[quote=@Keksalot]
[@Leidenschaft]
What about kinda-paranormal-but-not-exactly-magical characters? For example, a parapsychic successful result of the MK-ULTRA program who was endowed with mild reality-adjusting capabilities stemming from a particularly inspired state of mind which must be induced via meditation and LSD? A terribly mentally shaken person plagued by flashbacks from pasts that have never been and memories of places he never visited, gone rogue and hunted across the globe for the contents of his head, grasping for any straw that could keep him from falling into the abyss.

Or do we have to be like [i]completely[/i] mundane guys mandatorily fully out of their depth at the start of the game?
[/quote]

Short answer is yes. The characters at the beginning of the RP are supposed to be "level 1" per se. At most, they've had brushes with the paranormal, extraterrestrial, HPL mythos. All of these proposed characters have already lived out their most interesting stories, so it'd be a little redundant and almost silly to have Russian KGB lich be brought into a boardroom for Steve Foster to look at and the higher-ups to be kind of suckering the player into the mission, as is implied by their secrecy about it.

Steve Foster wants talented professionals as I said, yes, but he also wants blank slates. He's recruiting our characters into Delta Green, and considering this mission as their field test. Characters can embody this "blank slate" concept, or, as far as I'm willing to let people go, be as far along the sane-insane scale as Rustin Cohle of True Detective. That is, the character knows that there is more to the world because of what he's seen/thought he saw, but isn't babbling and scrawling glyphs on his cell wall with his own excrement.

Sorry if that puts you off.