Delta Green: Powered by GURPS The following guidelines attempt to present a quick playable framework for running Delta Green in GURPS from Steve Jackson Games. Delta Green is an Conspiracy Horror sourcebook for modern day Call of Cthulhu. It has been widely hailed as the best role playing supplement ever produced. What follows is an attempt to translate the Delta Green background for use with GURPS. Many GURPS products come in handy for running a Delta Green game: Illuminati, Horror, CthulhuPunk, Special Ops, Cops, and Espionage (Out of Print) cover most of the basics. High Tech and Modern Firepower might appeal to the Cowboy Gunfondler in all of us. The Ultra Tech series (Ultra-Tech, Ultra Tech 2, and Bio-Tech) is ideal for describing the alien science of Majestic and others. GURPS WW2 would help in running a campaign set in the forthcoming Delta Green: Our Darkest Hour supplement. Other GURPS Products tangentally useful to Delta Green would be Places of Mystery, Dark Places, Creatures of the Night, Monsters, Warehouse 23, Conspiracy X, Magic and Grimoire. No doubt many players and gamemasters will be able to add to this list to suit their own personal tastes. Online Resources The GURPS Lite rules are available for free download (in .pdf format) and may come in handy for those without full access to GURPS. Skill packages and much helpful material concerning the FBI can be found in GURPSnet's X-Files conversion. Many software resources and other resources exist to make a GURPS player or Gamemaster's life easier. Finally, conversion guidelines for characters and monsters from Chaosium's Basic Roleplaying System exist in this Roleplayer article.

GURPS Delta Green

Character Creation A typical Delta Green Agent is constructed using 150 points, with 65 points in Disadvantages and Quirks. Friendlies without the benefit of extensive law-enforcement or military training are often built with 100 points and 45 in disadvantages and quirks. Special Operations characters such as US Navy SEALS should be constructed using the somewhat restrictive Special Ops Templates, with 200 points and 45 in disadvantages. Finally, the following templates define a character's exact affiliation with Delta Green. Delta Green Agent : 0 point template Agents must take Delta Green as a 50 point Patron (Reasonably Powerful, provides equipment, has special abilities and appears on a 12 or less) and Majestic as a -30 point enemy (Extremely Powerful, appears on a 9 or less). DG requires a -10 Sense of Duty to "save humanity from the Mythos", a -10 Extremely Hazardous Duty on a 6 or less, and a -15 point Secret "Member of an Illegal Government Conspiracy". This leaves 15 points to spend on some combination of Law Enforcement Powers, Adminstrative Rank, Military Rank, and Security Clearance. Agents receive this template above and beyond their point quotas. Delta Green Friendly: 0 Point template Friendlies have Delta Green as a [25 point] Patron (Reasonably Powerful, provides equipment, has special abilities and appears on a 9 or less). They have the same [-10] Extremely Hazardous Duty (on 6 or less) as Agents. They still must take the [-15] Secret "Member of an Illegal Government Conspiracy" even if possessed of the optional -10 point Delusion: "Delta Green is an official government agency." Friendlies do not have to feel a Sense of Duty, nor do they receive Majestic as an Enemy unless Delta Green is compromised, in which case Majestic becomes a -60 point Enemy that appears on a 12 or less. Friendlies receive this template above and beyond their point quotas. Agents are likely to be members of Federal Law Enforcement, the Military or the Intelligence Community who have had prior encounters with supernatural evil. Friendlies can be experts in just about any field that might be useful in an investigation. The exact degree of experience with the paranormal is up to the player and Game Master, but starting characters with 1/2 a point or point in Mythos Lore, Xenology or Xenobiology is not outside the realm of possibility. It is usually a good idea to have some idea how a character in a Call of Cthulhu horror game will disintigrate mentally. Will Agent Smith become more callous and cruel, or turn into a raving paranoid as he is repeatedly abducted and medically restructured by hyperdimensional alien surgery? Naturally, the exact nature of the horrific trauma will have some effect on the resulting psychoses. Special Rules A-Cell as a Patron: Using the process detailed on page 47 of Delta Green, it is possible to forward a report on the Agent's current situation to A-Cell or make some sort of specific request and expect some sort of additional information or assistance. Should this be attempted in GURPS, many dice must be rolled. First, roll to see if the Patron appears, this is usually 12 or less for Agents and 9 or less for Friendlies. Should this roll fail then A-Cell is concerned with other things and is unable to respond to the Agents