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davidgillon) wrote2017-11-30 08:46 pm
Currently Playing... Nov 2017
I bought a couple of 128 page supplements for The Laundry RPG right at the very end of Cyber Monday (actually about 4 hours into Tuesday) as a reward for finally getting my ticket home for Christmas booked (it's not that I don't want to go home to see the folks, just that historically there's been all kinds of faff with the booking - and oh, hell, I just remembered I haven't booked passenger assistance yet*). For those who haven't run into it, The Laundry RPG has nothing to do with clothes hygiene, The Laundry is the UK's Occult Intelligence Agency in Charles Stross's Laundry Files series, which can be thought of as Modern Day Call of Cthulhu meets Cold War spying meets the squamous and many-tentacled horror that is ISO9001 Total Quality Management**.
So I read half of one on the way into London and back on Tuesday, and I've just finished the other, and I now have a new favourite word - Strangelovecraftian, which aptly describes the workings of the Black Chamber, the American equivalent of the Laundry (the Black Chamber has taken the fatally seductive concept from Stross's unconnected novella 'A Colder War' -Mister President, we cannot allow a Shoggoth Gap to emerge - and weaponised it).
As one of the supplements came up in a thread of Yoon's recently (I forget which) and I've now had a chance to look at the mechanic we ended up discussing there, I thought I'd review them them both, along with the computer games I'm currently playing.
As Above, So Below
This one covers warfare on two very different planes, the kick-in-the-door-and-shoot-the-tentacled-horror-from-beyond-space heroics of Special Forces, and the agenda-to-agenda conflict in committee rooms that decides what the Laundry - and other parties - want to get out of the mission.
The Special Forces section allows you to create characters who are SAS or SBS (or any other part of UKSF - the UK's Special Forces directorate), who can turn up when the amateurs from the Laundry mess things up and put out a call for OCCULUS*** support. There's a fairly strong suggestion that it makes sense for players to have two sets of characters, their mainstream Laundry characters and the knuckle-dragging doorkickers. The whole section is well written, well informed, and occasionally laugh out loud funny****. And it doesn't just stop at character creation, it looks at how occult operations might be different from conventional operations - such as using radar-altimeter equipped 40mm BATSTOP rounds to set up a mid-air no-go area for flying horrors, or why in a conventional operation you would want to be in a ditch during a firefight, but when taking on a horde of shambling zombies you would want to be behind it. This is really well thought out.
Next up is an SF scenario, On Borrowed Time - an alien installation just appeared next to the UK Jungle Warfare training base in Brunei, and the last message from the Laundry team sent to investigate was that they were under attack, so the players get to airdrop in to find out what happened to them, and kill it. It's not bad, but there's a strange mix of quite simple shoot-it-now and we-need-to-think-really-carefully-about-this.
And then we're back to the green baize tables of Westminster committee rooms. The basic Laundry Files includes a really well thought out mechanic which gives you a budget for missions, which can be augmented by the use of your Status (a character stat) within the Laundry. So while it is possible to exceed your budget and call in OCCULUS support (or whatever) for every mission, the downside is that you will then find your supervisor complaining loudly when the bill for said OCCULUS support (or whatever) comes out of their budget. Which can mean not getting sent on that Computational Demonology training course your character really wants to go on. It's really neatly self-balancing, you can abuse your budget, but there will be consequences. And it really fits the bureaucratic ethos of the Laundry.
As Above, So Below extends this mechanic. You now can call on more than just your own Status stat, you can draw on your department's Status, plus that of your mentor, if you have one. And the section runs through a whole range of mentor types, from Deeply Scary Sorcerors - the role Angleton plays for Bob in the novels, to MPs and Ministers (dangerous), the opposition (MI5 and MI6 that is - very dangerous), to journalists (flee, you fools!). And if your Status grows high enough, then you too may be promoted to management and expected to sit on the committees that decide Laundry policy for the next expedition to the Plateau of the Sleeper, or, more likely, the precise wording to the latest amendments to standing procedure for paperclip audits.
