First Impressions - Delta Green: Control Group

Delta Green: Control Group.

At the end of 2015, I backed the Delta Green Kickstarter at a level far beyond that which I'd normally do; I committed to take all the books and stretch goals. I've not regretted it; even though the product has been slow in coming out, it has been superbly made. It's also been reasonably canny, as it's meant I've avoided the Brexit impact on the pound, and locked in the costs. Every time a book arrives, it feels like a bonus.

Needless to say, Delta Green: Control Group is gorgeously laid out and illustrated. It is a collection of four scenarios, suggested as ways to introduce players to Delta Green. In reality, it's three introductory adventures and then a larger one which could lead to a mini-campaign. In the first three, the characters will not be part of Delta Green. The final adventure could even be their first mission as such. The scenarios are not interlinked in any way. The three introductory adventures feel like they are convention one-shots, and are likely to have a high lethality rate if not approached correctly. That is completely in line with the way that backgrounds are built for the game, but usually, you refer back to them rather than play them through.

The adventures are not your typical mythos scenario.

The first, Blacksat, follows a team of astronauts and civilians as they ride the Space Shuttle in 2010 to fix a broken military satellite. Needless to say, the technology harkens back to the kind of thing that was in MAJESTIC's sights and will prove extremely dangerous in the unforgiving environment of space. This has a huge lethality potential and could easily result in a TPK.

The second, Night Visions, is set in 2011; the players are US soldiers and officials trying to negotiate an alliance against the Taliban with a minority living in a remote mountain valley in Afghanistan. This is a survivable scenario, but the player's natural instincts may well make it hard to do so.

The final introductory adventure, Sick Again, was quite hard to read, faced as we are with the coronavirus pandemic. It's 2012 and the characters work for the CDC and are rushed to a remote town in rural Arizona where they fight to understand, control and prevent a dangerous and strange viral outbreak. This scenario has layers; there's a mechanic to drive the medical investigation out from which will fall a more traditional Delta Green encounter. I feel that the GM will need to be on the ball to run this well. The scenario is adjacent to areas that have been covered in earlier works such as Future/Perfect, but it does not overlap. I think the cover of the book is based on this scenario.

The fourth scenario, Wormwood Arena, is set after the other three, perhaps between 2013 and 2019. It's suggested that you could use the surviving characters from the first three scenarios as the core of the team here as they are brought into their first 'proper' Delta Green operation. As mentioned earlier, this is an investigation into a harmless-seeming Kansas self-help cult, so very traditional in approach. It is larger in scope than the previous games, probably needing at least two sessions to work through. The first part of the scenario is focussed on the undercover investigation. The second part could get very messy, with potential contact with a powerful being that could threaten humanity if it awakes. The scenario ends with suggestions for follow up; it even outlines ideas for how you could follow this up with a mini-campaign if the characters fail.

Full colour, hardback, 180 pages long, beautifully illustrated, with clear and easy to read layout. You can taste the ashes that Delta Green's battles create as you read it.

Recommended.