The Fall of Delta Green is a mixed bag of a role-playing game. A well-developed incarnation of the Gumshoe system is married to a setting that really fails to utilize a time period full of drama and story potential as well as it could have. Is the Fall of the title just address the fiction of the Delta Green setting, or does it speak to changing times, or changing tastes, negatively impacting a fan-favorite gaming franchise?
I don't think that I've been subtle in my love for the Delta Green franchise. The bulk of my Lovecraftian gaming of the latter part of the 90s and the early years of the 2000s was taken up with it. Then the franchise's fiction was sidetracked by the real-world changes to the American Intelligence communities and the military. Much of what made the setting of Delta Green what it was just kind of stopped working because the setting no longer matched the real world. Much of what drove the setting for me was the jarring overlay of the Lovecraftian horror and the tense, often paranoid, "realism" of the world of espionage. Because the setting did not keep up with that veneer of realism, it became "quaint," and quaint can become the death of any franchise.
Within the last few years (with a new edition now finally complete rolling out to Kickstarter backers and soon to sales channels) Delta Green has come back, revitalized and modernized, once again holding a dark mirror to the modern world.
Now, The Fall of Delta Green goes back in time to look at (and allow people to play within) an important juncture during the history of Delta Green: that time when the group lost whatever official standing it might have had with the United States government. The game doesn't directly address that "fall," that is there isn't an adventure in the book where the players can interact with one specific pivotal moment in the group's history. The problem with the book lies with that looking back.
I think that if The Fall of Delta Green had come out during the first period of the franchise's history, the issues that I have with the handling of setting probably wouldn't be as profound, but in light of the more overtly transgressive nature of the new Delta Green books it is harder to see the returning to the old defaults as anything more than a form of intellectual laziness. So much occurred during the decade of the 1960s, from the killings of leaders to the Vietnam War itself to the periods of internal strife and rioting within our country that any of this could have been used metaphorically to ground the fall from grace of Delta Green within the game's setting. This would have given more power to that fall, and it could have been used as a stand in for our country's struggles with the transition from past into the future. But it didn't.
Luckily, the setting can be fixed. The recent CNN documentary series covering the year 1968 showed that you can derive a campaign with the length and complexity of Masks of Nyarlathotep using just that single year. The fall Delta Green of the franchise's setting is as much a result of the sweeping change, chaos and conflict of that era as it is the horrors of the Mythos. Normally I am not a fan of excusing the atrocities of history taking away their agency through fictional excuses, but I do think that there can be an argument made for attaching an occulture to this setting that ramps up the horrors of the decade and can mix them with the horrors of the Mythos. I can see running an era-appropriate take on the television series Fringe mashed up with the sense of loss of the movie Easy Rider. After losing their place within the government of the United States, members of Delta Green travel to figure out what their place in the world is, and how they can continue to fight the good fight against the Unnatural forces plaguing the world.
Don't think that there isn't anything good about this game. The Fall of Delta Green features the best implementation that I've seen of the Gumshoe rules to date, particularly in regards to horror gaming. There are some really cool new abilities to be found in the book. Fans of Night's Black Agents should checkout the new Investigative ability of Agency. This ability represents a character's knowledge of, contacts within and capability to manipulate the agency for which they work. There is a bit of awkwardness to the name of the ability, because the game's Handler (what the GM is called in the game) will have to come up with other ways to refer to the agencies for which characters work so as to avoid confusion.
After playing Trail of Cthulhu a couple of times in the past, I "enjoyed" its Stability and Sanity in play a lot more than I have liked Call of Cthulhu's Sanity. Trail's methods, echoed here in The Fall of Delta Green, did a better job of simulating the crumbling of a character's sanity and the encroachment of otherworldliness of the Mythos for me. I like the fringe science approach to how magic is discussed in the Delta Green world, this is one of the many places where the architects of the franchise have really modernized the game's approach to Lovecraftian horror. By calling it hypergeometry, it puts that veneer of science over the weirdness (like any really good fringe science does) that almost makes it sound normal. The rituals are similar to what you would expect from a Lovecraftian horror game and are tied to the Hypergeometry general ability. Learning "magic" is through exposure to weird things and books, and the default is that starting characters cannot have any training in hypergeometry.