Putting players on high level commitees for operational policy is the main focus, and the suggestion is that they should again have a parallel set of characters, each with their own agendas, whether departmental or otherwise. Which is fine, not sure I'd want to roll it out a lot, but worth playing with from time to time. What I'm not sure about is whether I like the mechanic used, which uses a set of playing cards, which are given values for agendas and issues, with the idea being to trump other people's agendas and issues, possibly in combination with other players. It sounds workable, and I may just be having an irrational reaction to the playing cards, but cards aren't used anywhere else in the game. I think I'd be tempted to rewrite it to something closer to Status if I wanted to play it repeatedly.
And the last part of the supplement are two more scenarios, the first with the players themselves on a low-level committee, and the second using the dual level committee play mechanics. In Hot Potato, the characters end up one one of those committees everyone tries to avoid, in this case setting up the government bunkers for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, but something's gone wrong with a Compulsory Purchase Order (think eminent domain) and suddenly the press are all over it, when they shouldn't even know the Laundry exists. There's a leak in the committee, and the players are on a mole hunt. But this mole may be burrowed much deeper than they imagine. In Fire Drill, a Laundry agent sent on a mission to Kazakhstan disappeared several months ago, but has now been caught on the dashboard camera of an embassy car. The committee has to decide whether to focus on recovering him, carrying on his investigation (cases of spontaneous human combustion, possibly linked to a Russian rocket company) or whatever, a decision which the agent characters then get to implement it. There's a lot of flexibility built into this, possibly too much, the threat can be anything from the odd spontaneous human combustion, to world threatening. I think it might have been better to take a little of the flexibility of the threat out in order to concentrate attention on the flexibility of the mission planning - which is what the scenario is supposed to be showcasing. Which is not to say it's a bad scenario, just that it may be trying to do too much at once.
God Game Black
The Sleeper on the Plateau, part of the series mythos, is an alien god sleeping in an ancient temple on a pyramid on a plateau on a planet far, far from here, whose awakening will herald CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars come right and the Old Ones awake. GOD GAME BLACK is the codename for Laundry operations to stop the awakening. The supplement covers a range of Laundry related stuff, primarily bringing the game up to speed with developments in the series through The Apocalypse Codex, in which an American megachurch tried to to wake the Sleeper.
We start off with External Assets, the non-Laundry contractors such as Persephone Hazard, aka BASHFUL INCENDIARY, whose existence is revealed to series hero Bob during Apocalypse Codex. Assets tend to be experts in their particular area, so character generation provides for them to be more powerful than a raw Laundry recruit. On the other hand they can't pick up a phone and call for OCCULUS, their whole point is that they're deniable (or that's the cover story, anyway). Next up are rules for traditional magic. Magic in the Laundry Files is a computational process, and Laundry agents get to run it on their iPhones, isolating them from the Eaters in the Dark. But you can run it on raw brains, which is precisely what the Eaters like.
And then we get to CODICIL BLACK SKULL, a whole section on the history of the Sleeper, and humanity's contact with the plateau (which mostly consists of people dying horribly, or not-dying horribly). One oddity here is that 666 Squadron, who perform regular reconnaissance of the plateau using gate spells and the White Elephants (aka nuclear armed Concordes) is referred to as Squadron 666, which is neither British, nor American, usage, there's one or two other typographical oddities, but nothing critical. There's also a very minor problem with 666 Squadron's history, but you have to be extremely well read on the RAF to spot it.
Which brings us to the Black Chamber. They’re not so much our sister agency as our psycho ex-girlfriend turned bunny-boiler. The Apocalypse Codex. Remember what US foreign policy was like in the heart of Cold War - We don't care if you're channeling Hitler at seances and dropping democracy activists out of helicopters, any anti-communist is a true friend of America's - now apply that to contact with the Cthulhu Mythos. The Black Chamber's primary field agents are either human drones, remotely piloted via the black mark, or non-humans, who don't have any rights in US law, and so can be extorted into service - cf Ramona Random in The Jennifer Morgue. Think In order to save humanity, it became necessary to destroy our humanity. The chapter gives the complete structure of the Black Chamber, and rules for character generation if you should want to play a Black Chamber campaign, potentially including care and feeding of the demon the Black Chamber bound into you in order to ensure your loyalty. If you use the Black Chamber as an American version of the Laundry, then it’s best to embrace the Strangelovecraftian weirdness. ... While the Laundry hunts down possessed sheep in a rainy field in Essex, the Black Chamber’s off fighting DEEP SEVEN in the Colorado Mountains, or blowing up large chunks of the Middle East. Go weird, loud, and paranoid.
