Black Bag Jobs
by Matt Staggs
Black Bag Jobs, Cubicle 7, Role-Playing Game, ISBN 978-0-8574-4032-7, softcover $24.99, PDF $14.99, shop.cubicle7store.com.
Black Bag Jobs is a collection of six unrelated adventures written for Cubicle Seven’s The Laundry role-playing game, based on Charles Stross’s The Laundry Files novels (The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and The Fuller Memorandum). For the uninitiated, Stross’s books are best described as a blackly humorous hybrid of the British super-secret service and H. P. Lovecraft, in which civil servants must do battle against government bureaucracy and alien horror in equal measure.
These adventures pit hapless Laundry agents against Deep Ones, Shoggoths, and Dholes in exotic locales like the Hindu Kush, an oil rig, and even the surface of an alien world. In each case, there’s been a breach in the wall between the normal world and the world of all things eldritch and squamous, and it’s up to the players to patch things up.
All of the adventures included are fairly dangerous, and a couple of them could even destroy the universe should players muck them up. Like always, the Laundry’s agents will be expected to save the world, and to do so under budget and with all proper paperwork signed and filed.
Like almost all of the other Cubicle 7 products I’ve had the pleasure to read, Black Bag Jobs is well written and evocatively illustrated. Creating an adventure that is properly “Strossian” must have been a difficult task, and author Gareth Hanrahan should be commended for his efforts. All six adventures manage to maintain a balance between serious horror and serious send-up, so much so that I found myself double-checking while reading them to see if Charles Stross himself had been involved in their creation. There can be no greater compliment than that.
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