Triangle Agency is a forthcoming paranormal investigation, "corporate horror," RPG from developer Haunted Table that recently hit Kickstarter. In terms of meeting funding goals, the Kickstarter campaign is already a sure thing, with an expected fulfillment date of July 2024. Players will take on the role of super-powered agents employed by a sinister company seeking to acquire and control anomalies—forces of chaos that warp reality itself.
The Best War Games recently spoke with the lead creators of Triangle Agency and co-founders of Haunted Table, Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland, about the influences, mechanics, and themes behind their paranormal tabletop RPG. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Please introduce yourselves and share your favorite paranormal investigation game, show, or other media?
Huett: I am Caleb Zane Huett. I am the lead designer on Triangle Agency and co-founder of Haunted Table, with Sean here. We’re obviously huge fans of paranormal media. I’m trying to think of what my favorite would be in this case. I think if I’m really naming the one that is most originally deep-seated in my brain, it would be the book House of Leaves. I picked it up on accident in middle school. I was in a play and these older teens who were like seniors in high school were reading it, and they left it in the dressing room. And I was like, “That looks like an interesting artifact.” And by the time they had done their adult kid-lead scenes, I had already read three chapters and was brain-blasted. But I didn’t finish it until I was in high school several years later.
Ireland: Also hi, I’m Sean Ireland. I am a designer on Triangle Agency and a co-founder of Haunted Table. My favorite paranormal investigation property, the one that is closest to my heart, has gotta be Gravity Falls. The one that has probably impacted me the most as a human being was probably Sliders.
Huett: Sliders? We’ve never talked about this!
Ireland: Sliders. Caleb, what you were describing, discovering the artifact backstage, that was what Sliders was for me. That’s the one that haunted me growing up, and I still think of it when I interact with some cultural touchstones.
Q: How would you describe Triangle Agency to gamers who have yet to hear about the Kickstarter?
Huett: A paranormal investigation and corporate horror game, where you are taking on the role of agents working for this big, mysterious corporation. The corporation is interested in both making money and collecting these anomalies, which are forces of unreality that have crossed over into our world. They use them to create products, study the world, and further their power as a big corporation. You are a low-level field agent in the company, where your job is to do the nitty-gritty work of investigating these anomalies, catching them, and bringing them back for the company to do all the other workaround.
Ireland: And I would say, to add off of that, my elevator pitch version for people is: It’s a game where if you imagine the X-Men work at the Severance offices, you pretty much land where Triangle Agency is.
Huet t: Yeah, that’s it exactly. We’ve mentioned it before, but we are drawing from lots of stuff aesthetically that people will enjoy if they like video games like Control or shows like The X-Files. Yet, we are telling a totally unique story in that space and building a different and specific world.
I think something I want to call out about our descriptions so far is that a common link in this medium is that these organizations are usually government agencies, where we are explicitly corporate. And much of what we are talking about is the experience of having a job for a large company like that.
Q: You just mentioned Control as a major influence. Which aspects of the video game, (like combat, narrative, aesthetics) had the largest influence on Triangle Agency?
Huett: Yeah! I think the thing that connected with us the most from that game was the approach to a very human story in that space. Even though there are these grand structures, mysteries, and surreal things you can’t quite grasp, they have a really beautiful commitment to the individual characters in that game. You can see it in every part of it. How they have the main character coming in with this very human impulse to find her brother. You can see it in every single piece of paper you find. They’re always telling this really fun story about how the mundane details of the world can affect the surreal. And that is the part of Control that is most interesting and engaging to me. It’s something I enjoy in other media that I like replicating.
We’re also pulling influences from Swedish mid-century design, mixing that with this corporate, slightly dystopian, paranormal genre. You see those design influences in Severance, you see it in Control, and you see it in SCP Foundation. We treat that as if the company has continued to evolve into a modern start-up style corporation today, so we are borrowing that same aesthetic but trying to push it forward.
Q: Triangle Agency seems to boast a brighter color pallette and more fanciful weapons than Control. How do the tones of the two games compare to each other?
