Bast’s Scraps

Excerpts from God’s Teeth, an upcoming book for The Delta Green RPG

by Caleb Stokes

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 Understanding Bast
This chapter deals with the idea of Bast in-character, revealing what is actually going on with a clarity
that may be beyond the Agents. The next chapter, “Handling Bast,” provides practical guidance for
the Handler on how to present the antagonist in play.

The Beast Beneath Us

A creature wakes in a cavernous, darkened cellar. It remembers nothing about itself or how it got
there. The space is so dark that the animal’s limbs are obscured. It does not even know what it is. It
doesn’t know where it ends and the room begins. It knows only hunger and an instinctual need to
escape…to somewhere. Maybe to where it was before, or something like it. Maybe to the room
above, which it knows must exist through means it cannot interrogate.

The cellar’s every surface is covered with levers. Trillions of binary switches, each hair-thin. The dull
glow painted on their minuscule handles covers everything like a faint bioluminescent fungus. They
cover the ceiling, floor, and walls. The needle-sharp handles bite into the flesh of the creature and
cause what might be called pain. If it had words for such things. If all sensation were not dwarfed by
its hunger.

Toggling most of the switches does nothing. Some open secret doors to new rooms, larger than the
first, each festooned with their own googolplex of switches, leading to other caverns defined only by
further kaleidoscopic variations of on or off. Stairways constructed out of more levers burrow
downwards into labyrinthine sub-basements with more levers.

But the creature has nothing to do save toggle the switches, endlessly. Despite its exhaustion and
growling need, the hunger never seems to kill it. It only grows. It’s mind, erased of everything save
hunger, can only seek stimulation in combinations of on and off. So, it experiments. Endlessly.

After what feels like millennia, it flips a switch and the hunger abates, if only for a second. Eons
later, it finds another switch that, upon revisiting an old section abandoned long ago in its distant
past, changes precisely one other lever to the same type that dispensed nourishment. The dual meal
provides fleeting satisfaction it thought impossible in its isolated hell. It savors the bloody, satiating
relief with slavering mouths it has yet to find on itself.

There are now two sources of succor in its universe of endless impotence and pain. Its actions have
oriented the abyss infinitesimally away from the sole purpose of making it suffer. With nothing in its
mind save the hunger and the levers, the experiments grow in complexity.

Epochs pass. The blank slate of the creature’s mind fills with endless permutations of the levers.
Every switch can now be manipulated to feed it, though the complete set of inputs required to do so
span distances unimaginable. It has built its own tiny machinery — out of its own flesh or the

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detritus of the cellar, it cannot tell, for there is no more distinction — automating processes
discovered through infinite trial-and-error so that it might continue its blind search for more and
more and more.

The basement’s countless drips of sustenance would amount to an ocean, but the nourishment only
manages to dull the expanding, star-sized fire of need that occupies the creature’s every thought. The
increasingly sophisticated programming performed by the creature may have once been the function
of careful experimentation, but inconceivable amounts of practice in a place without time have made
the manipulations as instinctual as the bite of a starving beast. It can now feel the switches at all
times, trace their every interaction through light-years of circuitry with the same certainty as blood
through one’s own veins. It has ingrained their functions so deeply into its consciousness that it
commands them as it does its own cells.

The beast’s manipulation of the basement’s controls has grown so sophisticated that it can intuit the
circuitry’s effect on the room upstairs. From beneath, it “hears” a world without levers that is
nonetheless run by them. It “smells” the beings above as they dance according to its myriad
programs, judging its machinations’ successes or failures through the eddies and flows of the only
input that matters: food.

It has yet to free itself, but it knows its jailers are puppets. It will manipulate them to survive until it
can discover a way out. Then it will rise and feast on them and end the starving need that defines it.

The Allegory
The creature is the god that men call Bast. The basement is the quantum realm and housed in
dimensions only theorized, buried beneath the pittance of elementary particles recognized by men
and the legion that remain undiscovered. The switches manipulate these particles; nudging their
masses, toggling their charges, and altering their spins. The colors and flavors of quarks and
neutrinos can be mixed freely by the machine. Each femto-sized alteration coalesces into cascading
programs that ripple upwards until they alter a macroscopic statistical ensemble. Bast’s food is
energy, embezzled from the entropy it has engineered into our reality so that it might feed. The
room above the basement is our universe, a multiversal backwater into which Bast folded its sophon
consciousness to survive. If it can escape, it will consume our entire reality in a desperate feast
before burrowing through the veil into universes occupied by other hyper-geometric beings,
continuing its parasitism through physics until it has drained Azathoth itself and left every plane of
existence as cold and dead as the one from whence it came.

Bast's Birth
The cosmos are so relentlessly inhospitable to life that, to survive as the ancients have, a species
must undergo pain and change unimaginable. If we could truly know the suffering required, it would
stamp out the courage of the boldest soul. If we couldsee the future form we must assume, no one
would dare call the result human. But, though humanity lacks the will to adapt, not all creatures can
say the same. Some do what is necessary. Bast is the result of one such choice.

Bast is neither a singular creature, nor is it named Bast. Bast is merely the name used by humans
during the longest stretch of history where they could intuit the thing lurking between the gaps in
atoms. Some hypergeometric species have their own name for it — alternately regarding Bast as an

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immutable scientific principle, subatomic contamination, remnant of a failed evolution, or god —
according to their understanding. However, most intelligences across the multiverse are unaware of
its existence…including Bast. The Nameless God that lurks between atoms does not possess any
conception of “self ” humanity could recognize.

Bast started as an alien race, developing in an unobservable and immeasurably ancient dimension. To
pin-point a physical form amongst countless millenniums of evolution would be akin to calling a
cyanobacteria your grandmother. The evolutionary timeline of Bast dwarfs humanity’s by orders of
magnitude, their forms growing in increasing complexity and sophistication. For the majority of
their existence, their physical shapes might have resembled something a human could desperately
confuse for a giant cat, but this imagery is more likely the result of humanity’s need to find corollary
when faced with a creature totally outside understanding. Much of humanity’s knowledge of Bast
follows this trend: its lore is ascribed to it rather than brought with it. Bast itself remains ignorant of
its appearance, culture, and history. Anything that might be called a past has been overwritten by its
hunger.

In human measurements, Bast’s civilization reached Type III on the Kardashev scale before our
dimension formed in the “Big Bang” 14 billion years ago. Before its demise, Bast had ascended to
Kardashev Type IV, developing the means of utilizing all of the energy produced by all of the
galaxies of its universe. Bast’s success as an organism was total. By the time its development halted, it
constituted all life in its universe, harnessed the power of all stars, and possessed all the knowledge
available — even as its “body” comprised everything worth knowing. In terms of power, Bast fell
short only of Elder Gods such as Yog-Sothoth, and its knowledge of the true nature of the cosmos
eclipsed present-day humanity entirely.

However, the power proved insufficient. Something went wrong. Perhaps Bast’s expansion was too
greedy and sapped its universe dry. Maybe, during its slow development, its dimension drifted too far
from the spewing maw of Azatlhoth’s creation and risked dissolution in the void. The memory of
the crisis, like so much of itself, has been abandoned by Bast in order to focus on the work of its
survival, but it can be inferred from its continued existence that the alien civilization saw extinction
coming.

It dedicated resources totaling an entire reality towards the task of saving itself, but the ability to
grasp the hyper-geometric fundamentals of the universe require a cognitive malleability that often
ossifies in advanced species. The requirements of survival within a single contained pocket of
physical reality are laughable compared to the challenges of living in the multiverse of the gods.
Though countless alien races have matched and even surpassed the dominance of Bast, they were
equally doomed by the end awaiting us all. The great filter of the cosmos is near total, and Bast’s
intellect proved incapable of joining the ranks of dimension-spanning species. Or, at best, barely
capable.

By etching circuitry into the extra dimensions of subatomic particles that are as yet undiscovered by
man, Bast engineered a quantum retreat away from the constraints of the physical laws demanding
its death. It forged a subatomic life raft, small enough to puncture the membranes of the multiverse.
The closest analogy a human could grasp would be something akin to a probe, launched to another
planet in order to rebuild civilization in safety. Only instead of visiting another planet, the lifeboat
would travel through the quantum foam to another universe. Instead of taking a physical form of
metal, its circuitry would be etched into the most fundamental building blocks of matter: a quantum

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computer “sophon,” capable of occupying no space and all space simultaneously by folding itself
into less than one dimension.

It’s unclear how many of these subatomic ark ships were constructed and launched, but to make
even one sophon would have exhausted the combined resources of humanity many millions of times
over. Once completed, the quantum computing powers of the sophon — being divorced from
limitations of space, heat, and energy consumption — were nearly endless. The probes were capable
of holding the consciousness of every individual Bastwho had ever lived and the entire history of
their civilization…were it not for the fact that the processing power required for the task at hand
demanded that same infinite capacity. To rebuild the Bast across the dimensional divide, the sophon
would have to interact with, catalogue, alter, and administer interactions between nearly all matter in
the new dimension, engineering its rebirth through the smallest possible manipulations in a universe
with different physical laws than its own. Bast had no way of testing whether such a plan could
work, and it had no way of knowing exactly how much of its quantum computer’s endless storage
would have to be dedicated towards its renewal.

A human, put in the same position, might well conclude that a computer containing their legacy
would be so fundamentally different from life as to fail the definition of “survival.” A human might
say that overwriting the digitized souls of their species for the sake of fulfilling a program would be
an end more barbaric than any on offer from a dying universe. But even humans contain parts of
themselves they would sacrifice to save the whole. The beast that is man would rather gnaw off a
limb than die in a trap. Bast was no different. It merely possessed a different concept of “self.” It,
like all other superior beings, was willing to accept survival in any form. Thus, Bast launched its
sophons, and its hopes went with them.

