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My friend who is a leading expert on Startup Bullshit recently GMed for us an experimental play-through of the delta test version of Triangle Agency, a game that bills itself as being “a role-playing game of paranormal investigation and corporate horror;” a la SCP or Severance or The Magnus Archives.

I had mixed feelings about this game-as-game, but the character creation phase was one of the most conceptually fun I’ve ever experienced. The pitch is that you are all weird employees at this sinister agency, so the first thing you all do is pick an Anomaly Power (i.e. the Timepiece, which lets you manipulate time; the Manifold which lets you fold space; the Gun, which lets you remove people and things from existence; etc)

but! you also all have an actual day job at the sinister agency that gives you DIFFERENT abilities; some of them are things like ‘fixer’ or ‘gravedigger’ but some of them are also things like ‘receptionist!’ and ‘barista at the corporate coffeeshop!’ all of which come with fun little perks like ‘once per mission [as a barista] you can pour a special espresso to bring a corpse back to life for ten minutes’ or ‘once per mission [as the hotline operator] you can use a tape of hold music to instantly transport everyone to a safe waiting room for an hour’.

AND – this part was the most fun for me – you then pick a THIRD role, which is related to your life outside of work. You can be the Struggling (you’re working in the gig economy and have So Many Bills to pay), or the Pursued (you’re trying to create a new life for yourself while constantly in danger of discovery) or, the one I picked, the Backbone (you are a part of another organization also, and everyone in your book club or gaming group or PTA association or whatnot would be completely lost without you).

This process resulted in an absolutely stellar set of characters –

Eddie Carnegie, time anomaly/barista/part-time Elvis impersonator; “constantly humming ‘rock around the clock”
Annie Campos Ramirez, absence anomaly/gravedigger/disappeared actress formerly best known by the name on her SAG-AFTRA card; “blurry Rita Hayworth after five years of night shifts”
Reggie Walters, manifold (spacebending) anomaly/receptionist/Gig Economy Struggler; “always looking for a shortcut”
Silent Neal, gun anomaly/CEO/celebrity faith healer, but creepy, who isn’t in on his own con; “like a 60-year-old who walked out of True Grit”
Joanie-May Mack (me), drain anomaly/hotline operator/crime family shadow queen (and mom!); she always has energy in a meeting! you won’t!

– who were all tasked with investigating mysterious disappearances at Vsage, a promising new startup that makes VR monocles!

[One Month Later, our GM, in the groupchat, having come across a real VR monocle currently being sold: im so mad that the fake stupid tech thing i invented as a joke is LESS stupid than this real thing.]

Then we got into the actual gameplay. The game ran two sessions, which honestly is not bad (our quote-unquote one-shots in the past have generally averaged three) and the general consensus after the fact was that the game was extremely good because we all made it good, but perhaps not very easily playable in design.

Part of this is just that the gamebook is extremely dedicated to Its Own Schtick of being an Evil Company Manual. One understands the temptation of this; an evil company manual is a fun item. However sometimes it is okay to break kayfabe in order to provide clear information.

The bigger mechanical problem is that this is a game that’s designed to have a GM throw challenges at you, but also has very few mechanisms for how to address these challenges other than ultra-specific anomaly superpowers. You can roll dice to reshape reality using your anomaly abilities. There are no mechanics to figure out how well you did on anything else, like “research a problem” or “punch someone in the face.”

Given that some of the most interesting theoretical elements of the game are about the intersections of high surrealism and extreme mundanity, it feels like a bit of a wall thrown in the face of this to have the mechanics completely ignore all the standard mundane methods of problem-solving. You’ve either got to be very good at working with your GM for yes-and improv to move through the story, or using your special abilities literally all of the time.

In our post-game discussion, several people suggested that this would make a very fun setting/module/extension for an existing game with actual mechanics .. to be clear I’ve got nothing against rules-light games, I love rules-light games, but this is in fact a very rules-heavy game, it’s just that the rules are all tilted much more strongly in the direction of Cool Vibes than Actual Working Gameplay.

All that said, I’m still in love with the conclusion of our game, in which we infiltrated the sinister startup; fielded various attempted seductions by the lures of free pizza, branded t-shirts, and hypothetically infinite PTO; and learned that the heart of it all was just a shitty anomaly genuinely trying to manifest success for the stupid doomed ambitions of the mediocre techbro to which he had attached himself; or, in our GM’s words,

“oops I manifested me sacrificing my whole life at the altar of this dream as a dream that loves me back and wants to evangelize it”

STARTUP HORROR. Top tier. For the game designers, some notes; for the other players absolutely none.

