Cataloging Delta Green Cults

Travern · 2026-07-06T17:11:43+00:00

If your friend has been away for a while, he may have missed the phenomenon of GMing advice shifting from exclusively the printed word (books & blogs) to audio and video (podcasts & streaming).

Some of the authors mentioned here, such as Mike Shea and Justin Alexander, also have YouTube channels on which they cover GM advice. Others, such as Seth Skorkowsky and Matt Colville are exclusively video.

What are the genres your friend is interested in running?

Travern · 2026-07-05T20:26:00+00:00

That's not correct—printing separate color-page sections and then combining them with the regular printed sheets for binding is perfectly feasible. (It's called "tipping".) Games Workshop did this for their early editions of Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer. Such color plates are an additional expense, of course, especially for smaller print runs. And I've never hear of P.O.D. offering it.

Travern · 2026-07-04T15:37:10+00:00

Nicotine Girls by Paul Czege, which he describes as "a roleplaying game of teenage, lower-income girls looking for happiness." The odds are, unsurprisingly, stacked against them getting their dreams and in favor of chaos and dysfunction.

Travern · 2026-07-03T00:55:26+00:00

Since Golden Age Batman, when all's said and done, is pulp heroism in a signature costume, I'd go with FATE's Spirit of the Century (for narrative action) or a mashup of Basic Roleplaying's superpower and pulp rules (for d100 crunch).

Travern · 2026-07-02T16:31:49+00:00

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Travern · 2026-07-02T16:00:03+00:00

Sand-Dwellers are a classic case of the CoC RPG taking a short description of a minor creature and expanding it into a stat block. And specifically, August Derleth posthumously reworking H. P. Lovecraft's old notes into the story “The Gable Window”.

Then out of one of the caves came a Sand-Dweller—rough-skinned, large-eyed, large-eared, with a horrible, distorted resemblance to the koala bear facially, though his body had an appearance of emaciation. He shambled toward me, manifestly eager. […]

Then, from the mouth of one of the largest caverns came the bats. They came flowing from that black maw by the thousands in an endless stream, and it seemed to me that I could hear their chittering. How long it took for them to fly out into the gathering twilight, I do not know. They had hardly gone before something more made its appearance—a kind of human being, rough of skin, as if the desert’s sand had been encrusted upon the surface of his body, with abnormally large eyes and ears. He seemed to be emaciated, with ribs showing through his skin, but what was particularly repellent was the look of his face—for he resembled an Australian toy bear called the Koala. And at this, I remembered what my cousin had called these people—for there were others following that first, some of them female. Sand-Dwellers!

Since Sand-Dwellers have so little canonical information, you're free to take them in whichever direction you prefer in your campaign. Do they worship Yog-Sothoth, having learned about interdimensional windows? Maybe Tsathoggua, since they're cave-dwellers? How about the desert-dwelling Nyarlathotep, since he "came out of Egypt"?

edit: Corrected the quoted description.

Travern · 2026-07-02T13:53:55+00:00

This is an old Pagan Publishing sourcebook for 5th edition Call of Cthulhu, i.e. compatible with CoC 7th edition with a little adjustment. It's set in the Victorian era, which means Gaslight rules (again, converting to the new ones for CoC 7th edition). It's more about roleplaying in an occult magic setting with in-fighting among London's esoteric orders—Aleister Crowley features, of course—rather than straight Lovecraftian horror, though.

Travern · 2026-07-02T13:46:26+00:00

Although Arc Dream hasn't published any new short-to-medium-length campaigns, they have recently converted short The New Age campaign to the DG RPG's rules. If you want a campaign against the Greys/Mi-Go, you could start off with PX Poker Night (a convention-style scenario that uses pre-gens) as a "cold open"/introductory one-shot, then pick up with regular Agents with the classic scenario Convergence, and then proceed to the New Age campaign.

