Delta Green Tradecraft Manual excerpts
I wrote three articles for one of Kenneth Scroggins’s Delta Green fan projects. The book was to be a practical aid to players, presented as a secret manual for an illegal conspiracy within the US law enforcement community: Delta Green as it existed in the original sourcebooks, extrapolated to 2013.
Having GM’d Delta Green with groups of Swedes, I saw the need for a player resource on tradecraft. There were several contributors working on topics in Kenneth’s table of contents. For me, it was a chance to play around with 2013’s media saturation and the movement of scientific skepticism in relation to the world of DG.
- Initial Assessment is my first article in this series, commissioned to describe the “phase where agents and friendlies pick up on various warning flags that a case might be paranormal”.
- Communications Security is a not-too-technical summary of things players should be aware of when handling phones and computers in DG scenarios around the time of writing.
- Investigating Paranormal Locations, the last article, is a set of reservations against haunted house scenarios. It’s mainly intended to keep scenario writers and GMs on their toes against players who don’t love Gothic horror clichés.
The style is not very consistent. I was going for a mix of practical advice, a tiny bit of humor for readability, and flirtations with what the historian Raul Hilberg described as the key to the Holocaust from a psychological standpoint: “never to utter the words that would be appropriate to the action being taken.”1
The book project is dead, having been silent for almost three years and largely overridden by the evolution of DG canon and the release of an official “Agent’s Handbook”. If anyone wants to add these articles to the Fairfield Project, I give my permission.