The Unnatural are the creatures of the mythos, many of which players of Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu would likely be familiar with. Because there will often be more guns in a Delta Green campaign, many of the creatures are hardier than their equivalents in other games. The descriptions are also more likely to apply that veneer of science to the creatures, making them frightening in more modern ways.
The best thing about this game is the graphic design and layout of the book. This is probably one of the best designed books that I have seen in a while. Jen McCleary, credited with design and layout in the book, did an excellent job. As you flip through the pages of the game, it feels like you are going through a plethora of Delta Green files that someone has left on your desk. I love it when a game book is designed to look like an in-setting artifact because it helps to bring me into the game and makes me want to run it. Graphic design isn't often talked about in the conversations about role-playing game books, and there's a reason for that. However, when the graphic design is done well, as it is in this book, we need to let those people know. The font choice for the logo for The Fall of Delta Green is also spot on, and evokes the era of the book.
I readily admit that I have always been a little out of step with much of the Delta Green fandom, in that I have never been interested in the military side of things with the setting. Shooting a mythos creature with a tank gun has always seemed pointless to me, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the underpinnings of Mythos fiction. I am, however, a fan of role-playing in modern eras more than anything else, so my Delta Green games would always be more about outsiders, and people on the fringes of the government/corporate establishment trying to keep the weird world in which they live patched up and running for one more day. The deep lore of the Hastur Mythos outlined in the later first phase of Delta Green books was more of an impetus to my gaming in these worlds than all of the equipment lists and pages of equipment lists. My games took place in a world where the surface had cracked, and the strangeness was bubbling out of those cracks.
With a squint, I can see that game in The Fall of Delta Green, and with a little work I can squeeze that game out of it. It means taking off the rose-colored glasses and digging into the good and the bad of the setting and seeing the impact of squeezing the Mythos onto them. Despite the flaws of the book, I still recommend it to people looking for a Gumshoe horror game with a different approach to Lovecraftian horror than the accepted baseline. There are a lot of the good bits from the Delta Green franchise in this game, with a system that complements play in that world. The exact application of the setting might not be to everyone's taste, but this is neither the first nor the last time that a GM would have to adapt a published setting to meet their own needs.
I don't think that I've been subtle in my love for the Delta Green franchise. The bulk of my Lovecraftian gaming of the latter part of the 90s and the early years of the 2000s was taken up with it. Then the franchise's fiction was sidetracked by the real-world changes to the American Intelligence communities and the military. Much of what made the setting of Delta Green what it was just kind of stopped working because the setting no longer matched the real world. Much of what drove the setting for me was the jarring overlay of the Lovecraftian horror and the tense, often paranoid, "realism" of the world of espionage. Because the setting did not keep up with that veneer of realism, it became "quaint," and quaint can become the death of any franchise.
Within the last few years (with a new edition now finally complete rolling out to Kickstarter backers and soon to sales channels) Delta Green has come back, revitalized and modernized, once again holding a dark mirror to the modern world.
Now, The Fall of Delta Green goes back in time to look at (and allow people to play within) an important juncture during the history of Delta Green: that time when the group lost whatever official standing it might have had with the United States government. The game doesn't directly address that "fall," that is there isn't an adventure in the book where the players can interact with one specific pivotal moment in the group's history. The problem with the book lies with that looking back.
I think that if The Fall of Delta Green had come out during the first period of the franchise's history, the issues that I have with the handling of setting probably wouldn't be as profound, but in light of the more overtly transgressive nature of the new Delta Green books it is harder to see the returning to the old defaults as anything more than a form of intellectual laziness. So much occurred during the decade of the 1960s, from the killings of leaders to the Vietnam War itself to the periods of internal strife and rioting within our country that any of this could have been used metaphorically to ground the fall from grace of Delta Green within the game's setting. This would have given more power to that fall, and it could have been used as a stand in for our country's struggles with the transition from past into the future. But it didn't.
