A recent thread on yog-sothoth.com inspired me to do a little bit of Internet necromancy and try to find the earliest mention by Pagan Publishing about Our Darkest Hour.

From: owner-dgrpg@delta-green.com on behalf of PaganArt@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 15, 2000 6:15 PM
To: dgrpg@delta-green.com
Subject: Re: DG: Books?

The following books are ready for printing:

DG Eyes Only 3 Project Rainbow: Which is going to press on friday.

DG: Dark Theaters trade paperback: This revised edition will be available soon, most likely by the end of next month.

The following books are in production:

Delta Green: From an Dim and Ultimate Thule: A WWII era Delta Green novel dealing with the Great Race, Deep Ones and other nastiness. This should go to press some time the in the forseeable future, maybe within the next three months...

There are several DG: Eyes Only volumes in the works including:

Agents, Friendlies and Bronsons: 41+ Fully detailed NPCs for any Delta Green campaign.

Black Cod Island: An ancient Deep One colony located in southern Alaska still survives today, despite an attempt by the Haida indians of the northwest to stomp out the alien threat in the 1730's.

As far as big books go, the next planned biggie which is already underway is

Delta Green: Our Darkest Hour, a sourcebook for playing DG during WWII. Most likely it will make Countdown look like a slim little volume.

Cult of Transcendence is in the middle of its endless rewrite as we speak, no definite idea on when (or if) it will ever be released.

Other plans include a large campaign (modern day) for DG and more fiction.

Suggestions are welcome.

Dennis Detwiller.
Art Director/Co-Creator of Delta Green/Silly Rabbit
Pagan Publishing

But that's not the earliest mention of Our Darkest Hour, as there are posts as early as April 2000 mentioning the product. I purchased Delta Green sometime after August 1997, when I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I almost immediately got the idea for running a WWII campaign with it. I had created a website (two actually: one for WWII Delta Green, the other for Delta Green set before the Second World War), but I shuttered it when Dennis Detwiller announced on the DGML that Our Darkest Hour was in production... and that announcement was not in this email above.

That means that ODH has been announced for at least 11 years, and maybe even as long as 13 years. That's about the time it took the actual war to be fought twice over. All I can say is that both Scott Glancy and Shane Ivey have recently expressed strong interest in getting the book done, and not in the long-term but in the immediate future. I have delivered my own (very) rough draft of the OSS/Delta Green chapter, and have been working on similar drafts for the other "organization" chapters. Still, more definitely needs to be done, at least on my end.

The To-Do List...

... is pretty freaking huge. Here's what's on the docket:

1) Start my diet. I started exercising today, but I need to get to eating right.

2) Figure out what I'm going to run for KublaCon. Right now, the choices I'm either most interested or are the deepest in terms of pre-production are:

• Golden Gate (Call of Cthulhu) - a noir game of corrupt cops set around the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, involving a ritual murder aboard a Key System train passing over the Bay Bridge near Treasure Island.
• Götterdämmerung (Call of Cthulhu/Delta Green) - As Berlin falls to the Soviets, the Karotechia attempts to preserve the Third Reich through the Dreamlands, and an OSS/Delta Green team is sent in to stop them.
• Safety Not Guaranteed (Call of Cthulhu) - "WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 322, Oakview, CA 93022. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before."
• To Live and Die in the Magic Kingdom (Don't Rest Your Head, or Call of Cthulhu) - A degenerate group of Disney character impersonators must survive when the Magic Kingdom becomes a very bad place.

3) Begin working on Our Darkest Hour again.

• Rewrite the rough draft of the OSS/Delta Green chapter that I submitted last year.
• Organize my notes so I can create rough drafts for the Karotechia, Black Dragon Society, SMERSH, and PISCES chapters (in that order).
• Read my half-finished copy of The Last Hero, a biography of Wild Bill Donovan by Anthony Cave Brown (so I can read the new biography of Donovan that just came out).
  

4) Begin working on something for P Division (the section of the Office of Naval Intelligence that executed the raid on Innsmouth and would turn into Delta Green during the Second World War). I talked about The Black Chamber (a once-proposed book by Chaosium on espionage in the '20s for Call of Cthulhu) with Charlie Krank during his seminar at DunDraCon, and Ken Hite might be working on something like this for Trail of Cthulhu. I'd like to get something substantial together by KublaCon to show both of them (assuming Hite will be at KC this year).

5) Edit my version of the Vietnam scenario based on the disastrous Cambodian operation that resulted in the deactivation of Delta Green in 1970. I promised the files on this for a gamer buddy by the next Endgame Minicon, and I'm thinking that I'd like to run it again myself to playtest some new combat optional rules.

Writing all that down made it feel much less huge. I should do this more often.