Huett: The biggest difference in tone will come down to how you play it at the table. In terms of what you’re looking at in the document, the biggest difference is that those human stories have to happen at the table to flourish and blossom. With the document, the story we’re telling is on a broader scale, and it’s a little more about a large conflict between a couple of different forces.
And then, to be totally honest, because we are building for tabletop gamers, the story opens up to these big, very whacky directions that the story can go that Control is not quite as interested in. They’ve got humor in there, in small ways, but they tell a pretty intense and scary story as you go through. We are leaving the tools on the table for that. You can tell scary stories, and we’ve done a couple of them in our actual plays, but we are trying to embrace what a typical tabletop gamer will be interested in. Big, big choices. Big swings. Wilder effects.
The other thing is that Control really emphasizes the character’s lack of power in that situation. You are still small even as you get these big abilities. We are doing that as well, and that is probably our biggest tonal tie. The organization is much bigger than you are. It is unknowable, intimidating, and threatening to you even as you are part of it. But we also really embrace and enjoy the choices and directions that appear when you tell these players that they are extremely powerful. They are literally warping reality, and a lot of those options would be extremely difficult to make in a video game.
Ireland: Something I really want to shine a light on, to draw daylight between these two ideas, is that you are in a hidden maze. The player is inside a labyrinth, out of the public eye, and a big part of what Triangle Agency is about is mitigating the influence of these reality-shaping forces in public, in the town square. How are you and your players going to deal with the news crew that just showed up? How do you control the narrative for the corporation? The events occur in society rather than inside a bottle.
Huett: I think what I would add to that is that if you want to tell a bottle story, the tools are there for you, but it’s not an assumption of base-level play.
Q: Control itself was loosely inspired by the collaborative Wiki project, SCP Foundation, which you also mentioned as an influence. The Kickstarter also lists X-Files and Scooby-Doo as inspirations. How does Triangle Agency do paranormal investigation differently than these other examples aside from corporate as opposed to government?
Huett: Yes! I want to tap into something we just started touching on. I think the biggest twist on a lot of those, like when you are looking at Scooby Doo or X-Files, you are looking at people who are outside the problem.
In Triangle Agency, your characters have a pretty good idea of the big picture. They know where the anomalies are coming from, and they have these anomaly powers. You are usually doing what the villains in Scooby-Doo usually do, which is making sure that random people think that everything is normal and fine. You want to keep the truth covered up or make people think they discovered something which is not the actual truth.
Instead of being somebody powerless looking into some scary truth, Triangle Agents come in with a lot of power. You are doing an investigation. You have to find out what the anomaly wants. What is it interested in? You are making choices about what to do with the anomaly, and choices about what to do with the people affected by the anomaly. Meanwhile, you have to balance those choices with the company’s interests, which are mostly about making a profit.
Your characters are squished between those two forces. Neither the company nor the anomaly care about how their actions are affecting the world, and it’s up to the players to decide whether they care. Do they want to protect people? Do they want to save people? What would they consider a good end?
Q: In addition to paranormal investigation , Triangle Agency has a long list of creative influences ranging from The Matrix and Jujutsu Kaisen to “that job you hated.” Tell us about some of these other influences, and how you managed to blend them into a cohesive whole.
Huett: What’s interesting about the way you phrased that is that a lot of stuff we cited as influences are things that inspired us, but we didn’t set out to adapt or translate those things directly. Our approach was, we have feelings we like, can we make those feelings appear? Our anomaly system is absolutely inspired by the way that the devils in Chainsaw Man or the curses in Jujutsu Kaisen function. We make them, we play with them, we find a way to make them work, and then we realize, “Oh, something I love has led me down this path.”
At the same time, we really try to make important steps towards feeling like this is part of a cohesive narrative that we are building. So the inspiration list is a little more reverse-engineered than it is forward-melded.
Q: What general storylines and themes are you hoping players will explore through Triangle Agency?
Ireland: Something that we talked about that I hold very dear about Triangle Agency to my heart is that one of the first things you do, when you create a character, is define who the important people are in their lives. So something that is important to me is that people make decisions about their relationships with those people in tandem with the pressures they are feeling from these enormously powerful otherworldly invaders. What do players focus on, when on paper they can do anything, but they are constrained on either end by these impossibly powerful forces?
