Review: Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook

This is a followup to my review of The Laundry RPG.

The Laundry Files: Agent's Handbook is a sort of player's guide to The Laundry. It adds a ton of options and bells and whistles to player characters in The Laundryverse and, by extension, Laundry games overall. Like the core rulebook, it's well-written and put together and chock full of good information.

Pretty much every base is covered by the additions: new character professions, training courses, additional information on how to navigate the Laundry bureaucracy, expanded weapon and equipment lists, and guidelines for playing atypical Laundry characters ranging from non-humans to clueless civilians, and character templates. The equipment lists I kind of glazed over (as I typically do) - they appear complete, and have a couple of cool little widgets, a bunch of firearms that should satisfy gun-bunnies, but their inclusion or lack thereof isn't a selling point for me.

The biggest appeal for me in this book is the first chapter: Tradecraft. This is something that I was chomping at the bit for when I finished the main rulebook. This is really, really good stuff that covers everything from how to keep an identity, gather information, recruit informants and agents, various ways of signalling and passing messages (with a great reason why the Laundry sticks to older methods such as dead drops), and field operations such as tailing, evasion, surveillance, etc. The section incorporates the occult elements and tactics The Laundry employs seamless with the time-honored traditions of spycraft.

My second favorite chapter is Black Budget, Red Tape which adds some more detail to navigating the bureaucracy surrounding The Laundry. There are even Bureaucracy Random Encounters to drop on unsuspecting players. They are intended to make things a little livelier (especially when failing the check on one of them requires that you return to the office to fix it).

The new training courses hit the mark with the kind of corporate training that I've seen (such as "Achieving More With Less", "Aspiring to Senior Civil Service" and "Managing Changelings") plus military training courses and (of course) occult courses such as "Eschatological Countermeasures" and "Occulinux Installation and Use." There is also a small selection of Special Instructor Courses, dealing with specific oaths, rites, and books - these are courses you can sign up for (they're assigned) and the cost doesn't come out of your departmental budget. They of course cost SAN instead.

The chapter on Weird Characters is one of the ones least likely by me to get any use, but it is nice to have a "template" to put over an existing character if you need to turn them into a Gorgon or a Residual Human Resource (aka zombie, but HR doesn't want us to use that term anymore - it's insensitive). Parallel Dimensional Refugee characters are interesting - basically they're people who have slipped through from a similar dimension. Fringe meets the Laundry makes Walter Bishop's form of crazy a lot more ominous.

Likewise, Outside the Laundry has some pointers for running non-Laundry campaigns, such as civilian paranormal investigators, independent sorcerers, or just plain cultists. Unfortunately, a lot of it can be distilled down to 1) avoiding the Laundry because if they catch up to you, it's pretty much over or 2) coming up with contrived reasons the Laundry is looking the other way. The options seem somewhat unsatisfying to me (at least at the moment), and I know that I'd rather just play a straight Laundry game. There are also more details for playing agents agents from other OCCINTEL agencies.

Join the Black Chamber! Kill, and become host to, unspeakable horror!

The final chapter gives a brief summary of The Laundry during different eras. An Eighties campaign would probably be pretty cool - while computing power wasn't anything near what it is today, but they were still potentially dangerous and we didn't have ubiquitous cell phones, or email, the Web, etc. In a way, it had the beginnings of the truly dangerous stuff without a lot of the technology to fight it.

The book wraps up with print-outs of various forms (such as the Incident Report Form  - SBB1C, Sorcery Licence Application, and Reality Excursion Assessment - SSB2) plus a copy of the Official Secrets Act of 1916 and a blank warrant card. The forms aren't intended to be something players are forced to always fill out, at least not without a good reason (having your line manager come and dump a stack of forms on your desk is probably the opening salvo in a round of bureaucratic maneuvering).

