As part of the 2025 Mini Campaign Jam, I’m doing a devlog of my development process.

Step 0: Premise

Going into this, I already knew the premise of my campaign: recruits new to CORAL NOMAD (Delta Green’s asset recovery team) tackle a new kind of alien and balance their asset recovery duties, their need to remain covert, and their duty to protect American lives. This has a few benefits:

• Strong core formula/conflict:​ CORAL NOMAD’s mission​ of extracting artifacts, cleaning up after the Agents’ messes, and their normal US Pararescue mission of saving people is evocative and easy to generate ideas for.

• ​Low lore requirement: NOMADS are kept in the dark about the broader conspiracy, and CORAL NOMAD is relatively sequestered from the rest of the Program. So there’s little burden on the GM or players to know or manage the greater lore.

• Emphasis on action: compared to “traditional” Delta Green, CORAL NOMAD missions don’t emphasize investigation over direct action (violent or less-violent). This means less build-up to interesting, exciting moments compared to slower-burn mysteries.

• Military-themed: there are only four Delta Green adventures (Night Visions, Khali Gati, Jack Frost, Iconoclasts) that cast the players as military operators. This is a chance to fill that niche with military operations that can happen anywhere in the world.

• Transition to “proper” Delta Green: It’s conceivable that NOMADS may be inducted into The Program proper, either due to exceptional performance or learning too much about the conspiracy.

Step 1: Outline

My process is a little unique in that I already have the opening scenario, which I’ve playtested multiple times to great success. So I’ll start from the beginning scenario, jump to the climax, then work my way back to the beginning scenario.

Climax Scenario

I think I want this campaign to be a cautionary tale against weaponizing the Unnatural (“preoccupied with if you could that you never thought if you ​should​”). I think it would be really interesting to express that by having all the artifacts the NOMADS collected somehow turned against them (either as an “attack” by March Technologies against the NOMADS, or as March simply losing control of the artifacts).

Filling in the middle

Beyond peppering in cool artifacts to turn against the players, I also need to demonstrate March’s research and development process and give the players an opportunity to learn why weaponizing The Unnatural isn’t a great idea. This can probably be expressed as granting players March “prototypes” that end up being weird little Monkey’s Paws or White Elephant gifts: they may do what they said they would, but they have some strange drawbacks the players need to account for (see the testing of the real-life XM25 airburst grenade launcher). This can also be expressed by showing the direct consequences of the Unnatural; wherever the NOMADS are recovering artifacts/creatures from are likely changed by the artifacts/creatures.

And since this is a military campaign, it’s a good opportunity to have a mix of domestic and international operations. If I plan a total of five operations (one beginning, one climax, three middle), I’ll probably want at least two of the middle operations to be international. This is a good opportunity both to provide unique gameplay (via non-American cultures and non-American geography/climate), but also demonstrate the effects of overseas military deployment and intervention. It’ll also give me an opportunity to show the many complicated and interesting reactions people can have to the Unnatural; viewing it as a weapon isn’t the only way to interpret it.

First Scenario

The first scenario has a simple premise: recover a mysterious duplicating spacecraft and its human inhabitants (half of which are doppelgangers) before it sinks off the Alaskan coast.

The duplication machine, if recovered by the NOMADS, can probably return in the climax as an excuse to “respawn” any other creatures/phenomenon the NOMADS need to overcome. Alternatively, it could be used as an incubator to grow some strange thing. That could give the campaign a sense of irony: the NOMADS’ first recovered artifact is the source of their ultimate trouble. That could be fun.

The notable factions/elements are the Creators of the spacecraft (although human-looking, it’s made by aliens), some Deep Ones from Black Cod (who plan to check out the wrecked spacecraft when it reaches the bottom of the ocean), and an optional patron from March Technologies (who’s interested in growing a working relationship with the player characters).

My next task

With a clear vision (and a head-start), I need to actually finish the first scenario. I’ve run it twice over the last year to great success. I just need to write it down, polish it, and (hopefully) find a novice GM to run it. Hopefully that will all be done by the start of July.