The Laundry RPG

A busy week for Cubicle 7, not only with the release of Avalon but also the launch of The Laundry RPG - based on the The Laundry novels of Charles Stross, where the British Secrect Service and Officialdom meets the Mythos.

The Laundry uses Chaosium's BRP rules set and is a stand-alone game. Two supplements (Black Bag Jobs and Agent's Handbook) have already been announced along with a Gamemaster's screen.

The Laundry RPG

"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, H.P. 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 roleplaying game is based on the award-winning Laundry series (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, The Fuller Memorandum) by Charles Stross and uses the Basic Roleplaying System (as used by Call of Cthulhu).

In this book, you'll find:

• Computational demonology, summoning extradimensional horrors, and three ways to use a shotgun to banish alien monsters.
• A history of the Laundry and the other occult intelligence agencies.
• Classified briefings on known threats and monstrous horrors.
• Streamlined rules for character creation, investigation and combat.
• Three ready-to-play missions.

Yog Radio interviewed Charles Stross in Yog Radio #36. (MP3, 59 MB, running time: 02:09:24)

Price: £28.99 | $39.99 (US)
Format: 288 pages, hardcover
Written by: Gareth Hanrahan, Jason Durall and John Snead

The Laundry RPG is available from YSDC's shop and many other fine stockists.