Wanna share the progress you’ve made, or get help on a part you’re stuck on? Share it here!
I’m going to reply on this to post a quick update for anyone who’s interested!
Step 2: Review
The first post is up and we got some really solid feedback, so we are both working through that to try and spruce up the Operation, mostly streamlining it. I think we will have 3 tabs, one for each operations, and then 1-2 other tabs for ‘Supplemental’ material, background lore that ties the three ops together, detailed NPC breakdowns ect. I’ll drop a quick log here;
NEXT TASKS
So, lots of work still to do. Daktyl (me), is currently 75% of the way through the first draft for Mission 2, tentatively named Operation Shackled Dreams (I will almost definitely change this name). It’s set a year and a half later in a children’s hospital in Pennsylvania. Mythomancer is still plugging away at the rewrites, and I’ll be looking over some of the notes to see if there’s anything I can help out with for Black Forest oh I also made some more cover photos because I learned the basics of photo editing and can’t seem to stop myself.
Hey guys, these ideas are all so creative and I can’t wait to run them all for my players! I’m not familiar with the Discord server you all seem to be on (N@TO), but if it’s open to invites I’d love to weasel my way in.
I’ve been working on something the last month for this, current title is BE NOT AFRAID. The premise is it’s set in England in the 1990s and is based on the mythos of William Blake, and trying to graft it onto the Delta Green canon. I’ve got the first act finished and I’m super excited to publish it as a taster when I’m happy with it.
The reason this isn’t a PISCES campaign is I loved the paranoia of being rogue operators infiltrating another agency’s remit, and as we all know PISCES are a lot more insidious than Delta Green is, especially at this point in history.
The vibe is strangers in a strange land I guess. I’m English and am obsessed with the sociocultural schema of my country, of how out of everywhere it seems to constantly be in a state of rot and degradation. By tying all of this to the Masons and their higher powers, URIZEN and LOS, the agents start by trying to catch a serial killer, but what they’ve really been tasked with is infiltrating a hostile nation. One where the Toother must be allowed to succeed to weaken the veil, and one where URIZEN’s influence is so strong that the entire British institution is allowing it through the guise of institutional rot and inefficiencies.
I’ve been making all of this art for it too in the spirit of no-AI DIYism, I’ll see if I can embed some! It’s all just tracing in MS Paint for that real 1990s flavour, but it’s also in the colour scheme of a thing we used to have in the UK called Teletext, or Ceefax, which was basically a proto-internet you could access through any TV with a bunch of menus of news, current events, sports results and weather forecasts. This is relevant because the alien intelligence who rules the Masons, URIZEN, is communicating the exact specifications of who to kill and when and where to the Toother through Ceefax.
Here’s the introduction where I establish the tone and lore of the campaign:
INTRODUCTION
1994. The days keep getting hotter, a mild spring leads into a delirious summer. England is creaking. An old place, a place of graveyards and the memory of blood. Nowhere smells it more than Sheffield, with its industrial past, with its bleak future, and with its rampaging killer. The media have called him the Toother, a reference to his murder weapon, a cordless buzzsaw. He has been hunting the various wayward teens who trek into the moors to illegal raves, catching them out there, where he can do his work unbothered. He then displays their bodies on the tors and rocky hills. He has claimed three so far, just posh kids gone awry. He’s not going to stop soon, and the authorities seem clueless.
ABOUT THIS CAMPAIGN
BE NOT AFRAID is a three-part mini campaign placing the agents between two competing alien intelligences, those William Blake named URIZEN and LOS, and the agents and fanatics of both. It spans a time of rapid change in England’s cultural zeitgeist, where rigid authoritarian structure and abject hedonism wrestled for dominance, starting in 1994 and ending on New Year’s Eve, 1999. This investigation into the Blakean cult leads them from the gutters of Sheffield and its foggy moorlands to the heights of aristocracy and the British government.
The agents are commissioned by A-Cell to fly to England and go into deep-cover in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, all based on a tip-off regarding the Toother. Typically the Program would ignore minor international events, but a former friendly, Dr. Charles Porter, has frantically requested their assistance - he’s claiming the English paranormal agency he works for, PISCES, have ignored his warnings that the Toother might be trying to call something to our world - not only that, PISCES, more commonly known as the Section, are having Dr. Porter followed.
A CAMPAIGN FOR BEGINNERS
While BE NOT AFRAID may not be a “traditional” Delta Green setup, it's designed with newcomers at the core of its intentions. The mechanics and atmosphere are intact, but the story operates outside of the usual Program/Outlaw context. This gives players a chance to learn without being immediately overwhelmed by the secrecy and paranoia of the main setting.
Here, agents begin with unusually robust cover identities - credible, well-resourced, and resistant to casual scrutiny. That gives players a bit more freedom to experiment, make mistakes, and learn how the game works without the usual risk of immediate collapse.
The 1990s setting supports this flexibility. It’s a useful middle-ground. It’s before ubiquitous surveillance and facial recognition, when cash still dominates, and when digital systems are less locked-down and protected. The UK is notable for its lack of domestic firearms, only specialised teams within law enforcement are permitted to carry them. The agents certainly aren’t! This reduces lethality while the players adjust to the dangerous nature of combat in Delta Green.
