Introduction to "Delta Green: Black Sites" (Patreon)

Now in indexing and final review, Delta Green: Black Sites is due to be released in PDF in October and in hardback in February. 

Secrets hunger. They feed and grow. They corrupt. The burden of them makes their keepers alien and strange. 

Every secret is a temptation to profit from the power of its keeping. Sometimes the temptation is not profit but conscience. That very risk demands ever more secrecy. Secrets eat away at trust. They metastasize like black cancers in hidden places.

Agents of Delta Green keep secrets too painful, too dangerous for anyone to tolerate. They hold on to their lives and families as long as they can. But that only gains time in which the poisons that they guard seep into the lives they desperately protect. Soon, they have nothing left to guard. Nothing but their secrets.

Each scenario in this book brings your Agents to sites where secrets and death spread like living things. These scenarios open with an event that could inaugurate a sprawling Delta Green campaign, one that tracks the metastatic growth of Delta Green itself.

“PX Poker Night” looks back decades to the works of a cabal at the heart of the U.S. government, a network called MAJESTIC that sells human lives for power and wealth. An evening of violent madness culminates in a brush with a terror that was ancient before humanity’s fleeting rise. 

Survivors could be recruited by Delta Green, the Delta Green of the millennium’s end, a conspiracy of a few dozen criminals in feds’ clothing. Look outside Black Sites to the oldest Delta Green books and to the timeline in the Handler’s Guide. In 1998 and 1999, recruits fresh from “PX Poker Night” could stumble into the line of fire of “Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays” from the original Delta Green. In “Convergence” and “A New Age” they may confront horrors glimpsed on a poker night they would rather forget. 

Are you an ambitious Handler? Let survivors investigate “Dead Letter” from Countdown as their introduction to the Karotechia in 2000. Play out your version of the pursuit of the Karotechia around the world. Your Agents might meet GRU SV-8. Perhaps they learn Delta Green is making common cause with MAJESTIC. They may be on the ground when all these hostile forces converge for a raid on the Karotechia’s South American headquarters in March 2001. 

Next they may find that partnership with MAJESTIC has only opened new vulnerabilities for Delta Green. Their contacts in other cells vanish or die or are arrested. The MAJESTIC war goes hot. And then it flares out with uncaring silence from the aliens that MAJESTIC so feared and adored.

How then do the years pass? You may have many scenarios to play as Delta Green splits into the Program and the Outlaws, each seeing the other as rogue pretenders. Or perhaps we return to your Agents ten years later in “Kali Ghati” as the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan draws down. You could play the operations from Control Group, some as flashbacks: “BLACKSAT” in 2010, “Night Visions” not long before “Kali Ghati,” “Sick Again” in 2012, and then “Wormwood Arena” with the gathered survivors in 2013.

The rest of the scenarios in Black Sites could follow or be interspersed. “The Last Equation.” “Lover in the Ice.” “Sweetness.” “Hourglass.” “Ex Oblivione.” One stab at the putrid heart of reality after another. “The Child” could appear anywhere along the way. 

Years have flown. Are any survivors of “PX Poker Night” still alive? Still sane? Still keeping faith with Delta Green? Perhaps they dropped away long ago, each replaced by some new face full of grim resolve. Perhaps the very memories of them are lost, poisonous secrets held by the damned.

Delta Green fights on. It feeds itself to the darkness one agent at a time. It keeps its secrets close, thinking it protects humanity from intolerable knowledge. Delta Green fights on, driven by a glorious hope, by a dream that its leaders dare not voice: that humanity would even care.

We dare not put that dream to the test. But agent by agent, death by death, secret by secret, Delta Green fights on.

Shane Ivey
September 2020
Scientia mors est