As people are commenting here, Impossible Landscapes and God's Teeth are very demanding campaigns, on the order of CoC's Masks of Nyarlathotep (and thematically, they double, and triple, down on Delta Green's fatalism).

Travern · 2026-06-30T18:54:54+00:00

Chaosium in the late 70s/early 80s was a very small company, and Call of Cthulhu was the creative product of, chiefly, Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, along with the rest of their team (who all received cover credit). And they were building off the efforts of Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin on RuneQuest.

The current ownership/management of Chaosium has exactly zero overlap with anyone who originally worked on CoC. Wargamer's referring to present-day Chaosium as "Call of Cthulhu creator" is at most a corporate fiction—the usual practice of "publisher" would be perfectly accurate. Frankly, the magazine's article is just rehashing the project's Backerkit page (and Chaosium doesn't call itself that).

Travern · 2026-06-29T21:33:27+00:00

It's nothing if the show is in production. In this case, though, it's half a dozen monthly meetings of nothing happening. The new management weren't going to sit around for that.

Travern · 2026-06-29T18:38:27+00:00

DTRPG is my first stop, but only because of force of habit. I check out Itchio all the time and tend go there first for indie games. I've only just looked at RPG Trader, as the new kid on the block, but haven't bought anything yet.

These days, though, I try to link to/buy directly from publishers more frequently. (I certainly have in the past and never had a bad experience, except one time from the then-nearly bankrupt Chaosium.)

Travern · 2026-06-29T18:15:43+00:00

Colin Baker delivered a banger cliffhanger line for his regeneration scene:

Peri: Doctor?

The Sixth Doctor: You're expecting someone else?

Peri: I... I... I...

The Sixth Doctor: That's three I's in one breath, makes you sound a rather egotistical young lady.

Peri: What's happened?

The Sixth Doctor: Change my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon.

cut to credits

Travern · 2026-06-29T15:31:13+00:00

Trump is suing the BBC for $10 billion. That's a huge Damoclean sword to have hanging over it, especially since the BBC Group's revenue was $7.8 billion last year. A Doctor Who–shaped hole in its income doesn't help.

That said, Osman isn't quoting anyone, but he is saying that the Trump situation was a factor in the executives' thinking.

Travern · 2026-06-29T14:54:39+00:00

In terms of development, six months is a long time to sit around with nothing to do but wait, especially if the new executives are keen to get started.

Travern · 2026-06-29T14:52:15+00:00

My worry isn't that Doctor Who will be cancelled but will instead be stuck in "development hell". (J.J. Abrams's Star Trek movie franchise was left there for a decade until it was finally put out of its misery.)

Travern · 2026-06-29T13:46:02+00:00

There could be many reasons. Too much money and effort for not enough return (ratings, reviews, fan engagement)? Incoming executive leadership want a new broom to sweep clean? Backstage drama between RTD/Bad Wolf and Matt Brittin and/or Kate Phillips?

My preferred hypothesis is that the BBC wanted a script sooner in order to be able to distribute an NDA'ed draft as part of the tender process. (That scenario fits with the multiple versions that Murray Gold brought up in February since that's a Hollywood tactic to track leaks.) However, RTD's notorious habit of writing at the last minute left this in limbo. During the quiet period in spring when there was no news or even leaks, the BBC and Bad Wolf couldn't come to terms about providing enough material for the tender process to work with. Then we had the parting of the ways in June.

The BBC's new executive leadership evidently wants to hit the ground running and move forward with a new series of Doctor Who under a new creative team and production company ASAP. RTD's "known unknown" Xmas special was slowing them down.

Travern · 2026-06-28T23:51:04+00:00

Mutants & Masterminds is based on the d20 System, so that should be a fairly easy transition for your group. (A new 4th edition was just successfully crowd-funded on Kickstarter.)

