Delta Green: Geoffery Hawthorne in The Labyrinth (Patreon)

SPOILER ALERT FOR DELTA GREEN: THE LABYRINTH. If you expect to be a DG player in a campaign featuring The Labyrinth, read no more!

The Labyrinth is ever so close to being released in PDF and going to press for hardback. It is a fantastic book by Delta Green originator John Scott Tynes, presenting new organizations that can enter your campaign as allies or opponents and be forever changed by interacting with the players' Agents.

One especially fun element of The Labyrinth for me is John's inclusion of Geoffery Hawthorne, a retired DG agent who was involved in the cataclysmic fall of the Cult of Transcendence. That experience warped him forever. If the Agents meet Hawthorne, he is doing his best to pass as an eccentric Miskatonic professor. But the cracks in his psyche are likely to become fissures and bottomless pits when the demands of DG push him farther than he can go. 

Hawthorne was my character in a Cthulhu Now campaign in the late 1980s, years before Delta Green. He was a  college student and a descendant of a long-running 1920s character who went through multiple campaigns only to be devoured at last by Masks of Nyarlathotep. After Delta Green was published, I advanced him a few years and wrote him up as a Delta Green agent on delta-green.com, just for a lark. 

And the years went on. 

Last year, when John was thinking up a DG agent with a background in abnormal psychology and the academic study of cults, he asked about adopting Hawthorne:

As part of this, I’m going to establish a ... program tracking cults based at Miskatonic University, in part to help bring MU out of the historical timeline and into DG’s present. This MU program will be tracking overt cults in America, the kinds with websites and pamphlets like Heaven’s Gate or NXIVM, and doing research into extinct groups such as the Esoteric Order of Dagon. That program will really be just a professor and a couple of grad students who share research with [the Witness Alliance].

For the professor, I’d like to use Shane's Geoffrey Hawthorne aka Agent Christopher  He will have fairly recently left the FBI and gotten a tenured position back at Miskatonic, his alma mater. Shane, if I can use him, how do you think he would have navigated the schism prior to his retirement? And I’m thinking that his major focus at DG in the 2000s was the Cult of Transcendence — and that while the cult primarily corroded from within, Christopher was the one who put the pieces together as it fell apart and documented all he could. He could have been directly involved in one of the final cataclysms of the CoT and it would be that op that led to his departure from the FBI and his decision to return to academia and study active cults.

Naturally, I loved the idea. I said I figured Hawthorne would wind up with the Program, and that he ought to have it rough:

I think he would have wound up in the same clique as Abe Mannen and Victoria Winstead, tight with Jean Qualls after working with her at the FBI for years before and after joining DG. So into the Program. If he spent lots of years focusing on CoT cults and their manuscripts, he’s probably deteriorated a lot over time and probably saw Bonds burned away (maybe literally) during the CoT implosion and investigations. He came from old Massachusetts money, law school, FBI, a professor, so he probably looks pretty good on the MU website but is deeply damaged goods in person. 

You can see the result in The Labyrinth. 

Having my old character from my high school and college days appear in such a great work is a wonder. I hope you have fun completing his dissolution and destruction at your own table.

Happy Halloween.