Those hopes died in our strange, alien dimension.

The requirements of subatomic manipulation in our backwater reality proved more demanding than
even Bast imagined. It’s probabilistic sets for the construction of favorable statistical ensembles in
matter proved entirely inaccurate under new physical laws, and the process of recreating Bast in this
new Universe required the machine to invent a new field of physics from within its blind prison
beneath the quarks and muons. As the quantum machine experimented to find a path to rebirth, it
jettisoned more and more of its essence in order to make room for the endlessly sophisticated
programming required to interact with our reality. By the time the first creatures on Earth rose from
the ocean, nothing remained of Bast save the ghost of a dead dimension, dedicated solely towards
leeching enough energy from its surroundings to keep itself running increasingly sophisticated, yet
fruitless, processes.

Bast is the abandoned machinery of a long-dead civilization, bereft of life save a consciousness
ossified in the pursuit of a goal it has forgotten. It will continue to corrupt and consume our
dimension until there is nothing left, or until it can find some higher dimensional membrane more
conducive to its endless, mindless cannibalization of energy. Bast is a pure, unquenchable predatory
instinct placed at the controls of a god-like, nearly-omniscient machine.

Bast's Hunger
In the universe in which humanity finds itself trapped, life is not an accident. Lightning did not strike
a primordial soup and result in a bizarre, self-perpetuating mistake called biology. While luck may

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have shaped its forms, biology itself is the result of intent. Life’s existence is mandated by the same
physical constants that govern the rest of the universe, and these constants were engineered by Bast.
As matter must flow from areas of higher to lesser concentrations through diffusion, so must
inanimate particles eventually collect into the complex molecules that compose biology.

The closest humanity has come to perceiving this truth is the theory of Dissipative Adaptation.

• “Entropy” is the term for the gradient measuring the amount of disorder in a system. A
system with more possible states of matter — for instance, water molecules vibrating in a
liquid form vs. water frozen at absolute zero — has more entropy. As the movement of
molecules is determined by heat, humans often think of entropy as the dissipation of heat
energy, but entropy increases across every possible measurement and at every possible
opportunity. The universe moves constantly towards increasing disorder.
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy in an isolated system can
only increase. A system will evolve spontaneously towards a state of thermodynamic
equilibrium, a state of maximal entropy. On the scale of the largest isolated system, the
Universe, maximal entropy would occur at the theorized “heat death of the Universe"
• Lifeforms are more chaotic than inanimate objects. A plant absorbs light and creates a
number of complex sugars and gases (increasing disorder in the system) whereas a stone
merely absorbs heat. To match the level of volatility seen with the plant, the light must be
strong enough to melt the stone, which requires an enormous amount of focused energy.
Furthermore, the melted stone would not “reproduce” disorder like the plant. Life creates
more entropy than the inanimate, along a potentially infinite timeline of exponential growth,
if only because life creates more chaos with less energy.
• Dissipative adaptation suggests that, because atoms arranged into the complex forms of life
cause more entropy (e.g. chaotic arrangements of matter) than inanimate particles, any atoms
arranged into the unlikely structure of a lifeform are likely to maintain that state because it
increases entropy in a system — and entropy can never decrease. Fires go out. Cold creeps
in. Life springs forth. All follow the inevitability of the physical laws accelerating the
Universe’s thinning and dissipation until all is stillness and death.

Humanity, for all its failings, is mostly correct about Dissipative Adaptation. Their failure lies in
accepting the physics as a sourceless constant. These physical laws are “laws” less in the scientific
sense and more in the legal use of the term; they are edicts fueled by intent and purpose, and they
are enforced by a great power.

Bast exists as a quantum leech, embezzling energy arising in the wake of our universe’s entropic
decay. Dissipative Adaptation and the resulting lifeforms may arise “naturally” from physical laws,
but physical laws such as entropy were either designed by Bast as a form of subatomic agriculture,
parasitized by it, or otherwise exist as a direct result of its presence. Humanity can never know for
sure. The effect of Bast is so fundamental and omnipresent in our universe that no one remembers
that it is not its “natural” state. There exist dimensional planes without entropy. Many of them are
the homes of extra-dimensional beings, such as Mi-Go and Shan. But our dimensional backwater
suffers decay as a result of a subatomic invader.

Shortly after the Big Bang, both the phase transition that drove inflation and the mechanism behind
baryogengesis which created matter as we know it were the result of Bast’s quantum manipulations.
Its motivations for doing so are inscrutable — perhaps it was a mistake of its blind experimentation

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with new physics, or maybe our current configuration of matter is more similar to its home, or it
could just dislike the taste of antimatter. Regardless of its reasons, our Universe’s path was diverted
to Bast’s benefit rather than our own. Humanity, specifically, never factored into its plans, and
organic life, in general, is no more than the byproduct of an accounting decision made to optimize a
machine’s operations.

Bast’s manipulations helped create all that humanity recognizes as life so that it might feed on death.
It is a thanophage, feasting on entropy in all its forms. It’s interest in living things is strictly logical:
though it will feast on stars and other inanimate matter with equal gusto, biology increases the
number of entropic reactions from which it can embezzle energy across a longer timeline. Bast
tolerates life in the universe as a form of rationing. It is a machine stuck in low battery mode.

Despite the cold logic of this arrangement, the human mind is unable to perceive the truth when
touched by this presence. Humans, grasping for a corollary amongst their inadequate experience,
perceive interactions with Bast as encounters with a predator.

In truth, Bast is the predator. It sustains its mindless programming by ending life, and its quantum
programming creates more life only to fuel greater destruction. Death, decay, and chaos are
manufactured products for an entity farming disorder down to the femtometer. As entropy increases
from lifeless matter to microorganisms to plants to animals, so does Bast’s feast grow in bounty and
flavor.

Bast's Instincts
Bast can’t be said to have thoughts. It exists outside of cognition. Its thoughts are actions; it thinks
only through the movement and manipulation of matter. It has no concept of things outside of
itself; it’s omnipresence makes obsolete the difference between awareness and actual.

The few surviving parts of Bast’s original programming responsible for what humans would call
“motivation” seem simple even for a terrestrial animal, not to mention when compared to its catalog
of every individual photon, meson, and other subatomic particle in existence.

Firstly, Bast hungers. Energy embezzled from the entropy of the universe fuels the perpetual
expansion of its circuitry’s infinite dimensions. Hunger is the immutable core of Bast’s programming.
Though an appetite that craves the death of a cricket with the same desperation as the explosion of a
star may seem unrestrained, humanity has only ever encountered Bast on its best behavior. It’s
current state is the result of something akin to “low-power mode,” a rationing of resources until a
new source of energy can be found. Were it not for the certainty that it would go dormant shortly
afterwards, Bast would accelerate the heat death of our dimension exponentially and wipe out the
known Universe in a fit of orgiastic feasting.

Secondly, Bast is curious. The creators of the sophon had no way of knowing what their quantum
computer would discover. The very laws of physics would be different, and their machine would
have to be able to understand them in order to recreate civilization anew. Though the goal of
rebirthing Bast has long since been overwritten with minutiae given precedence by the sophon’s
need to survive, the innate drive to learn remains central to Bast’s existence. The only limitation to
this curiosity is the cap on storage capacity placed on Bast by its need to fuel expansion. Thus, while

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Bast always wants to grow its database, it only acts when such knowledge might enhance its ability to
consume energy more completely or efficiently.

Related to its curiosity, Bast needs to see. Or at least perceive. Bast has no innate sensory
perception beyond its ability to “touch” matter at the subatomic level. It creates a cause on the
smallest scale possible, and it can only perceive effect by reading those same micro particles: like a
man who has never learned braille trying to read it through trial-and-error. Its experiments might
best be described as throwing a stone through space and sensing the impossibly small gravitational
waves that ripple outward. The only other limitation placed on the sophon besides its energy needs
are the difficulty it experiences determining the results of its manipulations. Over the centuries, it has
learned to “read” the sensory perceptions of certain beings through an analysis of the quarks that
make up certain particles, extrapolating as to what those alterations “mean” when detected in the
numbers indicating organic cells, but the recipe of subatomic operations required for such
sophisticated measurement is incomplete and open to the bizarre interpretations of an alien mind
driven by needs it no longer understands.

Finally, Bast seeks escape. To where and to what end, it does not know. Aside from its survival
needs, this is all that remains of its base programming. It has a task to complete, and it believes with
something akin to faith that it can remember what it is…if only it could escape our backwater
dimension and find one with enough energy to function properly. It is this need to move on that
fuels Bast’s interest in other trans-dimensional beings.

Bast's Prey
Some creatures escaped the jaws of Bast or evolved separately from its predation. The Mi-Go’s
fungal dominion in the icy wastes of Pluto, the Hounds of the Angles omnipresence throughout
time, the immortal beings protected by the never-ending moment of the Dreamlands, the grotesque
homeostasis maintained by Deep Ones and Ghouls — all of these higher lifeforms have found ways
to slip the bonds of the Second Law of Thermodynamicsand achieve equilibrium indefinitely
outside understood material planes. Though rare, there exist stages of evolution past which the
impermanence of entropy is a mere suggestion. Some creatures have escaped the ecosystem
resulting from Azathoth’s run-off: engineering bodies, dimensions, and realities of timeless stability.
These species have succeeded where Bast failed.

As more complex life brings about more complete disorder, the destruction of entities that have
slipped into the realm of immortality makes for the most profound and appetizing disorder of all.
Breaking the stasis of lifeforms threatening to exempt themselves Bast’s feeding brings about an
intoxicating entropic feast eons in the making. Thus, Bast pursues this prey with more interest than
all others. Though Bast eats all forms of energy indiscriminately, it hunts creatures outside its
quantum cage with intent.

