Publisher: Cubicle 7 Entertainment
Authors: Jason Durall, Gareth Hanrahan, and John Snead
Year: 2010
Players: 2 or more
Ages: 12+
Category: Darkly Humorous Modern Cthulhu RPG
Pages: 288 pages
Retail Price: $39.99 hardcover; $24.99 PDF
CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES – WHAT NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP?
There are things out there, in the weirder reaches of space-time where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summoned them, HP Lovecraft wrote about them, and Alan Turing mapped the paths from our universe to theirs. The right calculation can call up entities from other, older universes, or invoke their powers. Invisibility? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable!
Opening up the way for the Great Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunately, much too easy.
That’s where the Laundry comes in – it’s a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth (and more particularly, the UK). You work for the Laundry. The hours are long, the pay is sub-par, the co-workers are… interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word), and the bureaucracy is stifling – but you do get to wave basilisk guns and bullet wards around, and to go on challenging and exciting missions to exotic locations like quaint, legend-haunted Wigan, cursed Slough and Wolverhampton where the walls are thin.
You may even get to save the world.
Just make sure you get a receipt.
***
The Laundry is an RPG based on the series of novels and stories from award winning author Charles Stross in which our protagonist, Bob Howard is a British civil servant in the employ of a shadowy government agency known as the Laundry. Bob’s job as well as that of his compatriots is to battle the minions of the Cthulhu mythos, for Queen and Country, while punching a clock and avoiding a mountain of red tape in doing so. The stories themselves play as a modern take on Lovecraft’s work filled with plenty of black humor, although I wouldn’t say the tales themselves are over the top comedy.
Let’s take a closer look to see if The Laundry is worthy of your attention.
Before we get into the meat and potatoes – or maybe I should say bangers and mash since the game is set in the U.K. – a few items about the layout of the book need to be mentioned. Overall the book is well put together and you can tell the tome will be able to hold up to a lot of use; this isn’t one of those hardcovers you immediately picture the binding falling apart after a handful of read throughs. Upon opening the book you’ll notice the artwork is rather sparse, kind of muddy, and fairly hit or miss overall. One thing that may also take a bit getting used to is the three different perspectives which thread through the text: straight rules explanations, Laundry files, and the series character Bob’s observations which appear from time to time. I understand the set up here is that this information has somehow made its way into your hands, and you’d be in mighty big trouble if the powers that be knew you had it, but it does come across as a bit jumbled as a presentation decision. Lastly, and I’ll be the first to point out I’ve only read The Atrocity Archives and The Concrete Jungle, I don’t feel the stories the RPG is based on have the same level of humor as the role playing game looks to interject into the game world. Many of the chuckles in the stories comes from Bob Howard being a bit of a fish out of water as well as his ever present gallows humor and frustration with his being a cog in the great bureaucratic machine.
So we’ve got the negatives out of the way let’s get on to the good and even great.
For gamers familiar with Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu or any other BRP title, many of the mechanics will come as second nature as The Laundry is based on the same D100 method of action resolution. The game isn’t simply a rehash of CofC as there are plenty of new wrinkles such as character creation calling for a personality type (the role your character plays within the team), better skill allocation, plenty of occult/technical devices, and a completely revamped magic system. Most of these changes are for the better although the more modern approach to magic as a mathematical based series of theorems and formulas might strike some as odd but it works within the overall theme. Many of the changes found in The Laundry – outside of the technological specifics of magic – would be welcomed in the base Call of Cthulhu game in my opinion.
Overall, The Laundry is certainly an RPG any fan of Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror will want to have a serious look through. I don’t think I’d run The Laundry with the same amount of humor (black or not) as presented but I can see utilizing the setting as a basis for a much more modern and realistic spin on Mythos related role playing. Granted, this is just my personal preference.
Finally I’ll mention, the U.K. setting may lead gamers in the U.S. to worry about the level of familiarity with that part of the world and the day in day out common regional knowledge which may be needed to run an effective campaign but there’s enough info included to muscle through; we are talking about a role playing game after all so if you can play a barbarian in the Forgotten Realms, or a space mercenary traveling through the Outer Rim, I can’t see gaming a low level civil servant thwarting Cthulhu cultists in Yorkshire to be much of a stretch.
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Highly enjoyable game. It was a truly wonderful and pleasant surprise to find a game with literally all the information one could possibly desire about the setting inside the core rulebook. I had a great time with my players, and it was a breath of fresh air for our group. I expect The Laundry to hold a welcome place at our table for years to come.