The Starkweather Foundation
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THE STARKWEATHER FOUNDATION By mellonbread and Will Roy — But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which we know may end the world. So I must break through all reticences at last—even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness. William Dyer A fan sourcebook for Delta Green — THE STARKWEATHER FOUNDATION 2 WHAT LIES BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS 3 IMPORTANT FOUNDATION MEMBERS 4 THE CONSTRUCT COMPLEX 7 HUMAN INTERACTION WITH ELDER THINGS 8 GAME STATISTICS: ELDER THINGS 10 GAME STATISTICS: JUVENILE ELDER THINGS 11 GAME STATISTICS: DEGENERATE ELDER THINGS 12 GAME STATISTICS: ANIMICULI 13 GAME STATISTICS: SHOGGOTHS 14 GAME STATISTICS: ARCANOTECH 15 GAME STATISTICS: BODY MODIFICATIONS 17 USING THE STARKWEATHER FOUNDATION 18 1: A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE 20 2: THE GATE IN THE GALLERY 24 3: Operation AUTARCH SUNRISE or: Thunder that the Rain Makes When the Shadow Tops Ythill 30 CREDITS AND SOURCE TEXTS 49 1 THE STARKWEATHER FOUNDATION Leadership: 9 member self-replacing board Net Assets: $361,871,194 (2015 form 990) Employees: 1,899 Headquarters: New York City, New York, United States EIN: 01-0193334 The James Starkweather Foundation for Polar Studies was established in 1934 to assist disadvantaged and struggling students who wished to conduct studies in the Polar Regions. To this end, it granted scholarships, conducted field trips and funded scientific research in glaciology and related fields. In 1955, the organization was established as a registered 501(c) private foundation. Declining revenues and the death of founding Board President Acacia Lexington in 1971 threatened to close the book on the Foundation’s activities. Since then, their fortunes have rebounded. As of 1977, the Foundation enjoys generous sponsorship from a number of petrochemical companies and gas giants, providing it with sufficient wealth to further its mission of advancing and popularizing Arctic and Antarctic science. The irony of accepting such large contributions from the entities many scientists believe are responsible for the decline of the Polar regions is far from lost on Foundation leadership - but in the nonprofit world, as everywhere else, money is money. The Starkweather Foundation maintains its headquarters in New York, NY. It has major field offices in Montreal, Geneva, Oslo, Moscow, Copenhagen, Reykjavik and Melbourne. It has schooling facilities and programs with host organisations in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Finland, Russia, Greenland, Iceland and Australia. It is associated with a number of humanitarian and scientific organizations. BOARD OF DIRECTORS ● President: Douglas Scanlon (Retired Professor of Geology, Harvard) ● Vice President: Amy Maria-Esposito (Partner, Deloitte) ● Treasurer: Bob Howard (Self Made Oil Tycoon) ● Secretary: Saejima Hideyoshi (Deputy Director of Global Environment and Marine Department, Japan Meteorological Agency) ● Herbart Frast-Desjardins (Senior Director, National Geographic Society) ● Indira Bhattacharya (Chief Financial Officer, Frontier Bio-Logic) ● Lukuas Bernard Lemelson (Director of Government Relations, Canadian Tire Petroleum) ● Julius Vos-Savant (Accounts Executive, Maersk Line) ● Riordan Waits (Resident Climate Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council) EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR: Dr. Cassandra “Sandra” Orgelfinger What the Public Knows: In 1930, Miskatonic University sent an expedition to Antarctica, for the purposes of scientific exploration. The world heard briefly of the incredible discoveries these men made on the ice, then only silence. Only two survivors returned, both half mad, neither capable of disclosing what really happened. In the year 1933, the Starkweather Moore expedition arrived on the ice, intending to determine the true fate of the Miskatonic expedition, and to investigate what exactly it was they found. This expedition was far better equipped, with cutting edge technology and a much larger science team and crew. 2 Ultimately, the expedition was a disappointment. Lake’s camp had been lost to harsh weather and infighting resulting from “ice madness”, a stress reaction all too common in the harsh Polar conditions. The expedition’s much vaunted paleontological finds had been exaggerated wildly out of proportion. The reported monstrous size of the Miskatonic Mountains was nothing but a monstrous exaggeration, brought on by an optical illusion. A flight beyond them revealed only more endless, icy wasteland. That’s what they told the papers, anyway. WHAT LIES BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS The Elder Things, in