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Unfortunately, 9/11 sort of shot Delta Green in the head. Delta Green worked because there were no real threats to the United States government at the time, and it made sense that federal agents of various stripes would have the free time to hunt down the Mythos. That made sense in the Nineties, but no sense in the 2000's, where FBI agents are probably being worked to the bone to make sure that the country approaches some degree of safety. Their attempt to update the Mythos to the modern day worked as long as the modern day didn't change significantly, but once the modern day got out from underneath them, Delta Green couldn't change fast enough to compensate.
This has been addressed before - I believe that there's a Worlds of Cthulhu article by Dennis Detwiller that addresses some of these issues, mostly suggesting that Delta Green would attempt to portray their anti-Mythos activities as being part of the fight against Al-Qaeda - but it just isn't the same as it was before. And, unfortunately, while the 90's were an excellent time to be alive, it's a little too soon to treat it like a historical era. It was fun to play in an era when we thought that the war was over, but the war wasn't over.
That's not to say that Targets of Opportunity is an irrelevant book. The forces of the Mythos are endlessly portable to other settings, and there's very little in any of Delta Green that can't be taken into a different era; in fact, a 1950's Delta Green game might be a blast. So, with that in mind:
Black Cod Island is, in a nutshell, The Shadow over Innsmouth except set on a distant Indian reservation, an island on the east coast of Alaska. For some baffling reason, the section starts off with a history of the Black Cod Island hybrids, then goes into a discussion of the climate - cold as fuck - some rules on hypothermia and freezing water, a quick sidebar on firing a gun underwater, some details on nearby settlements, the law enforcement of the island, details on the island's political status, a description of the reception that visitors receive when they visit Black Cod Island, and then we FINALLY get to the fireworks factory with the revelation of the Deep One activity on the island. If the article were a meal, it would begin with a host of fortune cookies, some snow, eight desserts and then the entree.
In a nusthell, Black Cod Island is Innsmouth that knows that the federal government is coming - to the point where I have a little difficulty trying to figure out how it's possible for Delta Green to even make a dent in the place. The Deep Ones have been on the island for a long time, have a huge hybrid population, magical, legal and physical defenses that will easily crush the average investigation party, and, to boot, have the local equivalent of Dagon sunning itself in the frigid waters off of Black Cod Island. If you asked me what would fix the problem, I would suggest a tactical nuclear weapon. It's honestly kind of baffling; Delta Green no longer has the pull required to pull off another equivalent of the 1928 Innsmouth raid, so involving federal authorities on a macro level is out - and would also be unsatisfying. Perhaps the mass of cultists are meant to be off-screen window dressing, equivalent to the screaming masses of cultists in Masks of Nyarlathothep, or meant to be a punishment if the investigators well and truly screw up, but they're there, and they have to dealt with in some fashion or another.
Black Cod Island also features another variant of the history and biology of Deep Ones, joining Fatal Experiments and Escape from Innsmouth with an explanation for them that doesn't jibe with any other version presented to date. This time, Deep Ones are separated into Greater and Lesser Deep Ones. The Greater Deep Ones are basically the Alien Queen to the Aliens, able to turn a normal human into a hybrid by way of jamming a stinger into a human and injecting just pints and pints of its own genetic material. But this is something that we've seen many, many times before, and it weakens the strength of Lovecraft's original story without really adding anything. The Shadow over Innsmouth wasn't about monster-on-human rape; it was about the horror of a good white Christian community adopting foreign ways and marrying foreign women who also happened to be pop-eyed fish monsters. I'm not sure where the whole idea that fish want to rape our women comes from - I envision sports fishermen using it as an excellent excuse to go fishing every weekend - but it just doesn't have any particular resonance for me. To be sure, slavish imitation of Lovecraft does nothing for anybody, and Detwiller's got every right to explore the Mythos in ways that are unique to him, but I just don't think that making Deep Ones rapists does anything but fall into the clutches of the Great Fish Rape conspiracy to convince our nation's wives that our catching of that trout instead of the attendance of our child's christening was to save her from a fate worse than death.
