Believe it or not, it is The Fall of Delta Green (2018) that finally got me to pay attention to Delta Green at large. Something about this cover art struck me as enticing, perhaps in the manner of a train wreck — Call of Cthulhu meets Vietnam? How are they going to pull that off?

Well, for starters, Fall isn’t Call of Cthulhu, it’s a standalone Gumshoe game (though it is compatible with both Trail of Cthulhu and Night’s Black Agents). I’m not super interested in the system, honestly, but I absolutely love the source material laid out here (and it is usable, really, with your Cthulhu game of choice). It was the operational history of Delta Green as presented here that hooked me on the larger Delta Green universe; the broad strokes of that are the same as in both the Pagan and Arc Dream DGs. What’s unique here is the particular focus on the ’60s, an era of dirty politics, dirty wars, massive social upheavals, drugs and all sorts of tomfoolery on the fringes of the counter-culture. As with the ’90s and our current era, the ’60s seem particularly rich backdrop suited to bringing out the themes of DG. 

It’s also a rich moment in DG’s history. The titular fall — the unsuccessful dismantling of the program — is triggered by an unauthorized operation in Vietnam and Cambodia gone horribly wrong in late 1969, early 1970. That episode is kept vague in all histories of Delta Green, but here it takes on a vivid horror — Col. Wade Satchel is sort of a Delta Green version of Col. Walter Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. He traffics with dangerous forces and gets a lot of people killed before being assassinated by survivors of one of his doomed off-the-books operations. Marrying that film with the Cthulhu mythos makes for some truly unpleasant dreams!