Tag: Triangle Agency

Be the change you want to play

I haven’t made any real progress in deciding what to run next. I asked the question here but have not enough feedback to be helpful. So I thought I would take a more practical approach to the problem. Several times over the last year or so, I’ve written up complete character creation posts for various games and systems to give me more of an insight into them, to see how I like them and to get me motivated to run them. You can read some of them here. I have always found these to be useful exercises and usually pretty entertaining for me too. So this will be the first in a series of character creation posts. I will do one for each of the games in the list in my aforementioned Time for a Change post. The first of those is one I am very interested in getting to grips with. I have been reading the rule book for a while and it’s one of the more unique and exciting on the list.

Triangle Agency

Triangle Agency is a game by Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland published by Haunted Table in 2024. Here is what the back cover has to say about it:

Triangle Agency is a tabletop role-playing game and exciting new job opportunity for humans like you.

Investigate supernatural Anomalies, wield tremendous power, and take advantage of our comprehensive life insurance benefits all from the comfort of your favourite table!

This book includes everything necessary for you to experience the chilling horror, wacky comedy, and emotional truth that can only come from working for Reality’s Most Trustworthy Corporation, 333 years running.

Welcome to the first job of the rest of your life!

I think that’s enough to go on for now.

Getting started

The book has more than fifty pages of material introducing the core concepts and rules of the game before it even dips its toes into the cool waters of character creation.

The first step into that stream would barely be considered part of character creation in most games (and I’m not entirely certain it is in this one, but that’s where I’m starting):

Identifying your Region

The book gives you a few options here, including your own hometown, a place you would like to be, a fictional place and Ternion City, the setting presented in the book as though it were a real place and so does not simply get included in the “fictional place” category.

I normally randomise everything in character creation posts but I’m not sure that will be helpful here. I’m going to go for Ternion City, which is, after all the location for the Agency’s primary HQ, a massive skyscraper that is “hard to miss and not included on maps.” In a real campaign, I’m sure this would have been decided upon through conversation with all the players or just by executive decision by the GM (General Manager.)

The same section wants you to determine the level of mundanity/reality of your setting, asking you to determine if a long list of phenomena are real or if they could be considered Anomalies. The list includes Ghosts, Artificial Intelligence and Debt. This is also probably something to be decided as a table or by GM decree.

Your agent’s ARC

The start of this section takes pains to remind you that you shouldn’t have skipped forward to this page. If you did, your agent will begin play with one demerit.

Essentially, your ARC is the set of components that makes up the essence of your agent. Each component is call an ARC piece. The A stands for your Anomaly, the R represents your Reality and the C is for your Competency.

Anomaly

As an agent of the Triangle Agency, you are bonded with one of the very Anomalies you are tasked with hunting down and dealing with. Such people are called Resonants.

There are nine Anomalies to choose from and I would expect the choice to be a hard one. Every one of them is split into three different abilities, each of which sounds like great fun to use in play.

They include:

• Whisper: if you have Whisper abilities you can manipulate what people say, express the thoughts of others or silence your own noises
• Catalogue: a Catalogue Resonant can create objects, change the properties of objects or even produce a duplicate of themselves
• Timepiece: Timepieces can adjust time to suit their needs, help allies to overclock their own abilities and effect a target’s memory

There are several others that are just as compelling but I love the idea of time manipulation powers so that’s the one for me.

This gives my Agent three abilities. Each of these abilities comes with a survey question to help you build your character’s personality. This is a really nice touch and great way to link personality and ability traits.

• We’ve Got Time, Q: I know A1: The deep magic
• Overclock, Q: I’ll sleep when… A1: I’m tired
• Remember When, Q: I’m more likely to ask… A: Where are they going?

Reality

Reality is as it says, really. It’s the regular, everyday shit we all have in our lives, family, relationships, background, etc.

I need to select one of nine Realities. They include:

• Caretaker – devoted to a Dependent who they bring everywhere with them
• Overbooked – Maintains a job (Vocation) in the mundane world as well as their Agency duties. Finds it hard to maintain Relationships.
• Romantic – constantly distracted by the building of complex relationship webs. They fall in love easily and always want to please that person.

With the Timepiece Anomaly, Overbooked seems like a suitable Reality for my Agent.

Overbooked provides you with a Vocation. There is a d4 table for this so I am going to roll on it. I got a 1! That’s “Journalist.” Very Clark Kent.

Every Reality gets a “Reality Trigger.” You get a work phone for one of your Relationships to call you at any time. This is for the GM to fuck with you at the worst possible time. You get a 4 box track called “Something Gives.” Every time you fail to fulfil the requirements of your Vocation or lose the phone you mark a box on the track. If you mark them all, that’s it, you’re done. You have to choose a new Reality.

Every Reality gets a Burnout Release. This is something you can do that allows you to ignore all Burnout, which is great because Burnout reduces the number of successes you score when you roll your dice pool to do stuff. In the case of the Overbooked, the Burnout Release is Threading the Needle. It means you can do anything relating to your Vocation and ignore Burnout.

Burnout is something you accrue as you attempt actions using Qualities that you have no Quality Assurances in. Sometimes you lose QAs and sometimes you just don’t have any to start with. Your Competency determines the level of QA you have in any given Quality so we’ll consider them more in the next section.

