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// The Labyrinth //
ARC DREAM PUBLISHING PRESENTS
DELTA GREEN: THE LABYRINTH
BY JOHN SCOTT TYNES
DEVELOPERS & EDITORS
DENNIS DETWILLER & SHANE IVEY
DENNIS DETWILLER
ART DIRECTOR & ILLUSTRATOR
INDEXED BY
JESS NEVINS
GRAPHIC DESIGN BY
SIMEON COGSWELL
DELTA GREEN CREATED BY DENNIS DETWILLER, ADAM SCOTT GLANCY & JOHN SCOTT TYNES
Delta Green: The Labyrinth
is published by Arc Dream Publishing in arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The
intellectual property known as Delta Green is ™ and © The Delta Green Partnership, which has licensed its use in this volume.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity with people or events, past or present, is purely coincidental and unintentional except
for those people and events described in historical context. Foreword by Mike Mearls, © 2019. All other text by by John
Scott Tynes, © 2019. Illustrations by Dennis Detwiller, © 2019. All rights reserved worldwide by the copyright holders. For a
free PDF of this book with your print purchase, contact Arc Dream Publishing at www.arcdream.com; at 12215 Highway 11,
Chelsea, AL, 35043, USA; or by email to info@arcdream.com. For more Delta Green, visit delta-green.com. Special thanks
to Christopher Gunning, Jenny Scott Tynes, Rowan Tynes, Vivian Tynes, Charles Ulveling, and all of our Kickstarter backers
for support and advice; and to Ramsey Campbell and Colin Wilson for their kind permission to feature their creations in
this book.
“I was calling for the last time. / We've been here before, they found the pictures in the snow. / I can tell your eyes
looked beneath the blue. / I walk underneath the trees for the first time.”
Sold by Studio2 Publishing
2663 Byington Solway Road
Knoxville, TN 37931, USA
phone 1-865-212-3797
email jims@studio2publishing.com
Delta Green: The Labyrinth
product stock
code APU8121
ISBN 978-1-940410-48-7
Printed in the United States of America
987654321
Foreword
I’ve heard some people make the case that
we’re in the Golden Age of Roleplaying Games. Now
that you’re holding in your hands a new
Delta Green
book written by John Scott Tynes, that case is closed.
We’re there. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Why
is this book so important?
Delta Green
was a landmark RPG release of
the 1990s. Fusing H.P. Lovecraft’s mythos with
modern-day action and intrigue, it transformed that
mythos into an imminent menace that felt perfectly
at home in that decade. The Cold War was over and
tension between the world’s powers was a thing of
the past. The Internet promised to unite us all in an
enlightened, information-rich environment where
prosperity could reach each and every one of us. The
utopia we’d dreamed of was finally within our grasp.
Delta Green
showed us how cosmic terrors could lurk
in that modern world’s nooks and crannies, reaching
out from its hiding places to taint and destroy every-
thing we looked forward to. In a time of hope and
optimism,
Delta Green
provided a delightful escape
to a cynical, twisted world where going out fighting
was a luxury.
And then, well, everything that happened between
THEN and NOW happened. Say what you will about
global thermonuclear warfare, but at least the end
it promised was mercifully swift, and was served up
without a legion of braying jackasses polluting every
possible channel of human communication. I’ve seen
The Day After, Testament,
and
Threads.
I did not
think we’d hurtle to our doom along this particular
trajectory. We live in a world of inverted tyranny,
where the worst among us have their say, their way,
and their day. The shit didn’t just hit the fan. It passed
through the blades, aerosolized, and reached every
corner of modern civilization.
And once more, against that backdrop, Tynes
comes along with a mind-cracking slab of horror that
is the perfect antidote to the bullshit of our times.
Once a doomed blaze of glory was the perfect escapist
entertainment in a world hurtling toward a bright
future.
Delta Green
gave us a vision of just how bad
things could be. Today, it must compete with exactly
how bad they’ve gotten.
Well, let me tell you, the times might be a-changin’
but
Delta Green
keeps the hits coming, even in the
21st century.
Within this book, you’ll find something far worse
than Cthulhu or Azathoth. You’ll find all the dumb,
grating, miserable ills that everyone agrees need to
go but that are too entrenched, too useful to the right
people, for anyone to do anything about them. In-
ternet trolls? The rich and powerful with an appetite
for resources that would give Grendel indigestion? A
religious sect made for incels? It’s all in here, and in
true
Delta Green
style, Tynes gives you the chance to
go down in a blaze of (covert, heavily tamped down
and conveniently explained after the fact to keep the
public wrapped in merciful ignorance) glory. Our
escape today is not to a world filled with horrors we
can’t imagine. Instead,
The Labyrinth
lets us step into
our own, horrible world—but with the dismal plagues
we suffer neatly prepared for demolition. It won’t be
pretty (what Delta Green op ever is?), it won’t be easy
(see the last parenthetical), and it won’t be the kind of
mission you come back from in one piece, if you come
back at all (seeing a trend?). This book is your chance
to do something that we, collectively, have lost touch
with: the ability to look the world’s ills in the eye and
send them packing.
I’d be selling this book short if I ended this fore-
word there, but we’re just getting started. The genius
of
The Labyrinth
is in its handling of both sides of
the horror equation. If the past 20 years have taught
us anything, it’s that things we think are unmitigated
benefits (like maybe a global network of interconnect-
ed computers) can turn out to have a dark side. Tynes
gives us enemies to struggle against, but perhaps even
worse, he gives us allies who can help us. For a time.
It’s fitting that
The Labyrinth
creates a web of
useful contacts for Delta Green operatives, all of
whom harbor their own secrets—and, in time, after
providing much needed aid, turn against their one-
time allies. I can’t think of a better way to capture
how our understanding of the world has shifted since
the late 1990s. Once we could divide the world: First
World, Second World, Third World. Now, we’re all
one blob of humanity trapped on this planet, and as
Walt Kelly once wrote, “We have met the enemy and
he is us.” In a world where 911 calls are weapon-
ized, where too many people fear the police that walk
their streets, could we see those who would crusade
against evil as anything other than our next enemies?
Tynes’ approach to groups like the Center for Miss-
ing Children or The Witness Alliance is one of those
RPG landmarks that is so brilliant it seems obvious
in retrospect. If we’re lucky, in five years it will be the
standard approach for tabletop RPGs.
Finally, in another game design maneuver that’s
elegant as Hell, Tynes lays out the individual pieces of
The Labyrinth
like a hideous game of
Jenga.
The parts
all fit together in just the right way that tugging on
one shifts at least two others, leaving the entire works
ready to come down in an avalanche of misery. The
pieces of
The Labyrinth
stand on their own as emi-
nently readable and incredibly gameable, but taken
together they weave a pattern that lights your mind
on fire. I have roughly 10,000 things on my to-do list,
but “Run a
Delta Green
campaign” just forced its
way on there and shot up to number one.
So, here we stand in the dismal years of late-stage
capitalism, an era that has somehow produced a
groundswell of RPGs. We have the benefit of know-
ing we’re in a Golden Age while it’s happening. We
have a new
Delta Green
book from John Scott Tynes,
and it lives up to every proper noun in the preceding
sentence clause. The world might be on the verge
of its last, shuddering gasps, but I’ll say this for our
little hobby. If this be our end, it’s a pretty damn
glorious one.
Mike Mearls
Seattle, September 2019

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