Luckily, the setting can be fixed. The recent CNN documentary series covering the year 1968 showed that you can derive a campaign with the length and complexity of Masks of Nyarlathotep using just that single year. The fall Delta Green of the franchise's setting is as much a result of the sweeping change, chaos and conflict of that era as it is the horrors of the Mythos. Normally I am not a fan of excusing the atrocities of history taking away their agency through fictional excuses, but I do think that there can be an argument made for attaching an occulture to this setting that ramps up the horrors of the decade and can mix them with the horrors of the Mythos. I can see running an era-appropriate take on the television series Fringe mashed up with the sense of loss of the movie Easy Rider. After losing their place within the government of the United States, members of Delta Green travel to figure out what their place in the world is, and how they can continue to fight the good fight against the Unnatural forces plaguing the world.
Don't think that there isn't anything good about this game. The Fall of Delta Green features the best implementation that I've seen of the Gumshoe rules to date, particularly in regards to horror gaming. There are some really cool new abilities to be found in the book. Fans of Night's Black Agents should checkout the new Investigative ability of Agency. This ability represents a character's knowledge of, contacts within and capability to manipulate the agency for which they work. There is a bit of awkwardness to the name of the ability, because the game's Handler (what the GM is called in the game) will have to come up with other ways to refer to the agencies for which characters work so as to avoid confusion.
After playing Trail of Cthulhu a couple of times in the past, I "enjoyed" its Stability and Sanity in play a lot more than I have liked Call of Cthulhu's Sanity. Trail's methods, echoed here in The Fall of Delta Green, did a better job of simulating the crumbling of a character's sanity and the encroachment of otherworldliness of the Mythos for me. I like the fringe science approach to how magic is discussed in the Delta Green world, this is one of the many places where the architects of the franchise have really modernized the game's approach to Lovecraftian horror. By calling it hypergeometry, it puts that veneer of science over the weirdness (like any really good fringe science does) that almost makes it sound normal. The rituals are similar to what you would expect from a Lovecraftian horror game and are tied to the Hypergeometry general ability. Learning "magic" is through exposure to weird things and books, and the default is that starting characters cannot have any training in hypergeometry.
The Unnatural are the creatures of the mythos, many of which players of Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu would likely be familiar with. Because there will often be more guns in a Delta Green campaign, many of the creatures are hardier than their equivalents in other games. The descriptions are also more likely to apply that veneer of science to the creatures, making them frightening in more modern ways.
The best thing about this game is the graphic design and layout of the book. This is probably one of the best designed books that I have seen in a while. Jen McCleary, credited with design and layout in the book, did an excellent job. As you flip through the pages of the game, it feels like you are going through a plethora of Delta Green files that someone has left on your desk. I love it when a game book is designed to look like an in-setting artifact because it helps to bring me into the game and makes me want to run it. Graphic design isn't often talked about in the conversations about role-playing game books, and there's a reason for that. However, when the graphic design is done well, as it is in this book, we need to let those people know. The font choice for the logo for The Fall of Delta Green is also spot on, and evokes the era of the book.
I readily admit that I have always been a little out of step with much of the Delta Green fandom, in that I have never been interested in the military side of things with the setting. Shooting a mythos creature with a tank gun has always seemed pointless to me, not to mention a fundamental misunderstanding of the underpinnings of Mythos fiction. I am, however, a fan of role-playing in modern eras more than anything else, so my Delta Green games would always be more about outsiders, and people on the fringes of the government/corporate establishment trying to keep the weird world in which they live patched up and running for one more day. The deep lore of the Hastur Mythos outlined in the later first phase of Delta Green books was more of an impetus to my gaming in these worlds than all of the equipment lists and pages of equipment lists. My games took place in a world where the surface had cracked, and the strangeness was bubbling out of those cracks.
With a squint, I can see that game in The Fall of Delta Green, and with a little work I can squeeze that game out of it. It means taking off the rose-colored glasses and digging into the good and the bad of the setting and seeing the impact of squeezing the Mythos onto them. Despite the flaws of the book, I still recommend it to people looking for a Gumshoe horror game with a different approach to Lovecraftian horror than the accepted baseline. There are a lot of the good bits from the Delta Green franchise in this game, with a system that complements play in that world. The exact application of the setting might not be to everyone's taste, but this is neither the first nor the last time that a GM would have to adapt a published setting to meet their own needs.
