Things I dig: Home Scenes (Delta Green)

Today, I want to talk to you about ‘Home Scenes’, which is central to the game, Delta Green, and tell you how it has made me a better GM overall and really taught me about pacing and characterization. It’s really more a phase of the game rather than a specific mechanic although it does have specific mechanics associated with it. This is not a video about how to play the game, so if you’re looking for instructions, you won’t find that here. I’ll link some resources that may help below in the description box though.

Before we dive in, I want to credit and shout out Jeff Baker, who helped me write out the script for this video. Check him out as my Delta Green GM who made me obsessed with Home Scenes, and the GM and fellow player in a bunch of other things in Adventures in Lollygagging.

To give you a brief summary of the game - Delta Green is a modern-day horror RPG with major themes around operational secrecy and conspiracy around the supernatural, and falling apart because of dealing with all that. It's basically what happens when you mash up The X-Files, True Detective, and The Leftovers and then explore what it would do to the people involved.

You play government or civilian specialists drawn into an off-the-books task force trying to contain supernatural threats. And while you might shoot at things sometimes, this isn’t a power fantasy where you win cleanly - you're meant to survive the best you can, be totally traumatized, and pretend to be a normal, functioning adult between missions. Being technically alive by medical standards is a win condition.

Delta Green is a game about emotional complexity in the face of unyielding threats. Like you are constantly having to decide whether saving  the world and keeping it secret is worth the cost of your marriage or being an absentee parent or your ‘real job’ finding you unreliable and a bit of a liability. So you can see why it’s like a top 5 game for me.

If you’re looking for classic heroism or satisfying power progression, this won’t scratch that itch. It’s just not that kind of game. Delta Green is about damage control and surviving at a cost. 

Mechanically, it’s roll under, percentile-based. Both your health and mental head get assaulted fairly violently to the point where even your home life is a source of tension because you probably are lying to loved ones about at least part of it. So ultimately, it’s about facing horrors and what you bring home afterward. That’s where Home Scenes come in.

What Are Home Scenes?

Delta Green operates in two phases. There’s the mission which is a fairly straightforward investigation of something hinky and supernatural that has major low-tech tradecraft energy . Home scenes are the moments when your agent isn’t on a mission and it’s unlikely to be restful. It’s a return to a life fraying at the edges at least partially because of your involvement with Delta Green. Operationally, they’re short roleplay vignettes that take place between missions, where agents attempt to patch up their lives, maintain important personal bonds, pick up skills, or pursue personal goals. To me, they’re sort of the emotional spine of the game because not only do they show who the agent is, they show what they’re losing and where the cracks start to show. It’s the part of the game that reminds you the agent is a person - and being distant- emotionally and physically - takes a toll.

How Do Home Scenes Work?

So how do they work? After each mission, every player picks a Personal Pursuit to focus on during downtime. It’s a mechanical pursuit wrapped in roleplay, and each one comes with a roll, a risk, and usually a cost. These vignettes occur between missions and reflect months or even years of time. They are individual scenes, not group ones. 

Just some quick definitions before we get started:

Bond: An important personal relationship in your Agent’s life - a spouse, sibling, friend, mentor, kid, coworker, etc. Basically: someone who grounds them in the “normal” world. Mechanically, they can be a buffer against sanity loss during missions to avoid immediate mental damage. But reducing a bond manifests as the relationship being damaged. 

Bond score: A numerical value determining the level or strength of the relationship. When you lose points from the Bond Score from Sanity loss mitigation or otherwise, you reduce that score permanently - you are damaging the relationship. A Bond with a score of 0 means the relationship is gone - they ghost you, they leave, they die, they turn on you. Mechanically and narratively, it’s over.