Huett: Another thing I’d add to that is that we are hugely inspired by how television works structurally. Every single episode has a particular plot, but there’s also a farther-reaching story. So episodically, when you are sitting at the table, you are investigating mysterious forces, attempting to overcome them, and then making a big choice. The kind of stories we are telling are complicated stories about how the real world gets distorted by the fantastic, and scary and stressful stories about how dangerous it can be when forces are threatening reality. What happens when there is a giant tornado monster in the middle of the city?
On the broader scale, the reason it’s a game is that we are really, really interested in telling a story about rules and following them, and how you engage with them on both the gameplay level and narrative level. The game is built around the conceit that the company is going to ask things of you that are sometimes immoral or counter to your own benefit, but because of your situation, you don’t have a super wide range of choices to avoid doing that without quitting outright.
That’s mirrored in our mechanics. Another one of the character-building pieces is called a Competency, which gives you a couple of restrictions and bonuses in terms of role-play. This is common in a bunch of role-playing games, but in ours, it is monetized. If you fail to role-play in certain ways, you get demerits, and if you successfully play in other ways, you get commendations.
The moment-to-moment choices you’re making are not just story-driven, but characterful as well. If you are playing the Barista, you can never refer to people by their actual names, and if you do, you get demerits. So you can give this character you don’t know very well a nickname and stress out the social situation, ruin a serious moment, or you can maintain the tone at the expense of a demerit. And there are a couple of different ways for that to come through depending on the character type.
In the end, after you engage with that system for a while, your character needs to make a choice of what they are going to do with their life. Are they going to obey the Agency? Are they going to be concerned with their Reality? Are the temptations of their powers growing? They have to make that decision at the end and a little bit along the way. Players have to decide who their characters are going to become.
Q: One of the most novel aspects of Triangle Agency is that the rulebook is set in-universe, and that simply reading the rules is part of playing the game. Can you tell us a bit more about how that works?
Huett: Yes. The game itself is a manual given to you by the agency. We are considering the player themselves as Triangle Agency hire. The premise of the game is that by playing it, you are controlling a person who is actually going through this stuff in a different reality. That is part of how we make sure that the player understands what we’re trying to do, and that their choices at the table actually matter. I think part of the fun is reading through it and seeing how that grows.
At a face level, I will say, the Triangle Agency wants you to do one thing, but there are other forces in this world that have ways to contact you, that want you to do other stuff. Those forces will make certain choices explicit to you that the manual doesn’t explain outright. So both the player and the GM will be making choices about the kind of futures you want to allow at the table.
Q: In brief, what can you tell us about the game’s Anomalies and Agent Powers? Can you give us an example of an anomaly ability?
Huett: Ah, let me pull out my favorite! We have an Anomaly Class called Drain, that I love-love-love, and it has a skill called “Borrow.” But first, Anomaly Classes are one of three things you pick when you create your character. The others are your "Reality," which is the people in your life and the life you lead outside the agency, and "Competency" which defines the job given to you by the agency.
The actual rule text for “Borrow” states: you may choose a feature of a mundane target and take it for yourself. Their face, their voice, their love, their fingerprints—now you have it and they do not. You roll after using the ability, and on a success, the borrowed feature lasts for an hour. Subsequent successes allow you to extend the duration by another hour, you can share the stolen feature with another target, or you can allow the target to retain a flawed version of the stolen feature. But on a failure, the stolen trait is lost permanently, and the target remembers what they have lost.
This is a good way to show how these powers all work. We have an idea you can interpret a variety of ways, which has a lot of range in how you can use it. A “mundane target” doesn’t necessarily mean a person. We’ve had people use borrow on the structural integrity of the building. We had people borrow theories. We had players steal somebody’s lack of confidence or other negative traits, and then fail on purpose so they don’t have to deal with those negative consequences anymore.