Finally, there's the sort of queasy resonance that comes along with agents of the federal government essentially waging war against a Native community, which feels a little like playing Call of Cortez. The Shadow over Innsmouth got away with a lot - including concentration camps for the survivors of the raid - because its victims were primarily white, but treating a native community that way is going to get a lot of people feeling very uncomfortable very rapidly. It's interesting to see the mythology of the Deep Ones filtering through the native traditions, with fish-influenced totem poles and so forth - but around the time that the investigators start torturing Deep One hybrids for their hidden stash of gold, a certain level of discomfort may crop up. The book is explicit in stating that the Deep Ones and the local natives are entirely different, but the hybrids still look like Native Americans - fishy, but Native Americans nonetheless. There's good information here, some memorable NPCs, some good information about the scientific implications of Deep One hybridization and some interesting hooks to get the PCs involved, but there's too many problems for me to really recommend it.
Disciples of the Worm is, unfortunately, kind of silly when it wants to be horrific. It's an entry into a new genre I'm now dubbing Ass Horror. It is not a genre that's originated in Disciples of the Worm, but serves as a good example of it; it's essentially the horror of having something non-human jammed up, or living in, or making eggs in, your ass. If you poop out a tiny, monster-sized lounge chair one day, and you hear a tiny little voice asking for it back, the chances are very good that you are in a work of art involving ass horror.
Allow me to explain further. Disciples of the Worm is about a cult created when an Arabian merchant, seeking immortal life, infiltrated a Tibetan monastery and managed to bribe his way into getting a visit to another dimension. Unfortunately, while he was there, he winds up - and this is made explicit by the text - with alien larvae shoved up his butt by an alien entity looking to breed. Considering how familiar with human anatomy the average alien monstrosity is, this is unlikely - that particular entrance is guarded by a pair of sturdy hams and is not immediately visible unless you're specifically looking for it, whereas the mouth is immediately visible and makes a lot of noise - but as it's horror fiction, we'll continue. Upon his return, the merchant in question gets turned into a surrogate womb for more of the creatures, another staple of ass horror, and gives birth to dozens more of the creatures, but doesn't die. Eventually, he realizes that he'll be immortal as long as he plays host to the creature, but has to take legendary amounts of opium in order to avoid utter agony.
This being Call of Cthulhu, the monks playing host/jailor to the merchant wind up with worms in them too - not all entirely by choice - and eventually form a cult that offers immortality at the price of basically having a hagfish shoved up where the sun doesn't shine.
I don't know what price I'd pay for immortality, but I'm pretty sure that if I were looking for immortality, I would be trying to find, say, a vampire, or maybe tutelage from a sorceror who's immortal without having the Very Hungry Caterpillar installed in his colon. There's a difference between insane and senseless, you know? Oh, sure, the book describes them as trying to get the benefits of immortality without the mind-blowing pain, with their stubbornness acting as a form of insanity in itself, but it's not entirely convincing to begin with that somebody would voluntarily subject themselves to this kind of thing. The back of the book asks what price is too high for immortality, and I will hazard to suggest that anything involving the butt is probably cause to explore another avenue.
In any case, the Disciples of the Worm wind up getting involved with the drug trade throughout the years, eventually winding up as the boogeymen of the Mexican drug smuggling world thanks to their ability to dimension-hop between the real world and the place where the assworms originally came from. So, to summarize, they're an Arabian-Tibetan drug cult that shoves worms up their butt to achieve an awful form of immortality, and are the boogeymen of the Mexican drug war, which is already ugly enough that setting a game there just feels like exploitation. There's also a scientist who's figured out how to use the excrement of the worms to form a super-healing drug that only works if you're in agony, which has some story hooks attached to it.
