Projection in Delta Green

One thing I love about Delta Green is the bond mechanic.  In purely mechanical terms, agents have bonds with loved ones, which can be used as ablative sanity armour - when you lose sanity, you can choose to project onto a bond, and reduce the sanity loss at the expense of reducing your connection with that person.

True Detective series 1 illustrates this pretty well.  At the start of the show, in 1995, Hart has a wife and children, while Cohle has nobody.  By 2012, Hart has all but destroyed his relationship with his family, but is still pretty much keeping it together, while Cohle, with no bonds to project onto, has gone entirely off the rails.

We've just finished playing the superb Delta Green adventure Viscid, and when I fumbled a sanity roll that I really didn't want to fumble, I decided it was time for a bit of bond projection.  I didn't have much time to think about the implications of it at the time, but after a bit of thought it's all making sense to me.

Minor spoilers for Viscid below.

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Emily had never stopped loving John.

Their marriage hadn't worked out; it had been a struggle even before the incident and impossible afterwards.  Divorce had been a relief.  But it turned out that without the pressure of being his wife, it was easy to be his friend.

She didn't think about her home life while working.  Even her regular work put her in contact with the worst of humanity, and then there were the special jobs.  Like this one, which had already claimed the lives of two of the team.

And then that...thing, that creature of flesh and slime that somehow still had enough brain to remember a name and enough mouth to call it out, came crawling into the house.  She'd kept it together before, out by the trailer, determined not to embarrass herself in front of Matt and Glenn.  But this time, knowing what - knowing who - this time she couldn't.  And as she ran she thought of John.

There was nothing to be afraid of, she told herself, even as she went stumbling out of the house and into the garden.  Just a man, scared and confused, looking for his wife.  Just like John had called out for her in the hospital.  And then Glenn was there to unpeel her fingers from the gas can that had somehow seemed so vital to hold onto, and once she knew that the creature was gone for good she started feeling a little better.

But the trouble was, now she'd made the association between that creature and John, she couldn't forget it.  Every time she saw him, every time she spoke to him, every time she so much as thought of him, it was there.  In her nightmares it was her name that the creature called out, and John's voice with which it spoke.

Emily still loved John.  But, she couldn't help wondering, for how much longer?