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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8277168" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't even think 'no win' is really a trope in Mythos. The Dunwich Horror for instance is certainly a 'win' for the protagonists. The Shadow Over Innsmouth ends with the government blowing up 'certain buildings' in the town, and I guess the protagonist gets what he wants, though you can slice that a few different ways. At the Mountains of Madness falls more in the "keep the secret" vein, the main characters cannot be said to have really 'lost'. Call of Cthulhu itself seems to be a sort of victory for the narrator. Granted, many other stories, like say The Whisperer in Darkness don't seem to end so well for the narrator, lol. A typical ending is on the lines of "I know too much now, there are things on my trail!" For PCs that isn't exactly a BAD ending, you got story hooks!Laundry Files stories (the material which Delta Green specifically addresses) are pretty much, by definition, of the latter type. You're a member of an organization trying to stave off 'Case Nightmare Green' essentially, which is the inevitable and unstoppable result of "When the Stars are Right", but there is at least hope that life can go on for maybe some future generations. Maybe even if modern civilization is ultimately doomed, some of humanity might survive (though there is that one non-canonical online story where shoggoths eat the whole world). Laundry Files is a bit more grimdark than HPL's Mythos though. In his imagining of it, humanity is destined to fade IN DEEP TIME, but that really is not so much different from what most archeologists and biologists today would suggest is likely. He just put a bit more of an outre spin on it, and the concept was certainly a lot less mainstream in his time. I think Charles Stross developed his interpretation mainly because of that. Modern audiences aren't exactly appalled by the idea that humanity will probably not be around in 5 or 10 million years. In the 1930's the very idea of Deep Time was rather 'out there', most people probably still thought Biblical time scales were all there was to it.</blockquote>

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