Pre-history is next up, or rather pre-Laundry History, so the history of the Invisible College, from the 13th Century through to WWII and its metamorphosis into the Laundry. As this covers the main 1920s era of Call of Cthulhu, there are brief rules for creating agents of the Invisible College in that era, plus a rogue's gallery of the movers and shakers in the creation of the Laundry, such as Major General JFC Fuller, who here gets the option of running the Laundry or being interned as a Nazi sympathizer, and Claude Dansey of MI6 - Spiteful and often cruel, he has a special dislike for intellectuals and academics, which makes his position in the Invisible College rather awkward, along with Ian Fleming, Denis Wheatley, and Aleister Crowley.
The Phoney War covers how to handle the period where the laws of nature start to change as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN draws closer and ideas for how to cover that in campaigns - it looks pretty much compatible with The Annihilation Score and The Nightmare Stacks, even if written before them.
And the supplement ends with two really good scenarios. Think of the Children is set in an academy (a privately-run, government-funded school - hugely controversial, perfect choice) controlled by the Golden Promise Ministry, the Christian(-ish, sort of not really) megachurch trying to raise the Sleeper in The Apocalypse Codex and can run either immediately prior to the events of the book or just after. Appropriately for a quiverfull ministry, the academy is another string to Golden Promise's bow, a different way of coming at waking the Sleeper by using psychically aware kids. Then one of the kids tries to make contact with the Laundry by taking a character's family hostage. Only there's multiple layers to this plot, and stopping it is going to present the players with a real moral dilemma. The final scenario is The Moral High Ground and runs in parallel with Apocalypse Codex. A handful of Golden Promise agents try to kidnap an exiled Tibetan expert on the mythology of the plateau and its intersection with Tibet, and when the main mega-massacre plot is stopped by Bob and Persephone, launch an attempt to reach a ruined monastery on the plateau and wake the Sleeper from there. Stopping them means paradropping a mixed Laundry/SAS team onto the plateau. And the record of teams surviving the plateau is not good.
It's a bit mixed thematically, but everything here is pretty good, and some of it really should be core to a Laundry Campaign. That last scenario ties in really well with the special forces stuff from As Above, So Below.
And while we're here, I may as well review the computer games that are eating up my time when I should be writing:
XCOM II: War of the Chosen
WOTC***** is a big add-on to XCOM II that considerably expands the strategy game, with parallel changes in the tactical game. You're still trying to take back Earth from the Aliens twenty years after losing to them in the original XCOM revamp, only now there are extra factions. The bad guys have the Chosen, three super-powered bounty hunters who've been promised the planet if they can stop you, while the good guys have three factions of rebels who can provide logistical support, and heroes to fight alongside XCOM. In general I'm impressed, the new additions add extra layers to the game rather than being more of the same.
I do have some minor criticisms, so far only one of the Chosen, the Assassin, seems a major threat. The Warlock seems to hang back, occasionally creating a minor monster, while the Hunter gives a turn's warning of his major attacks, allowing you to evade them. Of the new Resistance factions, the Skirmishers and Templars seem balanced, but the Reapers seem a little weak - they can hide, but for sniper types they can't deal out a lot of damage. Two of the new alien troop types seem to have being annoying as a major role - the Priests either mind-control your troops or stasis them, taking them out of play for a turn (and often need to be killed twice), while the Spectres hijack one of your troops until you kill the doppleganger. Both mechanisms reduce your strength while increasing bad guy strength, and if you run into a lot of either, or both, you can find yourselves having turns in which you can barely do anything. Which to me is bad design.
Integration with the previous DLC seems a bit haphazard as well. You get the choice of a balanced integration, but without the backstory they added, or the backstory without the re-balancing. I'm playing with the backstory, and the game just hit me with a massively unbalanced scenario that's an automatic campaign loss. Even if my team hit with every shot they can't do damage fast enough to stop the standard threat and the un-balanced DLC threat at the same time. It's probably pure chance it's happened, but it's unavoidable at this point and I'm going to have to mod the game to get around it. I'd planned on doing that over Christmas anyway, I like to balance the firearms slightly differently to the way it's done in the base game, but hadn't anticipated having no option but to do it.
Overall I'd rate it as really worthwhile, but expensive (almost as much as a new major league game) and with some questionable balance issues.