We have some Onboarding Questions here in the description of the Overbooked too. Let’s look at them:

• What is the most difficult decision you’ve ever made?
  • A: When I decided to take the position as an Agent, I knew it would severely impact the time and commitment I could give to my Vocation as a journalist. Even though I now know I was choosing between becoming an Agent and death, I sometimes regret my decision.
• What terrible thing will happen if you give up your responsibilities?
  • A: No-one can report the news with the same degree of integrity as I can. The world will lose a ruthless truth-teller.
• How do you celebrate victories?
  • A: I don’t. There’s no time for celebration. It’s just on to the next story or the next Anomaly.

I feel like I really learned a lot about this character in answering those questions. Very cool.

Finally, as part of my Reality, there’s the Relationship Matrix. You get three Relationships which you must identify by answering the questions provided.

1. Who is your other boss?
   • My editor, Sybill McPartland
2. Who cares the most about your health?
   • Mum
3. Who are you in charge of?
   • My rich kid intern, Hunter

I need to identify one of them as my closest Relationship. That will be my editor, Sybill. She gets 6 Connection. Mum and Hunter get 3 each.

If there were a full table of players for this, I would get three of them to portray each of my Relationships whenever a scene with them came up. These players would be chosen here. As it is, I will have to skip that step.

Competency

The final ARC piece is Competency. The book describes it as the most important aspect of your ARC (although, I have never before met a more unreliable narrator in an RPG book as the one in this section of Triangle Agency, so, you know, take it all with a pinch of salt.) Essentially, this is your role in the agency. It describes your responsibilities, code of conduct and equipment.

The available Competencies include:

• R&D – The creatives who see what people really want and make it for them while also figuring out the universe’s enigmas
• Gravedigger – These are the agents who are taking care of things no-one else wants to face in places they don’t want to be
• Hotline – An ear to listen, a guide and a customer service professional

With this character, I think I’m going to go for Hotline.

Here’s what the Hotline gets me:

Prime Directive – Never say, “unfortunately.” If I deliver bad news to someone, I get a demerit (demerits are used to negatively affect your standing in the Agency, while commendations have the opposite effect.)

Sanctioned Behaviours – I’ll get one commendation if I

• Help someone unburden themselves
• Take the blame for something I didn’t do
• Connect someone to an unexpected fate

If I do all of these on a single mission, I’ll get three extra commendations!

Initial Requisition – Hold Music, Vol. 1
A fantastical tape player the bland music of which has the power to transport the agents to a safe waiting room for up to an hour!

Self-Assessment – I have to answer the three questions presented to determine the increases I will get to particular Quality Assurances.

1. A customer has a problem I have been unable to fix in my own life. I…
   • Share the approaches that have failed, to save them time (+3 Empathy)
2. A customer has a broken product and a convincing story. I…
   • Pull every string necessary to get their refund (+3 Persistence)
3. A customer’s call disconnected. I…
   • Call them back and submit an error report to IT (+3 to Professionalism)

Signature quote – “Your call is important to us. Your time is important to us. Everything you do, think, and are is important to us.” I think my Agent really takes this to heart.

Onboarding Questionnaire

The final part of character creation that I will be dealing with today. There are several more pages dealing with Competencies in detail, Requisitions, Work/Life Balance, etc. but the book insists that you leave this section until after your first mission.

The Questionnaire is a set of nine questions, the answers to which you should expect to be shared with the rest of your Field Team.

1. How did you come in contact with your Anomaly?

• I was TAPped for fieldwork though the Triangle Academy Program. I was approached by another field agent who must have seen some potential in me. Once I had completed the program, I was left in a glass cell with an Anomaly that looked like an old egg-timer that kept spinning in the air until it fused with my body.

1. How did the Agency find you?

• I found the Agency through a case I was reporting on. It was about the disappearance of a circle of trees in Trinity Park. When I went there to investigate, I discovered several field agents who were impressed with my professionalism and brought me on board.

1. What is your Annual Salary?

• $80,000

1. What do you look like?

• I’m a skinny, white guy who wears a lot of brown and beige coloured corduroy and polyester. I have thick rimmed glasses, brown hair and brown eyes. I look like I’m from the seventies.

1. Do your powers have a unique visual manifestation?

• I sometimes leave little piles of sand behind after using my powers.

1. How do you take your coffee?

• Black

1. Who among your Relationships is your primary contact, and why?

• My editor, Sybill, because she would be the first one to miss me.

1. What do you bring to the table in a collaborative work environment?

• I am a dogged investigator. When I am given a task, I will see it through to the end.

1. Finally, please list all prior work experience and level of familiarity with Adobe, Excel and the Google suite.

• As a journalist, I have ten years experience working with all aspects of adobe software and most of the Google suite although I rarely use Excel for anything other than lists of things. Don’t ask me about formulas.

Two last things, I gave him the pronouns, he/him and the name Mark Dent for some reason.

Here’s the first page of the form fillable character sheet for Mark Dent:

Conclusion

This was a fairly involved process but one that got me thinking quite deeply about the type of person this Agent is and not just the type of character he is, if you see the distinction. I really liked doing it actually. I loved reading about the various Anomalies, in particular. If I was actually about to be a player in a game of Triangle Agency, I’d be eager to get to use them too!
I feel like I learned a lot about how the game would be played as well. So, mission accomplished in that respect.