Delta Green Beginner's Guide
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Delta Green Beginner's Guide

originally by Sammy J, written May 2025

Welcome to the Conspiracy.

Whether you're here from a cool podcast, a new Kickstarter, or ineffable machinations, this guide will help you get started running (or playing) the Delta Green RPG.

Which Books Do I Need?

Books for anyone

  • Start with the free Need to Know. It has the basic rules for character creation, combat, and sanity, and includes a scenario (obviously don't read it if you're a player). You can probably play 70% of scenarios with just Need to Know.
  • Also get the free/pwyw Delta Green Briefing Documents which can help flesh out your Agent's Motivations and reason for joining Delta Green, gives some basic Tradecraft advice, and gives more detail on Home Scenes than Need to Know.
  • From there, purchase the Agent's Handbook, which has all the rules.
  • If you want some extra information on other real-life agencies, consider grabbing The Complex. It has some helpful insights, but is non-essential.

That's basically all you'll ever need to buy as a player.

Books if you are running

  • In addition to the above, purchase the Handler's Guide. It contains a broad, basic overview of the entire setting, a deeper overview of the Delta Green conspiracy circa 2015, some monsters, some tomes, some Hypergeometric rituals, and a starter scenario, The Sentinels of Twilight/Operation FULMINATE.
  • If you want to run games set in the 90s era, pick up The Conspiracy, which details Delta Green in the 90s, a bunch of cool conspiracies, and has some useful advice on running campaigns in any era.
  • If you want to run games set in the modern day and want more factions and conspiracies, get The Labyrinth. It contains 4 "allied" factions and 4 hostile factions (including New Life Fertility and CptnSnshn, which have become fan-favorites).
  • As for scenarios, there are a lot of official ones and fan-made ones. Pick up what you think is cool, but start small (see How do I start running? below).

Other Useful Resources

Players

  • This Onboarding Video by NubiS is a great introduction to the themes and feel of Delta Green (content warning: gore and flashing lights), as is this Onboarding Video by Jim Le (content warning: more gore)

Guides to the rules

Character Creation and Pregenerated Characters

  • An online Character Creator. Another online Character Creator.
  • Five fully pregenerated characters can be found in the free Need to Know ruleset, though it's recommended players be allowed to tweak their skills to be more useful. The scenario collection Control Group also includes pregens.
  • 12 high-competence Pregenerated Agents by Mellonbread
  • Agent Dossiers includes one statted pregen for every Agent type in the rulebook (41 in total), to be personalised with names, bonds and motivations.

Guides to roleplaying a Delta Green Agent

Handlers

  • This fan-made GM screen (google docs) by Ozymandias @ NaTO contains useful rules summaries and tables for Handlers who need to create NPCs or complications on the fly. This rules quick reference may also be useful (may not be fully up-to-date).
  • The online Green Box generator can supply your players' Cell with all their Green Box needs; or for something less random, check out the Green Box article here, the N@TO Green Box Jam, or the N@TO Rats Green Box Garbage Extravaganza Jam.
  • The DG Scenario Database lists and tags over 900 official and fan-made scenarios. Use it if you're looking for scenarios to run.
  • DG Scenario Workbook. Guides you through brainstorming and writing a scenario. Tailored towards people wanting to publish scenarios (especially for contests), but useful for any Handler looking to writ their own scenario.

How do I start running?

Don't jump in the deep end with Impossible Landscapes, God's Teeth, or any of the big campaigns. Learn to walk before you run a marathon.

  1. Run a beginner scenario like Last Things Last (an updated version is in the free Need to Know - see this wiki for additional fan-generated resources), The Sentinels of Twilight/Operation Fulminate (which is in the Handler's Guide), or some fan-made beginner-friendly scenarios like Take the A-Train, Operation Minoan Augur, The Un-Natural Man, The Signal Smugglers, or Five Alarm Firefight.
  2. Select 2-4 scenarios and connect them together. Scenarios from collections like A Night at the Opera, Black Sites, and Dead Drops, as well as the hundreds of the short fan-made Shotgun Scenarios are ripe for this. You can use the fan-run Scenario Database to help you look for appropriate scenarios. Even if the events of the scenarios are completely unconnected, you can use the home scenes between them to weave them together into a cohesive narrative. Extra handouts and resources for many scenarios can be found on this wiki.
  3. Cap it off with a climax of your own design. You know your players better than we do, and you know what they're interested in. Take the immediate, unresolved, interesting stuff from the last few scenarios and mix it together. See Write Delta Green scenarios the mellonbread way or the DG Scenario Workbook for some tips on scenario design.

