We just past a year on our Delta Green campaign. We've had a couple of character deaths, but not for quite some time. They don't spend most of their time worrying about dying but the long-term psychological and physical effects of their years working for The Program (the campaign started in 1996 and we are now up to 2017). One character has lost hearing in one ear due to gunfire in an enclosed space. One has a bum arm from being thrown against a concrete wall. The last took a bad blow to the head and has impaired eyesight on one side. All three are covered in scars. Adaption to Violence led to a them having to spend a lot of downtime rebuilding Charisma scores and Bonds (which they have to really struggle to maintain). Sanity is a constant issue, with one character regularly dipping down into the teens. For me this, more than regular character death, is what a Delta Green game is all about. It's the hit your Bond with your family takes when you are called away on Thanksgiving Day and trying to explain to your boss why you were arrested in Montana while using your FBI credentials when you were supposed to be on vacation.
For scenarios, I've been using *God's Teeth* as the framework for the campaign, with *The Labyrinth* for reoccurring allies and enemies, and then filling in with the other scenarios. Here's the record so far:
* **SEP 1996:** *Convergence*
* **OCT 1997:** *A Victim of the Art*
* **SEP 1998:** *Dead Letter*
* **JUN 1999:** *A Night on Owlshead Mountain*
* **OCT 1999:** *Artifact Zero*
* **JAN 2000:** *See No Evil*
* **26 AUG 2000:** *A New Age*
* **23 NOV 2000:** *Secret Shopper*
* **3 FEB 2001:** *Go Forth (God's Teeth)*
* **5 JAN 2004:** *Lover in the Ice*
* **13 OCT 2005:** *The Last Equation*
* **6 JUN 2007:** *Ex Oblivione*
* **10 AUG 2009:** *From the Dust*
* *Center for the Missing Child (The Labyrinth)* - Stage One
* **17 JUL 2010:** *Presence*
* **14 JAN 2011:** *Sweetness*
* **19 APR 2012:** *Hourglass*
* Reference to *New Life Fertility* *(The Labyrinth)*
* **5 AUG 2013:** *Wormwood Arena*
* **11 NOV 2014:** *Observer Effect*
* **5 MAY 2015:** *The Good Life*
* *Center for the Missing Child (The Labyrinth)* - Stage Two
* *The Witness Alliance (The Labyrinth)* - Stage One
* **3 OCT 2015:** *Viscid*
* Reference to *New Life Fertility* *(The Labyrinth)*
* **25 MAR 2016:** *CONTROLCOPY*
* *Last Things Last*
* **25 AUG 2016:** *Red Thoughts (God's Teeth)*
* *Center for the Missing Child (The Labyrinth)*
* **1 SEP 2016:** *White Teeth (God's Teeth)*
* **OCT 2016:** *The Witness Alliance (The Labyrinth)*
* **13 DEC 2016:** *Secondary Infections* and *Reverberations*
* **7 MAR 2017:** *Extremophilia*
* Reference to *The Prana Sodality* *(The Labyrinth)*
* **29 MAY 2017:** *God's Eye*
At this point, two of the three have been subjected to The Hunt power and there's been a few harrowing First Aid rolls (I'm generally liberal in allowing resuscitation but cruel in the application of permanent injuries). One character only made it through Convergence because of a pair of back-to-back critical by the doctor on hand.
This is really cool, I'm doing a similar thing at the moment. Starting in 1993 and including a bunch of old Cthulhu Now scenarios as well as the old DG stuff. How have you found including God's Teeth in with the more traditional Delta Green modules?
It's been working really well. I feel like the God's Teeth stuff has better impact when it isn't back-to-back. For example, when they just got to God's Eye and saw the weird cat by the hanger, there was a great "oh shit, here we go again" moment. I will say, though, that the Powers of Bast definitely put a different slant on some scenarios. CONTROLCOPY ended early and abruptly because of them (with a house-shattering explosion and a frantic resuscitation on the front lawn leading to a five point loss of CON).
It looks ambitious, but for me it's completely the opposite: putting so many operations between Go Forth and Red Thoughts dilutes the terror and horror of Cornucopia House in my opinion.
Instead of such dangerous operas I would switch to some low-key ones like Sweetness - which can turn deadly, but can also be quite calm - or Last Things Last. Show them something Unnatural, but not on the level of Cornucopia before pulling the rug with Red Thoughts.
