EXCERPTS FROM THE DELTA GREEN RPG BOOK

Work continues apace on Delta Green the Role-Playing Game, a gargantuan undertaking of writing and art which we are super excited to release to the world. But, keeping with an old Delta Green tradition—we don't release books until they're READY. Below is an excerpt. Enjoy!

THE GREAT OLD ONES
What would the most well-informed Delta Green Agent know? What is the ultimate secret they keep? Approximately this: 

The Great Old Ones came from elsewhere and fought over the Earth billions of years before man, and now sleep in some infernal cycle of time. Life on Earth is the result of biological runoff; a fungus borne of alien shit, that has clung and crawled and evolved as these giants sleep. Their science is our magic, and remnants of their civilizations spring up to infect our world. Soon, they will wake, and destroy humanity. NOTHING can stop this.

So then, what exactly is a Great Old One? Some claim they are aliens from another world of a scale beyond all terrestrial life. Others say that they are native to Earth but that we are to them as bacteria are to us. Still others say they exist in some other alternate reality which bleeds over into our own. Still others place them in hierarchies of power: Elder Gods, Great Old Ones, Other Gods. Forces that serve other forces more infinite than infinite. No one knows how many exist or their true names or forms in any definitive sense—at least no one sane.
    There are many theories. What those theories agree upon is this: the Great Old Ones “sleep”, seek freedom, and once released, will destroy humanity. This will not be some war—just as a man does not war with an anthill—but a complete annihilation.
    The Great Old Ones manipulate reality in ways that make the most advanced human sciences look ridiculously primitive. Yet, some men have learned the hypergeometrical principles of the Great Old Ones, or at least, have learned to mimic them to achieve some, limited effect.
    The existence of the Great Old Ones can be said to have been “confirmed” on many occasions. So have the terrible effects of their alien “science”. Beyond this, little can be said with any certainty. For example, an entity called Cthulhu, “sleeps” in an alien fold in space/time at 49°51′S 128°34′W in the Pacific Ocean. What then, is it?
    It is the size of a small mountain. It has superficial features of a living being. It appears to be able to change shape, bend space/time, and warp its form. If nothing about the creature is static, how do you define it?
    Is this “Cthulhu” the same as a creature fired upon by the U.S. Navy S-8 Submarine in the February, 1928 raid on Innsmouth, Massachusetts? Or is it the entity spotted at Black Cod Island, Alaska, identified as “He Who Swims With Corpses”, of similar description? None can say.
    Take this further. Certain myth-cycles describe an entity called Nyarlathotep, linked to Egyptian myth. It is described as an ebony skinned man, a giant creature with a blood-red tentacle, and a horrific corpse woman; as well as a thousand other “faces”. Each of these forms is known to be “real”. Are they related? How does one tell? What if this entity is not only all these forms, but all the other Great Old Ones as well? Time, distance, mass and energy appear to mean nothing to “them”. What if these are a singular creature, conforming to our cultural perceptions the way water conforms to the shape of a puddle?
    As can be seen in this thought experiment, understanding implies an absolute knowledge of power, energy and time, something no man can achieve and remain sane.
    What can be said definitively is that it is likely the Great Old Ones were the initial catalyst for life on Earth. As such, most of the entities created below are products of, or are subservient to the Great Old Ones, either directly, or indirectly.

ALIEN INTELLIGENCES
After the reign of the Great Old Ones in the distant past, multiple non-human species from the stars warred over Earth (some even co-existed with the Great Old Ones for short periods of time). Crinoid plant-like beings, amorphous blobs of sentient cells that could reshape into any form, extra dimensional blights of non-terrene matter with a thousand eyes, fungal-scientists from the edge of the solar system, just to name a few; built cities, and forged empires that rose and fell long before humanity evolved. They left artifacts, ruins, and science buried far from the haunts of man. They are called by many, many names.
    Some still live today, enacting alien plans to restore their supremacy. Since 1942, Delta Green has actively hunted such creatures.

ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE: MI-GO, ELDER THINGS AND SHOGGOTHS
Vast alien empires persisted on earth for hundreds of millions of years before humanity. Their ruins remain in hidden places, in folds in space/time, and scattered throughout the solar system.

MI-GO: THE PACT AND THE SILENCE
Though few understand the real truth; the fungal scientists known as the Mi-Go have, since 1947, had the deepest relationship with mankind. In their cover as the “Greys” the Mi-Go have used the American government as a tool to further their agenda through MAJESTIC.
    In 2001, this pact ended suddenly and since, the creatures have remained silent, working their inhuman plans in the depths of the solar system on Pluto; the planet forbidden texts refer to as Yuggoth.