I don't typically buy every supplement for game lines unless I really like them, and usually there are a couple that I think are pretty much essential. Vimary Sourcebook for Tribe 8 is one of them, as was Scavenger Sons for Exalted. I tend to be partial to gazetteer-style books over "Look, new whiz-bangs!" books. I'd place the Agent's Handbook somewhere midway between Absolutely Essential and Nice To Have. There's a lot of good information, and the book is well worth the money. But the mileage you get out of it is is going to vary - you could run an Laundry campaign and not use 50% of the book. But the 50% that you do use is going to serve you well.

Review: The Laundry RPG

Before I go any further, I need to make a confession. I'm not a fan of BRP. It's a perfectly serviceable game system, but honestly I could take it or leave it. I know that this might be disconcerting to some people, but I'll chalk that up to exposure to QUEST RUNE GLORY. A nice man with a warrant card will be along shortly to ask you a few questions.

What I am a fan of is Lovecraftian-style occult trappings, various forms of geekery, and espionage.  Four or five years ago I was introduced to The Atrocity Archives - the first book of the Laundry series by Charles Stross - and I was hooked. It was only within the last year or so that I discovered Cubicle 7 had published an RPG set in the Laundryverse.

For those who aren't in the know, the Laundryverse is like Lovecraft meets The IT Crowd meets any variety of spy novels. The Laundry is a branch of British intelligence tasked with keeping the lid on occult happenings that are becoming all too frequent, because the ability to summon up things from beyond space and time is as (relatively) simple as getting the geometry right. Programmers can accidentally call up things that suck out their brain just by creating a new video compression algorithm, and that's pretty much the ramp up to the bigger show of the elder gods coming and turning everyone into meat puppets. Combine that with a self-sustaining bureaucracy that requires all of your paperwork to be filed on time and that you account for every expense or office supply requisition (for very good reasons, too) and you have a series full of dry British humor, obscure mathematical references, tech that can be re-purposed for occult workings (like the Necromiphone or "stoner guns" that reproduce the effects of a Gorgon's gaze) and of course all of the nasties that a good Call of Cthulhu game should include.

The book's foreward opens with Bob Howard - the protagonist of the novels - being assigned the task of reading over the rpg to make sure that it doesn't contain any real occult information. There a few faux-handscrawled notes in the margins that are Bob's comments, but they peter out toward the middle of the book and don't return. It's a nice touch, similar to the scrawls that are in The Dresden Files rpg. Overall the writing is wry and has a smart tone, and did a good job of keeping my interest. However, after a while the sardonic attitude starts to feel forced and wears thin. By the end I wanted to groan every time I read the words "squamous", "rugose" or how something wanted to evict me from my brain.  The artwork is pretty solid and generally matches the tone of the game, although I wasn't fond of the style of some of the character sketches.

System-wise, the game is vanilla Basic Roleplaying (BRP) - roughly 3d6 for stats, percentile for skills, roll under, various other dice from damage, SAN loss, etc., etc. At its heart BRP is a very simple, solid, and time-tested system. I'm reasonably sure there are a number of differences from the BRP that I learned playing Elfquest, Call of Cthulhu 1e or Runequest 1e (yes, it's been that long) but I couldn't tell you what they are because all of the basic elements are the same. The system for sorcery is pretty much tailored to the Laundryverse (it would have to be). Nothing jumps out at me as being horribly unbalanced or wrong, only a kind of ambivalence toward the system as a whole, and despite the ease of reading the underlying rules are fairly dry. One side effect of this is despite a lot of goodness in the book, personally I didn't get much of a "Gee whiz, that's cool!" feeling about the mechanics behind sorcery, or warrant cards (enchanted identification that can make the viewer think the holder is some other government official, or even bind them to silence), or other setting-specific elements.

Where the book truly shined for me is in the remainder of the material. The detailed description of various aspects of the Laundry (structure, history, training, activities, personnel), as well as sorcery, various threats and other background information is remarkably well done. It's well-written in a lively manner, clear, and informative. Contrary to my tendency to gloss over descriptions of monsters, spells, equipment, etc. until needed I read pretty much every entry. There are quite a number of "handout" style pages scattered throughout the book that would be great to print out. In a move that is not seen in too many rpgs these days, there are a handful of scenarios in the back of the book. The designers also included neat extras like a random codename table (YELLOW WATCHER TACITURN) and even a random mission generator:

• Mission: recruit potential asset
• Real situation: there's a leaky source of thaumic power that needs to be contained before more weird stuff happens
• Hostiles: PLUTO KOBOLD (Mi-Go)
• Location: Airport, seaport or train station
• Bureaucratic Meddling: There's an issue with the agent's weapon permits, no lethal weapons can be used.
• Dramatic Situation: Perform an impossible heist.

