The Truth is a 3 sided coin
Welcome Agent to the rest of your life. At the Triangle Agency we seek out individuals like you. Those who have bonded with Anomalies are often sources of chaos and destruction. With our stabilisation technology we can make sure that you can keep being you. All we ask is a lifelong commitment to the Agency. Surely that is not too much to ask for getting to be alive?
This intro sums up Triangle Agency at its core. A TTRPG of strange people, working for a shadowy organisation. You have to work for them, but perhaps they don’t have your best interests at heart? Like any corporation I guess. Inspired strongly by the likes of the computer game Control, the SCP foundation, and the X-Files, Triangle Agency is designed by Sean Ireland and Caleb Zane Huett and published by Haunted Table.
This is a GMs review of Triangle Agency. GM review means that I have experienced the game from the Game Masters chair but haven’t been on the player character side of the table. RPGs can feel different depending on the role you are adopting so I think it is useful to you, the reader, to know where my perspective is coming from.
I bought the game with my own money.
I ran the game for 6 sessions.
Welcome pack
Player Characters in Triangle Agency are agents bonded to strange anomalies, tasked with hunting down other such anomalies and taking them back to the Agency for ‘study’.
Anomalies in Triangle Agency can manifest in a variety of ways. Maybe they’ll look like a spidery slenderman type creature, a sentient plant, or just a strange ball of energy. What they look like isn’t as important as what they are. Anomalies come into existence from strong emotional reactions. That spidery slenderman isn’t just a scary monster, it wants to eliminate all the noise in an area as it has come into being from someone’s campaign against noise pollution. Your heart beating makes noise, right? This focus gives the Anomaly purpose and the GM (General Manager) ideas on how it is going to react to the investigation by the Agents.
Agents are made up of a trifecta of influences: their Anomaly, their Agency Competency, and the nature of their Reality. Let’s start with the Anomalies.
One of the aspects my players have loved about the Triangle Agency is how over the top the abilities you get access to are, even just the starting ones! Maybe you’ll take Growth gaining the ability to shield your allies with your flesh, or grow extra limbs of your choice. Perhaps Timepiece is more your speed, allowing you to help your fellow Agents out by manipulating the passage of time itself. How about being a Whisper and gaining the ability to literally put words in people’s mouths or drown out all noise in a room.
These examples are just a taste of what is possible in Triangle Agency. Each power also has a very narrative focused way of being expressed. Here is Missed! From the Absence Anomaly.
The writers could have described the power in a more mundane fashion but instead we got a more verbose description. All the powers are similarly described, but that doesn’t mean they always work. How do we actually determine outcomes in Triangle Agency?
When you want to activate a power you roll six d4s. Every 3 you roll is a success because the Agency has a 25% stake in reality and 3 is an obviously excellent number for the Agency. Every other number is a failure. Most of the time when you use an anomalous power you only need 1 success to fire off the effects. Roll more and you might be able to add some extra oomph to it. Roll none and you fail, potentially getting yourself into a sticky situation.
Now you’ll have spotted that the powers ask you to ‘Roll Duplicity’ or similar. These refer to the Quality Assurances (QA) that each character starts with. When rolling you can spend the relevant QA in order to change a die to any side, including a success. However powers aren’t the only way you can push the narrative in your favour. Since the Agency has a 25% stake in reality, you can ask them to change it on your behalf.
You see whenever you attempt something that might be covered by some sort of skill roll in another game, Triangle Agency just assumes that the characters will fail. In order to succeed your only recourse is to ‘Ask the Agency’ to change reality such that you are guaranteed to succeed. The door to the house you need to get into is locked, turns out the homeowner left a key under a rock that you just spotted. Need to get past the security on this building? They all just got called away to look after a surprise visit from the CEO. How convenient.
This may be the hardest part of Triangle Agency to get right as a GM and I am still not 100% convinced I push it as much as I should. You have to ask for rolls where you might not in other games, and the nature of those rolls is wildly different to when they might occur in other games. Its definitely a strong point of friction in the game and not rolling enough affects the GMs ability to mess with the players.
When a player rolls, the GM gains a resource called Chaos. They gain Chaos equal to the number of non-3s the players roll, unless the player rolls three 3s. That is called triscendence, of course it is, and comes with a bunch of bonuses for the player, and no chaos for the GM. Chaos is spent by the GM to allow the Anomaly to act on its environment in a variety of fun and interesting ways. I don’t normally like currencies that put up barriers between GM and players, but this one feels quite natural and flows well. I enjoyed using it, and letting the players know how much I could do as my resources built up. It felt threatening, and like a ticking clock they were battling against.
