CREATING THE DELTA GREEN HOOK

What makes a great Delta Green adventure hook? Well, let's back up and first let's look at the term "hook" — what do we mean by it, precisely? For me, a hook is the element that makes Delta Green step in an investigate; the "why are we here?" of the mission. Sometimes the hook isn't even that, it's the real secret behind the scenes that the Agents must piece together, after being brought in on a completely different mission. Either way, the hook is the thing that pulls the Agents forward through the game.

Often, these hooks begin in my brain as a pretty simple question. Let's look at some of my operations and examine a summary of their hooks (SPOILERS BELOW):

• ARTIFACT ZERO: What would happen if Delta Green Agents dug themselves up at an archaeological site in strata a million years old?
• A VICTIM OF THE ART: What if a teenager inherited an artefact that could call down and control a horrible monster, but he had no idea the beast existed and it lashed out against his deepest fears?
• CONTROL COPY: What if an insane Delta Green Agent could control what you could see through subtle magic? How would you know what is real?
• EX OBLIVIONE: What if the disembodied spirit of a powerful Deep One sorcerer remained behind in the Arizona town he and his brethren were imprisoned and studied in the 1930s and could possess people?
• FUTURE/PERFECT: What if a federal raid on a big corporation revealed that they somehow had access to recent, freshly-killed, dinosaurs?
• THE LAST EQUATION: What if a simple piece of math could drive those that could understand it mad? What if it turned up painted on a crime scene?
• MUSIC FROM A DARKENED ROOM: What if a house was haunted so badly and ate people up so swiftly, that few even noticed?
• NIGHT FLOORS: What if a New York city art co-op full of artists came under the reality-warping influence of The King in Yellow?
• PX POKER NIGHT: What if MAJESTIC experiments based on Mi-Go tech, performed on useless Air Force personnel, accidentally brought down a Grey craft and exposed it to unbriefed personnel?
• VISCID: What if a man transformed into a monster that could split into multiple versions of itself — all thinking they were the "real" one?
• SENTINELS OF TWILIGHT: What if an ancient inhuman race lived beneath the earth, stole children, and what if one of those missing children escaped decades later, without aging a day?
• SWEETNESS: What if a damaged Delta Green veteran used a hypergeometric artifact to interact with her estranged daughter.

As you can see, as a question, the hook is usually pretty straightforward in my mind, and, as you'll also note, a lot of what the operation would become just isn't there when I create the hook. Much, if not most of what an operation is comes later, when I take that hook and mind-map leads in and out of it. But that brings up another point, perhaps created isn't the best term for how hooks come to be.

For me, a lot of the times, the hook is just...there. It appears, if not fully-formed, then certainly as enough to start writing about. Sometimes I can feel when I create a hook manually, (THE LAST EQUATION rose out of a want to make a scenario based on some short-fiction in the original Delta Green book), and sometimes it's just subconscious (MUSIC FROM A DARKENED ROOM was just, "it's halloween and I want to write a haunted house operation!") but most of the time it's just..."there's a hook!" Most often, these hooks come out of nowhere. While I'm doing something else like going for a walk, showering, even shaving.

Now this is not to say they all come from inside me. Often, I'll be reading or watching something, non-fiction, fiction, doesn't really matter, and some element will pop out at me (as it did in an article on low-level EM causing hallucinations and cognition problems, which, eventually, lead to PX POKER NIGHT), or, I'll slap two ideas together (as I did watching a documentary on Howard Hughes after coming up with the basic concept of FUTURE/PERFECT). I strip mine science articles, especially ones with weird ideas in them, and keep them in a folder to flip through when I feel creatively flat — when I do I find, that feeling usually doesn't last.

Fiction is also a great inspirer of mine, though that requires some bending and prepping so the hook you have is not just some dim reflection of another property. I see this a lot in fan-scenarios. I'll read it for a bit and go, "ah, this is just SALEM'S LOT," or "this is TRUE DETECTIVE." This is a hard habit to get ahead of or to break, but I encourage you to try to do so. Find, create, mash, fold, spindle or mutilate something into a hook that's unique to you; because although you often want to capture the feeling of a property, you never want to be a dull pantomime of a property. (I'll let you in on a little hint, almost all of my micro-fiction pieces in THE WAY IT WENT DOWN are hooks already written for the Delta Green universe, and nearly any one of them could be made into an operation without too much trouble.) 

When you come up with a hook, scribble it down. I keep a list (currently in the hundreds) that I can pore over when I'm looking for something to write. I use a reminder program and drag and drop the hooks I think are best to the top, so I can always have a short-list of good stuff to write. This isn't required, of course, but I've found it definitely helps. Sometimes I can recall having had an idea for a hook which I failed to write down and which has since floated off into the void. If you have not had this happen, trust me when I say this is a terrible feeling.

So what constitutes a good hook? It's pretty simple for me: novelty. Does it tell us something new? Or at least, tell us something old but in a new way? This should be the rule in your mind. It's also a wonderful measure to place a hook up against to see if you should pursue it. If it's just another creature feature like a trillion other horror adventures then why waste your time? But more often than not that thought will lead to a new twist or bend in your brain, "but what if we changed X?" and bam, it all comes together. So, the following: 

• Agents investigate a haunted asylum
• Agents hunt a killer monster that's preying on locals in a small-town
• Agents receive Electronic Voice Phenomena from the dead

Might become:

• Agents investigate a haunted asylum only to find out that they have memories of those who were locked-in and perished there, long ago as if they lived those lives themselves. They must play a mystery in the past and the investigation in the future to solve it. 
• Agents hunt a killer monster that's preying on locals in a small-town, but it turns out to be manifesting from the mind of a disturbed six-year-old boy who is deathly afraid of police because his father, the sheriff, beats him.
• Agents receive Electronic Voice Phenomena from the dead, but the voices begin to tell certain Agents about future events with startling accuracy. 

Hopefully, in the above examples, you can see how those old-hat hooks are given a little tweak to make them more interesting. 

Like anything else, it's best to practice making hooks. Just sit down and try to think up a few. If that fails, think about your favourite horror films or novels (or even dramas or non-fiction!) and try to start with something there you twist until you make it your own. If you want, share some below and we'll chat about them. 

For now, get cracking, Handlers! A-cell is counting on you.