This morning, as soon as we posted the update announcing we’d passed the stretch goal for “The Children of Atlach-Nacha” we reailzed we’d better prepare to announce the next one. We were right.

Thanks to the amazing backers of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the Case Officer’s Handbook will be available in a full-color hardback edition.

The Case Officer’s Handbook includes everything in the Agent’s Handbook plus chapters on creating scenarios; running campaigns and customizing the setting; creating and customizing Cthulhu Mythos tomes, monsters, spells, and alien artifacts; cults, factions, and threats; and more.

We have updated the main page of the Kickstarter project with details about getting the Case Officer’s Handbook, whether by adding it to your current pledge or “upgrading” from the Agent’s Handbook to the Case Officer’s Handbook.

Please review the updated main page, and the FAQ at the bottom, carefully. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Next up—at this rate we’ll fund it in a few hours!—is “Protocols: The Unripened Fruit,” a report on the ways Delta Green must deal with the dead. It will be available FREE to all backers as quickly as we can post it.

In the meantime here’s another glimpse at the Case Officer’s Handbook, advice for the Handler—the Game Moderator—in preparing a Delta Green campaign.

The Limits of Intelligence

No one in the world of Delta Green knows and understands everything presented here. At best, the most informed members who have managed to remain sane understand a tiny fraction of it. And much of what is “known” is wrong, or at the very least misinformed. This information usually comes from books written by madmen on the cutting edge of science and religion, scattered across the twisted skein of history. Mankind’s technological ascent has done little to change the lack of clarity.

There is no “DEEP ONE ELIMINATION” manual. There are no repositories of artifacts or spells. Since the 1950s, Delta Green has understood the deleterious effects that such things have the human mind. It has learned to compartmentalize information not just for the sake of secrecy but also for sanity. Such books, artifacts and creatures act as a cancer on the mind, changing those exposed into something less human, and eventually into servants of the darkness. No one is immune.

Therefore agents often operate in a vacuum of information and must identify, uncover and destroy threats with little to no guidance. Assistance may come on rare occasions, but agents soon learn not to rely on it.

Fewer than three thousand people across the United States know anything about the truly unnatural. Most know only that forces exist outside of accepted reality, and they are as much a threat to sanity as to physical well-being.

On the level above the intelligence services tasked with uprooting the unnatural, what is reallyhappening? This is a question to work out for your own campaign.

Staying true to the concept of Delta Green, the players will never understand the ultimate truth. But establishing that truth for your own reference will inform the tone of the campaign and the threats the agents face. And it will give you ammunition to fill sessions with moments of terror.

You, the Handler, must decide what’s real in your Delta Green campaign. The players should never feel secure that they know what’s really going on. As soon as they think they do, it’s your duty to prove them horribly wrong.

The End Has Only Begun

We have 24 days to go and many amazing projects to create.

Keep fighting.