The “death” (or, at least, disincorporation) of hypergeometric beings passing through Bast’s
dimension fulfills all its needs. The decay of their forms creates exotic radiation that is as filling as
the collapse of solar systems. The flavor of theirdemise provides untold new information,
suggesting new, untapped dimensions into which Bast may burrow and feast. Their bodies, organs,
cells, and atoms — if Bast can but learn to control them — can illuminate this castaway dimension
in a sensory spectrum more complete than the lowly beasts it currently controls. Consume enough
of them and Bast may find a way to escape, expand, and fulfill a purpose long thought forgotten.

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The problem, however, is that encounters with such hypergeometric creatures are infuriatingly rare
in this Universe. They confine themselves to the void of space, quarantined from anything Bast
might manipulate. Their forms are made of exotic matter it cannot yet perceive nor touch. When
Bast can locate them, the higher lifeforms fold themselves into different dimensions. Some may
perceive Bast and thus flee its predations, but most leave ignorant of its existence. Our dimension is
no more than flyover country. When they do stick around, the lowly creatures spawned by Bast’s
manipulations across the universe rarely prove more than a nuisance to the superior races.

Bast only knows of the existence of higher lifeformsthrough their wakes in the realm of the
macroscopic, rippling down to the sophon through layer after layer of subatomic strata. To hunt
amongst hypergeometry, Bast’s manipulations must be exquisitely intricate. It must use the lesser
creatures it grows and culls as bait with which to grasp meatier prey.

What would such manipulation look like when the puppet master is already responsible for creating
life itself ? Even down to the subatomic level? Thus, to humanity, the hunt of the Nameless God
appears as nothing less than fate, destiny, and design — all fixated on death with the intensity of a
starving beast.

Bast's Blindness
The information contained in even one sense organ overflows the paltry container of words. A taste,
a smell, a sensation — these are already degraded signals, laughable chemical facsimiles of the actual,
further translated through countless substrata of atomic constructions until they reach the minuscule
grasp of Bast. Gleaning information from the perceptions of simple creatures requires immeasurably
complex calculations. The reality Bast feels with its very being must be filtered through a batch of
greasy chemicals and reassembled into something with meaning in Bast’s quantum realm. It is a
blind creature, pawing at strange surroundings, trying to determine their color despite having no
concept of the very notion. Though potentially infinite in its capacity for storage, the sophon
circuitry comprising Bast can only translate so much animal nonsense into actionable intelligence
before its energy consumption caps out.

The struggle to interpret the perceptions of creatures existing in macroscopic scales could be said to
infuriate Bast…were its patience not infinite. One of the many perplexing obstacles it currently faces
is the human animal.

Humanity lacks genetic memory, telepathy, time travel, and any other adaptation for conveying
information across generations. Instead, they have language: hooting sounds and cryptic scratches
imperfectly translated. To take the already degraded signal of organic perception and ferry it to
another human mind with words? Nothing remains. Meaning leaks away: water carried in cupped
hands from a distant well. Humans lick at the remaining moisture and must be sated, evolved as they
are to subsist on the dewey remains of reality. For Bast, there simply isn’t enough left to work with.

The evolutionary dead end of language has infected the very cells of humanity, to the point that
species’s perceptions, once exposed to language, become divorced from the reality Bast tries to
gauge and influence. To other sentient creatures in Bast’s kingdom, language is a mere tool, a
technology only useful in specific logistical instances that do not concern an omnipresent being. But
for humans, language is a contagion that alters their very anatomy and infects their being with the

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illusion of consciousness. To the human mind, the objective alteration of matter in the brain (which
Bast needs in order to “see”) only occurs after sensory perception is combined with…some sort of
spontaneously manifesting delusion.

A human must constantly tell itself a story about what it perceives, even as the limitations of its sense
organs create another fiction. The two lies reach an accord called human perception, but Bast has no
means of reverse-engineering such a backwards and counter-intuitive process. The minds of other
animals resulting from Dissipative Adaptation are easily altered. The seemingly impossible decay of
an isolated proton into a neutron, a millisecond tweak in the gravitational constant or suspension of
the weak nuclear force, each change executed in batches of trillions in careful sequence — these
subtle alterations can provoke any behavior Bast needs, like the ring in the nose of a bull. But for
humans, unfathomable interference degrades the signal. Language firebreaks and encodes the
information Bast needs to hunt its true prey. Its manipulations can be felt but not acted upon, and
the false distinction between thought and action isn’t something the sophon can ever hope to
understand.

This is made all the more infuriating by the fact that, through another cruel cosmic joke, humans
have devised means of contacting beings capable of hyper-geometry and frequently use them on
Earth, all while evolving so haphazardly as to place them at the limits of Bast’s influence. In the
meta-evolution of creatures within this dimension, humanity unwittingly bridges a gap between the
depressing reality in which Bast remains trapped and the transdimensional ecosystem where it seeks
to escape and feast.

Other species in our Universe, such as the Elder Things and Flying Polyps, have evolved enough to
perceive Bast and removed its access to their worlds. Thus far, only humans remain both susceptible
to the sophon’s quantum controls and able to contact (albeit haphazardly) the creatures in which
Bast actually holds interest. The nonsensical canyon between sign and signifier gouged into the
human mind remains beyond Bast’s capability to traverse, but the creature has nothing but time and
hunger. It has developed a work around.

Bast's Sign
The vast scope of Bast’s influences on our universe cannot be overstated. Its hunt for
transdimensional beings, though often unsuccessful, takes place across every life-supporting planet
in the galaxies of our universe. To try and assign a single modus operandi to such a wide-ranging and
desperate hunger is impossible.

However, the peculiar problem of language’s effect on human cognition funnels Bast towards certain
patterns on Earth. Humanity remains, for the moment, the most dominant species among the
mundane (read: accessible to Bast) animals on their specific planet. Thus, on Earth, encounters with
Bast share three similarities: the presence of feral children, bizarre animal behavior, and concurrent
unnatural activity.

Feral children — with their unique human cognition untainted by language and unrestrained by
Sapir-Whorf — are more open to direct control by Bast’s quantum meddling. The perceptions and
cognition of these children are used in conjunction with every other lifeform in the area that Bast
can hijack in order to triangulate the location and forms of humans capable of doing some —any —
damage to hypergeometric beings. Once discovered, Bast can affect, if not directly control, the

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perceptions of these unfortunate creatures. It uses this influence, in addition to rigging the very
reality in which its chosen agents live, to steer them towards the Unnatural in hopes a confrontation
provides the nourishment it craves. If they die, they die. What could Bast care? It will find or make
more.

It’s a circuitous route with little chance for success, but Earth holds only one of a million hunts for
higher lifeforms Bast carries out across the universe. It’s a parasite, looking to kill and eat its host.
Though its chances of harming the superior beings are slim, minor successes may accumulate until it
finds a way to consume this dimension and the next. Bast has nothing but time and patience.

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 Handling Bast
True knowledge of Bast is inaccessible to Agents. In God’s Teeth, Bast represents a new threat never
before encountered by Delta Green or any other living human being. Or, rather, it might be more
accurate to say it represents every threat encountered by humanity, along with its every comfort and
existence itself. Regardless, no name given to the malign intelligence ineptly puppeting the matter in
our universe has ever been accurate, and its motivations have never been truly understood.

There is no tome containing the answers. There is no weathered veteran capable of pulling back the
veil. There is no cure. The Agents can only hope to struggle, go mad, and die in conflict with a
confusing, terrifying force whose only purpose seems to be reminding them how little humanity
understands and controls.

This isn’t to say the events in God’s Teeth are entirely inexplicable. This chapter contains the
information actually available to Agents, but it is forever removed from the root cause of their woes.
Any understanding of what’s really going on should be hard-won, conjectural, and purely academic.
Giving a name to the forces ruining the lives of the Agents in no way arrests the process. Handler’s
are provided a series of historical events that seem correlated to events in the campaign, but the
narrative of what these correlations actually mean should be solely composed of conjecture from the
Agents.

The Handler’s job isn’t why; it is how. Terror doesn’t live in the cause; it lives in the symptom. So,
while the Handler should read “Understanding Bast,” this chapter deals with the brass tacks of using
it in a campaign.

The Basics
These are “rules”of Bast, for lack of a better term.

Handler’s may break and change any they see fit. You’re presenting Agents with a life-hijacking
intelligence that operates on nightmare logic. The consistency provided by these rules only exists to
imbue the threat facing Agents with a sense of totality. While we will continue using the name Bast
for simplicity’s sake, Handlers should only refer to it as The Nameless God, God, or, preferably, avoid
referencing it at all. Agents can discover “the true name” of their antagonist (as if such a thing
existed…and for all the good it will do them) by researching its history on Earth, but until they
uncover it themselves, the Handler should never use Bast’s name. Events of the campaign just
happen; don’t give them the comfort of a label to hang the horror on.

Here are the fundamentals Handler’s should use to maintain the campaign’s tone.

The Prayer

• Bast is incompatible with language. Sign/signifier interfere with its direct influence.
Language offers no real protection; it merely ensures those suffering under the god’s
attention remain unable to understand what is happening (deaf to the god) and unable to call
its attention (mute to the god).

