I've been thinking a bit about #deltagreen and I've come to the conclusion that it's too optimistic. Specifically, I don't think it fully comes to grips with The Problem of Evil. And that's maybe a fault that goes back to Lovecraft, but I think the RPG format makes it worse 1/n
So let's think about the basic set up: #Cthulhu is real. Governments do what governments do. Life continues, until it doesn't.
But. Nuclear and biological weapons. Global warming. Genocide. The use of religion to justify vast destruction of human lives, violent and otherwise.
But. Nuclear and biological weapons. Global warming. Genocide. The use of religion to justify vast destruction of human lives, violent and otherwise.
What's fucked in the world is fucked in ways which are really hard to capture neatly in the #Cthulhu framework; he's a pre-nuclear character, for the most part, and the human race hadn't shown its true colors yet, in The Bad Places of the Mid 20th Century. We can do much worse.
So let's run through basics: nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, and The Martians. The Bomb Team joked that they were all aliens en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marti…
Ha ha. Ha ha ha. No, I can't make that funny. I'm trying. I can't make it work.
So there's the first thing: history is worse.
Ha ha. Ha ha ha. No, I can't make that funny. I'm trying. I can't make it work.
So there's the first thing: history is worse.
Hitler, ok, #deltagreen has some occult nazi stuff. Man in the High Castle level involvement. But *surely* if you're going there, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest, are all catastrophic mythos events. The Duvaliers in Haiti, etc. People in power doing massive human sacrifices.
So now you're well dug in. This is a *vastly* worse world than the standard #deltagreen setting - WW2 becomes an enormous Mythos slugfest between different groups doing mass human sacrifice, and the Americans bringing in alien superweaponry as their final move. Great setting.
But we can do worse. So much worse. Humans are escaped lab rats in the Mythos. Great Old Ones. No less a source than Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter gives us a great read on slavery: it's how vampires farm humans so now we've got a mythos for slavery too.
This is a very elegant darkness. It gives the Mythos some real historical legs: ancient Egyptian vampires, aliens who want humanity to exterminate itself and keep trading us technologies we can't handle to wipe us out, and human sacrifice to raise POW for magical world domination
In this setting, #deltagreen ops are in the backdrop of a long struggle for human self-determination versus a human elite trading with and being manipulated by mythos forces. The roots of political oppression become directly aligned with the Mythos. The ills of the world? Magic.
The medieval witch hunts, protestantism, the scientific enlightenment all become game moves as humans seek self-determination against the Mythos and the human masters it has corrupted. John Dee wields spells to make the British Empire, then recants and makes the Invisible College
#DG becomes precisely aligned with witch hunters, a kind of planetary immune system trying to prevent human beings falling back under the thrall of evil magical forces, and rooting out corrupt rulers who are allied with the Mythos and have to be put down. They become Templars.
It also suggests a fundamental human alliance against the Mythos: all your political ills come from Mythos sources in the end. Humans may have been spawned by it, but they're trying to go from slavery to freedom, to break their chains. It's the unifying theme across the ages.
The humans are forced into the devil's bargain: to fight the Mythos, you need the magic of the Mythos. It tends to produce slavers at the top - watchmen who turn corrupt. Who's to say an Inquisition wasn't a Mythos subversion of the guardians for Yet Another Mass Sacrifice.
Now a worse thing happens here. The best of human life is far, far away from the Mythos. But if nobody goes to fight it, it invades. But those who do fight it often become corrupted and rule us from above, then re-import it. Central human drama here. Plus The Stars Are Right etc.
You have a constant stream of brave souls going to Fight The Power, learning to Use The Power to Fight The Power, then Becoming the Power and having another generation have to come and take them out. Wars between corrupted and uncorrupted senior guardians. Ala Mage the Ascension.
And at the end of this process, we all lose. The Mythos swamps the fragile bubble of human existence, and everything ends. Unless humans become so powerful that they themselves become mythos creatures, mysterious lords of space and time, ruling the multiverse. #DrWho #deltagreen
And now we have #DeltaGreen posthumans vs. transhumans vs. humans, which is about the most interesting conflict I can think of. The #Mythos creatures wind up embedded in our struggle for transcendence, a sort of messy, exploitative, blood sacrifice filled #UpliftWar scenario.
The idea of weaving in a Singularity-on-our-terms as a prize to fight for in #DeltaGreen opens up a whole new can of worms. It rams home the questions about the mythos and humanity that have been there from the beginning: we start as lab rats, but they're just evolved animals too
A human faction which strives for parity with the #mythos is a perfect foe for #deltagreen. The worst possible humans doing the worst possible things in the best of possible causes. DG agents who're secretly working for the Billionaire Singularitarian Evolving Space Immortals
Billionaire Singularitarian Evolving Space Immortals are the perfect antagonists. Mythos-sodden demigods who will do anything to protect humanity *on their terms* and who view #deltagreen as the modern Inquisition persecuting Galileo, dooming humans to perpetual enslavement.
But when something goes wrong? Exactly the same kind of humanitarian catastrophe as when #Cultists mishandle a summoning. Two generations of humanity's guardians at war is a *far* better reasons for agents to get out of bed than #CallOfCthulhu's desperate struggle for survival.