Sanity: A core stat that represents your Agent’s grasp on reality and psychological stability. You lose SAN when you witness violence or helplessness, learn unnatural truths, or fail important tests. When SAN drops too low, you can suffer a temporary or permanent disorder including risking your Agent being retired either by death, trauma, or losing all Bonds.
Just to give you a sense, average starting Sanity is 50-60 and 2–4 Bonds with bond scores of 6-10, but these will dip during play and keep dipping unless you invest during Home Scenes to keep them alive.

So that’s the ‘what’ broadly. Let’s dive into the ‘how’. Ideally, these are led by the player and the GM serves to play facilitator. Some of the options are:

1. Fulfill Responsibilities

Try to keep it together at work or at home and focus on ordinary obligations and relationships. You make a roll to see if these efforts pan out and on a success, your Bond score improves with the person you’ve been trying to connect with. On failure, it strains. Critical fumble? Things fall apart hard.

2. BACK TO NATURE

Think off-the-grid seclusion, minimizing stress and distractions and obligations. Not a family vacation. The agent is alone or mostly alone in a place that isn’t demanding. Automatically reduces one Bond by 1 as you let other responsibilities lapse and rolls determine whether this effort restores your sanity. 

3. ESTABLISH A NEW BOND. Try to create a new Bond - friendly, romantic, professional, whatever - that becomes an essential part of your Agent’s life. Again, mechanically, the reason to have additional bonds is that they can yelp you shore up sanity during missions. Rolls determine the success of this attempt. If it works, cool - you’ve made a connection. But another Bond suffers for it. Time is finite.

4. GO TO THERAPY.

This one has a lot of moving parts and can potentially have a pretty significant mechanical impact so I’ll just summarize by saying this is systematic deconstruction of mental trauma, requiring honesty and commitment which might have a positive impact on Sanity but automatically reduces a Bond by 1 as you don’t meet your obligations.

5. IMPROVE SKILLS OR STATS.

Your Agent tries to boost any two separate skills or stats, or one stat and one skill. Describe what your Agent is doing to improve the stat or skill. Rolls determine success of the endeavour. But every improvement costs a Bond score. Growth has consequences.

6. STUDY THE UNNATURAL. Spend a vignette studying a forbidden tome, a decrypted flash drive full of data, case reports from a prior op, etc. The agent chooses which bond takes a hit as they obsess and sink deeper into the horror.

There are a few others but I just wanted to share a few that I think really embody the core “push-pull” of Delta Green: save the world, lose the people who may make any of it mean anything and love you. So players say what their Agent is doing - therapy, training a skill, isolating, reconnecting with a Bond and you roll to see what that choice really does to them. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it just cracks something deeper. Home scenes are your moment to ask: what does this work cost? And what are they trying to hold onto or avoid?

You roleplay it out, but the choices you make here affect your mechanics but also who you are, how you’re entering the next mission. I live for narrative and roleplay with mechanical impact. I just love that concept so much. Burn out a Bond and your sanity might stay intact but your sister might stop answering your calls. Try to get better at shooting? That’s time you’re not spending with your kid. Everything’s a tradeoff. Everything costs.

Because Delta Green isn’t just about monsters. It’s about the cost of hunting them, and Home Scenes show that cost. I mentioned earlier that I love home scenes for having taught me to be better pacing - Specifically, for something longer term after missions full of visceral rot and supernatural violence and shattering your sense of reality, I’ve found that home scenes let you give space for the campaign to breathe with priorities on emotional pacing, non-combat character growth and consequences to actually land. Downtime doesn’t mean dead time. You don’t need a plot hook every five minutes. Sometimes, you just need to give your players space and that contrast is what makes the tension hit harder when it does. Let them define their own stakes. 

You don’t need car chases or shootouts to build drama. Sometimes, it’s just a missed recital here or a cold breakfast at an empty dining table there, or your brother texting you that you forgot Mom’s birthday again.

Listen closely. They’ll show you exactly where to poke next time. 

Home scenes aren’t filler. They’re the part that sticks. And they do it without slowing the game down. A good home scene is tight, sharp, and full of weight.