2020 Day 27: The Laundry
I am shattered. I was going to write three of these for the 2023 challenge and send some friendly emails, but I've watched most of season 7 of West Wing instead. Good luck to me in January!
This was going to be a 1920s Mall Santa character for Call of Cthulhu but I appear to have given away my book or such, probably because I’m never going to run it. I quite like playing in the occasional game but I find the book too dry to give me inspiration. The Laundry on the other hand is quite mad and beautiful for it.
The Laundry is a supernatural intelligence agency, underfunded and full of people who couldn’t be put anywhere else. Investigate and shutdown the supernatural and pray you don’t fall foul of the paperwork. If you like Paranoia, or just generally like playing to fail, then you will almost certainly enjoy this game.
The mechanism is basically the same as Call of Cthulhu but with a more developed character creation process. That is: roll percentage dice and try to get less than your skill level; roll particularly well or badly to get a special success or failure. It also has special rules for mission accounting and training (if you can afford it). Finally it has rules for casting spells using computers. Like in CoC, the non-bell-curved % works really well for the randomness of a horror game although the improved odds on special successes is better. Furthermore, the new rules really do convey the feel of the setting which is something every game should strive for.
I rolled a very middling character - almost everything is average. I did roll a second list with very high dex and very low strength (some sort of crippled thief?) but I then thought that “average” does suit a particular element of The Laundry: that is the everyman who had to be brought in after they saw something they shouldn’t. So let’s call him Bob Reacher.
Bob was just one of the crowd. He did good enough in school, but not too much. He did a little work to earn cash, but not too much. Mainly he hung out with his pals, played games with his pals, then started drinking with his pals etc etc. He had a few manual jobs, but ended up working in a computer store as an average salesperson. Then one day a Laundry agent used his shop as a last ditch way of casting some computational demonology and it backfired. The shop exploded, the agent was castigated (and relegated to the archives) and Bob… well they couldn’t explain it away so he was recruited. And given a promotion to sitting in a van all day waiting for orders that rarely came.
So he spends most of his time hanging around with his colleagues, smoking with his colleagues, drinking with his colleagues, playing games with… etc. Then, much to his annoyance, the original agent found his way out of the archives, earned a promotion with what they found down there and took an interest in Bob. Now he has to actually do shit.
Bob’s goal is to stay out of the way of people who look like they know what they are doing. He figures that they will assume he’s nothing but a driver, leaving him free to make caustic comments about them, women and “those” people. Ironically, his very ordinariness makes him quite good at his job and a strong leader might force him to apply those skills. And it would be really cool if computational thaumaturgy could somehow utilise l33t gaming skills.
STR 11, CON 14, POW 9, DEX 11, CHA 13, INT 11, SIZE 10, EDU 9
Age: Base rolled is 23, and that’s when Bob joined the agency. He’s been here a while but is only now going on his first mission. He’s now 43. This gives him +40 skill points and +2 EDU.
Damage modifier: 0
Hit Points: 12 (Major wound level 6)
Experience bonus: 6
Sanity: 45
Personality type: Slacker (gives specific bonuses)
Previous profession: Labourer (retail)
Laundry Assignment: Plumber (keeping the lid on witnesses)
Wealth Level Average (because of extended payment from The Laundry)
Skills@
Appraise (35), Bargain (25), Brawl (30), Bureaucracy (30), Climb (40), Computer use (gaming 70, rest 10), Craft (sewing 20), Disguise (25), Dodge (42), Drive (50), Fast Talk (25), Fine Manipulation (55), Firearms (Esoteric 10), Gaming (30), Grapple (60), Hide (30), Insight (25), Knowledge (Accounting 5, Espionage 5, Law 5, Occult 15, Politics 5), Language (Spanish 20), Persuade (35), Repair (structural 25), Science (Thaumaturgy 10), Sense (30), Sleight of Hand (25), Sorcery (10), Spot (30), Stealth (20)
Cover to The Laundry
I can't find a link to buy The Laundry, but it does come up occasionally on Bundle of Holding (which is, I think, where I got mine).