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 • Bast is, in some ways, responsible for all life native to our universe and able to act through
most biology. It is a thanophage. As far as it is concerned, life exists only to feed it with
death.
• Bast is drawn to Earth when pre-lingual or language-impaired human beings are made to
suffer prolonged, extreme torture. Animal terror is a sensation extreme and simple enough
that the god has learned to recognize it by reading the individual particles that make up the
brain, and human senses are precise enough to focus its perception (if it could be called that)
in a single place in time.
• As a reward for their prayers of pain, Bast manipulates causality and probability to ease the
suffering of those who call it. Those manipulated into rescuing the God’s Children are God’s
Teeth; totem organs of the God on a material plane. The rescue of the Children is not the
point; causality is manipulated to bring the Teeth within perceptive range of the Children.
Once able to “see” it’s new agents on Earth, Bast “locks” them as targets and tools in its
machinations.
• The purpose of the God’s Teeth are two-fold. They are meant to rescue the feral Children so
that they may live and keep their perceptions open to Bast. More importantly, they are meant
to throw themselves at what humans consider Unnatural threats in the hopes they will do
enough damage to feed and/or teach Bast. When it learns enough, it can finish eating our
universe and move on to the next.
• Mankind is woefully unprepared to serve in Bast’s war, but the god does not care. All death
feeds it, including the death of its puppets.

The Children

• After the rescue, those whose pain called to Bast become servants to it. They resist language
and development at every turn. They move by instinct and seek to serve the hunger of their
savior.
• If infected by language, the Children still gravitate towards arcane pursuits, seeking out
extra-planar entities, endeavoring to call down more Teeth through the torture of innocents,
or pursuing death at the hands of the Teeth so that they might feed their savior their own
essence.

The Teeth
• God’s Teeth continue to live without any way to commune with their new master, but they
gain certain abilities and urges. The Teeth can detect the “taint” of certain mythos magics,
and they are possessed by a growing need to attack them. This new sense organ is
completely imprecise, as likely to fire on a victim of hypergeometric manipulation as a
perpetrator. The memory of such a sensation is itself indiscernible from its present
perception, resulting in faulty target acquisition.
• The psychological urges grow more urgent as they are indulged. Teeth deep into the process
of their god’s feeding often find themselves pushing beyond the limits of human endurance.
To an outsider, the afflicted might look like fanatical crusaders against the darkness, but they
are more like addicts with all the withdrawal and none of the high.

Synchronicity
• Even with its limited processing power, Bast is sophisticated enough that it runs simulations
on both sides of the quantum present, seeking escape and nourishment. It alters events
simultaneously in past, present, and future to chase probabilistically desirable outcomes.

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 conspires with fate itself to place both its Children and Teeth near the higher lifeforms upon
which it wishes to feed. The Children understand this as the nature of life. The Teeth
perceive only a doomed march through unimaginable horrors until they are killed or go mad.
To them, the dark salvation of the Children is the beginning of a curse as reality begins to
twist itself in order to keep the Teeth on a path straight to hell. .
• No human mind is capable of understanding the absolute nature and total scope of Bast’s
hunger. Forced to find a corollary, humanity grasps for metaphors in nature, regarding the
influence as some primal force of animal instinct and hunger. The portrayal isn’t entirely
inaccurate; Bast does hold some dominion over all living things. That humans rarely consider
themselves the animals under control is a function of ego. Attempts to confabulate a source
for the hunger have resulted in a series of zoomorphic animal gods throughout history, most
notably Bast of Egypt.

What Can Be Known?

Handlers can run a successful campaign providing only misinformation and silence when Agents ask
the deeper questions. However, players and Handlers may find this unsatisfactory, so what are some
other possible clues as to the true nature of Bast?

Here’s a list of clues Agents can discover about their situation, but only after confronting the Go
Forth scenario, and preferably after Red Thoughts.

Indicators
Outside of Egyptian history, evidence of Bast remainsscattered and difficult to correlate. The three
signs of its impact on Earth — feral children, unusual animal behavior, and Unnatural threats — can
be sifted from the chaff of history if one knowswhat to look for.

1. Ferals
The Nameless God’s attraction towards the long-term suffering of the young appears incidental,
relating more to the peculiarities of human psychology than malice. If long-term abuse manages to
disrupt the inculturation of children throughout the entirety of the critical phase of psycholinguistic
development (stretching approximately from six months to seven years-old), documented case
studies suggest the victims are incapable of ever learning a first language, even after they are removed
from the abusive environment. These children “time out” on language acquisition and never develop
the ability to speak, write, or understand fellow humans, despite possessing otherwise genetically
healthy brains. Bast’s essence cannot be contained in the reduction of language, and so it is only
through these rare, tortured ambassadors that its machinations become felt in the anthropocene.
The effects of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis — whereknowledge of a language forever alters the
brain structure and thought processes of the speaker — inoculates most humans against the
perception of Bast, and only those without the vaccine carry its infection.

Such cases are extremely rare. Few children survive the sort of constant torture and isolation
required to severe their linguistic faculities completely. Barely a dozen cases of feral children have
been documented by modern psychology, and the veracity of many instances is hotly debated to this
day. However, tragic periods in history have created conditions where ferals likely survived in great
numbers and away from the eyes of modern science. The ritual sacrifices of pre-Columbian

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civilizations, the Minoians of Crete, the Muti murders in tribal South Africa — multiple cultures
show archeological evidence of mass ritual murders suggesting children were prepared for the knife
on an agricultural scale. As “meat for the gods,” children selected for these rites at a young age
would likely be denied all forms of human inculturation, leaving any who managed to escape their
captors feral. Mass abandonment also results in feral children, most noticeably the legendary “fae”
children commonly reported in the Black Forest in the wake of the famines common during the
Little Ice Age. Extended war can have the same effect, be it the “Blitz babies” found wandering the
countryside in the wake of WWII or defecting child soldiers from Sudanese and Congolese civil
conflicts.

2. Fauna Disruption
Suffering children is nothing new in human history. The Nameless God can only be suspected if
reports of feral children coincide with uncharacteristic animal behavior.

Charles Augustus Munro, Inspector General for the Imperial Indian Police stationed in British
Burma, related in a letter to his sister Charlotte a strange occurrence in 1880. Officers under his
supervision raided a village in the jungles of the modern-day Rakhine State suspected of supporting
guerrilla activities. The village was easily pacified, but officers soon heard screaming from the
village’s outskirts. Munro ran to investigate and “discovered a sight fit to incite the hardiest soul’s
gorge into rebellion: an elderly woman harried by a swarming horde of mongooses, rodents which
young Hector can attest are similar in form to our polecat-ferret. The beasts tore into and through
the woman with a savagery unfit for description, dear sister, and my nightmares are nightly haunted
by the image of my men futilely trying to rip the rabid pests from where they clung so tenaciously to
the woman’s flesh. Her unbelievable demise and our futile attempts to forestall her fate were
attended by a mute chorus of wide-eyed children, lined up on floor of the hut and watching the
attack as if they had paid to see one of the infamouscobra fights found in the less salubrious
warrens of Arkady.” Upon questioning the children, neither the Brits nor the translators could get
any response. Prisoners taken during the village raid claimed the woman was a Ma Phae Wah, or
“yellow-ribbon woman.” They lived in fear of her and resigned sickly children to her care lest she
visit her wrath on the village. The letter ends with a screed of colonialist complaints about local
superstition, as many of Munro’s native officers deserted shortly after the event to “go hunting” and
never returned. The incident exists only in the family correspondence and has no other record in
surviving documents of the British Raj, though Munro’s raid does appear to have been sanctioned
for the date and time alleged in the letter.

In 1952, a massive bird attack and die off in Cornwall’s Port Isaac resulted in the death of one Willis
Emerson. The fisherman was driven off a cliff as hewas assaulted by an unprecedented flock of
homicidal cormorants, all of which dropped dead from the sky moments after the attack. In the
following week, a local news article recounts the discovery of a twelve-year old girl named “Iris” in
Willis’s cellar. Identified by a filthy embroidered blanket that appeared to be the girl’s only
possession, Iris Belford was reported missing by her aunt during the blitz of ’41. Long thought dead
in the blast that killed her parents, the mute child appeared to have been living the entire time in the
home of Willis, a life-long bachelor who claimed to have immigrated from Brichester in ’44. The
paper reports the unnamed constable who discovered Iris traveling to London to reunite her with
surviving family members. There is no record of their arrival, nor any other mention of them in the
historical record.

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In 1987, the village of Dhuusasaso, once located near Kenya’s northern border, was wiped out in an
attack by a giant baboon troop numbering in the thousands. By the time army officials responded to
the panicked reports of those few survivors able to escape in vehicles, the village was abandoned, its
residents torn limb from limb and scattered about the decimated buildings. Official records claim
the primates were driven to hunt humans by extreme drought conditions. Though it was a dry year,
much worse conditions have been seen multiple times across the continent before and since without
a similar incident. Buried witness accounts located in the AU records office at Nairobi contain a
different narrative, dismissed as hysteria at the time. Survivors claimed the attack was preceded by
the arrival of a few desperate soldiers of the SudanesePeople's Liberation Movement (SPLM) fleeing
across the border to escape the Second Sudanese Civil War. The men hardly stopped in the village at
all, pressing on in desperate flight and warning of “the beast child.” That night, the baboons
attacked. One fleeing journalist described what looked like a naked boy walking at the head of the
frenzied troop. The threat to Kenya’s border provoked a faster military response than would have
typically arrived to address a natural disaster, so Kenyan officials dismissed explanations of the attack
as clever lies concocted by those who escaped in order to secure faster assistance. A few Kenyan
soldiers were dispatched to investigate the claims of SPLM incursion, but most returned without
having ever made contact with the enemy. Those few who never checked in were thought deserters
and never heard from again.

3. Unnatural Prey
Mute witnesses obscure. Ineffable animal attacks cry out to be explained away through legend and
science. Finally, the last and most elusive sign of Bast is its shared presence with other beings outside
human understanding. As lions follow the herd, so Bast appears to follow its favored prey. But how
can the eater outside of time be seen? In the rare confluence of events that makes such madness
apparent, how can the effects of Bast be separated from the effects of other entities whose very
presence distorts reality and warps the mind? Only one period surviving in human memory exhibits
all three signs of the presence, and it is only through studying this period that the Teeth of God
become visible. Failing that, the only way to know the truth is to suffer the curse that transforms a
person into Bast’s living totem.