Now we’ve touched on Quality Assurances (QAs) but where do they come from? Although the core of the game happens out in the field tackling anomalies, you still have a day job at The Triangle Agency called your Competency. Maybe you are a lowly Intern, a Receptionist, or a Gravedigger. As with everything else in Triangle Agency, these are all much weirder than they first seem. Except the Gravedigger. Weirdo.
Each Competency comes with a Prime Directive, a narrative rule you must obey in order to avoid Demerits (you’ve been a bad Agent). This might be something like ‘Every time you deliver Bad News’ or ‘Every time you touch something living’ (which makes shaking hands a little problematic). On the flip side you also get ways to earn commendations (you’ve been a good Agent) which are effectively Agency bucks you can spend to requisition equipment and services. These range from the mundane ‘Make someone feel welcome’ to the creepy ‘Change someones life, permanently’. You’ll note it doesn’t say ‘for the better’ in that last one.
Alongside these roleplaying prompts you also get an initial requisition, a power you can use once per mission. These could be a rubber duck that holds all the answers, a printing press that you can use to put out news everywhere, all at once, across the globe, or Dracula’s Coffin where you can make a problem disappear such that it never existed in the first place.
On top of the outrageous powers given to you be your Anomaly and Competency, each character also has a Reality: how their world looks like outside of their time at the Agency. Maybe they are the backbone of an RPG club, or have a freelance journalism job. This provides relationships which can again provide an odd power if you spend time with the folk in question.
You’ll have no doubt come to the conclusion that there is quite a lot going on for the players. From the unconventional way of resolving the ‘Can my character do this?’ question, to the absolutely ludicrous powers, the initial contact with the game can be a bit discombobulating. Once they do get into the swing of it, these are wonderful toys to play with.
Although the powers are outrageous they are often very specific, giving players license to interpret them creatively. This is the special sauce that makes the play of Triangle Agency so compelling. You have the ability to effectively alter reality, constrained by the borders of the narrative.
The mission structure for the GM is a little odd as well. It starts with ‘morning briefings’ a lens on the character’s lives outside of the Agency. Here they will get hints as to the nature of the upcoming case, and then get briefed at the Agency as to the location and target of the mission. What follows is an investigation and there is some decent advice in the book on how they should be constructed. When they finally confront the Anomaly in its Domain, they will capture it and bring it back to the Agency for study. At least that’s what the Agency wants. We all want to give the Agency what it wants don’t we?
Lets come away from substance for a moment to talk about the production. I bought the collector’s edition and it comes in a little cardboard briefcase, like the briefcase you use to capture anomalies in the game. It comes with the dice you need to run the game, the core book, and The Vault, a series of missions that I have enjoyed running some of.
The rulebook is a fantastic example of using the world of the game as a framework for explanation. The players side of the book reads like an employee handbook for The Triangle Agency. The GMs side is similarly in-world, but I don’t want to spoil that for you. This makes the book an easy and entertaining read, but hard to reference. There is a contents page, but no index. This is something I could say about many RPGs. Indexes are golden, please include one. The art across the books is weird, evocative, and fits perfectly with the tone they are attempting to evoke.
I think Triangle Agency is really good fun. A bit of work is required to make it sing, but with every power a joy, each mission dangerous and entertaining, and the power to change reality it is a raucous time. The central mechanism of ‘Ask the Agency’ is hard to grok at first but I enjoyed what my players did with it and the Chaos system was actually pretty good. I’ve had a blast running it and my players have thoroughly enjoyed it.
But.
That sounds like a pretty full throated recommendation. Run as a one-shot it would be. However we need to talk about campaign play because this where things go really, really bonkers and the cracks begin to show.
We need to talk about the Playwall.
Spoilers.
Massive Spoilers.
Ahead.
Corporate Culture
It all comes down to time.
In between each session players spend a resource literally called Time. If they spend this on their Competency, doing extra work for the Agency, then you get to increase your QAs, giving you more resources to manipulate reality with and a better chance of having your powers fire off well. Spent on your Reality, you can get the level of your relationships up, moving them towards becoming a permanent power, rather than having to spend in session time on the relationship to get its benefits.
Spend Time on your anomaly and all hell breaks loose.
The keen eyed amongst you will have spotted that some of the spaces along each track have a letter and a number. These refer to an area of the book called the Playwall.
If the first two thirds of the Triangle Agency depict a game of strange but restrained powers in the service of an all powerful reality altering corporation, the Playwall removes the ‘restrained’ part of that idea. It will make you exclaim ‘What!?’ on every page. It’s anomaly country.