There's actually some concepts that would work pretty well here, if you take out the assworms stuff - because really, that's a pretty big mountain to hurdle. There's a scientist researching the worm's excrement who's learned how to refine it into a drug that promotes rapid healing, but only when you're in agony, and if you apply that to a cult who's into radical self-mutilation, you could see some interesting stuff result. The same holds true for a drug cult that knows how to slip into higher dimensions in order to guarantee drug delivery across the border, although given the porosity of the US border at present, I'm not sure that you necessarily need higher dimensions to make sure that your smack gets to Los Angeles on time. But the underpinnings of the cult, its background, just needs to be removed to make any sense out of the section.
The DeMonte Clan, also by Adam Scott Glancy, is actually pretty good, about a French-descended Haitian ghoul clan living in post-Katrina New Orleans. Rather than just being a collection of hooved targets, the DeMontes are actually kind of interesting - they're openly interested in trying to push society towards every sort of liberalization, ranging from civil rights to the promotion of extreme Internet pornography, so that the consumption of human flesh becomes an accepted thing. In fact, the discovery of consensual sexual cannibalism play - something that I'll deny knowing anything about just as soon as I delete my internet history - has gotten the ghoul's interest, to the point where one of the ghoul leaders is just desperate to get somebody to volunteer for cooking and eating, a la Armin Meiwes, and plays out said scenario with zombies that she's raised.
This runs smack-dab into one of the major problems with Lovecraft, in that he was essentially an enormously racist xenophobic asshole for most of his life. When he talked about man running wild and free and becoming more like the Great Old Ones, he would probably identify most of the changes that have taken place in our society as being exactly like his nightmare vision. Show him a copy of Fear of a Black Planet, he'd have eight heart attacks and die on the spot. Seeing the same principle expressed through a ghoul clan doesn't come off as preachy or particularly political, but just a way to gently twit a couple of generations that have grown up on the extreme playground of the Internet.
In any case, the section tracks the ghoul's fortunes throughout their history in New Orleans, including expanding the history of a particular DG friendly and describing the ghouls' defeat to a clever Delta Green operation - it should be regarding as gooby and self-serving when people write their own games into a book they're writing, but for some reason, it works when it's done as part of a Delta Green book. It keeps the game feeling as if the player characters can make a difference; these did, so can you. (There's also a lot of references to Realm of Shadows, a ghoul-centered campaign published by Pagan back in the early 2000's; you don't need Realm to play, as the book summarizes the aftermath.)
In any case, besides a history of the clan, we also get a number of useful and entertaining ghoul personalities, each of which could easily be translated into a different setting by their lonesome - the aforementioned voluntary cannibalism enthusiast, a pair of rivalrous ghoul children fighting for control of their family, a ghoul trying to seek his way back into the Dreamlands, and a Resurrected lackey who's frustrated to be back under the thumb of a sorcerous master. All of them work nicely in other contexts, although with the setting as good as it is, I'm not sure that you'd necessarily need to.
M-EPIC is Canada's answer to Delta Green. I was initially a little skeptical as to why in the world Canada would need its own Delta Green, but the book makes the answer crystal clear: the cult of the Wendigo, combined with Canada's proximity to the North Pole and the endless wastes of the Canadian North make for a pretty Mythos-heavy area. It actually makes more sense for Canada to have its own Mythos department than any other. In fact, an M-EPIC game based entirely out of the North could be a hell of a lot of fun, provided that you kept a steady stream of odd temples found in the ice.