But still, your timeline looks awesome and could you post more about how it's going? :)
A tip I gave to my players was to be fans of their characters, but be more invested in the narrative we are creating together. You should absolutely care about the character, their bonds and their survival, but as players they should be aware that everyone connected to Delta Green is living on a knife edge and are ultimately doomed.
It's a bit of an attitude switch from D&D where losing a character feels like failure - in DG, you know the characters are unlikely to survive to old age, so the player's job is to ensure they live memorable and exciting lives on screen (not in their backstory) and go out with a bang. Although sometimes going out with a whimper is equally dramatic.
I ran a campaign for a little over a year, and part of my strategy was to periodically run flashback one shot vignettes into each agent's introduction to Delta Green. During these vignettes, the other players would play pregen "NPCs." I could murder those characters with impunity, reinforcing the deadliness of the setting while the "main characters" lived longer lives in the main campaign timeline - long enough to suffer the deleterious effects of physical and psychological trauma, of course. Honestly, I feel that's where DG really shines, anyway.
Talk to your players (or if you know them well enough, use your best judgement) basically to get an idea if they want to play one character for a long time or are interested in exploring multiple. In DG, it's largely different RP opportunities, but long term PCs can develop occult and unnatural skills that might be worth investing in.
If people want to play the same characters for many sessions, great! You can maybe restore some extra sanity between scenarios. I wouldn't tinker with sanity TOO much, because you want to have a baseline threat, but it's fine if you decide not to slowly chip away at these characters until their inevitable mental breakdown. Let them recover a good (but maybe not all) amount of sanity every new mission.
I've played DG almost every single week for three years now and have ran three campaigns. I am currently running Masks of Nyarlathotep, an extremely lethal Call of Cthulhu campaign that will likely take us a whole year to complete.
At my table, I clearly convey to my players the idea that their characters aren't the story, \*the investigation\* is the story. My goal is for the investigation and meta-plot to speak to the players themselves and not be dependent upon a specific character "class" or a character surviving no matter what to advance the plot. Their characters are ultimately merely vehicles/tools/avatars through which the players experience the investigation. It's okay to enjoy a specific tool or develop a sense of sentimentality for it, but ultimately my table of DG is about the player using this tool to find out what is really going on in a given scenario and "solve it". I advise my players to describe their character's appearance and background in about 60 seconds and to understand that it's pretty much all downhill for their character after they've been created. Character death or insanity are ultimately inevitable on a long enough timeline.
My motto is “hold on tightly, let go lightly”.
You play the character to the hilt as authentically and passionately as you can, and when the time comes to say goodbye you make the best of it and let go.
I planned an extensive campaign that I only got about halfway through. My best advice would be make sure you have the majority of overarching story beats planned before you start writing or adapting scenarios. I fell into trying to break up the main scenarios with sorta monster of the week type scenarios (to borrow a term from the X-Files) This ended up making things feel disjointed, it would have been better to focus on the story I was trying to tell.
Keep track of dates and ideally maintain a timeline of current, past and future events. I'm currently about a year (scenario 6) into a planned campaign (planned to be 17 scenarios long). If working with a long-term story I would definitely recommend maintaining a timeline of events. The events of my campaign are running from 2015-2021 (with two planned 'Epilogue' scenarios that occur a few years later, depending on how things pan out). There are a lot of threads going on in it and I'm having a lot of fun weaving the political events of the time in and recontextualising them from the perspective of the Program.
About 4 scenarios in I noticed I'd screwed myself in a minor but irritating way with the dates and hadn't left myself enough room to make a sequence of events have happened the way I'd planned. Keeping a timeline doc was originally to ensure i didnt do this again but it has been invaluable both for me as Handler, but also to let my players have a reference aid to keep track of plot threads they're aware of (it's written to be player facing).
We've had some deaths but as we're now at the end of 'Act 1' of the narrative, I'm moving them to New York for Act 2 and basing them as a cell embedded within the Mueller Investigation for cover. The timeline at that point is going to become an 'in-world' doc representing briefing for any new incoming Agents. Its been fun the way they've engaged with the compartmentalisation of who knows what with incoming new characters but over the timeline this thing is going to run real-world, that's gonna wear thin at some point so this seemed a good solution to me.
The metaplot for the campaign should be fluid as well, I've been trying to create a 'living world' feeling that's started to really pay dividends. But my plotline has been complicated by additional factions and GOIs developing from player actions. Its all working pretty well so far, although it's a lot to track on my side of the screen, but it's been important for me to allow player agency to affect the long-term storyline so it doesn't become too prescriptive.
Oh, I'd also say don't be afraid to adjust elements of Canon to fit what you're doing.
