The Laundry

It has been nearly fourteen years since the First Edition of The Laundry Roleplaying Game was launched. Ah, those carefree days before the events of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN. Times have changed, and so has The Laundry Roleplaying Game. But what has actually changed from the first to the second edition?

 

The Game System

The most obvious change is the game system. The first edition of The Laundry Roleplaying Game used the Basic Roleplaying System, as seen in Call of Cthulhu. We’ve changed the game system completely, almost like taking all of those Windows operating systems out of the Laundry offices and switching them to Linux. 

The C7d6 system uses a dice pool that scales nicely from the gritty realism of being a lowly accountant sent out into the field to the more powerful individuals you encounter as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN looms ever closer. 

It’s quite simple, really. Whenever the outcome of an action is in doubt, and success or failure would greatly impact the characters and the story, the GM will ask players to roll a pool of dice to determine the outcome. During play, players roll pools of six-sided dice (d6s), and the GM tells them whether they have succeeded or not based on the task's difficulty. This is known as a Test. The number of dice you roll for a Test varies depending on your Attributes, Skills, and other traits and abilities you might have. All Tests follow the same simple steps.

  1. Create your dice pool: Once the GM tells you what type of Test you are undertaking, gather a number of dice equal to your score in the appropriate Attribute (Body, Mind, or Spirit), plus any Training you have in the Skill. Talents and other circumstances may change your dice pool.
  2. Roll some dice: Roll all the dice from your dice pool and compare the results against the Difficulty set by the GM.
  3. Apply Focus: For each point of Focus in the Skill, you can raise a die result by one.
  4. Check for success: After applying Focus, check to see if you scored any successes compared to the Difficulty of the Test. If you have successes equal to or above the Complexity of the Test (usually 1), you succeed!


Your Assignment

Instead of Archetypes, The Laundry Roleplaying Game has a wide variety of Assignments – these are your ‘day jobs’ while working at the Laundry. When you were recruited, whether it was voluntary or not, your skills and abilities were considered when determining the best place to assign you. When it comes to character creation, it works the other way around - you choose a cool-looking Assignment for your day job and gain a package of Skills and Talents that define what you’re good at. 

You can work in Accounts, Legal Affairs, IT, Archives, or Logistics, or take on one of the stranger roles as a Counterpossession Exorcist, Computational Demonologist, or as a Plumber, Cleaner, or OCCULUS Support.

Of course, these are your day jobs, and you’ll team up with other operatives from various departments to venture into the field. 

New Talents

If you’re already familiar with the C7d6 system, you’ll know that in addition to your usual Attributes and Skills, every character has a number of Talents that reflect their natural abilities or unique specialities that can come in very handy when facing mind-melting horrors. In addition to the expected combat-orientated Talents, operatives for the Laundry often develop a knack for bureaucracy and how to manipulate forms and paperwork to get access to better equipment or bypass all of the red tape that can slow things down. They can have a particular affinity with computers or tech, allowing them to identify rogue coding that could open portals to incomprehensible realms or jury-rig a gadget to get them out of a sticky situation. They could have a natural ability to know where they are in London (not an easy feat unless you’re a cabbie), sense mystic energy lines, or just where a good takeaway is.

New Art!

You’ll probably have noticed the striking and very different artwork we’ve been using to promote the game, and that the art style for The Laundry Roleplaying Game has been radically changed. Also, we’re going full colour with lovely hardcover books. We wanted to revamp the layout to give it a striking new design that not only stands out but evokes the tone and feel of The Laundry.

New Adventures

Along with a new system, there is a host of new adventures for your operatives to undertake as part of their ‘active duty’. This is most evident in the brand new supplement Introduction to Applied Occult Computing, which takes a new group of operatives and, over the course of a series of mishaps, find themselves assigned to the prestigious Milton Keynes field office (established after the unfortunate SCORPION STARE incident). From there, Gamemasters will find a wide range of adventures and plots hidden within the city, which will keep players on their toes for many sessions to come. 

In addition to Introduction to Applied Occult Computing, classic adventures from first edition’s Black Bag Jobs have been revamped, revised, and reopened with some new adventures to create Black Bag Jobs Reopened, a collection of missions where ‘Things’ (with a capital T) try to break into our reality. 

Both of these collections can be found on our Kickstarter page for the Second Edition ofThe Laundry Roleplaying Game.

 

Be sure to keep up with the development of The Laundry Roleplaying Game by following our blog, or find us on Facebook, X, Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram.

 

Head over to the campaign page here to discover how you can bring the game to life.

 

The laundry