The Hellier Lovecraft Connection
Part 1: Delta Green
I’ve written several love letters in the past, published here, that bridge the gap between gaming and gnosis. I’ve also written about the many esoteric notes that the documentary series, Hellier, hits during their investigation but misses, due to the crew just not being aware of this detail or that. But now I bring to you a breakdown of what might be my personal grand unification theory. All my favorite shit rolled into one ambitious study: Gaming, Hellier, the occult, and H.P. Lovecraft.
Because I can’t just can’t be concise about this stuff and Substack eventually drops a gavel and tells me to cut the shit and get to the point, I’m going to break this up into several parts.
Part 1: Delta Green
Part 2: The Whisperer In Darkness
Part 3: Crowley, Lovecraft, and Grant
Part 4: Putting It All Together
Important note: I am in no way associated with the Hellier production, Planet Weird, etc. I’m just a fan with a substack and too much time on their hands. These articles are in no way endorsed by the Newkirks.
Part 1: Delta Green
My favorite role playing game of all time is a game called Delta Green. Published back in 1993 by a company called Pagan (now published by Arc Dream), it was an expanded setting for the crucial horror RPG, Call of Cthulhu. Where Cthulhu was set in the 1920’s to be consistent with the pulp themes of Weird Tales and Lovecraft’s own settings, Delta Green updates the setting to the 90’s (Arc Dream’s edition is contemporary) and reimagines the game in a way that gives players a good reason to investigate the unbearable beyond: It’s your job.
The number one plot failing in a lot of Call of Cthulhu games is often one question: Why are we even doing this?
I ran a Call of Cthulhu scenario for players once called Genius Loci, which sets the players up to rescue a mutual friend from an insane asylum before they’re sacrificed to a creature living in a nearby pond. Right out of the gate, one of my players tried to thwart the entire adventure by calling the police. This is obviously the thing you’d actually do but, like, dude. Stop. I’m trying to run a horror game here.
Delta Green solves this problem by making you The Mythos Cops. Or at least by calling the police you would then have to kill the cops that aren’t driven to gibbering maniacs by what they discover in order to cover up the awful truth of reality: We are perpetually stuck at two minutes to midnight between incomprehensible forces of destruction and a skeleton crew of woefully broken people whose task it is to maintain the stalemate.
In this game, you’re an agent of a government conspiracy that roots out and destroys The Mythos wherever it might pop up. Variations of this arrive in the form of other governments and their blacker-than-black version of Delta Green. Some work like Delta Green, others not so much. It’s basically X-Files vs Cthulhu but instead of Mulder and Scully you’re Krycek and The Cigarette Smoking Man. This is not a game for heroes.
Arc Dream publishes compilations of adventures from time to time in really nice hardback editions and I dream of being published in one of those books one day. They have a crew of writers pulled from the original Pagan days, plus a couple of other well-known agents of gaming and it’s basically an impenetrable shield of smart brand-gatekeeping that I’ll never crack. But I’m going to try anyway, and failing that I’ll just publish them on Reddit for free or something.
I’ve been obsessively revising a scenario I wrote for the last couple of years and intend to playtest it this year. I’m quite proud of it. It fits roundly into the Delta Green canon but sidesteps the usual mythos boss fight that players face at the end. I did this on purpose in favor of putting the players up against a shadowy organization that used to collaborate with The Mythos but is now central to keeping the Delta Green organization running.
Finally, getting around to the point, I also recently began brainstorming a new scenario that is based heavily on Hellier. In fact, I intend to feature the Alien Cave Base Task Force as NPCs not as cleverly renamed puppets but as their actual selves (with permission, of course). I imagine Terry R. Wriste being a member of a previous iteration of Delta Green, which operated outside of the government apparatus, and David Christie is impossible to find since everyone is looking for a person when they should be seeking out a brain in a jar which may or may not even be on this planet. Allen Greenfield will absolutely feature. At present, he’s shaping up to be a magician whose UFOnaut Cipher is actually a form of hypergeometry. Hypergeometry being Delta Green’s stand-in for a magic system. But unlike other games where magic throws a fireball and helps you out, hypergeometry is massively powerful, gets you what you need, but often ruins your life since it’s like staring directly into the sun, if the sun were awful truth of reality embodied in a singularly sinister intelligence.
In the process of brainstorming it occurred to me that a re-read of H.P. Lovecraft’s novela, The Whisperer In Darkness might be in order since my idea involves the monstrous race from Pluto ahem, Yuggoth), the Mi-Go and in the process of that re-read it occurred to me that – holy shit – Hellier and The Whisperer In Darkness bear more than few qualities in common.
It’s actually a little alarming how similar they are. Being that Hellier has a way of triggering paranoia, I vacillated between feelings of betrayal – How dare they fool us through plagiarism! – and wonder, which I will elaborate on. Needless to say, no. I don’t actually think that this whole thing is a fake but if it were, it’s a hell of a way to raise your profile and meet Jeff Goldblum.
I’ll outline precisely how the two align in Part 2: The Whisperer in Darkness.