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[One Month Later, our GM, in the groupchat, having come across a real VR monocle currently being sold: im so mad that the fake stupid tech thing i invented as a joke is LESS stupid than this real thing.]

I'm so sorry.

“oops I manifested me sacrificing my whole life at the altar of this dream as a dream that loves me back and wants to evangelize it”

That, however, is pretty great. I hope the game gets better at letting you just throw the cup of coffee you happen to holding at the eldritch horror and run like hell.

I feel giddy just reading about it!

Much as I love the theory behind the character creation, I actually found the gamebook's dedication to its own schtick interfered with that too; it's just so intensely committed to the (copious, occasionally hard to read) graphic design and aesthetics of its schtick that I had a hard time picking out the relevant information to be getting on with. I loved all our characters! But about 50% less kayfabe would have made even character creation much less frustrating for me.

In conclusion, loved our yes-anding, loved the setting, enjoyed the anomaly abilities very much, totally agree about the mechanics. I think some tweaking would make this a really fun game, though!

the Backbone (you are a part of another organization also, and everyone in your book club or gaming group or PTA association or whatnot would be completely lost without you).
I feel seen. *groan*

He's a private eye, a CEO
A gun anomaly, and a celebrity faith healer
Dangeresque

If this were a movie/anime/podcast, I feel like Silent Neil would have a small but dedicated fan following on tumblr, and I'd almost certainly be part of it. Was his name ever explained?

The game really does sound like it would benefit from being bolted onto the back of something like Fiasco, or something else that's all about chasing your dreams into oncoming traffic. And on that topic, I had to google the AR monocle, and i) I learned that Brilliant Labs secured over $3 million in funding for it and then just called it the Monocle, and ii) the most concrete use for it I was able to find is that it can offer suggestions for what to say in job interviews or on dates. So jokes on you, pal. If you'd been wearing a Monocle, you could have relied on its patented 'Charisma as a Service' technology to take care of all those pesky resolution mechanics for you. "It's like having God observe your life and tell you exactly what to do next."

Edited 2024-03-18 09:07 (UTC)

but! you also all have an actual day job at the sinister agency that gives you DIFFERENT abilities; some of them are things like ‘fixer’ or ‘gravedigger’ but some of them are also things like ‘receptionist!’ and ‘barista at the corporate coffeeshop!’ all of which come with fun little perks like ‘once per mission [as a barista] you can pour a special espresso to bring a corpse back to life for ten minutes’ or ‘once per mission [as the hotline operator] you can use a tape of hold music to instantly transport everyone to a safe waiting room for an hour’.
Of course every barista is a necromancer in a spare time and hotline operators have access to pocket dimensions xD Fun.

This character creation does sound PHENOMENAL.

THE REAL THING IS REALLY IMPRESSIVELY STUPID. absolutely would not be surprised to learn that there was a weird chaos entity behind it, but I would not love it as much as our weird chaos entity and his genuine fondness for/obsession with his incredibly average techbro.

I'd definitely be very curious to hear how someone else's playthrough went!

Yeah -- I was very grateful for the Excel cheat sheet too which made it 100x easier to play for me personally than it otherwise would have been!

RIGHT LIKE THIS IS SUCH A REAL EXPERIENCE

A laconic gentleman, Silent Neil!

& yeah, this would make a phenomenal setting for Fiasco, or even something like one of the Lovecraft games or whatnot, depending on what flavor of weird and surrealist you wanted to pursue.

...I clicked this link and saw the name 'rizzGPT' and immediately wished I could forget it again, but alas, this will never now be possible for me.

I looked down the list of possible professions and was like 'well other people can be CEOs or fixers but I personally would love to be a call center employee or an intern --'

It was sooo good -- there was also a mechanic we didn't get a chance to do much with where every outside role also got three related NPCs to make up (mine as the Backbone were "a successor," "a threat," and "a person in your life who can't remember your organization's name") that the GM could deploy against you to complicate your life at any time, which was ALSO really fun.

This makes me wish I were better at roleplaying!

[One Month Later, our GM, in the groupchat, having come across a real VR monocle currently being sold: im so mad that the fake stupid tech thing i invented as a joke is LESS stupid than this real thing.]

I laughed so hard at this that my kids were like "what is so funny??"

hypothetically infinite PTO

I cannot stop laughing, never has a description of startup life been more accurate.

The VR monocle came up while I was at work and I lost more of that workday than I frankly should probably admit just cackling about it.

Every single startup detail was just too, too real!