My post focus is bouncing around a lot, I know, when I DO get around to writing, but all of these things are on my mind regardless of their representation here. To wit: Delta Green.

Here’s a secret: I don’t like “horror”. To clarify, I don’t really like the kind of horror that seems to play well with Western audiences, things like slasher films (gore), jump scares (*waves hands in several directions*), or the really gross stuff (body horror). What I do like is “supernatural horror” which can be tamer on the surface than the aforementioned genres — think of Mike Flannigan projects such as The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass — as well as what they apparently and broadly call “New Weird Fiction” which is a “…combination of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and weird elements…“. In these kinds of stories, the horror is always behind the scenes, represented through the surreal and the dissonant as they tend to occur in places and situations that seem mundane and rote to the reader/viewer. This is why I love games like The Secret World and Control and have been obsessing over Delta Green.

I’m not generally good at explaining “a feeling” that I might have about “a thing” because by definition they’re feelings and not necessarily thoughts we come to understand through analysis; sometimes doing so can wreck the allure, like looking behind the curtain to find that the powerful wizard is just a sad old man. In this case, I think that I can try to explain why I like this kind of fiction without ruining it for myself because part of the draw is in not being able to fully explain, or even come close to grasping, the truth of what’s going on.

Starting with an overt example, there’s The Secret World. It’s not a secret to us as players because we’re part of it. We get chosen for reasons never explained and are granted power to enter this realm. We are presented with exposition and stories and notes as if they are ripped from factual encyclopedia because they really are. While the overwhelming majority of humanity doesn’t have official knowledge of the Secret World, there’s a belief in its existence that is held by many for reasons they cannot explain. The franchise’s tagline is “every conspiracy is true” and while I wouldn’t go that far, it means that all myths, suppositions, and faiths are correct, but rank and file populus could never prove it. In The Secret World, people live in and around the supernatural and are affected by it in both wonderful and fearful ways (usually the latter), but it’s always on otherworldly terms.

Kind of on the opposite end of the spectrum, but also extremely similar, we have games like Control, and TV shows like The X-Files and Warehouse 13 (or if you’re old like me, Friday the 13th: The Series). In these examples the supernatural isn’t hiding out in the woods, nor is it a product of ancient rituals long forgotten; it’s sitting on your kitchen counter, buried in a box of Grandma’s mementos in your attic, or found in a bazaar in a far-away country. Common items that act as foci for undetermined and often unregulated power are dangerous in any hands simply because they are unassuming and mislabeled, and if left unchecked could result in calamity. That’s why there are always a secret cabal of specialists who work to find, collect, and neutralize these curios to keep them out of the hands of those who would abuse them and ensuring that no one, past or present, can ever find them again. The kicker is that a lot of times there’s both a good and bad side to these artifacts; viewers can see how many of them can be used for good, assuming there aren’t any supernatural strings attached (spoiler alert: there usually are). Such ambiguity can lead one to consider the moral implications of crossing over from ignorant to knowledgeable and then to become a potential wielder of such power: how would we use such devices or knowledge? We might say we’d solve the world’s ills if we could, but would we? Or would we inadvertently be creating new ones in the process?

Far off beyond the end of this spectrum, befitting its definition, is the really messed up stuff. This is where we start talking about “Cthulhu Mythos” and maybe even movies like Event Horizon. These treatments never explain the why, the where, or even the how because they buck the trend of a neat package. The Ultimate Evil isn’t always evil; it just Is, but as the human mind is simple when compared to this intelligence at scale that we are incapable of comprehending any of it. The only outcome a participant can expect in these situations is insanity. The ride we as readers or players or viewers experience it is not an “if” but a “when”. How long can these people function in the face of cosmic horrors, how much can they learn, and how many can they warn before they are driven insane? In the end, it’s an exercise in futility because humanity will never come out ahead even if it manages to win a few battles in an ever-present and eternal war. People keep trying not because they think they can win, but often because they are drawn in and become eventually trapped like flies in amber and all other choices are eventually beyond their control.

People generally look down on those who might profess belief in faeries or Bigfoot or ghosts because these things have entered popular consciousness several hundreds of even thousands of years ago, yet no proof can be found of their existence; the parallels to organized religions shouldn’t be discounted, but belief in Earthly fantasy seems less acceptable than belief in a central and ethereal power. Why? In keeping with the topic, maybe The Powers That Be know that if humanity could prove some of these “weird fictions” then that gives us power over them. A lot of these stories focus on that: in TSW we are agents of Gaia and fight against the Filth in a war unseen by humanity; in Control, we find a bureaucratic agency that collects mundane yet powerful artifacts for scientific study and archiving. Humans have always craved power over its world, and the more we know the more we find ways to abuse and misuse it. If we had dominion over real power we should never expect it to be used for good will. Some things are secret because they must be kept secret and one way to do that is to deride, belittle, and infantilize belief in the mystical, drawing away the power of allure to protect the power of the truth.

This isn’t a manifesto on belief or an attempt to create Grillo’s supernatural database but really just an appreciation for the levels of imagination that creatives can come up with when the need arises. I’ve been watching through an Actual Play of a Delta Green module called “Impossible Landscapes” and while it’s been quite the adventure thus far (I’m only on ep. 3) I’ve opted instead to read the adventure instead as it came in the massive pile of Delta Green content I purchased recently from Humble Bundle, and it’s a lot quicker to get through. It’s pretty wild in width and breadth and while I’m not a fan of how the Delta Green machine puts together their content — interrupting the gameplay content with massive interludes focused on background info better served at the back of the book — the authors have been making an incoherent subject amazing coherent. Although presented in the clinical manner of the blueprint that it is intended to be, reading through the module has sent shivers down my spine several times. It’s a creepiness moored in reality, with peripheral glimpses of the unknown both literally and figuratively as the plot requires. Everything is in front of the players if they know where to look but is otherwise as out of sight as the furthest shore from any point they stand upon. It’s weird and unsettling, and it’s one thousand percent my kind of gameplay.