One side question out of sheer curiosity (no-one-true-way) : do you explain the “intention behind the mechanics” before the game begins or do you explain mostly the mechanics and let the players experiment with them and discover their meaning ?
Hacking The Between for a Delta Green style experience
I guess it depends on the mechanic? In the case of this particular game, I probably will explain the connection between the masks and conditions insofar as together those represent the slow erosion of self and mental security that is the result of confronting cosmic horror. Replacing Sanity as a mechanic was one of my goals for the hack and The Between offers a pretty awesome way to to do that.
Unless by intention you meant play loops, which I’m always transparent about. In this case I think players need to know what their choices are when it comes to spending and refreshing resources.
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A little more granularity on the harm-conditions-masks playloop. My overarching goal here is to keep mechanical additions inside that loop, rather than having negative consequences fall into a completely separate mechanical category or playloop.
So two tracks, one for harm and one for stress, more or less BitD style. You use Stress in-game to push rolls and resist conditions, and recover it using the Vulnerable move (small amounts) and also an after-threat move (a new thing) that clears a larger amount. Harm is taken for bodily harm, either in combat or as a consequence, and will require some kind of basic equipment list, probably listing harm and some basic weapon tags much like MotW. Harm can be healed using the Rest move (new) and also as an after-threat move. Both the harm and stress tracks result in a condition if filled, at which point they clear. The Condition track remains the same as the between, so everything moves toward eventual mask use.
The notion of an After-Threat phase occurred to me as the right design space to add a limited sort of downtime phase to the game. There will be a After-Action report with some attached mechanics, and each character will be able to choose one or two actions from a range. The healing and tress clearing ones comes at the expense of additional training and asset acquisition (just to name a couple of things I thought of). Successful resolution of a threat gives advatage one roll in this phase, while unsuccessful resolution results in disadvantage on one roll, although you won’t be forced to use that second roll.
Unsuccessful threat resolution you say? Why yes, I reply. Delta Green is all about secrecy, and I think this hack needs a cover or secrecy mechanic. When you do things that threaten your cover or operational secrecy, you fill the clock. If the clock fills before you resolve the threat the Agency pulls you out and sends in a rendition team. Sad trombone. I think the clock will be relatively short, maybe six segments, but I also think there will be a move to repair cover, but at the cost of not taking day (some?) Day actions. I need to make sure this doesn’t end up being a death spiral, but I like the idea. It’ll work a lot like Heat in Blades, but without the incarceration bit, and it will add another kind of consequence the GM can use for7-9 and 6- results in some cases.
Anyway, this is what I thought about on my walk home from work today.
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In the Between, there is a part of the dusk phase where the players use Paint the Scene Moments to describe Hargrave House one room at a time, so over the course of sessions the picture of that games particular version of HH becomes clearer and clearer. Each room has a prompt or two to help direct things. For example, the prompts for The Reception Hall are: Do you feel unsettled or at home when you enter Hargrave House? What do you perceive in the reception hall that reinforces this feeling? There are 13 rooms in HH that get described in this way, one per Day cycle. This is a small moment in the grand scheme of things, but it adds great flavor to the building that houses the group.
I really wanted to keep something like this in Liminal Dark, but have been struggling to figure out how to do it. I have at last settled on a scaffold that might work for a Delta Green version of HH. I didn’t think that the Cell’s home base would be physically as big as HH, which is a Victorian Mansion, so I had to go a little further than just rooms, so here’s what I cam up with. Instead of rooms there are three different kinds of things that get this Paint the Scene Treatment like HH does.
First, the Office, which is what I’m calling the Cell’s home base (it’s also interchangeable with the phrase Cell to describe the group as whole for which the PCs work). The Office has 5 parts: The Front Company, the Office, the Armoury, the Lab, and Records (or Library). Each of these will have prompts much like the rooms of HH.
Second, Secure Storage, which is the Green Box or whatever your particular flavour of DG calls the place where they store the dangerous shit. Here we won’t be talking about rooms, but rather strange objects. There will be five basic prompts which give a type of object, and the players will take turns filling in details. A very preliminary list of objects would be things like books, specimens, weapons, masks, etc. The players fill in details such as What is it? What’s unsettling about it? What case is it from? Who worked that case? How did the case resolve?
Third, Agency Assets, who are NPCs the occasionally work for the Office. These might be game-useful, but in this instance serve more to exemplify the sorts of people the Office has working for/with them, which in turn helps define what the overall feel of the Cell is. Each NPC gets a series of prompts as well, things like name, specialty, quirks, reputation, and that sort of thing.
The basic cycle is to go Office - Secure Storage - NPC until there are no more prompts, which in this case I’m thinking will be about 5 of each, so 15 Day cycles.
I like this tech. I’ve been looking to do a DG game (actually Fall of DG that takes place in the late 60’s early 70’s) that’s not either default DG or Gumshoe. I look forward to your first alpha/beta version.
The Between setting is only lukewarm for me, but the rules sound cool. This DG version seems more in my wheelhouse.
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Love it, I’ve done a PBTA Delta Green which I’m happy for you to take apart and repurpose bits out of, especially on the combination of procedural traits for an agency oriented model. https://blackethical.itch.io/aichmophobia
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That’s really cool, thanks for sharing. This hack of mine has been put on the back burner for a bit. I have a Sci-Fi/Horror hack of Trophy Gold that needs to get finished now that I bought art for it, and I got roped into some playbook design for Ghosts of El Paso that I really should finish. Then I’ll be back. 
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OK, the Legend playbook is in the bag, so back to DG. I’m currently trying to decide when to set the hack. The modern day default involves a lot of computers, which I’m not super keen on having to write rules for, so I was considering a 80’s or more likely 90’s setting.