their ancient wars against the other prehuman denizens of earth, devised a means to call beings from the outer reaches of space, imprisoning them and tapping their energies to deploy weapons of unspeakable power. To this end, they constructed a massive Elder Pharos to act as a lure, and beneath it, a “God Trap” to ensnare the things which descended from higher worlds. One day, they went fishing in the deep end, and caught the Nameless God. Larger and more powerful than anything they had caught before, the God threatened to wipe out all earthly civilization. It was barely within the Elder Things’ power to contain, and soon, would be beyond it. As the Elder civilization declined, so too did their technological knowledge. The delicate crystal matrix of the God Trap’s Construct was damaged in a great cataclysm, setting the device on the path toward decay and looming catastrophic failure. Consummate scientists to the end, the Elder Things devised a solution which would preserve the planet that their loss of interstellar flight had trapped them on. The Construct could be mated to a lattice of living nervous tissue, mixing biological components with its computational engine. And the more complicated the components, the better. When the Elder Things in the cave were inadvertently woken by the Miskatonic Expedition, they returned to the Pharos to find the machinery pushed to its very breaking point - with parts failures in its organic components threatening a complete and total collapse. Their first priority was to hunt for replacement parts. It was this house of horrors that the ill fated Starkweather Moore Expedition discovered at the bottom of the world in the year 1934. Discovered, and understood. The Starkweather Foundation’s Secret Mission: Since its inception, the Starkweather Foundation recruited postgraduate students and academics from appropriate fields to transport brains, nervous systems and occasionally living subjects to be used in the Construct of the Elder Things. These secret acts revealed the resurgent Elder Things to the individuals that were being recruited, and once both sides worked out what was going on, a sort of silent truce was established - the humans delivered the 'supplies' and the Elder Things maintained the Construct. A few Foundation members stayed behind to assist in repair and maintenance, and became vital to translation and interaction with the Elder Things. During the Second World War, the Starkweather Foundation worked closely with P Division, sharing knowledge and assisting in operations to counter the Karotechia’s efforts in Antarctica. This cooperation continued well into the following decades, though the Foundation neglected to inform Delta Green of their true relationship with the Elder Things - as the aliens’ primary contact point with humanity (that they knew of, anyway). When Delta Green was disbanded in 1970, steps were taken to ensure that no material detailing the Elder Things or the God Trap fell into the hands of MAJESTIC. Scattered points of contact kept the Foundation supplied, with the illegal Delta Green conspiracy tangentially aware of its activities. 3 Currently, nobody in either the Program or the Outlaws are aware of the true nature of the Foundation’s activities. The Delta Green Agents charged with procuring raw materials for the construct have been operating independently for over a decade without any contact with A Cell - who does not know that they exist or what they are doing. Fewer than 50 people within the organization know about the secret mission. Only that many people need to. The supply chain is easy to conceal within the organization’s vast transportation apparatus. ● The Elder Things, using their super-scientific knowledge, created specialized containers which can be used to transport human nervous tissue - a severed head, spinal column, and the rest of the body’s nervous system - while keeping it alive indefinitely. These containers are shipped, empty, to the United States. ● After travelling through a series of intermediaries, the containers are filled by a team which, outside of receiving them empty and sending them back full, has no contact with the Foundation. ● The full containers are warehoused until weather and supply needs on the ice make a shipment practical. They are then clandestinely inserted into the shipment disguised as ordinary canned goods. Once they reach the Antarctic, Foundation operatives or allies ensure that they are stored somewhere that the Elder Things can easily retrieve, for flight back to the Construct and installation. During the long sleep of the remaining Elder Things, the Nameless God began to seep out of its containment, scattering sinister seeds throughout the valley where it was confined, and the