Casting Shadows

We have reached the third installment of this series on increasing our familiarity and flexibility with game mechanisms by watching and assessing appropriate media while thinking of them in terms of those mechanisms. In particular, this series of posts, however many it turns out to be, is looking at the cold war spy drama called The Sandbaggers and two Cthulhu Mythos covert action roleplaying games: Delta Green and World War Cthulhu. I still haven’t decided if this series will go the distance of looking at all twenty episodes individually, but even if I had and had decided against that, this particular episode needs its own post regardless. Third in the series, Is Your Journey Really Necessary? takes a deep and unflinching look at who the Sandbaggers really are as people who have dedicated their lives to the secret service. The nobility and challenge of their commitment shown in the first and second episodes is revealed to be only part of the picture. It is a picture which in full view might cause many to flinch away.

BURNSIDE: (I did it) to avoid giving the FCO and Number Ten the excuse they need to tie my other hand behind my back.
‘C’: Could you have got him out?
BURNSIDE: No, he was wounded, and the border guards were waiting for him.
‘C’: Well… put yourself in my position. I have been here, what… four months? And I am not a professional Intelligence Officer. My Deputy Chief is on leave, and my Operations Director has mounted an illegal and highly sensitive operation. Give me one good reason why I should not have him out of the service by lunch time.
BURNSIDE: I did what I felt necessary, Sir.
‘C’: I don’t think you understand. I am giving you an opportunity to save your career.
 BURNSIDE: Very well. I don’t think as yet you have come to grips with the realities of this place.
‘C’: You can speak frankly…
BURNSIDE: I mounted that operation as a favor to the CIA, and in return I will get ten times as many favors around the world. And I need those favors, because our beloved government won’t give us the funds to function properly on our own – and at the same time, the government’s restrictions are getting tighter and tighter.
…
‘C’: You’ve assassinated a soviet general, on foreign soil, at the request of a third country, and had your own agent killed thereafter.
BURNSIDE: The end will more than justify the means.
‘C’: Even with the death of Landy?
BURNSIDE: That’s on my conscience, not the government’s.

Burnside with the Chief of SIS, keeping his job despite himself

Episode 3: Is your journey really necessary?

After watching this episode, I am sure more than a few viewers found themselves wondering if Burnside has a conscience at all – and if he did, if it would interfere with the manner in which he does the job and the demands it makes of him.

Over the course of the episode and not much more than two days and two nights, the complement of Sandbaggers is reduced from 3 to 1, Burnside’s former father-in-law deftly maneuvers the special section into securing blackmail against a political opponent, and Burnside himself breaks the rules of separation between MI5 and his department to illegally investigate and then intimidate a young woman he perceives as a direct threat to his special section into keeping her distance from one of his sandbaggers.

To take a little time for a little context, the Special Section has a brief to maintain 4 sandabaggers, but is already under a ‘temporary manning standard’ which prevents replacements of service members lost from the section, for any reason. In the time period of the show, government austerity programs in essential but potentially unpopular departments were seen as being as politically expedient as it is at the time of writing.

Burnside, in this context, is looking at a lengthy failed period of recruitment for Sandbagger 4 by his predecessor due to a lack of qualified candidates. He got lucky recruiting the new Sandbagger 3, but at the time of his own promotion to Director of Operations, leaving the section still understaffed. Now, events are conspiring like tumbling dominos to strip him of two of his three agents in one go. With little hope of recruiting in the next year or perhaps longer, Burnside has tough decisions to make. With only 1 sandbagger, the effectiveness of his directorate will crumble, their value to the CIA will be lost, and given the government he serves disdain for covert operations, the writing would be on the wall to get rid of the section altogether.

Does this justify the lengths he goes to to keep his losses to one sandbagger, not two?

Will the role of fate in this episode serve him a wake-up call like the one which turned him away from alcohol?

How do we as viewers respond to Burnside’s seeming inhumanity, and how would it seem to us were we to play such a character?

Delta Green

What mechanisms does this game offer us to motivate, challenge, or add consequence to actions such as these?

One thing we could consider is the service itself, in particular the specific alignment of the important personalities within it, as a Bond for Burnside.

The initial Bond would have been formed through camaraderie and the chain of command during his stellar career first as a marine and then as a sandbagger. This sort of bond in the game is created at a lesser value than more personal ones, but they are important – and at a certain point they are likely the only bonds left to a character.

In Burnside’s case, we meet him as a man who has a tight personal Bond with his former father-in-law. We might also assess that his Bond with Cain, Sandbagger 1, is personal as is his relationship with Ross at the CIA.  It is these bonds which are most often put at risk or keep Burnside from losing it. They are much more robust and repairable than the ones which are tested in this episode.

Burnside is failing to earn the trust of the new C, a politician by training and experience. Worse, he has long ago earned a cautionary distance and disapproval from his immediate supervisor, the Deputy Chief. He is feared rather than loved by the crew manning the ops room, and he is so often balked in what he considers to be understandable requests for essential operations, that he has taken to circumventing the rules of the service as standard practice.

He claims one of the three deaths in this episode, but truly is far less to blame for the one he accepts and totally responsible for the ones he disavows.

If the extent of what Burnside did in this episode were to come out fully, he would be facing incredible repercussions to liberty and psyche – and he knows it.

He will keep on doing it.

Even if it kills him.

World War Cthulhu: Cold War

What mechanisms does this game offer us for this situation?

We might approach this as an exploration of past trauma and how its consequences play out in such a demanding environment.

In the case of defining Burnside’s past experience, World War Cthulhu paints a picture of the strictness and formality of a military structure with its briefings and debriefings and its clear plans and objectives can help provide a framework for retaining or at least recovering Sanity. In addition, the influence of N’s network, Section 46, has means at its disposal to help alleviate or bury some of the worse traumas through hypnosis and other therapies.

What are the effects of such experiences on the modern life of Burnside?

In times of stress, where would he naturally turn? When the well-oiled machinery of procedure and duty begin to erode not because of enemy action or the need for quicker reaction but because of personal political agendas and ill-informed penny-pinching, what sort of reaction would bubble to the surface? In the grey ambiguity of the Cold War where the soldier’s best weapons might be a lie and a false smile, what sort of self-loathing might take root in a marine turned covert operative?

Again and again, despite strong signals to leave a service no longer interested in or properly valuing his contributions and capabilities, Burnside would continue to seek the certainty, the assurance, and the ability to strike a blow or stage a defence of the one thing he really knows how to love – his country… or at least, the idea of his country and the freedoms it represents.

In the absence of a strong leadership to provide what should be provided, Burnside would have no choice but to take on that duty himself, providing it for those under him and shielding them from the wrath which might fall from above because of that.

The pressure mounts.

The days pass.

The clock ticks.

What explosion awaits?