All of our failures are really intense because it’s actually pretty hard to fail in Triangle Agency for most of the missions. As long as you have points in your abilities, you will fail pretty rarely, so when somebody does fail, it’s a big, story-shifting swing. The target losing what you’ve taken from them permanently is a huge one, and it has been an absolute blast. You might be trying to borrow somebody’s face because you want to sneak into a high-security place, and then you fail at your check, now you don’t have it, they don’t have it, and nobody on Earth has that face anymore. Then they become a loose end that you have to deal with.
I think that’s a good microcosm of how the abilities work. On the whole, they are all connected to abstract ideas sorted into a couple of categories. There are "The Rules," which are the laws of reality and physics, allowing you to adjust time and space. There are "Fears," which have to do with human fears like “Drain,” “Gun,” and “Absence.” There is also Body which is about the human body and how you can affect or use it, including “Whisper,” “Grow,” and “Dream.” So that’s the powers.
The anomaly monsters can fall into any one of these categories, and I think that’s where the SCP influence comes in the strongest. They have this really wide range of what qualifies as an anomaly, in their case because the SCP Foundation is studying a number of different sources of effects. They can be objects, animals, cryptids, or monsters. The core thing though is that they have to have a Focus. To create an anomaly, they have to come from a human place, a human obsession or fixation.
Ireland: I would just add that the other half of a player's power is the resources of this company. They have the ability to broadly and generally request assistance from the Agency, which also results in reality-shifting effects. We have an example in the rule book where an Agent is trying to get on a crowded bus and there is no space. But you could request the agency to shift reality so you have a seat. It may even be reserved for you if you succeed at your roll.
Q: The Kickstarter also emphasizes interpersonal relationships as a key aspect of gameplay, but rather than the game master controlling NPCs, other players at the table take over a character’s relationships. Can you tell us more about this system?
Huett: This is my favorite part of the whole game! There is so much about the game that we love, and the world and the paranormal aspects have been a super fun road to go down, but the thing that is most fun about being at the table is the relationship system, and I hope I start to see it like everywhere. I want it to be in every game.
At the beginning of every game—we’ve even been doing this for one-shots because it’s been an incredible help—you pick your character’s Reality with three questions. The questions are meant to help you pick an interesting set of people who are close to you. For the Star who is famous, your relationships are your manager, somebody from your former life, and your biggest rival. This is where we drew the most on our theatrical background. You want to create characters you can have a conflict with and characters you can have goals with because that creates the most momentum when you sit down at the table.
Then you answer questions about these characters. When asked about your manager, you might say “he’s kinda like a rude, fast-talking, movie manager sort of guy.” And as you describe these characters, players can slam their hands down, claim that they want to play that character, and then collaboratively you work out their name and other details. By the end of character creation, you’ve done that with everybody at the table.
Over the course of your career and your adventure, you have a really strong side cast of characters who can pop in at any time. Nearly twelve supporting characters with a standard three players and one GM group. Everybody gets to play and feel part of any scene, and it fixes something that I find frustrating about tabletop games sometimes. While it is wonderful to see a character step into the spotlight—everybody wants to see the plot move—but it can happen at the table where you check out during somebody else’s scene. But when the GM has a list of four characters they can call in at any time, you might be drawn into those scenes.
It's such a gift to the table, and it’s really nice for a GM. If you have an idea for a scene, but you don’t want to sit there talking to yourself forever, you can summon the manager and give them a prompt like “I think you have bad news for the player,” and then you can take what they come up with and move the scene along.
Ireland: I would also add that the idea of this stock cast, A) undergirds the idea that we’re trying to get people to engage with that episodic structure in that TV show way. Tell stories that have arcs but are also episodic. Having that cast is a huge gift to the GM where the players are tasked with keeping everything underground. Because as a GM I can say, “Okay, your hands have turned into bricks. And wouldn’t you know it, your rival Tabitha is walking around the corner and makes eye contact with you. Go at it.” And then two players play that very spicy scene.
Huett: And that’s the superhero part. That’s like the X-Men… well, not really X-Men since they aren’t really that secret—but the feeling of Spider-Man trying to balance his personal life and his secret identity—that comes up so much in this game.