in time, or simply does not have the information or aid requested. Gamemasters may wish to forgo the Patronage Roll in favor of a more direct Reaction Roll. Should the Patronage roll succeed, make a Reaction Roll with appropriate modifiers for past behavior, the reasonableness and difficulty of the request, etc... Agents start out with a +4 bonus to Reactions from A-Cell, while Friendlies get a +2. This number is not fixed by any means and can rise or fall as circumstances dictate. For example, Friendlies operating under the -10 Delusion: "Delta Green is an official Government agency" receive no bonus to patronage rolls from A-Cell (the -2 reaction penalty from their delusion represents A-Cell's lowered level of trust in them). Should the Reaction Roll indicate a favorable result, then it is possible that the aid requested will be granted or that ALPHONSE will roll vs. his Mythos Lore-14, contact a friendly with a specialist skill of 15, roll vs. his Research-16 (+5 for Library of Congress access), or his Intelligence Analysis-17 to see if he can come up with an answer for the stumped Agents. A bad reaction could result in A-Cell deciding to pull the players off the investigation, while a good reaction might see them send additional Cells to assist in the investigation. Green Boxes: One possible benefit to taking Delta Green as a Patron is access to the Green Boxes. A bit of tradecraft first described on the Delta Green Mailing List, they first saw publication in the out of print chapbook Delta Green Eyes Only Volume Three: Project RAINBOW. The Boxes are caches of equipment sequestered by Delta Green cells in rental storage facilities and other isolated properties across the country. Access to a Green Box is determined by a Patronage Roll as described above. Green Boxes include all sorts of legal and illegal equipment useful during espionage and conspiratorial operations. A typical Green Box will contain 2d x $1000 worth of equipment (including firearms), and occasionally even actual cash amounting to 3d x $100. A critical failure on the Reaction Roll may result in a Green Box with little to no useful material and possibly some rather incriminating evidence (such as the corpse of a cultist) or even worse, some hazardous leftovers from the last Delta Green operation in the area. Barring such unfortunate circumstances, players should usually determine most of the contents of a Green Box, although a few surprises may be placed by the Gamemaster to spawn further investigation. Petty Cash is also available from A-Cell, usually at a -1 on the reaction roll per $1000 requested up to $5000, with an additional -1 for every $2000 beyond that. Thus, requesting $10,000 for some dubious purpose will result in a -8 penalty to the reaction roll (-5 for the first $5000, and -3 for the next three increments after that). Exposure to the Mythos The Mythos Fright Check When creatures of the Mythos are encountered or the brain twisting thought processes required to fathom hypergeometry are undertaken, the strain on sanity is often too great to bear. This aspect of human frailty displays the fundamental inability of homo sapiens sapiens to comprehend even the slightest hint of reality's true nature without suffering severe mental trauma. The rules for the Mythos Fright Check are largely identical to the ones found in GURPS Cthulhupunk and to the Sanity Blasting Fright Check found in GURPS Horror. A Mythos Fright Check is similar to a normal Fright Check, with the following modifications: The maximum bonus to be applied to Will when making a Mythos Fright Check is +4, the benefits of Fearlessness are halved, while Unfazeable merely provides the maximum bonus of +4. This modified willpower is then halved before applying any situational penalties. This is the final number to be checked under the standard GURPS Fright Check rules. Suffice it to say, failure is inevitable in most cases, leaving only the degree of failure to be determined. [(IQ +/- Strong Will) + (Max +4 from Unfazeable or Fearlessness) /2 ] - Mythos Fright Check Penalty. To find the Mythos Fright Check penalty in terms of Chaosium's system, simply take the maximum result for lost sanity and divide by two, rounding off. 1d100 SAN losses and Deities are a special case: Minor Great Old Ones such as Rhan-Tegoth and avatars of Y'golonac are worth -15. Major Great Old Ones and Minor Outer Gods such as Great Cthulhu or Yibb-Tstll are worth -20. Most Outer Gods such as YOG-SOTHOTH and most of the monstrous avatars of Nyarlathotep are worth -25. Only AZATHOTH is worth -30. This represents a slight departure from a straight conversion and GURPS CthulhuPunk. Mythos Creature Mythos Fright Check Deep One Hybrid -1 Advanced Deep One Hybrid -2 Deep Ones, Ghouls, Shan -3 Mi-Go, Yithian -4 Elder Thing, Flying Polyp -5 Colour Out of Space -6 Father Dagon and Mother Hydra -7 Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath -8 Star Spawn of Cthulhu -9 Shoggoth -10