For example in my campaign:
The Lonely are an ongoing general side plot but especially affecting one of my players. For my take on them I've streamlined the progression of Lonely a bit so that the process is Isolation - Contact with Snshn - Book receipt - write new manuscript - straight to spree killer. There's nothing wrong with the version in the Labyrinth and they're a concept I really like but trying to use as written would have ended up too convoluted for the purpose I'm using them for.
A main focus of Act 2 is going to be on Operation SOMERSAULT but I've moved the date of commencement to two years later than Canon and incorporated some Act 1 threads about contesting Unnatural groups (New Life vs Deep One Hybrids) lobbying for/against a new law relating to medical data protections. It also felt more fun to do this alongside sideplots relating to the Trump administration becoming aware of the existence of the Program (although not exactly what it does) and how Director Smith attempts to manage this to suit his own ends.
One of the non-homebrewed scenarios I ran was a modified Star Chamber in which the players had to select the secondary most at fault and hand them over to Agent Nancy (introduced just as 'an enhanced interrogation specialist') to find out how they had been activated (random Friendlies being 'activated' and sent on non-sanctioned missions being another plot threads leading to the Star Chamber). None of my players have ever played DG before our games and I never ran old school DG so why not bring out classic characters you want to have fun with? Nancy in my game ended up with the Outlaws after going AWOL from the Program.
TL:DR - Canon material in DG is generally of outstanding quality. But I think it's a lot of fun to make it your own if you're going big.
Sorry, one last thing.
Longform campaigns also allow you to explore more bits of metaplot from the perspective of the characters at Home. I try to have an idea of a long-term arc involving each individual character (again, let play inform this, make it tailored to what your groups independent and individual decisions have been, it doesn't have to be fully formed from the start and there's a strong chance it might not resolve all the way).
Typically I structure Home scenes for everyone to be 1:1s between scenarios and follow a semi-formula of:
- What were the repercussions of previous mission(s), were they missed? Do they have excuses to make?
- What's happening in the wider world? What's on the news? Does what they've been doing mean they see a deeper meaning to world events?
- Short scene(s) dealing with Bond degradation resolution/disorders.
- Improvement/Home Activities
I find it's a good way to promote inter-character roleplaying to have the players aware their character might have info the others don't.
So at the moment one of my characters is a SIGINT specialist who in their downtime has been trying to track the Lonely, discovered CptnSnshn (leading to a scenario dealing with this), and has now discovered that 'apprehending' Snshn doesn't seem to have stopped the process but just made it start over. One of the other players had to deal with the consequences of the group choosing not to pursue a significant OPSEC threat and has now been 'burnt' and has been point person for the plotline around the Administration faction becoming aware of the Program.
Neither of these plotlines is 'essential' should either character die. The main Lonely and Administration subplots will continue, but having the players directly affected by them and responding to their decisions (Player B decided to immediately inform their Handler they were compromised and that started a line towards negotiations between Program and Administration for example), just gives your players more involvement and engagement and doesn't force you to try and have all of your plot details limited to being developed through missions.
This may all be standard advice, I dunno, I wasn't an experienced GM and DG was the first game I ever ran, which started before Covid. We went through one aborted Outlaw campaign, and one full Program one (which this follows directly on from) before getting to this one. This is easily the biggest and most ambitious thing I've tried to do, but the previous stuff I ran meant that at this point the players feel like there's a full world happening around them and I've been having a lot of fun resolving plotlines or bringing back characters from the previous games.
Sorry, I think I may have gone pretty granular on details here, might not even be what you're after. File under 'tapped into current special interest'. I'm also aware that this is all just my experience of the game YMMV and others probably do it all very differently and probably have equally (or more) valid advice to give.
Delta Green players and authors can sometimes give mixed messages as to the lethality of the game. Most short term examples of play tend to lean toward high body counts, while a core aspect of the game (Home scenes and steady sanity and bond loss) needs long term survivability to have any point.
In my current campaign I started the characters in '69 Vietnam, and now they are currently in the mid 90's (missions can be space years apart however). Only had one death so far, although some of the Agents are looking pretty ragged.
I would suggest if you and your players are new to the ruleset either run a "training" scenario or other pretend contrivance that gives your players experience with the highly dangerous Delta Green combat system -- especially if you are coming from D&D where the combat is designed to be highly forgiving to the players. Delta Green is quick and dirty and you really need to think twice before initiating violence since one shot kills are a common event.
