In the murky days of the 1990s, my roommate Armando introduced me to a role-playing game called Delta Green. That game could be a book or a film in and of itself, however I think that it has within it the germ of an idea far larger in scope and the writer in me is eager to explore it.
Delta Green is steeped in the Cthulhu mythos of legendary horror writer, H.P. Lovecraft. As the backstory goes, the U.S. military performed a raid on the town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts back in the 1920s following the events of Lovecraft’s Shadow Over Innsmouth. The government learned that the horrors of the occult are very real and that there needs to be a cadre of operatives willing to keep the world safe from the proverbial things that go bump in the night. Thus, the super-secret Delta Green was born.
The membership of Delta Green is made up of agents culled from the military and government agencies such as the FBI, ATF, and many other acronyms. Teams of Delta Green members would be deployed on “black ops” to handle dark horrors or even alien incidents. In the 1980s, things apparently went south after an op in Cambodia and Ronald Reagan along with Majestic 12 cut a deal with Grey aliens of UFO conspiracy lore. Delta Green then “went rogue” and began operating independently.
Sounds a bit like The X-Files, right? Well, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought so. In truth, Delta Green was published a full year before that show ever hit the airwaves. Even if the game did gain subsequent inspiration from The X-Files, I don’t consider that a detriment as I’m a big fan of the show. Heck, I’m a big fan of the entire milieu…which brings me to my inspiration.
While I truly enjoy and appreciate the work of Lovecraft, I’d rather see something that focused a bit more on alien threats. If we follow the thought process of UFO conspiracy lore, then there must indeed be a shadowy, black ops organization that handles extraterrestrial matters, whether that entails crash retrieval, evidence acquisition, witness silencing, or even direct combat with the aliens as in the case of Dulce.
What kinds of people would do this sort of work? What would their lives be like? What would it be like to witness such amazing and at times harrowing things and never be able to speak of them? Would these people be able to have families and home lives? If so, what would that be like for them? I see the narrative as having action of the kind in the classic game X-COM UFO Defense only with a strong backstory and rich characters.
Then again, I'm not sure I'd want to write this as singular story but rather as an aspect of a much larger narrative. I'll let you know.
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Sound entertaining to anyone else?
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