I've been a big fan of Delta Green since its original appearance in the late nineties. The Delta Green concept has always been an interesting treatment on what a mythos-burdened world might look like if there was the usual level of Cold War era espionage layered on top of the very real threat of the occult and the mythos. To one degree or another I have used its concepts in my own Cthulhu campaigns for decades now, and recently I took the time (while laboring through the latest round of "what sort of virus is plaguing the household this week?") to read the newest edition's Handler's Guide cover to cover.
I got reasonably far in when I began to experience a weird sort of fatigue, not so much with the subject but with its endless precision in presentation. I realized that Delta Green as a foundation for framing the mythos in a modern, espionage laden context, is really useful, but that the concise and rigorous approach of the latest edition has created an elaborate narrative arc that can be quite at odds with that most important element of the Cthulhu Mythos that I feel must as a necessity permeate any good campaign, that being the utter and total lack of understanding of the unknown, and the unclassifiable depths to which the mythos will degenerate a human understanding of the world and how it functions. Delta Green is all about "scientists with guns" to use a phrase in its early era (P4), seeking to understand it enough to classify and destroy it. In the process of doing so, the organization develops a lot of clinical methods of interpretation and approach.
There's nothing to criticize about this presentation, of course, and it fits the mythos well, but as one reads further along it becomes clear that Delta Green at least as presented is a game for the sort of players who might engage with and enjoy Call of Cthulhu more if the world worked in a more rigid and discernable fashion than the universe of the Mythos as a whole tends to work. A good example is the Dreamlands, an element of the Cthulhu Mythos which is a bit incongruous in some ways with other aspects of the setting. When looked at from the view of Lovecraft in his time the elements of the Dreamlands can fit just fine, and indeed they work well in many pastiche homages for decades afterward as a weird and mysterious element that is somehow coterminous with if not directly embedded in the more conventional madness of the Old Ones and their inscrutable natures. In Delta Green, however, the setting of necessity parses out the information in a manner consistent with an espionage agency which is identifying features and elements as clinically as possible.
Again....nothing wrong here, it makes sense. But, it got me to thinking: the approach Delta Green takes, even when it highlights how certain members in the field have gone mad, seems to lean heavily into a certain kind of player type for the game. These are player types I encounter when running the game on occasion, usually guys with some background adjacent to or occasionally in the military, who find the idea of Call of Cthulhu fun but argue semantics on things like sanity checks and whether or not these would really be called for when presented with grisly content. The conversation often boils down to, "I think I'd have seen worse in Afghanistan," vs. me as GM saying, "But nothing in Afghanistan warps your perception of existence just by looking at it."
Delta Green's current iteration (as I do not recall this phenomenon being evident in its original books in the 90's) seems to lean more in to this notion that one can, if you are clinical and precise enough, analyze and understand the conceits of the mythos through proper analaysis. I am not entirely clear on whether or not this is fully intended....and as I continue to read through it I may come to different conclusions, so this may only be the first part of my discussion, but it did get me to thinking that Delta Green in its pure form may be the better "fit" for those guys I have gamed with who get into this sort of argument about how and why sanity as a mechanic works and what it represents. There's a "grounded, reality-based, I was or wish I was in the Army" kind of mindset which conflicts with a more literary view, in which the notion is that "sanity in this context represents something you can't experience in the real world because the mythos are functionally destructive to all of our perceptions of what reality is."
Delta Green likes to identify this through various terms which --again-- make perfect sense for its interpretation of the genre, such as hypergeometry as a term to define what amounts to magic, but it is interesting to consider that the game may choose to cater to an approach where, without that sort of analytical approach, some players might not otherwise be willing or able to embrace the concept that the "unknown reality" of a universe with the mythos is simply too damaging to a normal mind on exposure not to lead to an erosion of sanity. That merely interacting with things that exist across more dimensions than our own can be debilitating.
I don't know where I am going with this, just yet....as I plow through the second half of the book my view on how it handles the matter might change, so probably a part two to come!
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