You have this list of people who are high-pressure characters. If some random guy sees you with sharks for hands, you can make something up or even kill him off. But if it’s your mom who comes around the corner, you suddenly have to deal with that on a much higher level. And you get punished by the Agency for letting people in your life know, so it’s a very complicated series of choices.
Q: From a GM’s perspective, is it difficult to maintain control of the story with so much improv happening at the table, or are there systems in place to structure this secondary roleplaying?
Huett: My personal answer to that is, the thing I like most about GMing is when it is a back-and-forth conversation I don’t plan all the way out ahead of time. I would draw us back to the way an SCP story is structured. There are a set of pretty rigid rules that they are trying to get to underneath. You have this wall of “this is how this works, and if you mess around or treat that lightly, people will die.”
We call our whole dice system the Stability/Chaos system. The GM has a resource called Chaos. A lot of games have what’s called mixed successes, and I think they are an extremely important step forward for the RPG medium. They also have a widely known drawback, which is challenging to come up with interesting mixed successes quickly and consistently at the table.
Our chaos system is that in a mixed success, the GM just collects a couple of points, which they can spend on a table of effects and those effects aren’t really up for debate. There is an option to kill NPCs. You can even kill PCs if you get that high. There are other ones that allow you to reshape the space and make it more dangerous for the players. Prompts that allow the GM to use it when they need it, not in a railroad way, but you can cite the system and say “I have these points. I’m going to do this now.”
It’s a huge gift for everybody because it makes the game feel much fairer. The relationship between players and GMs can sometimes be weird because even when it’s fun, there is a power dynamic that can be hard to navigate. And if the GM has points and decides to spend 15 chaos on an event, everybody at the table can feel the weight of that event.
Ireland: I would only add to that, in my entire career as a GM, I can say I never confidently controlled the narrative. It’s very much the sort of thing where the harder you squeeze, the faster it flies away. And that’s not a bad thing! Just like Caleb mentioned, this medium is about collaboration, and enabling people to tell the story back and forth and have shared ownership of it.
But I would also say that when you are reading the rule book, you get some very strong perspectives, and you are hearing from characters who have very specific agendas. And as a game master, when you are running the game and seeing players interact with the situations you’ve set up, you can let those perspectives and agendas inform the way you nudge your players. It’s a scaffold that’s backstage in every scene.
Huett: That’s not something I’m sure we’ve articulated before, and Sean really said it perfectly. We try to make sure that by the time you are finished reading the rule book, you haven’t just read the rules, but you have been exposed to very strong opinions of how you can run the game. Before you start playing, we explicitly encourage players to figure out what their goals are. Those goals have less to do with what power you have, and more to do with what you want your table to take away from this. And I think that’s something that all GMs can benefit from thinking about that.
Q: The Triangle Agency website refers to the game’s scenario guide, The Vault, as a “mission subscription.” Are there any plans to continue this subscription beyond the twelve missions included in the hardback book available through Kickstarter?
Huett: Yes! Yeah. It has shifted a little bit over time because we got such a huge outpouring of support for it. We want to get a big group of people working on these really fast. In terms of their wide release, yes, I think those are still going to happen monthly. And I will say if you asked me this four days ago, I would have said “No clue, we’d love to do it,” but now we are hitting a point of success on the Kickstarter campaign, where I can say definitely maybe. We have a list of writers we want to go with, should we have that opportunity.
Q: Tell us a bit about Triangle Agency’s version of the character sheet; the Triangle Agenda. How does it depart from traditional character sheets you would find in D&D or other TTRPGs?
Huett: A couple of things! We will have a typical character sheet available. The thing is, it’s not just one like it’s not just one in a lot of these big games. Because you are dealing with these paths—your Anomaly and how it can grow, your Reality and how it can change, and how well you can follow or avoid your competency—character development is based on a series of choices about how your character spends your time.
We really want to emphasize that. So at the end of every game, you spend blocks of time. You can spend time building your relationships, you can focus on work and securing promotions in the company, which may unlock additional tools for you to use. You can gain quality assurances, which are points to help ensure you succeed. And then you can practice your powers and engage with your abilities by going out and using them.