M-EPIC winds up with a lot of history, and a lot of Mythos threats that it's dealt with, but in a sense, it almost feels like there's no particular focus to the various mythos threats that it's faced - instead of a single narrative, like Delta Green vs. Majestic 12, much of M-EPIC's history involves dealing with different Mythos threats and largely putting them down. But there's no common theme to let a GM or the PCs know what the campaign is about beyond excessive politeness when shooting down a Mi-Go. ("Oh, sorry, eh, but you can't be stealin' Canadian brains out of people's heads, you know.") There is a high-profile serial killer in the form of the Tarot Killer - whose name seems straight out of a bad movie from the 1970's - who shows up to kill people at random throughout the years - and a couple of M-EPIC researchers with a terrifying secret, but there's nothing that glues everything together to make an attractive hook. Of course, M-EPIC actually has official backing and a place within the government, as opposed to Delta Green's outlaw status, which makes it an attractive option for players who want to color within the lines, so to speak. (They pretend to be environmental police - and sometimes investigate environmental threats - when they're not dealing with Mythos threats.) There are some interesting bits in it, particularly among the M-EPIC agents themselves, but it didn't set me on fire quite like I'd hoped.
The Cult of Transcendence is something that Delta Green players have been waiting for since the publication of the first book - and, tragically, the passage of time has once again made it somewhat irrelevant. In its original form, it was hinted that the Cult of Transcedence was very much like the Church of Scientology, where you had a front organization promising the ability to transcend the limits of the human body, when in fact it was more about a red-headed megalomaniac stealing all your money and shooting you with his machine-gun eyes if you happened to complain. Back in the days before the Internet, Scientology was actually a pretty good metaphor for a Cthulhu cult that could exist in the modern day...
...right before the Internet showed up and basically scattered Scientology's secrets to the four winds. It's difficult to be impressed with an organization that's getting thoroughly spanked by 4chan, and when you watch the organization's secrets being roundly - and deservedly - mocked on South Park, it's hard to create a proxy that carries some of the same menace that early Scientology had. Furthermore, the Fate already exists as the Mick Jagger of Mythos cults, which makes any subsequent major cult jockey for conceptual space in a GM's game. As a result, Greg Stolze and Kenneth Hite - and there's a dream team if there ever was one - had a fairly uphill battle on their hands if they were going to go in that direction.
As he describes in the postscript, Greg Stolze wrote the original draft of the Cult way back in 1995 - a chunk of Grand Guignol horror that didn't quite fit the tone of the game at the time - then was asked to polish it up by the Delta Green devs in 2008, after some fifteen years of excellent writing within the business. (My words, not his.)
You know, I hate to say it, but the whole tone of the Cult of Transcendence just didn't work for me. That's not to say that it won't work for you, but let me give you the details and explain why it didn't work for me.
First is the history of the Cult of Transcendence - obviously written by Ken Hite, which has the cult as an unsuccessful mover and shaker in a majority of historical events, weaving in the Templars and the Habsburgs and the Rosicrucians and Gilles De Rais and the Masons and the Illuminati. Because this is hite we're talking about, he manages to touch on all of these things and weave them together into a historical whole that's fascinating - but regrettably irrelevant to the situation in the present-day. Hite does throw in the twist that the Cult's history - if it's true - has it failing to do anything of import, repeatedly getting blindsided by various historical events beyond its control. I almost wish that Hite would just leave the conspiracy stuff to one side and starting writing straight history, because the man's work is brilliant, and also because I have little use for the stuff that he finds so fascinating - he's able to tease the truly cool stuff from the "...but what really happened is that the Pope's black helicopters gave me a vasectomy while I was sleeping!" dross of conspiracy theories like nobody else I've seen.
In any case: The Cult of Transcendence is actually an entire pyramid of cults, with those below acting as a support system for the inhuman, quasi-senile Ascended Masters at the top. The Ascended Masters themselves are trying to join the court of Azathoth - but I'm going to stop for a moment and observe that the idea that a human being could join the various alien entities surrounding Azathoth kind of goes against one of the basic ideas of Call of Cthulhu, which is that human beings are essentially ants in the kitchen of the Great Old Ones, and no magical ritual will be able to turn an ant into a human being. Again, everybody's interpretation of the Mythos varies; I'm just saying. Beneath the Ascended Masters, who live in a house of extradimensional horror in Stockholm, are the Bishops, who in turn each monitor cults related to their chosen field of influence.
