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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scribe invited me to join in a game of Jukebox, a new TTRPG (available here!) in which the primary game mechanic is semi-randomized karaoke.
