SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS

(Above is some new art for Delta Green—picturing the Delta Green team inserted into Novosibirsk to prevent the life-extension experiments of Erwin Peis to be used on an ailing Josef Stalin.)

Delta Green’s flagrant disregard for its original mission would likely have led to its disbandment if not for the successful conclusion of Operation SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS.

In 1952, Delta Green had begun hearing rumors about a Soviet NKVD research project in Novosibirsk, directed by a former Karotechia scientist named Erwin Peis, pursuing life extension experiments, to extend, perhaps indefinitely, the life of ailing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. In December, Delta Green inserted a six-man team onto the Arctic coast of Siberia via U.S. Navy submarine. The Delta Green agents and their Aleut Eskimo guides crossed the eastern Siberian Mountains to Novosibirsk. Only the team leader, Col. Michael Keravuori, returned the following winter via the frozen Bering Strait.

Keravuori reported that the team had struck just in time, and that the labs, personnel, and data had been completely destroyed. The most puzzling aspect of the operation was that the Delta Green team was captured by Soviet authorities before their raid, but, after interrogation, were inexplicably released in order to complete their mission. 

During the raid, Soviet agents both aided the team and later tried to assassinate the survivors. As for Josef Stalin, he died in Moscow, on 5 MAR 1953 of apparently natural causes.

In the Field: The Cold-War Campaign

After World War II scattered the unnatural to all points of the globe, the reconstituted Delta Green undertook a decade-long “mop up” campaign. In these operations, Karotechia personnel, their research, and their unnatural technologies were hunted down, assassinated, captured or destroyed before they could tip the scales of world power.

At this moment in time, from 1948 to approximately 1960, Delta Green had access to the full might and infrastructure of the U.S. government. Nothing was beyond their grasp.

Those wishing to run a game set in the Cold War should keep the following in mind:

•UNKNOWNS: America itself is filled with hundreds of mysteries. Flying disks, bigfoot, various beast sightings such as the “Mothman,” and others fuel Delta Green operations at home, even as the group acts abroad to protect U.S. interests. 

•WE MUST RECOVER IT!: The Karotechia spent years collecting unnatural artifacts—books, devices, icons, relics, and statuary—before the western intelligence services caught on to their actual utility. By the time Delta Green was in the war, the Nazis had the most extensive collection of unnatural artifacts gathered in one place in the world. These were scattered at the end of the war, and they turned up in the strangest places.

•LAST SEEN IN SOUTH AMERICA: Many of the Nazis (and Karotechia) fled to South America. And many of the missions in this era were carried out in various South American locales. 

•RUSSIAN EXTRACTS: Karotechia researchers were captured and put to work by the Soviet SMERSH. The Karotechia’s research in resurrection and life-extension technologies continued under Soviet rule, for use in the growing tensions of the Cold War. 

•ROCKETS AND NUKES: The focus of the Soviet Union throughout the early 1950s was atomic and hydrogen bomb research, as well as rocket technology strong enough to carry such a weapon. The unnatural featured into this in many ways. Karotechia scientists enamored with alchemy claimed they could create uranium or plutonium from lead, that they could render the bomb assembly weightless, and more. None of these projects came to pass, of course; but was that because the researcher was killed, the underlying unnatural formula was flawed, or Delta Green intervened?