In practice, what you've essentially got is a description of eight or nine different cults of varying qualities, plus the house of the Ascended Masters, plus the description of the Bishops underneath them. The Ascended Masters are essentially the end boss version of what a Mythos cultist can become, insanely powerful, but disconnected from reality. Their house is a nasty piece of work, featuring the headless corpses of women who were sacrificed to make the ascension of the Masters possible, a pipe organ made out of a family of five twisted through conventional space, a scale model of R'Lyeh, and an object lesson as to why a tattoo of an Elder Sign isn't necessarily going to save yout. It's got some cool set pieces, and if your players prepare, they might be able to survive long enough to defeat one or two of the Masters before being twisted through eleven-dimensional space.
The Bishops, underneath the Masters, are clear evidence that Hite or Stolze have been doing a lot of reading about neurochemistry, as each Bishop has something to do with the brain or its chemistry; one of them shows you a blind spot in your vision, another causes the brain to view cute as ugly and vice-versa, another has a rather dramatic case of OCD. Beneath them are the Acolytes, who spend much of their time grooming the cults underneath them and trying to eventually become Bishops themselves.
The Acolytes, however, is where the book somewhat lost me. Stolze describes the work that he wrote as being Grand Guignol, and that's true, but so many of the Acolytes are just flat-out vile that they stop being fun and start just being gross. Just for instance, there's a Dreamlands killer who would be an interesting antagonist, but the fact that he runs around with a cloak full of the souls of the victims that he's raped, tortured and murdered - mostly children, of course, which strikes me as less horrific and more of a cheap way to score an easy horror - puts him over the edge from interesting to just kind of silly. (White Wolf used to do this all the time back in the days of the early WoD - whenever they wanted to emphasize just how horrific they were, they would drop a reference in to said character doing something awful to children. After a while, I had to wonder if the Wyrm just had a vending machine where you could get a six-pack of kids to mutilate in exchange for a five-dollar bill. Pity the Black Spiral Dancer with a crumpled bill.) Another Acolyte is a persistent serial rapist, which creates a definite squick factor no matter how you play him. Another is a child raised without any human contact whatsoever - and that's been tried in real life before, with the usual result of the child in question dying from lack of outside contact - who's become a Mythos savant as a result. At a certain point, I realized that I didn't want to use these horrible, shitty little men in my game because all they are is horrible, shitty little men with horrible, shitty little habits - learning about them is squicky, there's no fate horrible enough for them to feel that justice can be served and using them in one of my games feels like it would result in people leaving my game as a result.
Each of the Acolytes runs a collection of cults under a rough premise - Hate, Flesh, Fear and Greed - with the general idea of bringing the human race a little closer to being like the Great Old Ones. And there's truly a dizzying number of cults in this section, some fleshed out, some left as general description.
But again, though, we're running into the problem inherent in the difference between the Mythos that Lovecraft presented and people's interpretations of same. Lovecraft's vision of the Mythos is infinitely flexible, but the man was a huge racist bastard xenophobe crybaby when it came to anything that wasn't purest white and/or antique. What he saw as virtues, we see - rightly - as character defects; like I said above, Lovecraft's vision for the end of the human race is probably very much like our society today. Seeing a ghoul cult promote liberalization so as to come closer to Lovecraft's vision is....I don't want to say jarring, but it makes it clear that we've come a long way since the 1920's. To bring the human race closer to the Great Old Ones, the Cult of Transcendence promotes hate, fear, greed and sexual liberation - Lovecraft espoused two of those, probably had no strong opinions about greed and was notorious for being a very anti-sexual creature.
In other words, I'm not sure that it's possible to resolve the fundamental problem of Lovecraft's view of the end of the world with a modern-day game, unless you want to write a new role-playing game called That Awful Negro in which the bottoming-out of your sanity automatically coincides with your purchase of The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. (Can you tell that I don't know much about hip-hop? I think that you can.) If you're going to suggest an ending for humanity, you're going to have to identify the values that will bring it to an end, and explain how those values clash with the existing values of today - or explain how our own values might be twisted to a bad end. Otherwise, it's hard to explain why the bad guys are bad. I'm not sure that this particular book is up to the task of explaining how Lovecraft's vision of humanity running itself to ruin is going to come about.
