In April 2024 we presented a newly compiled Delta Green Fiction Library that gathered dozens of stories and full-length novels inspired by Arc Dream Publishing‘s roleplaying game of modern-day Cthulhu Mythos conspiracy-horror, Delta Green. These novels and short-story collections, drawn from four past Bundle of Holding offers (2013-2019), show the ways Delta Green operatives slip through the system, manipulating the federal bureaucracy while pushing the darkness back for another day – often at shattering personal cost.
Delta Green began as a US Navy program to investigate the terrifying implications of the federal government’s little-known 1928 raid on Innsmouth, Massachusetts. In World War II, that program was folded into an OSS psychological warfare unit dedicated to exploiting Nazi belief in the supernatural – but which really fought to thwart the terrifying supernatural things that certain Nazi researchers had uncovered. Its activities were classified DELTA GREEN.
After the war, Delta Green split apart. Many of its veterans joined a new program, code-named MAJESTIC, after the Roswell incident revealed what appeared to be UFOs and alien life – discoveries that concealed a far more horrifying truth. What remained of Delta Green pursued supernatural threats across the globe for decades, until a disastrous Cambodia operation in 1969 shut the group down.
Delta Green never really went away. Its leaders went underground, pulling strings from within the US government to send hand-picked agents on new operations. They kept fighting to uproot and destroy supernatural terrors just as they had been fighting since Innsmouth, despite the awful toll they paid in life and sanity.
In 2001, Delta Green agents staged a sort of coup in the Majestic-12 program, a hostile takeover that again split Delta Green apart. In the Global War on Terror, the Defense Department reactivated its long-defunct DELTA GREEN classification for a top-secret program that fought cosmic terrors with the tools and aegis of the War on Terror. Many Delta Green agents joined the new organization. Others distrusted the close ties between the new Delta Green and the infamously corrupt Majestic. Those few cut all ties with their former comrades and remained out in the cold, pursuing their desperate work with even fewer resources and less hope.
In his foreword to Strange Authorities by DG co-creator John Scott Tynes (2012), Kenneth Hite put the setting in context: “Delta Green came out of the Nineties, out of what was, in retrospect, America’s Indian Summer vacation between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers. It presented a vision of a black-suited conspiracy in league with alien entities that were using the entire US government as their puppets, or perhaps as their host body. Opposing that conspiracy? Our heroes? Not the heroes of previous decades; not lovers, or reporters, or Rambo. No, our heroes were guys in (slightly different) black suits, members of that same federal government, themselves forced to lie and sneak and conspire to defeat a faceless, multi- headed military-industrial-bureaucratic complex in the name of How Things Used To Be. Our enemies weren’t Us – this ain’t Pogo – but they weren’t quite Them, either. […] That decade’s zeitgeist perhaps most famously also created The X-Files – which debuted a year after the first Delta Green scenario saw print, a datum I must have heard Tynes adduce a hundred times in a fugue of irked pride.”
Some of these titles are presented in ePub format, others as .PDFs, and still others in both formats. With the exception of The Way It Went Down V2, each book came from one or another of four past offers: Delta Green Pagan (March 2014), Delta Green RPG (June 2018), DG Operations (October 2019) – and Strange Authorities previously appeared in our third offer ever, the Bundle of Holding 3 in June 2013.
There were eleven titles in our DG Fiction Library (retail value $61) as DRM-free ebooks in .PDF or ePub (sometimes both), including Alien Intelligence, Dark Theatres, Denied to the Enemy, Down in the Delta, Extraordinary Renditions. In the Court of the Yellow King, Strange Authorities, Tales From Failed Anatomies, Through a Glass Darkly, and The Way It Went Down Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.