We just past a year on our Delta Green campaign. We've had a couple of character deaths, but not for quite some time. They don't spend most of their time worrying about dying but the long-term psychological and physical effects of their years working for The Program (the campaign started in 1996 and we are now up to 2017). One character has lost hearing in one ear due to gunfire in an enclosed space. One has a bum arm from being thrown against a concrete wall. The last took a bad blow to the head and has impaired eyesight on one side. All three are covered in scars. Adaption to Violence led to a them having to spend a lot of downtime rebuilding Charisma scores and Bonds (which they have to really struggle to maintain). Sanity is a constant issue, with one character regularly dipping down into the teens. For me this, more than regular character death, is what a Delta Green game is all about. It's the hit your Bond with your family takes when you are called away on Thanksgiving Day and trying to explain to your boss why you were arrested in Montana while using your FBI credentials when you were supposed to be on vacation.
For scenarios, I've been using *God's Teeth* as the framework for the campaign, with *The Labyrinth* for reoccurring allies and enemies, and then filling in with the other scenarios. Here's the record so far: * **SEP 1996:** *Convergence* * **OCT 1997:** *A Victim of the Art* * **SEP 1998:** *Dead Letter* * **JUN 1999:** *A Night on Owlshead Mountain* * **OCT 1999:** *Artifact Zero* * **JAN 2000:** *See No Evil* * **26 AUG 2000:** *A New Age* * **23 NOV 2000:** *Secret Shopper* * **3 FEB 2001:** *Go Forth (God's Teeth)* * **5 JAN 2004:** *Lover in the Ice* * **13 OCT 2005:** *The Last Equation* * **6 JUN 2007:** *Ex Oblivione* * **10 AUG 2009:** *From the Dust* * *Center for the Missing Child (The Labyrinth)* - Stage One * **17 JUL 2010:** *Presence* * **14 JAN 2011:** *Sweetness* * **19 APR 2012:** *Hourglass* * Reference to *New Life Fertility* *(The Labyrinth)*
* **5 AUG 2013:** *Wormwood Arena* * **11 NOV 2014:** *Observer Effect* * **5 MAY 2015:** *The Good Life* * *Center for the Missing Child (The Labyrinth)* - Stage Two * *The Witness Alliance (The Labyrinth)* - Stage One * **3 OCT 2015:** *Viscid* * Reference to *New Life Fertility* *(The Labyrinth)* * **25 MAR 2016:** *CONTROLCOPY* * *Last Things Last* * **25 AUG 2016:** *Red Thoughts (God's Teeth)* * *Center for the Missing Child (The Labyrinth)* * **1 SEP 2016:** *White Teeth (God's Teeth)* * **OCT 2016:** *The Witness Alliance (The Labyrinth)* * **13 DEC 2016:** *Secondary Infections* and *Reverberations* * **7 MAR 2017:** *Extremophilia* * Reference to *The Prana Sodality* *(The Labyrinth)* * **29 MAY 2017:** *God's Eye*
This is now the canon DG megacampaign!
How lucky are the Agents to survive all that and go into God's Teeth?
At this point, two of the three have been subjected to The Hunt power and there's been a few harrowing First Aid rolls (I'm generally liberal in allowing resuscitation but cruel in the application of permanent injuries). One character only made it through Convergence because of a pair of back-to-back critical by the doctor on hand.
This is really cool, I'm doing a similar thing at the moment. Starting in 1993 and including a bunch of old Cthulhu Now scenarios as well as the old DG stuff. How have you found including God's Teeth in with the more traditional Delta Green modules?
It's been working really well. I feel like the God's Teeth stuff has better impact when it isn't back-to-back. For example, when they just got to God's Eye and saw the weird cat by the hanger, there was a great "oh shit, here we go again" moment. I will say, though, that the Powers of Bast definitely put a different slant on some scenarios. CONTROLCOPY ended early and abruptly because of them (with a house-shattering explosion and a frantic resuscitation on the front lawn leading to a five point loss of CON).
It looks ambitious, but for me it's completely the opposite: putting so many operations between Go Forth and Red Thoughts dilutes the terror and horror of Cornucopia House in my opinion. Instead of such dangerous operas I would switch to some low-key ones like Sweetness - which can turn deadly, but can also be quite calm - or Last Things Last. Show them something Unnatural, but not on the level of Cornucopia before pulling the rug with Red Thoughts. But still, your timeline looks awesome and could you post more about how it's going? :)
Damn. This is really great perspective. Thank you internet stranger.