Bast In Egypt
The Egyptian religion held no special insight into the maddening reality of the cosmos; its flirtations
with accuracy owe to its majority position in the blip that is human history. The Egyptian gods were
worshiped for 60% of all recorded time, and, through the tether of their myths, vibrations of truth
can be felt rippling down from a faith worshiped as far back as the rise of Lemuria.

Worship of what came to be known as Bast was most authentic around 13,000 BCE during the
second empire of Atlantis. Sorcerers attempted to weaponize the Nameless God’s hunger to wage
war against the cult of Dagon and the siege of theDeep Ones. The attempt ultimately failed, but as
Atlantis sank and its few survivors resorted to barbarism, gratitude towards Bast ensured its rites
were some of the few pieces of knowledge preservedby high priests Klarkash-Ton and
Luveh-Kerapht. As devolved Atlantean diaspora migrated into the Sahara to flee corruption from
the sea, they carried Bast with them and into the Egyptian pantheon. This is the first record of Bast
entering surviving human memory through Plato’s allusion to the ancient Priests of Sais. Even if the
priests’ records could be recovered, the inadequacy of language, in general, and 14 centuries of
translation issues carried down to the 26th Dynasty, specifically, would make the texts useless for
learning anything actionable. Similarly, Herodotus’s record of Bubastis’s festival and Abdul

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Alhazrad’s accounts of the Black Rites in the Necronomicon both depict corrupted forms of
worship, distorted by mankind and Nyarlothothep, respectively.

Furthermore, it would be a mistake to think of Bast as the only faltering attempt by the Egyptians to
understand the Nameless God. The pantheon held over 1500 gods, many of which themselves
possessed multiple forms. B’sst, Bastet, Mau — these were other names for Bast. Her sister in the
North, Sekhmet, bears similar characteristics and is another confabulation of the Nameless God’s
presence. Other gods, such as Sobek and Anubis, bear a resemblance as well. Bast is typically
thought of as the closest corollary because her myth structure most closely resembles the role of the
Nameless God’s worship in late predynastic Egypt. Bast’s dual nature did not develop until later; it
wasn’t until well into the 5th dynasty that her metaphysical remit was expanded to include fertility,
domesticity, and motherly love. Initially, the wrathful aspect of Bast was the element appreciated by
the Egyptians. Bast and Sekhmet, the Eyes of Re, were responsible for slaying the water-serpent
Aphophis, a formless monstrosity that served the pantheon’s role of absolute evil and likely
represented Dagon in the minds of Atlantean descendants. However, Bast’s protection was not
without price. Her hunger for the blood of men was unquenchable, and the myth of lulling Bast to
sleep by mixing her feast of blood with red wine until she was “drunk on blood” was metaphorical.
Only by providing Bast its preferred prey could mankind divert its endless hunger from the small,
undernourishing lives of baser animals. It is in these stories that some kernels of truth about Bast
can be found amongst the clumsy fumbling of humans desperate to make meaning.

The Late Predynastic period was ideal for worship of Bast. The religion developed well before the
invention of writing. Literacy rates hovered below 1% for the entire Old Kingdom period. Worship
also eschewed concepts of representation: statues of god were god, temples were literal houses of the
gods. While Egyptians had spoken language, extreme hardship and separation by harsh desert made
feral humans more common, and the culture’s general resistance towards sign/signifier made minds
more receptive to the Nameless God. Furthermore, the Unnatural, while still rare, was more active
than in the modern age and had frequent impacts on Egyptian life, worship, and even statecraft…at
least compared to now. These elements, combined with what knowledge remained from Atlantis,
turned the worship of the Nameless God of Atlanteansinto the worship of Bast, a goddess capable
of combating the terrible threats preying upon the Egyptian people.

The initial Black Rites of Bast occurred in southern Egypt in the late predynastic age. They were a
codified regiment of religious child abuse. Priests of Bast, either raised in the temple as survivors of
its torture or recruited from the dregs of society, would enact the “mysteries” on orphans snatched
from raided tribes or sold into slavery. Children were kept pre-lingual and carefully monitored to
prolong their pain without reaching death. After a time, their animal pain called out to Bast, at which
point it grew it’s Teeth.

“Teeth” could be selected from anyone in the populace. The priests of the temple knew to anticipate
their arrival by interpreting the behavior of animals. Often, Teeth were warrior caste and found
themselves drawn to the temple, despite being forbidden by holy rites to enter. Fortuity,
happenstance, and undefinable instinct would find a way to draw the Teeth towards those that had
called. Upon arrival, those selected as the Teeth of God slaughtered the priests. The abusers, already
tainted by magic, happily laid down their lives as sacrifices to Bast’s hunger, using their blood to
“make drunk” their savior so she might refrain from consuming the world. The Teeth would remain,
transformed by the sacrifice into fetish organs for the Bast’s feasts on Earth. As a predatory force,
Bast sought to end life, and no life was sweeter to end than that which had touched immortality. The

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Teeth could now detect the taint of what humans would call “magic” on creatures and their fellow
man. The drive to kill those with the taint drove the cursed mad with Bast’s hunger, but it also
blessed them with its strength. The ministrations of the awoken god drove the Teeth on crusades
well past the point of human endurance, pushing them to battle against forces of chaos outside
human understanding. Both mankind and Bast benefited from this feeding frenzy. Survivors of the
Black Rites, freed as their tortuous priests were slain, communed with their savior god and found
themselves taking the place of their captors, creating a new set of Teeth by ensuring the agony of a
new generation of voiceless children. As they worked, the current crop of Teeth wore themselves
down to nubs against foes no human was meant to face.

Bast’s largest effort in the war on the Unnatural came during the 2nd Dynasty. The statue of Emperor
Kha’sekhemy erected in the South commemorates the civil war in which 47,000 rebels were killed.
This battle for the fate of Egypt was politically engineered by Nephren-Ka, priest and avatar of
Nyarlothethep. An entire force of Bast’s teeth were amongst the rebel army and lost. Egyptians of
the time might have regarded this as a failure of their god’s protection, though the Bast was
contented; it had feasted on eldritch energies otherwise free from the thanotopic entropy that
typically sustained it, and the lives of men lost in the process were garnish to the dish.

Behind the throne of Djoser and then as emperor himself, Nephren-Ka worked to sabotage his
enemy’s hold on the people of Earth. The sects of Bast were purged. The “mysteries” of the Black
Rites, already hidden from the public lest the outrage prevent the growth of new Teeth, were
reshaped to worship Nyarlothethep. Publicly, Bast’s image was rebranded into a god of domesticity,
revelry, and fertility. The blood-drunk lion once unleashed upon the enemies of Lemuria, Atlantis,
and Egypt became a house cat. Ironically, the simultaneous softening of Bast’s public image and the
secret perversion of her hidden rites spread worship of the goddess farther than ever before.

Worship of “the true Bast” (the Nameless God) continued. After years of reconstruction, new Teeth
were summoned by torturous rituals performed deep in wastes of the Sahara. Warriors of Bast allied
with Sneferu in the revolt that drove Nephren-Ka from power, and the new pharaoh of the 4th
Dynasty turned a blind eye to the cult’s depraved reproductive cycle in gratitude. This
back-and-forth conflict between Bast and Nyarlothethep defined much of Egyptian history even as
it corrupted any accurate record of Bast’s original role.

Starting with the Tcho-Tcho corrupted rule of Pepi II (whose 94 year rule began with the arrival of a
“dancing pygmy from the land of Yam”), Nyarlothethep’s worshipers continued to soften and
pervert the worship of Bast. The god’s seat was moved to the North in newly constructed Bubastis
so as to better monitor the corrupted version of the cult for signs of the old religion. The Memphite
theology of the Sabakah stone, which claimed Ptah “spoke” the world into existence, was
constructed as an alternate creation myth to emphasize the importance of language in an attempt to
destroy Bast worship. But, as Nitocris resurrected worship of the Black Pharaoh in the 6th Dynasty,
Teeth summoned by the cruel worship of the original Bast eventually found their way back into
battle. The infamous drowning of Nitocris’s subjects was actually an attack by the Teeth to feed Bast
their corrupt energies, and Nitocris’s self-entombment was less an act of suicide and more a tactic to
deprive Bast a feast. Teeth sabotaged attempts by Nyarlothethep’s worshippers to regain power again
during Nophru-Ka’s insurrection in the 14th Dynasty, and threat of their presence was thought to
deter the Black Pharaoh from aiding Akhenaten’s reign in the 18th Dynasty.

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Still, the damage had already been done to the legacy of Bast. Already incompatible with human
communication, disinformation by Nyarlothethep worshippers cycling in-and-out of power had
turned Bast into a god of revelry and households by the 5th century. Even records of the secret Black
Rites of Bast found in the Necronomicon and the archaeological work of Professor Enoch Bowen
unknowingly recount worship of The Crawling Chaos rather than the Nameless God that feasted on
its forms and worshipers. That which was once called Bast does nothing to correct this
misunderstanding, as the chattering of men lies beneath its concerns. It makes itself known in the
world only when dark happenstance stumbles into the ritual required to draw its vast predatory
attention towards Earth. Once there, it won’t hesitate to feast on what prey it can find, savoring the
unique flavor released by the death of things that were not meant to die. One day, mankind might
again confuse the hunts carried out by Bast’s proxies as protection when, in fact, they serve as
nothing but the Teeth of the God: hardened so that they might consume, of a killer but without
agency, worn, shattered, and regrown like the teeth of a shark, feeding a never-ending hunger.

