Delta Green: Playing an Analyst

In my home Delta Green campaign, I gave a longtime Agent the option to retire from the field. There’s no real retirement from Delta Green, of course. But her case officer, growing perhaps ill-advisedly sympathetic to her traumas over the years, pulled strings to have her transferred from operations to intelligence. She is now an analyst, which means she reviews possible unnatural incidents before they are sent to operations. I plan to play a brief cameo for the character at the beginning of each new operation. Most won’t have any impact on the other Agents. But she’ll have opportunities to be exposed to more of the Program and more of the unnatural, which may someday lead back to her former companions.

This text is a work in progress, probably bound for the book Deep State. When the rest of the Delta Green team gets their hands on it, things may take a hard turn. If you try turning an Agent to an analyst at your table, come back to the comments here and tell us how it went.

Photo by Kenneth Lu.

THE ZENO INSTITUTE

A handful of the Program's analysts work at the Zeno Institute, a small but lucrative think tank in Maryland. Once or twice a month, Zeno’s analysts produce an almost meaningless political piece for the Department of Defense or the Department of State. That takes up, on average, about a third of their time. The rest they dedicate to the Program.

The chief analyst is Dr. Lawrence Hong, a slim, 55-year-old Chinese-American with thick glasses over sad eyes. A forensic analyst turned physicist, Hong encourages analysts who come from the humanities to pursue degrees in astronomy, quantum physics, and advanced mathematics. The Zeno Institute offers scholarships to facilitate continuing education.

Analysts privately review reports and sightings that may indicate unnatural phenomena. They call such phenomena things like “scalar field disruptions,” “intrabulk membrane contacts” or “Calabi-Yau sheaf intersections.” Most analysts strongly, even desperately, frown on using phrases that hint at the occult or the supernatural.

On average, an analyst vets about 60 potential events or “potentials” each month. About 90% of those can be ruled out as hoaxes or false alarms within an hour. About 90% of the rest can be ruled out with extensive study, each taking up to half a day. The rest, averaging about one a month, the analyst designates “actuals” after two or three days of checking. Actuals are forwarded to Hong. Most analysts have no idea what happens next. Former Agents know all too well.

Analysts are told to carefully control access to their work. They are warned that their every keystroke is logged and investigated. But in private, senior analysts are likely to roll their eyes about all that. Their researches could be logged, but nobody investigates them unless something comes up. The Program pays attention if there are symptoms that something has gone wrong with an analyst. Those they investigate.

Analysts’ work often leads to strange and awful fields. Many analysts skimp on research in order to reduce their own stress and protect their sanity.

THE ANALYST AT HOME

As part of the cameo, resolve a home pursuit for the analyst before each operation that the active agents pursue. Before the home scene, the analyst has a choice. They can skimp on  research, losing 0/1 SAN from helplessness. Or they can do the job right, perhaps protecting agents in the field but reviewing the worst kinds of evidence. That, too, calls for a Sanity test. If it succeeds, the analyst gains 1 SAN, up to a maximum of the analyst’s POW×5. If the roll fails, the analyst loses 1D4 SAN from the unnatural.