The Cost

Most horror RPGs measure what monsters do to you. Delta Green measures what you do to the people who love you.

In 2016, Shane Ivey wrote a chapter called “The Home.” It appears in the Delta Green Agent’s Handbook between the sections on combat and sanity—the mechanical bridge between the horrors your character faces at work and the life they’re destroying at home. The chapter introduces a mechanic called Bonds.

Bonds are numbered relationships—your wife, your daughter, your partner at the Bureau. When your agent loses sanity from witnessing something impossible, you can project that trauma onto a Bond. Roll a die. Reduce the sanity damage. But the Bond’s score drops permanently. Your wife doesn’t know what happened in that warehouse in Duluth. She just knows you came back different. Colder. Further away.

No horror RPG had done this before. Call of Cthulhu tracked your mind unraveling. Unknown Armies tracked how damage hardened you. But nobody had built a mechanical system where saving your own sanity literally costs you the people you love—where the math itself models the trajectory of a trauma survivor pushing away everyone close to them.

That mechanic—one chapter, one designer’s contribution to a four-person collaborative project—is the most acclaimed innovation in modern horror RPG design.