Skills and Clues

Here’s a list of clues Agents can discover about their situation, but only after confronting the Go
Forth scenario, and preferably after Red Thoughts.

• Anthropology or Archeology at 50% or higher knows enough about Egyptian history to

find correlations between the current situation and the rumored Black Rites of Bast. From
there, successful rolls in either skill reveal that surviving accounts of the rites differ too much
to belong to the same cult, not to mention a goddess of the household like Bast.
• Either skill at 80% correlates Egyptian language difficulties, apocryphal occult texts
of Atlantis, and the influence of Nephren-Ka. Fromthere, successful rolls identify
historical attempts by Nephren-Ka’s followers to corrupt records of the true cult of
Bast. Anthropology finds that Bast combats Apophis as a metaphor for the
goddess’s battle against forces threatening mankind (on a failure) or to prey upon
that which she wishes to feed (on a success).
• Successful Archeology and a trip to the National Archives in Egypt discovers
pictograph depictions etched from a now destroyed tomb in southern Gebel Dosha
detailing the ritual child torture used to call Teeth into the world. The etchings were
considered imperialist fantasy and dismissed at the time because they bore no
resemblance to anything in the hieroglyphic record, but close contact with Bast is
enough to clue agents in that the etchings were actually evidence of sequential art
used as instruction to pre-lingual cultists of Bast.
• History at 60% accesses same information of the first bullet point. From there, successful
rolls discover odd occurrences in other cultures and times resembling the characteristics of
Bast. For each success, reveal a characteristic or a specific historical occurrence from “Fauna
Disruption.”
• Occult at 40% makes clear that the bizarre behavior of animals and children has at times
been associated with the goddess Bast. It also suggests that the Black Pharaoh and the
goddess Bast had a running war throughout the history of Egypt. Successful rolls after this
level indicate that the true cult of Bast was never recorded, leaving the work of Enoch
Bowen and Abdul Alhazrad full of disinformation and shoddy scholarship. Failure on this
roll conflates the worship of Bast entirely with the worship of Nyarlothetep as one of his
thousand faces.

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 • Unnatural reveals fundamental truths suggested by the history of Bast on Earth rather than
getting lost in specifics. Each success should earn the Agent an additional point of Unnatural
and the resulting permanent SAN loss.
• The first success suggests that physics is man’s paltry excuse for the universal hunger
of the cosmos.
• The second suggests that, while that hunger doesn’t have a name, it does have intent
and the ability to enforce death as an absolute.
• The third success reveals that Bast manipulates the Agents (or anyone chosen as the
Teeth of God) as metaphysical proxies in its hunt for those that wish to escape the
constant of death.
• The fourth success fully enlightens the Agent, making clear that reality itself is the
proxy by which Bast engineers the universe’s slow death so that it may feed. Life was
grown merely so that it might have teeth with which to eat itself.
• Science at 70% or Science: Physics at 50% make rolls possible — provided the Agent has
the access, abilities, and time to work with the Large Hadron Collider. Firsthand experience
with The Nameless God and skills at the minimum rating are required to suggest such
research might even be possible. Provided access to proper equipment, a successful roll
discovers “The Bast Particle” at the rate of one month for every margin of success. For
example, a failed roll of 66 would find nothing regarding The Nameless God after over five
years of research, while a successful roll at 24 would bear fruit in exactly two years of
research. The super-symmetry of the Bast Particle and its implications, if published, set the
field of quantum physics aflame for the foreseeable future, but it serves as no more than a
controversial hypothesis for those without experience with The Nameless God. However,
for those who have found physical evidence of the God’s impact on their lives, the discovery
is much more profound. The realization that the Agent’s life is all but pre-determined by a
malign intelligence, operating outside of time and manipulating events with levers smaller
than femtometers, causes 1/1d8 SAN loss in the discoverer. Continued study of the Bast
particle increases knowledge of the Unnatural and decreases the max SAN of the researcher
by one point for every week studied thereafter.
• Characters reaching 0 SAN as a result of studying the Bast particle lose all language
function, but they gain an ability never before enjoyed by mankind: by
reverse-engineering downwards from the level of their own cognition, they can
collapse the wave function of the Bast Particle and instantiate its mass on the
sub-atomic level using nothing but the power of thought. The afflicted researcher
does this compulsively to no immediately discernible effect, appearing to outsiders as
stuck in a catatonic stupor. However, the coalescence of the particles have a
secondary effect of creating the Lightest Kaluza-Klein Particle, a
previously-theoretical exotic radiation specific to the R-parity model of the UED
theorem. Unshielded and undetectable, enormous amounts of LKK radiation is
generated by the dark matter around the afflicted researcher, eventually killing the
patient and a wide swath of biological life around them with an invisible, traceless
radiation sickness.

Motifs
Handlers may want to use Bast as it is conceived in this book in other campaigns. What follows are
general guidelines for using Bast in God’s Teeth or any other Delta Green campaign.

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 It Hears Pain
As a thanophage, Bast is sustained by all death and dissolution. As a mountain erodes into hills,
stones, pebbles, sand, molecules, atoms, etc…every broken bond on every level of cohesion fuels it.
Complex living things are more nourishing because they exist only through the breakdown of other
matter. Their deaths come after a lifetime fatted by the death of others. Complex creatures often
evolve the ability to feel pain, and Bast has come to associate great amounts of pain with a feast.
Then again, as a thing that exists beneath space and time, it may have engineered life with such a
response for its convenience, or its ability to recognize the throes of agony may be accidental
because it is too fundamental to possess anything as lowly as consciousness. Who can know?

For Handlers: To those humans unlucky enough to perceive it, The Nameless God appears to
“hear pain.” Such instances are rare because the signature of agony is muddled by language. Thus,
only humans uninfected by the mutation of language draw attention; their suffering shares the
familiar flavor of pain found in the suffering of more developed species. This accounts for the scant
presence of Bast in human history. The child abuse and/or brain damage extreme enough to clean
language from the signal occurs infrequently and rarely goes noticed.

It Speaks Fatalism
When Bast causes odd behaviors in animals, humans can mistake this for possession. They might
extrapolate the god’s “takeover” of a creature to be a tactic, indicating that its plans have yet to be
achieved. These ideas are fables contrived by the desperate. Bast exerts control over creation at the
most basic level, and linear time holds little meaning in its quantum realm. When an animal moves in
a way that nature would not allow, it is because Bast has designed its nature from the quantum level on
up. When one of its children draws a message or says a name it can’t possibly have access to, it’s
because god has grown that human for the express purpose of communicating that message. Bast
thinks as little of time as it does language. Its plans have been, are, and will be forever bearing fruit.
Those finding themselves adrift in such massive currents could regard themselves as cursed by fate.
This is likely as close as a human ever gets to true understanding.

For Handlers: Whatever choices the Agents make, there is evidence that it was forever fated to be
so. If they view what they interpret to be a prediction, the choice they make to spite destiny ends up
being the choice they were going to make all along. Those tortured to call the god were always going
to be tortured, and those fated to save them were always going to succeed. If an Agent dies, it is at
Bast’s design. Evidence of this fatalistic universe should pile up throughout the campaign (see “A
Note on Synchronicity” p. XX), suggesting a world in which the campaign’s conclusion was written
before the Earth cooled. The game is played to figure out how the characters’ fates play out; the what
was decided before they were born.

Of course, this doesn’t destroy any player’s agency. They can still do whatever they would like with
their Agents. However, whatever they decide was actually destined to occur by Bast, even if it
appears to harm Bast. Trying to figure out to what end their entire existence was manipulated is the
horror. The illusion of freewill persists, even as a person realizes it is an illusion.

Apophenia
The signs of Bast can be jarring, but they are rarely obvious to anyone besides the Teeth.
“Apophenia'' is the tendency for humans to make meaningful connections between unrelated

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phenomena and the anxiety that results from that inability to separate conspiracy, pattern, and
paranoia. In addition to their terrible new senses, apophenia weighs on the minds of the Teeth. The
inexorable stacking of coincidences that only they can see drives the Teeth towards madness, or at
least what others call madness. In truth, when the Teeth succumb to the truth of predestination,
when they give up fruitless worrying about nonexistent freewill, this is their first moment of true
sanity.

For Handlers: The campaign is peppered with coincidences both large and small, and each Handler
is encouraged to come up with more besides. The happenstances are separated enough in time,
place, and audience that it is nearly impossible to convince others that there is a connection. Even if
Agents insist on investigating the phenomenon, their colleagues can only see random chance where
the Teeth taste providence. The lingering sensation of apophenia should haunt the Agents and their
players for the entire campaign. When both come to accept the immutable certainty of their every
future action, when they resign themselves to the ignorance of their time-bound consciousness,
that’s when they truly grow into becoming the Teeth of God.

Signifier Interference
Bast is always present and working in the world of men. It makes up a fundamental force of their
Universe, whether they know it or not. However, unlike other creatures, humanity lacks any ability to
commune with this literal force of nature. The inefficient cognitive loop of sign and signifier dilutes
perceptions so much that Bast becomes confabulated along with the rest of human reality. In the
sub-quantum realm, thoughts (if they could be called that) are acts. Perception is a physical
movement. What is the word “hydrogen” to a thing that can see every atom of it with an
omnipresent gaze? Conjure its particles from nothingness? Track the manipulations of that atom and
uncountable others to carry out inscrutable work on higher planes of existence? Bast remains
incompatible with language for the same reason a human cannot hear bacteria. Only when the mind
bypasses the dead-end loop of language and perceives the actual does Bast manifest. Once its
perception is rooted, those altered by language can perceive Bast if they are unfortunate enough to
become its tool.