I don’t want to spoil too much of what you will uncover but we need to look at the first couple of unlocks on each track. It is worth noting before we go much further that when you do choose a track to spend Time on, the other two have their tracks reduced, meaning the game encourages a sort of focus if you want to get to all the juicy bits of a particular part of your character (or does it?).
The moment you become an Agency Associate, just 3 steps up the Competency track, you get access to vault requests. The vault is where anomalies go when you capture them. Now alongside being able to requisition a car or a lifetime meal plan (triangular food only) you get access to items derived from the Anomalies you have captured. Maybe something like this.
Head a step down the Anomaly track and you learn that you can practice your powers, asking questions about how the other characters perceive you. Fill one of these question tracks out and you unlock a new power or an adjustment to an existing one.
But let us step a little further.
The next unlock down the Anomaly track and now you can form relationships with the Anomalies that escape, gaining new powers when you max out these relationships.
Although it takes a little more time to get interesting, the Reality track begins focusing on eliminating Anomalies, allowing those on this track to absorb their resonance, boosting QAs and similar.
There is more to unlock down these tracks: secrets of the Agency, ways to turn demerits into currency, and much more besides. The important detail I would like to focus on is this: the tracks bring an asymmetry to player character motivations.
Our first session of Triangle Agency was good. I ran with pre-gen characters to see if my group wanted more, and they did. We then had a sort of downtime sessions to explore the world more and look at the Time and Playwall mechanisms. Our second investigation was better than our first and part of that was the different character motivations that the players had now unlocked.
This is where Triangle Agency truly started to shine for us. As we unlocked more of the Playwall strange dice, d6s aren’t even triangular, started appearing in the pool for the Anomaly and Competency focused players. When one side asked about the dice they didn’t know anything about we all lent into ‘the bit’ saying ‘What dice?”. Every session we spent Time and I would update everyone’s sheets with new powers, abilities, and rules. They were met with glee, confusion, and revelation. Each unlock more gloriously over the top than the last.
And it is here where the cracks began to show.
We spent about 3 Time each session, the max the game recommends, meaning we were unlocking new options every time we played. We played 6 sessions, 5 investigative and one downtime so about 15 Time spent in total.
As you unlock powers there is no easy way to convey this information to each player. The character sheets for the game are fine but start to become small novels. Competency, Anomaly, and Reality Powers are 3 separate sheets. As you unlock more and more options, each of which comes with new opportunities, restrictions, and rules.
In order to make this easier for my players I took to basically stripping out the relevant rules from the Playwall for each character and putting a PDF together for each one. I would update this after every session. Here is what one of these looked like after 5 sessions. This PDF contains massive spoilers.
That looks like a lot, and it is.
A slight caveat here. My group played about once a month or so for about 2 – 2.5 hour sessions. This does mean it can be a little tricky to remember everything your character can do from session to session. If playing more regularly I think the deluge of new powers might be assuaged by better system familiarity. That said.
It’s a lot.
New powers, new dice, options galore, and an emergent campaign embedded in the Playwall. An anomaly trapped in the Agency starts talking to those going down the Anomaly track. The reality track literally starts asking if you are the player or the character, if you know the difference anymore. The Competency track has you getting deeper into the ‘truth’ behind anomalies and the greater threat that is coming.
It’s a lot.
It’s too much.
It brought our campaign to a screeching halt as I stuggled to keep up with everything, the players struggled to remember everything, and we all agreed to bring it to a close before we just ran out of steam. I found over the course of our run that we never really engaged with the Reality side of the game, only touching on it from time to time. The players were more invested in the Agency and Anomaly side and so I let them run down those paths with abandon. There is so much going on in the game that I think most GMs will struggle to weave everything together perfectly.
Exit Interview
All that said, it can’t be denied that Triangle Agency is a wonderful, over the top homage to X-Files, SCP Foundation, Control, and similar fiction. It also seems to have been designed in such a way as to include every wacky idea that the team thought up. I love that. I admire ambition like this. It’s a game that absolutely without abandon leans into ‘The Bit’. It does leave the GM and players spinning a lot of plates, and no easy way to make all the new pieces easily accessible. I found myself wanting a digital character manager of some description.
Phew. It’s a lot, and I’ve written a lot. Of course what you want to know is this: do I recommend Triangle Agency? Yes I do. I’ve had an absolute blast running it. It is over the top, wonderfully so, and revels in the strangeness of its world and premise. You should be aware that it is a lot of work to play, and even more to run. If you are willing to dig into the depths of the Agency, to put in the hours coming to grips with its mission, then I think you will enjoy one of the most unique games I have ever played.
Thanks very much for visiting the site and reading this article. You are welcome to comment on the piece below or join our Discord. If you would like to support us financially you can do so via Patreon or one of the other methods on our site.