That said, this is not a license for reckless behaviour. The UK is still a modern state with functioning law enforcement, and operational discretion is as vital here as in any Delta Green campaign. The goal is to create a little breathing room, not to dull the edges.
MEDIA INSPIRATIONS
The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker, From Hell by Alan Moore, Trainspotting by Danny Boyle, From Beyond by Stuart Gordon, Utopia by Dennis Kelly, The Game by David Fincher, The Brotherhood by Stephen Knight, Naked by Mike Leigh, Threads by Barry Hines, Shifty by Adam Curtis, the discography of the seminal 90s electronic dance act Underworld (particularly Dubnobasswithmyheadman)
URIZEN, THARMAS, LOS, LUVAH
Before we begin, don’t feel the need to explain all of this to the players. Much like other Delta Green publications, the mystery is part of the horror. The deeper lore is here to give the world weight and cohesion, not answers. Let players uncover only fragments. Let them feel small.
At the heart of this campaign is the ancient, abstract war between two entities: URIZEN and LOS, who were once mortal men. John Dee the royal mathmetician, occultist and alchemist who served Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century became URIZEN, the lord of logic and cruelty, while William Blake, the mad prophet who wrote of URIZEN, LOS and the FOUR ZOAS in the 19th century has become part of his own mythos and assumed the role of LOS, king of carnal pleasures and art. They have transcended flesh and time, their minds burned into the deepest substrates of the cosmological order.
PISCES’ hypergeometrists describe our reality as enclosed within two higher and stranger dimensions; the Fourth Dimension, called THE INTERVAL, or THE DREAMLANDS, where human consciousness goes when we sleep, an atemporal porous membrane between our world and the Fifth Dimension, called TRUE EXISTENCE, or THE LAST VOID. A realm of limitless energy, anti-form and raw consciousness. In THE INTERVAL dwells four ZOAS, beings of total hyperdimensional integration and significant power.
Through ritual and desperation, Dee escaped mortality, his spirit ascending into THE INTERVAL. There, unbound by time and eroded by abstraction, his identity collapsed into something new over millenia: URIZEN. A being of total order, obsessed with hierarchy and reason, seeking to impose structure on England’s soul. In the process of forming a perfect circle and stepping inside, he shed his flesh, leaving it behind as THARMAS, the king of the nervous system, who lives in the amygdala of all of England’s citizens, rotting in the hallways of the INTERVAL still.
LOS followed after. Blake’s visionary mind, already attuned to THE INTERVAL glimpsed what URIZEN would build - a world without imagination or sensual pleasures. Blake performed the same rites not to dominate, but to resist. Yet the transformation unmoored him too. Without URIZEN’s zealoutry to anchor him, LOS became a maddened thing of pure sensation, feeding on rapture, art, lust, consuming beauty to keep himself from breaking completely. In the process his desperation and love for his wife Catherine had to be abandoned, and it became LUVAH, the hungry heart, what we call love.
LUVAH dreamt of Catherine still, and in the morphic realm of the INTERVAL that dream soon became flesh, forming ENITHARMON, a tulpa of Catherine. In the moment she was formed two things happened simulatenously: LOS immediately impregnated her in rapturous joy, and URIZEN utilised all of his power to trap her within a colossal mirror that hums with TV static, hiding her from LOS in a fold of the INTERVAL he couldn’t spread over. ENITHARMON’s sorrow and betrayal echoes through spacetime, a simple being without personality, only yearning, her pregnancy doomed to never be realised, her love beyond her reach.
This is not a story of good and evil. This is a cold war between alien gods that once wore human faces. URIZEN moves through structured institutions: Freemasons, ritual killings, hidden orders. LOS moves through chaos: in altered states, in cults of youth and ecstasy, in whispered poetry that drives the listener mad, in ecstatic violence. Both travel through dreams, through the subconscious, and since the founding of the National Grid in England, they travel through electricity, radio waves and radiation, all of which must pass through THE INTERVAL from TRUE EXISTENCE. LOS is not an active opponent, more a rot that URIZEN must constantly attend to and seeks URIZEN’S demise, while both ZOAS they left behind merely dream and wander.
This actually sounds amazing, if you ever need a Beta reader let me know. I am literally a stranger (British) in a strange land (Canada) haha so reading your synopsis made me excited to see it!
My mate that would be so helpful, I’ve been staring at it for so long that it’s hard to gauge pacing etc. Ditto for yours, I love the twin-soul aspect of your antagonist, it reminds me of BOB in Twin Peaks, being horrified at what your shadow self is doing and the moral complexity of that. Plus the integration of German folktales is an interesting creepy angle I haven’t seen explored anywhere else in DG canon :)
So I’ve been going over this in my head a lot - I was pretty set on a three-act structure and have recently decided instead on two long and dense acts, which should give the concepts I have of serial killer investigation -> national conspiracy room to breathe.. I’d been kind of losing the will and getting directionless with it, so it’s a big relief to have that one kind of seismic idea that shifts it to it all being achievable again. Will post updates soon, but here’s some more art I made for it, once again in that teletext style I’m aiming for