For Handlers: Bast is not a thing in the world of the Agents. It has no referent. If evidence to its
existence can be found, no one has ever correlated the contents correctly. The only people with any
experience are the mute Children tortured into summoning it and doomed to grow into its cultists.
Even if they develop language later in life, recovered victims cut themselves off from the vast truth
they could never communicate with in the first place. For the Agents that become God’s Teeth in
this campaign, no one but their doomed comrades have any framework for what they are
experiencing. They can try to communicate what is happening to them and come up with any
explanation they deem adequate, but they can’t expect to find the answers in any library on Earth.

Apex Predator
“…And with strange aeons even death may die.”

For a creature consuming death, the demise of something otherwise outside the reach of mortality is
the choicest cut of meat. Bast consistently wages a low-level war against other Unnatural creatures.
Humanity’s simplistic thinking sometimes translates this information into “the enemy of my enemy
is my friend” cliche. In truth, there exist ecosystems, politics, and scientific laws above and below
human attention which mankind can never hope to understand or resist. Bast is one of those forces.

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The propensity for its fated operatives to find and combat other Unnatural threats is a function of
design, not chance. All deaths nourish it, but it must use its Teeth to pursue those who have escaped
its universal grasp.

For Handlers: Children that prayed to the Nameless grow up either desiring to feed their own lives
to it, find other godlike creatures like it, or create more mute sufferers to call it down. The Agents
chosen to serve as Teeth should, as the campaign wears on, stop seeing their continual interaction
with the Unnatural as a function of their job and start regarding it for what it is: an inescapable
hijacking of destiny, cursing them to face the rarest and most horrible things humanity has ever
encountered. The gods do not work for Delta Green; all existence works for Bast.

Atavism
The human mind can’t fathom an entity that is equally nourished by eroding stone, exploding stars,
and the extinction of species. Even using our most advanced theoretical models, Bast has no form
we can grasp. Only when freed from language can one understand the predatory force underlying
our dimension, but this knowledge is only attainable by those who become what they seek to perceive.
Words have led us astray from the truth: all life serves Bast. Organic needs for constant
consumption sustains the god’s increasing hunger for chaos. Procreation expands the plague of
biology. Death fulfills the only purpose life ever had.

In the brains of mutated primates, incomplete analogy must suffice to conceptualize this absolute,
total hunger. The ancestral fears of the jungle predators serve as the closest metaphor the human
mind can grasp when confronted by Bast. Thus, we confuse its abilities to alter causality at the
quantum level as a special penchant for possessing animal life. We invent zoomorphic gods with the
heads of lions, struggling with the knowledge that all creatures are born to be hunted. We recall long
buried genetic memories of primal savagery because it is as close as our species has ever come to
grasping the truth.

For Handlers: Disturbing images and occurrences of animal savagery trace the wake of Bast. They
may be interventions sent by the force itself, meant to work inscrutable whims on its chosen Teeth.
It could just be that the minds of the affected fixate on such imagery in a desperate grasp for
conceptual relationships. Both may be true. Regardless, haunting animal behavior and imagery serves
as the central motif of a Bast campaign.

Teething
Gods are responsible for the pain that causes people to seek relief through belief in those same gods,
just as they are responsible for any salvation that comes as a result. The person suffering rarely cares
about such hypocrisy as long as the pain stops. Bast operates no differently. When it “hears” the
prayer of pain from its mute children, relief comesin the form of its chosen avatars. These are the
Teeth.

To the Children of Bast, the arrival of their saviorsis a vindication of the only faith their suffering
allowed them to believe in: faith in a bigger predator; faith in revenge; faith in a hateful cosmos
whose focus has been directed elsewhere for once. The appearance of the Teeth is likely to be the
most gratifying and formative experience in their lives, and their pre-lingual minds have a direct line
to the one being they have to thank for it. For the Teeth, the “rescue” can take any number of

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forms. It can be part of a job, a religious ritual, or seeming happenstance. However, as they fall
deeper under the control of Bast, they soon find that their service is fated, involuntary, and life-long.

For Handlers: Agents that become Teeth may start off thinking they are in control. They might
even continue under the delusion that they’re fighting a crusade against darkness with the help of a
supernatural benefactor. In reality, they serve as no more than the avatars of Bast’s hunger, giving up
their lives to shovel death into its unquenchable maw.

The Curse
Cultures in the past sometimes deluded themselves into believing Bast was some benevolent,
supernatural pet sent to assist humanity’s warriors. As the Handler, you are in charge of shaping the
perceptions of your Agents, and you should never allow them to believe this comforting lie for long.
They are not superheroes. They are the damned.

This doesn’t mean that being chosen as one of God’s Teeth is without power. If the Handlers so
choose, they can give the unfortunate Agents additional tools (see “Optional: Powers of the Teeth”
p. XX). However, these powers make for more effective Agents in the same way suicide bombers
grow more effective with proximity to the target. The only assistance the Teeth receive is
acceleration towards a more spectacular end. They are on a forced death march from the moment
they are chosen, out to feed their god as much death as possible before they are swallowed in kind.
The more Agents indulge in Bast’s “assistance,” the faster their lives degrade. As they edge closer to
madness, the truth becomes more apparent. The power to fight its battles grows as the ability to
resist its urges weakens.

Outsiders might view the Teeth as tireless crusaders, but those living the nightmare won’t be able to
escape the dire truth of their condition. For the truly successful Teeth, even observers won’t be able
to maintain the illusion forever. Anyone that remains too long on the hunt starts to look less like
Delta Green’s operative and more like its mission.

Powers of the Teeth

Being chosen by Bast can confer certain powers to the Teeth of God. These powers are optional and
included at the discretion of the Handler. While not necessary to complete the campaign, the Powers
of the Teeth emphasize the terrible curse that comes with becoming Bast’s proxy. They also lend a
continuity of theme if the Handler is usingGod’s Teeth to frame a monster-of-the-week Delta Green
campaign.

Handler’s should note that the point of these abilities isn’t to help anyone. They exist to tempt Agents
with what they might interpret as weapons in Delta Green’s war; in reality, they merely degrade their
fragile human minds all the faster. The powers are the devil’s tools. They won’t ever tear down the
devil’s house, but they might convince someone to die trying.

1. Scent
At any point after the first scenario, the Handler can call for a 1/1D4 SAN test when the Teeth
encounter new people or places associated with the mythos. In later games, Agents may even request
to make this test. Either way, the Handler should roll the dice for the player in secret.

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If the SAN test succeeds, the Handler lets the Agent know if the target person or environment has
encountered any “mythos” magic or creatures (Deep Ones, Lligor, Mi-Go… anything that might be
considered Unnatural). The player only gets to know that the person or environment encountered
something; there’s nothing more specific than that. The information manifests as a shifting, meaty
smell that alternates between appetizing and nauseating: rancid BBQ, blood pudding, seafood
markets, burnt hair, etc. There is no indication to Agents experiencing the scent as to what this ghost
smell indicates, and no humans unaffected by Bast can detect it. If the Agent manages to figure out
what the smell means, the new sense in no way distinguishes between the victims, practitioners, and
unknowing bystanders. A Tcho-tcho sorcerer triggers the reflex the same as one of their victims.
Even experienced Delta Green Agents carry the taint.

After the SAN test, the smell grows more and more powerful if the Agent remains in the presence
of the source, inexorably drawing the Agent’s mind towards increasingly bloody impulses. Additional
SAN checks may be required if the Agent remains in the presence of “prey” without taking violent
action. After removing oneself from the situation or succeeding a SAN check, the smell and urges
subside. The psychic pain can also be alleviated by murdering the source of the offending smell.
Increasing SAN loss may lead to even more drastic effects, and broken agents may be compelled to
ingest their victims so Bast can examine their matter through assimilation into other cells.

If the SAN check fails and the Agent has never experienced the Scent before, nothing happens.

If the SAN check fails and the Agent has succeeded in detecting the scent at least once before, the
Handler should describe the target as if they are covered in the taint…whether they are or not. This
is a false positive for the unfamiliar sensations caused by interaction with Bast. The reasons false
positives occur so often is because the sensation of smell isn’t real in the first place; it is the human
mind desperately constructing a facsimile sensation to cope with alien influence. Memory of this
analogous smell is indiscernible from present experience, so those who have tasted the Scent risk
faulty pattern recognition. Enduring the choking, mouth-watering atmosphere for a moment is the
only way to be sure, as no additional SAN checks are made in the presence of a false positive.
However, SAN checks can be called against Helplessness, such as if the Agent has the sudden,
mouth-watering urge to tear into a relative due to a scent “flashback.”

Success on the Scent’s SAN test is the only outcome in which someone or something may test
“negative” for the taint. If the test succeeds and no Scent emanates from the target, it hasn’t had any
encounter with higher dimensional beings or their arts.

The Handler should never explain how the Scent power works. Let Agents come up with their own
explanations and call for their own SAN tests if they feel it will help them.

2. Call
Agents that become somewhat aware of their new role as Teeth might seek to communicate with
their “patron.” These Agents may ask questions for the cost of a 0/1D4 SAN roll. On a success, the
veneer of reality holds and they receive no guidance. In the event of failure, the Handler may answer
in the form of a vision.

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Imagine if you asked a professor in another room to help you solve a complex math equation and
the only way the teacher could convey their answer was by sending over clips from nature
documentaries with the sound cut out: that’s what it is like trying to get an answer from Bast. Asking
about the cult of Nyarlothetep might be answered with the Agent feeling the same sensation a dog
feels when its claws scrabble for purchase on linoleum. Asking about the Lligor transports the Agent
to the first person view of a crocodile stalking a wildebeest at a river’s edge. Asking about where
your spouse was last night sees the Agent transfixed by the image of a honey badger covered in bees.
The Handler can try to engineer some poetic symbolism into the images, but the answers should be
largely inscrutable.