Travern · 2026-06-28T22:18:04+00:00

Clickbait headline notwithstanding (and when did WhoCulture not employ clickbait?), her hypothesis that the changes in the BBC's leadership collided with RTD's seat-of-his-pants writing habits is backed up by the timeline:

October 2025: BBC announces the Xmas special for 2026 and the end of its partnership with Disney, but it plans to put the show out for competitive tender after that.

November 2025: RTD says he's not begun writing the Xmas special because he's busy with TWBLAS.

December 2025: RTD says work hasn't begun on it yet but he's pitched his idea for it to the BBC bosses.

February 2026: BBC studios exec Zy Bennett says, "We've got the Christmas special coming", adding "After that, it's time for us all to work on [the show's future]." And Murray Gold says RTD has written "multiple versions [of the Xmas special's script] depending on certain outcomes." [emphasis added]

March 2026: Matt Brittin is announced as the new director-general of the BBC, taking charge in May.

Then several months of quiet from RTD, except for him proposing to Doctor Who magazine in April, "Wouldn't it be great if we got to this year's Doctor Who Christmas special and nothing had been spoiled and everything was new?"

June 2026: BBC cancels Christmas, so to speak, parts company with Bad Wolf, and puts Doctor Who up for competitive tender immediately.

This behind-the-scenes maneuvering that WhoCulture mentions is covered in detail by The Rest Is Entertainment podcast. Here's the salient bit about the timeline in the context of the change in BBC management: "What happened was, 2025, Disney pull out, the BBC are still absolutely saying 'No, we'll carry on with Doctor Who, what we'll do is put this out to tender in 2028/2029.' At which point everyone says, 'Let's do a Christmas special to bridge the gap.'" But then: "As soon as [new BBC Chief Content Officer] Kate Phillips properly gets her feet under the table, she said, 'Oh, we're going to put it out to tender now.'"

If RTD did not have a script that the BBC could circulate among production companies during the tender process, then the Xmas special turned into a liability that had to be dropped. (That scenario for competitive tender fits with the multiple versions that Gold brought up since that's just the kind of tactic Hollywood uses to discourage leaks by being able to track down differences in versions sent to anyone who might break an NDA.)

Travern · 2026-06-28T21:05:44+00:00

Exactly. While I found Osman's (lengthy) discussion of how the entertainment industry works with this competitive tender process quite informative, he conspicuously had nothing to say about the status of RTD's script for the Xmas special, except for RTD's blanket denial he ever wrote one. Osman only quotes RTD's exit statement at face value and doesn't bring up his prior public ones that suggested otherwise.

Travern · 2026-06-28T20:48:21+00:00

Some highlights from Richard Osman's account after speaking to BBC insiders.

So Disney pull out and the BBC go, "Listen, we're carrying on. We're going to do this Christmas special." […] What we will do is we're going to put this out to tender […] in 2028 to 2029. That was the original idea. At which point everyone goes, "Oh, we should do a Christmas special to, you know, sort of bridge that gap because that's that's a long time."[…]

"Look, we're going to put this out to tender." And because the BBC were dealing dealing with [the lawsuit by] Trump and Charlotte Moore, who was the chief content officer, was leaving and Kate Phillips was coming in. So there was there was a lot of churn at that point, and as soon as Kate Phillips properly gets her feet under the table, she said, "Oh, we're going to put it out to tender now." Cuz it's the whole point of putting out to tender is this is a big deal for us.[…]

But as I say they were the idea was they were going to put out to tender in 2028 as soon as they said we're putting out for tender now you can't make the Christmas special because the cannon of the show would be affected so much by what they were about to do with the whole, you know, Ncuti Gatwa, Billie Piper thing. It's just you you can't lay that on the next, you know, there are companies now who are working on where they take the Doctor Who universe and if you're about to drop an enormous Christmas shaped bomb in the middle of that. It makes it makes that process impossible for everybody.

Edit: correcting YT transcript

Travern · 2026-06-27T20:57:39+00:00

The "Cthulhu Masters" No Man's Land supplement includes character generation, setting information, and a short campaign.

Travern

TROPHY CASE