But if you want some premade campaigns instead, the fan community has you covered with beginner-friendly mini-campaigns:

  • The Schism by Hank Belanger et al: A "stitch" of beginner-friendly scenarios to introduce your group to the Delta Green conspiracy.
  • Singularity by Cody K Scott, W Blake Kimber, and Jonathan Langley: a series of murders in Providence, Rhode Island tease a surreal and corrupting online cult. If you're interested in Delta Green because of Impossible Landscapes, this is worth checking out.
  • BE NOT AFRAID by Marc Magill: Set in the 1990s in England, this campaign centers the players in a struggle against two alien intelligences against the decay of the country.
  • Almost Heaven by Kevin Dent, Taranosyo, and Countryhome: A three-part campaign about an world-conquering hivemind, taking players through rural West Virginia, the swamps of DC, and back through a burning corrupted version of West Virginia.
  • Alternatively, the official mini-campaign Control Group is designed to introduce new Agents to the world of Delta Green, but has mixed reviews.

What do I do next?

After that experience, you should be ready to run anything else (including the large campaigns Impossible Landscapes and God's Teeth).

If you liked what you played and would prefer smaller campaigns, consider one of the short official campaigns such as Future Perfect (parts 1-2 are good, parts 3-4 will require work), Iconoclasts, or the trilogy of Puppet Shows & Shadow Plays/Convergence/The New Age.

Just keep in mind you'll probably need to make new Agents for half of those campaigns.

Where do I find all the cool fan-made stuff?

Four main places:

  1. The Fairfield wiki (here!). This is where all twenty years of the Shotgun Scenarios contest are stored, plus other scenarios and mad ramblings. We also maintain a list of every official scenario, which books they're in (especially helpful for keeping track of scenario compilations), and fan-made resources for them.
  2. Itch.io. A website for hosting indie video games and TTRPGs. Sammy J maintains a collection of all the DG fan material on the site, including the big fanzine.
  3. The Night at the Opera Contest List. A big fat document that links to all the server's contests and jams, which each link to individual scenarios and submissions. I suggest first browsing the Annual Scenario Contests.
  4. The DG Scenario Database. Lets you search through all the tracked scenarios (official and fan-made) to find ones with the tags you're looking for.

But what if I can't get a group together?

There are a few things you can do:

  1. Look for groups online. You can look for groups on the official Delta Green Discord server. Or you can visit the open-table community Night at the Opera Discord server (famous for running many contests and producing a lot of fan scenarios). These links have probably expired by the time you're reading this, but you can usually find up-to-date invitations in r/DeltaGreenRPG.
  2. Subsist on the fiction. Delta Green has multiple novels and short story collections (that contain setting spoilers), both official and fan-made. Consider reading them in release order, or starting with Strange Authorities. See the articles on Pro fiction and Fan fiction.
  3. Subsist on podcasts/Actual Plays. I haven't really listened to any (beyond the first dozen episodes of Pretending to be People and some of RPPR's Delta Green sessions, which were good), but many other good podcasts exist. Many Delta Green podcasts announce new episodes on the N@tO reddit.
  4. Solo roleplay (1 player, no GM). Delta Green (and mystery games in general) are difficult to roleplay solo, but it is possible (especially if you have prior experience with solo RP). Grab your favorite GM Emulator, like Mythic GME 2e and/or the Rogue Handler booklet, then make a 3-Agent team and get to work. An extended "how to play Delta Green solo" writeup can be found on Solum Protocol's Substack.
  5. Watch inspirational media and plot feverishly for when your stars come right.

Are there other editions of Delta Green?

Yes. Delta Green exists in three main forms:

  1. The current stand-alone "Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game." This is the one I've been talking about in all the other sections of this post. It inherits a lot from 5th/6th edition Call of Cthulhu, but adds its own useful changes: simplifying automatic weapons with Lethality, making Sanity interesting thanks to Bonds and Projection, reducing skill bloat, and making Agents feel more competent by not rolling most skill checks. This version has multiple printings with differences in the rules for skill improvement, bonds and mental disorders, and vehicle usage. If you have an older version, you can get an up-to-date PDF from Arc Dream by emailing them.
  2. A Call of Cthulhu setting. (5th/6th edition CoC) This was the case from its inception in 1992 all the way until 2015. The books Delta Green (1997), Countdown (1999), Eyes Only (2007), and Targets of Opportunity (2010) are the main publications for this era. It has a heavy emphasis on the 90s-era of the setting. It's easy to convert the stats to the current stand-alone version of Delta Green, but all of it is being updated as part of The Conspiracy Kickstarter. An edition of the core rules with dual stats for Cthulhu D20 (D&D 3E compatible) was also published.
  3. A GUMSHOE game called The Fall of DELTA GREEN. This primarily focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, before Delta Green faced a major setback. It uses a Gumshoe rules set rather than a d100 rules set. There are very few books for this version (although it has one of the big campaigns, The Borellus Connection), but it is contemporaneous with the current stand-alone d100 version of the game.
  4. If you like the simplicity of Cthulhu Dark, there are two Delta Green-esque hacks for it: Delta Dark (from the DG Mailing List), and the longer Cthulhu Deep Green.
  5. There is also also a long OOP but official Delta Green sourcebook for the Cthulhu Live LARP system (2nd edition), listed here for completeness.

Good luck, Agents. Remember: you are the Conspiracy now.

tradecraft
page revision: 60, last edited: 13 Feb 2026 00:09
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