First Looks - The Laundry and C&C Monsters & Treasure of Aihrde

Two new RPG products have entered into my gaming vision in the last 24 hours or so.

The first, The Laundry, from Cubicle 7, drew my attention as it uses the Basic Roleplaying System and is Licensed by Chaosium.  Intriguing to say the least.  The last two Cubicle 7 games I looked at are driven by the FATE gaming engine (Starblazer Adventures and Legends of Anglerre).  278 pages is going to take me a while to dig thru, and I may need to find some of the (British) fiction this is based upon.  Give me time before I even attempt a review.

From the blurb:

CAPITAL LAUNDRY SERVICES - WHAT NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP?

There are things out there, in the weirder reaches of space-time where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summoned them, HP Lovecraft wrote about them, and Alan Turing mapped the paths from our universe to theirs. The right calculation can call up entities from other, older universes, or invoke their powers. Invisibility? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable!

Opening up the way for the Great Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunately, much too easy.

That's where the Laundry comes in - it's a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth (and more particularly, the UK). You work for the Laundry. The hours are long, the pay is sub-par, the co-workers are... interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word), and the bureaucracy is stifling - but you do get to wave basilisk guns and bullet wards around, and to go on challenging and exciting missions to exotic locations like quaint, legend-haunted Wigan, cursed Slough and Wolverhampton where the walls are thin.

You may even get to save the world.

Just make sure you get a receipt.

***

The Laundry RPG is a standalone game using the Basic Roleplaying System (Call of Cthulhu). Players take the role of Laundry agents, saving the world from extradimensional, Lovecraftian and occult threats.

The other RPG product I've been peeking at is Monsters & Treasure of Aihrde for Castles & Crusades.  So far at first glance this is a very pleasant surprise.  I'm sure there are typos, but they haven't popped out at me.  176 pages of monsters and treasures for use in C&C, but I'm sure they could work in most Old School games. 

Some of this has already made appearances in Crusader magazine and some previous adventures and short PDFs, so perceived value will depend on how much of this one already has in different formats. 

I'll come back to this once I've given it a more thorough read thru.

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