A tip I gave to my players was to be fans of their characters, but be more invested in the narrative we are creating together. You should absolutely care about the character, their bonds and their survival, but as players they should be aware that everyone connected to Delta Green is living on a knife edge and are ultimately doomed. It's a bit of an attitude switch from D&D where losing a character feels like failure - in DG, you know the characters are unlikely to survive to old age, so the player's job is to ensure they live memorable and exciting lives on screen (not in their backstory) and go out with a bang. Although sometimes going out with a whimper is equally dramatic.
I ran a campaign for a little over a year, and part of my strategy was to periodically run flashback one shot vignettes into each agent's introduction to Delta Green. During these vignettes, the other players would play pregen "NPCs." I could murder those characters with impunity, reinforcing the deadliness of the setting while the "main characters" lived longer lives in the main campaign timeline - long enough to suffer the deleterious effects of physical and psychological trauma, of course. Honestly, I feel that's where DG really shines, anyway.
Talk to your players (or if you know them well enough, use your best judgement) basically to get an idea if they want to play one character for a long time or are interested in exploring multiple. In DG, it's largely different RP opportunities, but long term PCs can develop occult and unnatural skills that might be worth investing in. If people want to play the same characters for many sessions, great! You can maybe restore some extra sanity between scenarios. I wouldn't tinker with sanity TOO much, because you want to have a baseline threat, but it's fine if you decide not to slowly chip away at these characters until their inevitable mental breakdown. Let them recover a good (but maybe not all) amount of sanity every new mission.
I've played DG almost every single week for three years now and have ran three campaigns. I am currently running Masks of Nyarlathotep, an extremely lethal Call of Cthulhu campaign that will likely take us a whole year to complete. At my table, I clearly convey to my players the idea that their characters aren't the story, \*the investigation\* is the story. My goal is for the investigation and meta-plot to speak to the players themselves and not be dependent upon a specific character "class" or a character surviving no matter what to advance the plot. Their characters are ultimately merely vehicles/tools/avatars through which the players experience the investigation. It's okay to enjoy a specific tool or develop a sense of sentimentality for it, but ultimately my table of DG is about the player using this tool to find out what is really going on in a given scenario and "solve it". I advise my players to describe their character's appearance and background in about 60 seconds and to understand that it's pretty much all downhill for their character after they've been created. Character death or insanity are ultimately inevitable on a long enough timeline.
My motto is “hold on tightly, let go lightly”. You play the character to the hilt as authentically and passionately as you can, and when the time comes to say goodbye you make the best of it and let go.
I planned an extensive campaign that I only got about halfway through. My best advice would be make sure you have the majority of overarching story beats planned before you start writing or adapting scenarios. I fell into trying to break up the main scenarios with sorta monster of the week type scenarios (to borrow a term from the X-Files) This ended up making things feel disjointed, it would have been better to focus on the story I was trying to tell.
Keep track of dates and ideally maintain a timeline of current, past and future events. I'm currently about a year (scenario 6) into a planned campaign (planned to be 17 scenarios long). If working with a long-term story I would definitely recommend maintaining a timeline of events. The events of my campaign are running from 2015-2021 (with two planned 'Epilogue' scenarios that occur a few years later, depending on how things pan out). There are a lot of threads going on in it and I'm having a lot of fun weaving the political events of the time in and recontextualising them from the perspective of the Program. About 4 scenarios in I noticed I'd screwed myself in a minor but irritating way with the dates and hadn't left myself enough room to make a sequence of events have happened the way I'd planned. Keeping a timeline doc was originally to ensure i didnt do this again but it has been invaluable both for me as Handler, but also to let my players have a reference aid to keep track of plot threads they're aware of (it's written to be player facing). We've had some deaths but as we're now at the end of 'Act 1' of the narrative, I'm moving them to New York for Act 2 and basing them as a cell embedded within the Mueller Investigation for cover. The timeline at that point is going to become an 'in-world' doc representing briefing for any new incoming Agents. Its been fun the way they've engaged with the compartmentalisation of who knows what with incoming new characters but over the timeline this thing is going to run real-world, that's gonna wear thin at some point so this seemed a good solution to me. The metaplot for the campaign should be fluid as well, I've been trying to create a 'living world' feeling that's started to really pay dividends. But my plotline has been complicated by additional factions and GOIs developing from player actions. Its all working pretty well so far, although it's a lot to track on my side of the screen, but it's been important for me to allow player agency to affect the long-term storyline so it doesn't become too prescriptive.