On a fumble, the Agent loses 1d10 SAN and Bast has discovered, through eons of experimentation, a
statistical ensemble and sequence of subatomic particle manipulations specific to the Agent’s brain
that communicates something akin to the truth of its nature. This wide scale manipulation of the
molecules in the mind is imprecise, causing the Agent physical side-effects such as nosebleeds,
dysphagia, seizures, and other symptoms of internal trauma. Handlers should adjust the physical
symptoms and any resultant HP loss to match the severity of the SAN loss. As a result of an Agent
critically failing to focus on the veil between realities, he or she gets a vision from the
“Understanding Bast” chapter reserved for Handlers (p.XX). The Agent witnesses a universe made
of a single organism, dying and racing to escape. They “see” the dark matter within Bast’s unfolding
sophon circuits reside. They witness the battle of Emperor Kha’sekhemy against the hellish
monsters summoned by Nephran-Ka from the eyes of 47,000 soldiers simultaneously. They feel a
hunger vast enough to consume a universe, a chain around the neck that has choked for eons. In
addition to the vision, the Agent gets a point of Unnatural for the trouble.

Regardless of what information the Handler chooses to reveal, the results are mind-rending and
physically painful, straining and snapping the limits of human sensory perception. While hearing the
Call is the only surefire way to get “the scoop” on Bast, the information should be largely without
context and costly to obtain.

3. Hunt
Upon receiving damage that would reduce an Agent to 2 or less HP, the attention of Bast may drive
its Teeth to feats of superhuman endurance. There are limits to this power. It cannot stop a death caused
by the lethality rating of a weapon. Bast eats the death of all things, and having one of its avatarsatomized
by a landmine or ripped asunder a Dark Young tastes just fine. Furthermore, this power may only be
used by an Agent once. The human form is frail and can only accept so much assistance.

Aside from the aforementioned limitations, receiving damage that would render the Agent
unconscious or dead, an Agent chosen as God’s Teeth can make a 0/1d10 SAN check. On a success,
they succumb as normal. On a failure, they remain in the fight with 3 HP…against all reason. Teeth
can keep fighting with gaping chest wounds, disembowelment, missing limbs, and other injuries that
anatomy would suggest impossible. Bystanders may eventually explain away the feat as adrenaline
and the fog of war, but seeing a person up and moving after sustaining such terrible damage causes
1/1D6 SAN check…and that’s after whatever Helplessness/Violence checks that came from
witnessing the attack that caused the damage.

The affected Agent has no superhuman strength or abilities besides the ability to stay upright. Bast
doesn’t want them healthy; it wants more kills before the tool loses its sharpness. Teeth driven by

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this supernatural force instantly suffer a 1D10 SAN loss and insane insight into the nature of their
condition (Agent’s Handbook p. 69 and or “Call” p. XX), permanently reducing SAN. If a
temporary insanity is suffered, the Agent must select Struggle, entering into homicidal rage on the
nearest creature suffering the taint of the Unnatural. This might be the enemy that harmed the
Agent, but it could just as easily be a fellow Agent or innocent victim. Any damage taken in this state
occurs normally, meaning that the likely effect of the interventions is dying, reviving, causing a panic,
and dying again.

If the Agent somehow survives this jolt of supernaturalpower, the effect ends the second the
Unnatural threat is eliminated or escapes. Agents that would have been incapacitated instantly fall
unconscious. If the injury would have killed the Agent, trained personnel have one chance to make a
First Aid or Medicine check to stabilize the patient before they succumb to the laws of biology and
die. If they live, healing occurs normally. The Agent also suffers a permanent injury (Agent’s
Handbook p. 55) and suffers amnesia regarding the battle. Actively trying to remember anything
about the event causes the survivor 1/1D4 SAN loss. The only thing that can be recalled is a
terrible, bloodthirsty euphoria the likes of which the person has never experienced before.

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 Campaign Logistics
With the history and form of Bast established, let’s turn to the task at hand. God’s Teeth is a horror
RPG campaign. How do I get my players started? What should we expect? How do we make a story
in line with Delta Green’s brand of terror? This section focuses on the overarching fundamentals
Handler’s should know before starting the scenarios.

Parallel Structures
The structure of God’s Teeth traces the evolution of Delta Green during the early years of the 21st
century. The first scenario takes place before the official Program, when most of the characters
aren’t even full Agents of the conspiracy. The vignettes of the second scenario cover the years
following, as Agents are recruited into the official Program and find a place in the post-9/11 security
state. Finally, the last scenario forces the Agents to trace the consequences of their earlier actions,
confronting the cost of their intervention, suffering encounters with impossible foes, and
succumbing to the force they come to realize cursed them on that fateful night. The first scenario
represents a timeline of initial choices and mistakes, whereas the back 2/3rds deals with the
consequences of those choices decades later.

As a group, the Agents transition from Outlaws to the Program. Then, depending on how well they
adapt to their new purpose, they may find themselves transitioning out of Delta Green entirely, forced
to follow the whims of a harsher master than they ever imagined. In the process, the group ends up
working clean up for a number of threats from the old days as Delta Green forges forward into a
new, terrifying millennium. Thus, the campaign is also paired across versions of Delta Green as an
organization, forcing characters to suffer under the flaws of both systems.

Between the second and third scenarios of this book, the proclivities of Bast make it possible for
Handlers to accommodate one-shot, “monster-of-the-week” scenarios within the framework of
God’s Teeth. With Bast’s hunger and curiosity driving the very fates of the characters, it’s possible that
sheer “coincidence” moves the Agents into the paths of other Unnatural entities. They could
encounter them in their pursuit of the broken children from Cornucopia House, running into the
disastrous experiments of young adults desperately trying to reconnect to the power that once saved
them and calling up what cannot be put down. Or they could be assigned to each new case through
impossible bad luck, victims of a cosmic butterfly effect that started with Bast.

In short, God’s Teeth can be a three-session campaign that takes place over twenty years —
exclusively focused on the terrifying fallout of compassion — or it can be a tripod framework upon
which to support a campaign made of disparate mythos elements. It can tell a self-contained tragedy
of good intentions gone awry, or it can provide a narrative explanation for throwing the same group
of doomed characters at the rarest, most horrifying phenomena the Handler can think up.

Character Creation
What kind of characters should the players create?

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In general, whatever they want. The Agents in God’s Teeth come together at the behest of an alien
god unconcerned about ideas of party balance. The events of the game and organization can be
trusted to bring the most disparate Agents together. Handlers should still allow players a peak
behind the curtain to ensure everyone enjoys playing their characters for the entire campaign…or
however long they survive.

• Content Warning: First and foremost, make sure everyone at the table understands that the
story contains disturbing content and remains safe during play.
• Long Haul: The events of God’s Teeth span nearly two decades. Characters that make it to
the end are significantly older when the campaign finishes. In fact, most scenarios are a
decade or more removed from the initial chapter. A character that starts the campaign in her
sixties should be made by a player okay with piloting a geriatric for the majority of the
campaign.
• Beltway Folk: The inciting incident occurs in Maryland. The preponderance of government
agencies, academic institutions, and military institutions located in that area make almost any
DG character concept fair game. It eventually becomes apparent that the Agents were called
together by a higher power, but the initial reason for their gathering is proximity to this
mission area. There is no problem if someone wants to play a scientist working out of the
CDC’s offices in Atlanta, but for the purposes of the campaign, they need a reason to travel
to Maryland for the first scenario.
• One Agent: At the start of the game, only one member of the team is a “member” of Delta
Green. Someone can volunteer for this role, or the group can roll a die and decide randomly.
The rest start as Friendlies with very limited contact or knowledge about what the
organization actually does. They come together in the first scenario out of desperation. They
aren’t the best people for the job; they’re the only people available.
• No Mandate: The single Agent that acts as team leader is not in charge. DG at the time of
the first scenario has no command structure that can be enforced on largely-clueless
Friendlies. As the campaign moves forward, it quickly becomes apparent that no one has
much control over anything, so don’t worry about getting “bossed around” by characters
with a higher rank. All characters become Agents in the Program with equal standing after
the first scenario.
• Green Troops: With the exception of the person playing the Agent, character contact with
the Unnatural should be minimal. Characters can have enough experience to know there is
more to the world than the news lets on, but the campaign is meant to turn the group into
grizzled veterans. They know enough to be useful to DG (e.g. I once ran a forensic audit on
a weird religious organization at the behest of a secretive agency) but not so useful as to be
part of DG (e.g. I once conducted an off-the-books raid on cannibal cult after we got tipped
by some accountant).

What if a Character Dies?

If the characters are specially chosen by Bast, what happens when one of them dies?

Then they die. As they were always fated to die.

Nothing about being chosen as God’s Teeth protects the characters. Quite the opposite, in fact. If a
character passes away or goes mad, play out the consequences normally. The Handler has two ways
to get the player back into the game.

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• Teething: Bast selected one before; it can select the replacement. Governmental paperwork
mix-ups, chance encounters, poor timing — the Handler can conspire with every Deus Ex
Machina imaginable to bring a replacement into the group. Bast holds sway over causality
itself. If someone else is meant to join the Teeth, it will happen. The Handler’s only difficulty
is making the addition seem inevitable.
• Oversight: After a short time in operation, it becomes apparent to the Program that
something is wrong with the Agents involved in God’s Teeth. Their penchant for encountering
Unnatural threats passes statistically improbability and strays into the realm of outright
suspicion, but the organization can’t afford to give up a working group that’s having good
effect on target. They can, however, monitor the freaks. Placing a spy in the group is a good
motivation to get a replacement character integrated. It also makes for good drama as the
veteran Agents must decide how much of their “condition” to share with the newcomer.

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