Making Handouts: Old Spycraft Documents for Delta Green and other modern mysteries

One of my favorite types of handouts is mysterious documents hinting at great secrets. This is part of why I love to run games like Delta Green - there are so many mysteries and hidden intelligence buried in obscure documents. Conspiracies and secrets dating back decades uncovered in forgotten archives. Redacted phrases suggesting a human hand deliberately obscuring the truth.

For my own Delta Green campaigns, I have created a template I use on Google Slides for these types of documents. I like to use Slides because it's lightweight but does everything I need it to, and I have easy access to all my documents online wherever I go, without a need to download them or run them through a photo editor like Photoshop. You can of course do all this in Photoshop if you have it, but even Keynote or PowerPoint can do all of thos.

If you have Arc Dream Publishing's official asset kits, they make an excellent source to use for this type of technique as well.

Apologies ahead of time to anyone with actual security clearance reading this.

This CIA document dated 1965 was made as a handout for a Fall of Delta Green campaign. I based the formatting off actual declassified CIA documents from the era, and assembled something similar with the tools available to me.

To make this document, this was my rough process:

• I set up a Google Slides file with the dimensions of a document
• I found a photocopy paper texture online and put it as the background of a slide
• For the text I used the Google Fonts Courier Prime, Staatliches, and Syne Mono
• Over the top of all this I added a number of transparent grunge textures in white to add a sense of irregular wear to the text and stamps
• I also added some blackout redaction blobs that I found online to keep the hand-redacted look that is appropriate to the era

In order to get the "photocopy" effect on the document, I took a screenshot of the finished slide and pasted it into a new slide, and I used one of Google Slides' image recolor effects (darken) to achieve the effect. This increases the contrast while also making the blacks of the text bloom a bit, mimicking the effect of running a document through several rounds of photocopying.

This is a significantly more modern document which I shared with my players during our run of the Iconoclasts campaign for Delta Green. My players had some run-ins with Russian intelligence and this was what their handler was able to share with them about their counterparts.

Fundamentally this still follows the same design approach as the 1965 document but with a format that apes more recent intelligence reports. I chose to use one of modern Delta Green's cover names "Security Studies Group" because of how nondescript it sounds, and the majority of the text is borrowed from the Fairfield Project wiki.

• The fonts used for the text is Calibri for all the body text and headings - as should be standard for U.S. Govt. files from the era.
• The only exception is the use of Staatliches again for the "Top Secret" stamp
• For a bit of added "tech" flair to the document I also chose to include a BCBP (bar coded boarding pass) code to the top and a USPS Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) to the foot of the document - not because this is accurate to any type of intelligence report but just because I want to evoke a feeling that these documents are tracked by some digital monitoring system behind the scenes
• On this document, the redactions are simply using a black highlighter effect in Slides

Get the template

If you want to take a look at my template, you can check it out here.

If you want to use it for yourself, you can follow this link to add a copy of my template to your Google Drive.