For instance, the See of Hate has a pair of hate groups underneath it - one focused around white hate, the other around black hate, each with a slightly different avatar of Nyarlathothep who sponsors it. Admittedly, Nyarlathothep is more human than any other Mythos entity, but the idea of him stooping to the level of encouraging racial hatred via a cult just seems a little too message-y to fit Call of Cthulhu's bleak nihilism. A lot of cults under the See of Hate just seem to be taking a real-world political stance and pushing it into a cult - so there's a right-wing cult called AACE that's essentially the John Birch society on steroids, but the Brotherhood also wants to create a left-wing cult to counterbalance it, along with cults based on radical feminism and anti-Zionism.
Some of the cults definitely have potential. For instance, the Cult of Transcendence runs a temp agency called Just Say Please! that essentially uses temp agents to spy on federal agencies or enemies of the cult - shades of Scientology's Operation Snow White. (Of course, I'm not entirely sure that they would work in real life - temps are not much trusted - but it's still a neat idea.) The Brotherhood of New Potential offers its members a chance to explore the idea of getting back to nature, back in touch with your primal self, and winds up with human sacrifice; unfortunately, it's more like EST and not as much Iron John as I would have liked, but it's okay. One of the cults under the See of Flesh is very interesting, based entirely around the obsessive acquisition and purchase of fine wine, and I liked the idea behind the Mythos cult that uses a fake UFO in order to induct members into itself.
Some of them, not so much. The Dorian Gray society is a society of rich bastards who are heavy into real-world, nonconsensual BDSM, complete with drug-addicted sex slaves, but a game involving them may both squick out the players, or potentially step on real-world issues involving power exchange. The Secret Senate wants to bring the King in Yellow to the masses through the use of intellectual trendsetters, but it just doesn't click for me for some reason, miostly because it presumes that art is derived from a pre-existing group of influential artists, rather than a continual turnover of people coming up from below. (I also disagree with the idea that killing them won't stop their ideas from spreading; they cite JFK as an example of somebody whose death didn't stop his message, but when's the last time we were on the moon? Plus he was kind of, you know, the President, and had a massive organization beneath him devoted to spreading his word.)
Really, there's so many cults described here that if you don't like one, the next will at least give you an idea that you can expand into a scenario in its own right. I'm not sure that the hierarchical organization of the cults in question actually works, though, just because it makes things too neat and orderly for the traditionally chaotic and alien universe of the Cthulhu Mythos.
One thing that I do like is the idea of what each cult does if Delta Green decides to go after it in any sort of serious manner - some cults can easily be popped open by the right kind of pressure in the right spot, while others lawyer up or start killing witnesses as fast as they can. While you shouldn't let it fall into the hands of your players, it's also a sterling way to give an example of how it's possible for Delta Green agents to apply pressure to cultists without necessarily needing to kill them - threaten them with jail, bad-jacket them, alter the text of that Mythos tome they're printing just before it hits the presses, go after their tax receipts, all manner of stuff.
On the other hand, if the GM spends too much time throwing lawsuits and various legal pressures on the investigators, it'll start feeling less like Call of Cthulhu and a little more like Scientology Harassment: The Game, and remove some of the cowboy thrill of being able to blow somebody's head off instead of spending a few years building a tax evasion case. On the other hand, Hite and Stolze assume that the agents are still full members of their originating organization, so there's a lot of references to stuff like being able to influence judges, use Hellfire strikes on recalcitrant Mythos monsters, ask for twenty Special Forces soldiers - which is something that I thought that Delta Green agents couldn't get access to except in the most dire of situations. In the article, it's treated as somewhat routine, or at least something that's within the realm of possibility. In addition, the article doesn't really explore what happens when cult members are sent to prison - I imagine that most jails will be a fertile recruiting ground for cultists, because they're offering power, or powers, to people who are largely powerless. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the article doesn't really deal with the aftermath of the suggestion that a cultist might be sent to prison; neither does Delta Green, but Delta Green doesn't really assume that you can send a cultist to prison. I might be wrong; feel free to comment.
