Welcome to TTRPG Insider! In this issue, we spoke with the team at Cubicle 7 about The Laundry Files, a recently updated British TTRPG all about using numbers to stop Cthulhu from attacking the United Kingdom.

Doing The Laundry

There’s a subgenre in fiction and in TTRPGs around secret agencies that protect the world, contain malevolent entities and subvert the truth for the greater good of the public. Whether it is the open-source creativity of the SCP Foundation, the Cold War-themed Control, or the psychologically terrifying Delta Green, there is just something about stories where agents of a secret group that contains the evils of the world that captivates our imagination. I know that personally, it is one of those topics that I adore. I was a big X-Files fan and spent years rewatching the old seasons of the show when I wasn’t obsessing over fan theories for Lost.

The Laundry: Second Edition is the latest addition to this genre, albeit with a British twist. Based on the novel series of the same name by Charles Stross, The Laundry Files tells the story of the Q-Division of the U.K.-based Special Operations Executive, an old-school government agency dedicated to quelling Lovecraftian threats. The original books, which center around “Bob Howard”, began publishing in 2004 with The Atrocity Archives and have since expanded to more than a dozen novels in the twenty years since.

Cubicle 7, the publisher of the game, successfully raised more than $200,000 on Kickstarter to publish the latest version of the game and released both the Player’s Guide and Overseer (aka GM') Guide in digital form online in the last month.

Players are members of this agency, although their roles often take on a more bureaucratic and mundane aspect, ranging from the accounting department to the legal department. However, those roles place them at the forefront of protecting the world from the influence of dark creatures who wish to breach this world and bend it to their will. Lovecraftian creatures are real, and they’re summoned through a rather peculiar means: applied computation.

Computer users who are exposed to the wrong sort of code or mathematical formula can suddenly find themselves possessed and driven to open a portal to Cthulhu, which will let in malevolent forces into our world.

The Laundry has to stop cultists and monsters from doing that. This means that you may need to perform computational math to close the portal. The world mixes the dull nature of bureaucracy with the mind-breaking Cthulhu mythos and the secretive intelligence work that has culminated in the fiction of Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, and other spy thrillers.

Stross took “the spy genre and the secret information that you're learning as a spy and just changing that information to being occult knowledge,” David F. Chapman, The Laundry producer and writer, told TTRPG Insider.

“If you drew a triangle and placed Delta Green at one point, and [Haunted Table Games’] Triangle Agency at another point, I’d place The Laundry at the juxtaposition between the two,” Chapman said, noting that the game and novels attempt to bring a lighthearted brevity to a genre that has historically been defined by innocent people going mad and corrupt systems pushing for power. Humor is an integral part of the story, Chapman noted, claiming that bringing brevity to anything that is “particularly bad or horrific” is a “very British thing to do.”

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Cubicle 7’s Collaboration with The Laundry

The first edition of The Laundry Files was released using Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying Engine, according to Chapman. It was updated with C7’s new C7d6 system to hopefully simplify the rules and give it some new flavor. The system relies on a dice pool of d6es that players create between their core stats and skills, making it a simpler system to learn compared to Cubicle 7’s crunchier systems (such as Warhammer Fantasy Fourth Edition.

Stross was heavily involved in the Second Edition’s development, Chapman said, including a lot of fact-checking, creating the organizational structure, and clarifying the timeline. Chapman seemed to enjoy working with the science fiction author, noting how he “gets particular about details, and it's terrific. For example, we might be writing an adventure where someone is taking out someone with a silenced gun in a certain location. He'll come back and identify the perfect gun for the attack and point to the tons of research he did on this for his last book.”

Stross’s mixture of intense action and bureaucracy created an interesting blend of roles for the player to inhabit.

Players hold very boring-sounding roles within the agency, such as field support, internal logistics, legal affairs, or R&D. These roles still carry some risk. Still, they provide players with the necessary skills to handle the threats they may face in field operations. They will have access to traditional weaponry as well as the “magic” of the world, which are often contained in phones, apps, and other technological devices (a return to that reliance on computational mathematics to succeed.)

The game diverges from sanity systems, which are typically a staple of the Cthulhu Mythos. Players don’t go mad from exposure to monsters and cultists, but they are occasionally at risk of being infected with “a version of Alzheimer’s” if you use too much magic in the world.

The current game primarily focuses on the timeline set within the first four books (before a key apocalyptic moment in the book where everything goes poorly. Stross’ sense of humor permeates the book in an arid manner. It is exceptionally well illustrated in the player guide introduction, where the players are briefed on absolutely maddening affairs but are regularly told to “have a biscuit” and to keep calm and carry on. The book also holds the art of Gareth Sleightholme and Davide Calabrese, who capture the mixture of action and horror that embellish the genre.

If players want to take a look at a Cthulhu-inspired genre with a particularly British twist, they might enjoy giving The Laundry a look.

Thank you to Cubicle 7 and David F. Chapman for chatting with us! You can buy the books on DrivethruRPG or Cubicle 7’s website.

What are your thoughts? Send any scoops, tips or press releases to [email protected].