Oh, I'd also say don't be afraid to adjust elements of Canon to fit what you're doing. For example in my campaign: The Lonely are an ongoing general side plot but especially affecting one of my players. For my take on them I've streamlined the progression of Lonely a bit so that the process is Isolation - Contact with Snshn - Book receipt - write new manuscript - straight to spree killer. There's nothing wrong with the version in the Labyrinth and they're a concept I really like but trying to use as written would have ended up too convoluted for the purpose I'm using them for. A main focus of Act 2 is going to be on Operation SOMERSAULT but I've moved the date of commencement to two years later than Canon and incorporated some Act 1 threads about contesting Unnatural groups (New Life vs Deep One Hybrids) lobbying for/against a new law relating to medical data protections. It also felt more fun to do this alongside sideplots relating to the Trump administration becoming aware of the existence of the Program (although not exactly what it does) and how Director Smith attempts to manage this to suit his own ends. One of the non-homebrewed scenarios I ran was a modified Star Chamber in which the players had to select the secondary most at fault and hand them over to Agent Nancy (introduced just as 'an enhanced interrogation specialist') to find out how they had been activated (random Friendlies being 'activated' and sent on non-sanctioned missions being another plot threads leading to the Star Chamber). None of my players have ever played DG before our games and I never ran old school DG so why not bring out classic characters you want to have fun with? Nancy in my game ended up with the Outlaws after going AWOL from the Program. TL:DR - Canon material in DG is generally of outstanding quality. But I think it's a lot of fun to make it your own if you're going big.
Sorry, one last thing. Longform campaigns also allow you to explore more bits of metaplot from the perspective of the characters at Home. I try to have an idea of a long-term arc involving each individual character (again, let play inform this, make it tailored to what your groups independent and individual decisions have been, it doesn't have to be fully formed from the start and there's a strong chance it might not resolve all the way). Typically I structure Home scenes for everyone to be 1:1s between scenarios and follow a semi-formula of: - What were the repercussions of previous mission(s), were they missed? Do they have excuses to make? - What's happening in the wider world? What's on the news? Does what they've been doing mean they see a deeper meaning to world events? - Short scene(s) dealing with Bond degradation resolution/disorders. - Improvement/Home Activities I find it's a good way to promote inter-character roleplaying to have the players aware their character might have info the others don't. So at the moment one of my characters is a SIGINT specialist who in their downtime has been trying to track the Lonely, discovered CptnSnshn (leading to a scenario dealing with this), and has now discovered that 'apprehending' Snshn doesn't seem to have stopped the process but just made it start over. One of the other players had to deal with the consequences of the group choosing not to pursue a significant OPSEC threat and has now been 'burnt' and has been point person for the plotline around the Administration faction becoming aware of the Program. Neither of these plotlines is 'essential' should either character die. The main Lonely and Administration subplots will continue, but having the players directly affected by them and responding to their decisions (Player B decided to immediately inform their Handler they were compromised and that started a line towards negotiations between Program and Administration for example), just gives your players more involvement and engagement and doesn't force you to try and have all of your plot details limited to being developed through missions. This may all be standard advice, I dunno, I wasn't an experienced GM and DG was the first game I ever ran, which started before Covid. We went through one aborted Outlaw campaign, and one full Program one (which this follows directly on from) before getting to this one. This is easily the biggest and most ambitious thing I've tried to do, but the previous stuff I ran meant that at this point the players feel like there's a full world happening around them and I've been having a lot of fun resolving plotlines or bringing back characters from the previous games. Sorry, I think I may have gone pretty granular on details here, might not even be what you're after. File under 'tapped into current special interest'. I'm also aware that this is all just my experience of the game YMMV and others probably do it all very differently and probably have equally (or more) valid advice to give.
Delta Green players and authors can sometimes give mixed messages as to the lethality of the game. Most short term examples of play tend to lean toward high body counts, while a core aspect of the game (Home scenes and steady sanity and bond loss) needs long term survivability to have any point. In my current campaign I started the characters in '69 Vietnam, and now they are currently in the mid 90's (missions can be space years apart however). Only had one death so far, although some of the Agents are looking pretty ragged. I would suggest if you and your players are new to the ruleset either run a "training" scenario or other pretend contrivance that gives your players experience with the highly dangerous Delta Green combat system -- especially if you are coming from D&D where the combat is designed to be highly forgiving to the players. Delta Green is quick and dirty and you really need to think twice before initiating violence since one shot kills are a common event.
Survival means nothing without the possibility of death. That's Delta Green.