Courtesy Cubicle 7 Entertainment
Cubicle 7 Entertainment will produce a roleplaying game based on the award-winning Laundry series (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and the forthcoming The Fuller Memorandum) by the even-more-award-winning Charles Stross, and uses the also-award-winning Basic Roleplaying System (Call Of Cthulhu) by Chaosium Inc.
If Stross' name seems familiar, it's because he's also the author of several iconic Dungeons & Dragons monsters that debuted in White Dwarf and later the Fiend Folio, including the death knight, githyanki (borrowed from George R. R. Martin's book Dying of the Light), githzerai, and slaad.
Stross' Laundry series is described as "Lovecraftian spy thrillers" involving a secret history of the 20th century. Horror elements such as the Nazis using higher mathematics to open "gates" to other dimensions are combined with humorous elements satirizing bureaucracy. The protagonist of both stories is a computer expert named Bob Howard forced to work for a secret British intelligence organization called "The Laundry".
The Laundry is a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth. Players take the part of Laundry agents, cleaning up the mess after things go wrong or, sometimes, even managing to prevent the manifestation of ultimate evil. Agents have access to the best equipment they can get their superiors to approve, from Basilisk Guns to portable containment grids to a PDA loaded up with Category A countermeasure invocations.
What's of particular interest to Delta Green fans is that Cubicle 7 acquired the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) license, the same game system that powers Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green. This is particularly exciting because it adds another yet another element to a Keeper's toolkit for running modern games and addresses a long-standing frustration of mine. While Delta Green is so iconic as to be accused of being a copy of the X-Files when it in fact predated that show, it has never found a mainstream connection in literature. Though not nearly as dark as Delta Green, The Laundry may be the next best thing.
And besides, The Laundry's tone sounds a lot like my current Delta Green campaign, which veers from nihilistic horror to beaureaucratic humor at any point in time. Now I have to pick up Stross' series ... as soon as I get through the other six books on my nightstand.
The Laundry RPG is a self-contained rulebook and will be supported by a number of sourcebooks and adventure campaigns. The game is due to be released in July 2010.
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