The design itself isn’t finalized, but we have a really brilliant UI and UX designer working with our interpretation of the original character sheet making a set of character packets that help you go into as much detail as you’d like for spending your time. And this is structured like an actual planner. And because you are going through a whole character’s life, the hope is that at the end of it, you have this physical object that exists in your house that has the full history that can be as narrative as you want for multiple characters. So if you look back in five years to remember what you did, you have a really beautiful record of everything you did.
Ireland: I would just like to call out that the system in the game is called work-life balance.
Q: In general, how much math is involved with Triangle Agency’s combat and character-building? Is it very crunchy, or more open to improvisation and narrative roleplaying?
Huett: The actual math is very low. We have done so much to make it as quick and easy as possible. When you’re rolling dice you are only looking for threes, and you are counting threes. And the dice we’ve included in the campaign make three the only red side of the die, so it only takes seconds between rolling and knowing how many threes you have.
So where combat is concerned, number crunching isn’t as big a deal, but there’s a high emphasis on the choices made with your resources, so it’s closer to a resource management system than a math-driven combat system. It’s about the choices you're making and how do you use the limited amount of resources at your table.
But our role-playing is crunchier than people expect. We’ve had people refer to it as crunchy in a way that I find very funny. That goes back to the Competency system we mentioned earlier, where you can get commendations for role-playing effectively, and demerits for violating your prime directives. It adds a level of thought and planning to the way that you approach situations, which people say is a crunch weighted on your role-play, rather than your math abilities. The term we’ve been using rather than “rules-lite” is “business-casual.”
Ireland: I think the inverted, mirror version of making role-playing crunchier is—you asked about combat. The characters and anomalies don’t have hit points; they have a statistic called Stability. Damage is conveyed in terms of a resource called Harm. And Harm is calculated by making a subjective call about how many times—and how messily—something would kill an average human.
Huett: One Harm is enough to kill somebody. So the more harm there is in a situation, the more bombastic and extreme the thing that hurt you is.
Ireland: And so as a GM, you discuss with the table how gruesome a fate the character might be facing. And then, the player has a choice of whether they accept it and messily die and maybe have their team clean up after the wreckage or use their reality-shaping abilities to create a loose end. Because a bystander may see you withstand a hit from a city bus.
Huett: In general, combat is intended to be flavor because it's almost always a bad thing for players to be in combat. Not because you’ll lose, but because you are doing so much rolling, like, “Okay, now I want to shift the world.” And you might defeat one bad guy, but you could also add more Chaos to the GM’s pool, and it might even be enough chaos to create more bad guys. So you are trying to avoid combat as much as possible. And action sequences are more about the flow of characters overcoming or solving a problem, rather than slamming against it and seeing if you win. Because you almost never come out of that fighting something in a very direct way.
Q: Is there anything else you would like readers to know?
Ireland: Our Kickstarter is going to be running until July 6th. If you haven’t already taken a look, please check out our page.
Huett: I have a big one actually! If you are interested in learning about this world, in playing the game, and what’s been going on with the campaign, our Kickstarter page has an active narrative going on in it. If you are into that, our Discord is the place to be to engage with it, and we always have a bit of a light narrative going on in Discord.
Ireland: If you have already read the rules and you feel inspired, and you have an amazing bit of homebrew, you can A) talk about it in the discord we just talked about, and B) we’re running something called the Stabilize All Realities Jam on our HauntedTable.Itch.Io. It’s an open invitation. Anybody who is interested in sharing a new kind of Competency or a full adventure module is welcome to enter.
Huett: I love the Stabilize All Realities jam. It’s born out of our desire to connect with other creators who working in the horror/corporate space. And there are missions that can be played in both systems, which is interesting, because the Triangle Agency, when you put it in the context of any other game is almost always a bad guy. It’s been extremely fun to show how the Triangle Agency clashes with the typical heroes in these systems.
[End.]
Triangle Agency is fully funded on Kickstarter and its campaign will run until Thursday, July 6.