Total War: Warhammer/Warhammer II
The Total War franchise is well known for combining strategic empire building with tactical battles, here they're applied to the world of GDW''s Warhammer, taking the series from historical to fantasy for the first time. And it works really well. The plan is for three games, eventually covering the whole Warhammer world, and for all three to be able to link together.
Warhammer released last year and covered the Old World - effectively Europe. Beginning races were the Empire (think Holy Roman Empire), the Dwarves (Tolkien meets Steampunk), the Orcs (Tolkien meets 8yo bogey humour) and the Vampire Counts (Transylvania shall consume the world), to which was added via DLC (some free) the Forces of Chaos (archetypal bad guys), the Beastmen (archetypal bad guys who lay down with the beasts of the earth), Bretannia (cod-French Grail Questers), and Wood Elves (militant tree huggers). Appearing as Free Content if you pre-ordered Warhammer II were the Norsca (Chaos Vikings). I didn't buy Warhammer until this summer, when everything was on offer pre-Warhammer II, so I've only ever played with all DLC available and it works really well as a nicely complex strategy game in which you may have to pay off one threat while you counter another. The major drawback for me was hard-coded restrictions on which cities you could conquer, which meant that in a lot of cases you could kick the bad guys out, but only have the option of razing it to the ground, not taking it for your own. And no sooner would your back be turned than they would be back in there, rebuilding.
Warhammer II released late summer and moves south and west of the Old World, and does it well. Again it launched with four races, in this case the High Elves (Tolkein lives), the Dark Elves (Tolkein would blush), the Lizard Men (Aztec dinosaurs) and the Skaven (steampunk plague rats). Rather than just beating seven kinds of snot out of the other guy, this edition adds the Vortex campaign as a motivational mechanism. The ancient spell that controls magic and keeps Chaos out of the world is creaking at the seams and the forces of Order (High Elves and Lizardmen) have to stop the forces of Chaos (Dark Elves and Skaven) from destroying it altogether. I've only played a part campaign, but it seemed to work well. Really adding to the game it added an environmental system, so no longer were you prevented from occupying someone else's territory just because the game said so, you could occupy it, but it might not be good for your people (High Elves don't like the Arctic, Dwarves do badly in magical forests, etc). This is really well done and addresses my major concern with the original game.
Mortal Empires, the integrated game for owners of both launched about a month ago as DLC , and it really works well. There's some rebalancing going on currently because the Chaos invasion is a little too focused on destroying the player, to the exclusion of everyone else on the map, but in general I'm really pleased with it. My major complaint is that the combined map doesn't go as far south as the Warhammer II map, which means you can't sail around the bottom ends of the two continents, and I just can't see why they would do that. Maybe they'll add that in later, I can hope. My other complaint is more minor, the reasonably frequent updates (only to be expected, and in many ways a plus as they add content), means that any mods you're using run the risk of being invalidated with annoying regularity. The solution is to play without mods, of course, but they do tend to add extra flavour.
Favourite moment so far, my first battle against Skaven, where as the High Elves I had brought a dragon, which causes fear as well as having a flaming breath weapon. Picture hordes of rat-warriors screaming "It's a dragon, run' and fleeing for their lives. Least favourite moment, taking my attention off it for a moment and finding the little sods had shot it down. (I'm not sure how - probably their wizard).
They're all really good games if you're into the strategy/tactical mix, but they're eating far too much of my time (though that's partly the novelty of finally having a PC able to play them without straining).
* The ludicruous system is that you book a ticket, pay for it, and only then can you ring to check if the wheelchair seat is available, at which point they book that in your name, leaving your theoretically reserved seats in limbo. What happens if the wheelchair seat is already booked (there only being three per train) is left unexplained.
** I'm actually an ISO 9001 fan, given my QA background, but I can see why the version implemented in the Laundry might be unpopular.
*** Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations - the equivalent to a NEST team for things that wriggle and chitter, rather than glow, in the dark
**** Some of the humour is likely to pass you by if you aren't British, and possibly of a certain age. For instance, SAS slang for magic is 'animal', and that's never explained. But Brits like me will be sniggering over the reference to 'Animal Magic', a kid's TV show baack in the 70s. There's not a huge amount of this, but it is there.***** The acronym keeps confusing me, because I've been reading WOTC as Wizards of the Coast (a US game company) for about 20 years.
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