored at this location were “anomalous remains recovered at Corona, NM, in 1947.”