It gets a little weirder, however, when it gets to the investigation of the Acolytes and Bishops of the Cult, and how they might be brought down legally; there's even a sample dialogue between Delta Green agents and one of the Acolytes if they decide to confront him and demand that he stop. The chances are very good by the time that the characters discover that there's a single person responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of these various cults that they're simply going to retreat to a good range, then blow the guy's head off from a distance- perhaps to the tune of "Fuck You", by Cee Lo Green, as I envisioned it - rather than risking any sort of direct engagement with them in person; it's what I'd do. There are a good number of useful clues included to point the investigators to the Acolytes in question, but it doesn't make much sense for the investigators to try to deal with the Acolytes in any way other that an overwhelming, sudden and unexpected attack; anything else is just asking for trouble.
The book rounds out with some appendices. The combat options appendix allows you to add some 24-style mechanics; modified rules for burst damage, crippling and targeting limbs, hit locations, taking cover and laying down suppressing fire and so forth. I wasn't able to test the mechanics myself in a game, but I think that they're useful additions. The section on post-traumatic stress disorders replaces and/or augments the temporary insanity mechanism, replacing Lovecraft's pulp disorders with more modern-day afflictions like anxiety and panic attacks, and offering drugs, tobacco and alcohol as another option alongside traditional therapy.
The appendix on relationships add an option that feels like it was missing from the DG corebook, allowing investigators to form relationships with actual mechanical effects. Now, instead of just being a faceless contact in the IRS, there's a reason for the player to actually describe and quantify the relationship with said contact; keep the contact in the dark, or call on the contact once too often, and there's the risk of weakening the relationship to the point where it breaks up altogether. It's not quite as draconian as, say, Dark Heresy's relationship system, where influence is bought and sold; rather, it's a way to reinforce the impression that an investigator is a real human being with actual human friends, instead of a mobile chess piece with an AK-47. A section on flashbacks allows the characters to start with Mythos knowledge - a violation of the core rulebook's tenets, but a forgivable one - and allows for a clue-for-Sanity system, using the flashback to the investigator's introduction to the Mythos as justification for the sudden Mythos insight / sanity damage.
There's a brief section on DNA matching that I'm afraid that I just didn't have the heart to read through, although I'm sure that it's dead-bang accurate and useful for Keepers whose investigators try to match DNA. The book concludes with a section by Dennis Detwiller and Shane Ivey on running a Delta Green game. I disagree with some of it - I agree that you should never describe a monster by name, but if the players know that the Child of the Fish-Wife has the exact same stats as a Deep One, is that an improvement? - but other Keepers will probably find it quite useful.
The artwork is largely computer-generated, and falls neatly at points into the uncanny valley - I'm thinking that there's a lot of Poser art that's been nicely massaged into looking creepy, but the characteristic stiffness is still there. Worse, some of it just looks downright silly; the transformed heads of the Brides of Nyarlathothep look like Pokemon, rather than something that'll actually frighten the investigators. I don't want to knock it, and I'm guessing that Pagan no longer has a shitload of money to spend on good art, but it just doesn't look right to my eyes; it's the best Poser art I've ever seen, but it's still Poser art.
Overall, Targets of Opportunity is worth what the guys at Pagan are asking for it; while there are weak areas, there's still enough good material to recommend its purchase. If you pull them just a little bit of their mooring, scrape off some of the stuff that doesn't quite work and adjust it for your own campaign, then you'll have something eminently worth your time.
-Darren MacLennan