ELDER THINGS: BENEATH THE ICE
Since the doomed Starkweather-Moore expedition of 1930 when an ancient, giant, cyclopean city of basalt pyramids was discovered in the center of Antarctica, and the crinoid, Elder Things were reawakened. Just eight years later, a second expedition found no sign of the Elder Things or their alien city; though outposts surely remain beneath the antarctic ice.

SHOGGOTHS: ROGUE ENTITIES
Lone Elder Thing scientists, and their mutated creations, the terrifying, plastic Shoggoths, persist, hidden in the depths of the oceans and beneath ice sheets, enacting unknowable plans.


INHUMAN EARTHLY INTELLIGENCES
Other inhuman races exist which may or may not be native to Earth. The most common inhuman earthly intelligence is the Deep One; ocean-dwelling, immortal beings that have been interbreeding with humanity since the dawn of history for unknown purposes. Second are the ghouls; dog-headed, immortal beings who feast on the human dead, hiding in warrens underground. Third are serpent men—reptilian-humanoids who, during the age of the dinosaurs gained access to the science of the Great Old Ones.
    While these three species are the most commonly encountered, there are others.

HUMAN HYBRIDS
Both deep ones and ghouls, through unknown means, interbreed with humans to produce hybrids. Serpent men, using hypergeometry, have masqueraded as humans for long periods of time, undetected; even interacting with humans in the modern age.
    Hybrids and creatures living in masquerade represent some of the greatest threats Delta Green has ever known.


ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE: GHOULS AND DEEP ONES
Ghouls and Deep Ones represent an insidious threat to humanity. They seem to be able to breed with humans, or at least infect them—changing them, over time, into hybrid species, or possibly, fully changing them into a Deep One or ghoul given enough time.

DEEP ONES: THE HYBRID DIASPORA
Since the discovery of the Deep One civilization by the American Navy in 1928, a secret war has been wrought by various world governments against these creatures, and their bizarre method of infiltration and interbreeding with human populations.
    The surface colonies of human/Deep One hybrids have, for the most part, been destroyed (as far as those in the know believe), but few in Delta Green have any delusions that this has had any effect on the true, immortal, deep one civilization beneath the oceans. There, they wait and occasionally venture upwards, to begin their work anew.

DEEP ONES: BLACK COD ISLAND
The oldest and most significant Deep One colony in North America was founded in 1555 A.D. by an infected offshoot of the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest. It remains hidden on Black Cod Island, Alaska, in plain sight, as a model American-Indian settlement. There it remains a den of inhuman worship and terror.
    These Deep One hybrids (called the Xaatgáav Skíl or “Black Cod people”) are known as smiling, simple and strange looking—but friendly—and their industry and self-sufficiency is admired by all. In secret, they kidnap and sacrifice lone travelers in the wilderness of Alaska to their dark lord, a huge, primal deep one called He-Who-Swims-With-Corpses.

DEEP ONES: OTHER FRAGMENTS
Who knows what darkness tinges the shores of out-of-the-way places, or when the deep ones will once again launch a colonization of the surface? Their motives are alien, their bodies and minds immortal, their science hundreds of decades in advance of humanity. The last seventy years of human conflict are nothing but a flicker of light across the vast shadow-hand of the Deep Ones’ plans.

GHOULS: THE KEEPERS OF THE FAITH
In the 1630’s, a religious order run by a heretic named Mogens Dekker fled from Europe to the free port city of New Amsterdam (later New York), and there, set about a secretive worship of an unknown god. Dekker and his followers—known as The Keepers of the Faith—were actually ghouls-in-the-making, once human monstrosities who dug into the earth, were immortal, and fed on dead human flesh.
    Even today, dozens of the immortal ghouls persist in New York. In the 1990s, Delta Green hunted The Heretics—a group of younger ghouls who had broken off from The Keepers of the Faith, and who had begun preying on the living. With the assistance of The Keepers (who refused to touch living flesh) Delta Green brought The Heretics to heel.
    Today in exchange for the truce which brought down the Heretics Delta Green has moved the few remaining Keepers of the Faith from Manhattan to the vast graveyards of Glendale and Forest Park, Queens, New York—an endless feast in which they may live on forever in secret, and in peace.