Two chapters are dedicated to advice on playing in and GMing a Laundry game and give a good feel for how the game can be run and some other good advice. I did feel that there was distinct lack of discussion on tradecraft (as in, how to do spy work). I'm more than passably familiar with the basics, but it would have been nice to see more of a nod toward the Laundry's Special Operations Executive pedigree in terms of how they do their job. Of course, there is the Agent's Handbook (next up on my reading list) and from a cursory glance it does include this sort of information.

One great thing about the inherent nature of the Laundry is how well it molds itself to ensemble-style play with disparate character types. A number of people are brought into the Laundry because they've made some discovery or seen something and the Laundry's solution is to bring them in, give them jobs and make them useful. Because of the nature of the work, it's not like these people can continue with their former lives or live with any old random people - so the Laundry sets them up with secure accommodations and other Laundry employees as roommates. This creates a near-perfect setup for a group of a PCs, where a bunch of people who probably wouldn't willingly want to work together or share a bathroom kind of have to.

As I've been doing with all of my reviews, I created a sample character but unfortunately found that the form-fillable PDF I had created can't be saved. It was easy enough to create a character that had a few core competencies, but I felt the need to tweak the chosen profession slightly (consultant) in order to reflect my character concept more accurately. On a similar note, I noticed something about the skill bonuses for the Computer Hacker/Tech profession that kind of bugs me (and is true of many games that represent programmer-types). I don't know shit about electronics or electrical work, so why would I get a bonus to electronics or electrical repair skills? Maybe I know more than the average person does (likely) and maybe I'm atypical for computer nerds, but I pretty much know how to install PC components. The last time I tried to rewire a lamp I blew it up. But I can write SQL like there's no tomorrow. I know a reasonable number of programmers who are less computer savvy than I am regarding operating systems and hardware (I did do technical support for a few years), and I've seen power users who aren't techies that can run rings around me in applications like Excel.

Overall if you're a fan of the Laundry novels, think decidedly British humor is funny, or want something more geeky/sarcastic than Delta Green, you can't go wrong with this game. The authors and Cubicle 7 did a great job realizing Stross' universe in roleplaying form (which probably isn't surprising, considering that Stross has a roleplaying pedigree).

Year of FATE: The Laundry and Exalted

To round out the other games I'd like to be able to tackle this year are two games where I love the settings but not really the system.

The first is The Laundry rpg from Cubicle 7. I have a soft spot for espionage, office humor, and Mythos-related things, and I think the Laundry-verse is perfect for playing in. The only issue is I'm very lukewarm about BRP - it's perfectly functional, but just kind of sits there for me. I would definitely veer toward using FATE for such a game, and incorporate some specific elements to help capture the required feel. One idea I had was using handouts and forms from the sourcebooks as a way to generate FATE points. Get handed a form, fill out, when the player returns it they get a FATE point because you know something is going to happen because of whatever is in the report. The other idea I had was for a zombie parody mission, possibly in the style of the Warm Bodies.

Second, we have Exalted. I loved the first edition setting but wasn't big on the system. This wasn't for lack of trying - I ran both a first edition and a second edition game, but they were such a huge chore I swore off Exalted for a number of years. The announcement of third edition has piqued my interest, but I doubt even a complete system overhaul would encourage me to wade back into the system. Even if I take cues from people who have previously adapted Exalted, it'll still be a lot of work, Since I haven't regularly gamed for a number of years, taking on Exalted too might be a too much. I suppose I could run Tribe 8 and Exalted, and keep the other games in the wings for nights when regular players can't make it.