Currently Playing... Nov 2017

Or reading if not actually playing....

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.

 

( RPG and Computer Games reviews behind the cut )

 

* 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.