GHOULS: THE DEMONTE CLAN
The DeMonte clan, a degenerate group of ghouls who persisted as an infection in New Orleans from 1766 to 2005—hiding in plain sight as a family of successful mortuary owners using hypergeometrical disguises—were rooted out and destroyed in a hastily thrown together Delta Green operation during the chaos generated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
    Few of the DeMontes remain, and their once stout empire has been shattered. Still, today, Delta Green monitors the city through operation REDBONE—looking for those trying to buy influence and power by robbing federal relief funds. Occasionally, a hidden ghoul is uncovered and destroyed. Even in 2017, this mop-up operation continues.

GHOULS: REMNANTS IN EUROPE AND ASIA
Ghouls once infected all of Europe, but barring reports during the wars which wracked the continent in the last century, few known ghoul populations remain; most having been hunted to extinction by various secret agencies. Still, it is not unimaginable that lone ghouls still haunt individual graveyards, hidden beneath the earth, immortal.
    The largest and most dangerous ghoul outbreak occurred in Russia during the reign of Josef Stalin; called The Cult of the Great Provider. While Stalin’s death-squads stoked the fire of the ghoul cults, thousands of ghouls were born, and put down by the Soviet agency tasked with the unnatural: GRU-SV8. Who knows if any remain? If they do, they have certainly learned to hide themselves more carefully.


EXTRA DIMENSIONAL INTELLIGENCES
The Great Race is a non-human intelligence which can transcend time and occupy human minds, and through these proxies, manipulate history. The Lloigor are non-physical intelligences which manipulate energy and matter to create living projections of their consciousness. These two forces appear to be in conflict, with their battlefield spanning the last two centuries of human history. Since time and space remains insubstantial to them, this war is persistent and temporally fixed only to them—a front in a war across time.
    There are others, of course, demons, djinn and more—but it is unclear if these are covert manifestations of other forces, new threats, or simply legend.


ACTIONABLE INTELLIGENCE: THE GREAT RACE AND THE LLOIGOR
The Great Race and Lloigor—creatures that exist outside of our four-dimensional world—manifest and war for supremacy over something greater than what we call existence. No one can remain human and understand their motives, plans or drives.

THE GREAT RACE: THE CONSTRUCT
The Great Race left the concept of time behind long, long ago. To them, it is simply a geography they travel through, to embed their consciousness in living beings to enact their bizarre plans. But this geography of time, (which they call “the construct”) is always changing and collapsing. It must be rebuilt, to maintain a connection to a distant radioactive future to which the Great Race will one day escape (have escaped, will always escape), to occupy the lone survivors of the earth: giant, coleopterous, beetles. To this end, the Great Race agents might be found anywhere in human history, and their servants—temporal “coolies” they call the Motion—will die to see their plans enacted.

THE LLOIGOR: A CANCER ON REALITY
The Lloigor are extradimensional intelligences that can perceive and manipulate our reality to manifest living vessels to contain their consciousness. They are seemingly addicted to the physicality of our world, and are drawn to torture, death and pain. Like the Great Race, the Lloigor seem to be driven to cause an outcome in what we might call “history”, which seems contingent on the establishment of a human empire—the last—called the “Tsan-Chan” in approximately 5,000 A.D. Though it is not clear, this outcome seems in direct conflict with the Great Races’ plans for future nuclear war.


OTHER UNNATURAL THREATS
The Great Old Ones and their minions are by no means the only threats discovered by Delta Green. There are other worlds, planes, and times connected to the Earth through alien science and the powers of the Great Old Ones. Invisible, alien carnivores living in the membranes between dimensions, coherent fogs of swirling glass that can congeal in the angles, rat-creatures imbued with the face and mind of a human; all of these, and more, exist at the periphery of human experience. No experienced agent doubts there are many others.
    Some unnatural threats conform to human legend, or, perhaps it is better to say human legend conforms to them. Things that operate like supernatural creatures from history: vampires, lycanthropes, yeti. Nearly anything could be hiding out there, distorted through the lens of history.
    What has not been discovered is a confirmation of the world’s religions—heaven, hell or an afterlife. There have been cases of non human intelligences impersonating religious or historical figures, and there have been reports of humans using alien techniques to separate mind from body. But so far, no aspect of spiritualism has revealed the affirmations and comforts of a human religion to be true.


BOOKS, ARTIFACTS, AND ALIEN SCIENCE
The unnatural exists in many forms, not all of them living. The remnants of alien cultures and science have intertwined with human history and can be found buried in ancient texts of magic, in one-off artifacts pulled from the Earth, or in alien concepts that haunt the human mind.
    More often than not, a book, artifact or alien concept causes an outbreak of the unnatural—either directly, or through a human agent exposed to it. Worse, this is often the first step in calling something from outside. Delta Green works hard to identify, contain or destroy these things before they can find a foothold and do lasting damage.