Triangle Agency Delta Test
A downloadable TTRPG
The universe was not meant to be observed.
Observation is dangerous. Observation creates thought; thought shapes reality. Small distortions in reality caused by its observation are called Anomalies. The Agency exists to identify, apprehend, and, if necessary, eliminate these Anomalies.
Welcome to your first day at the Triangle Agency! Together we will stabilize reality.
🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺🔺
Triangle Agency is a game about wielding enormous power and navigating bureaucratic red tape, all while tending to the obligations present in your personal life. You play as Resonants: human beings who have bonded with Anomalies and gained supernatural powers. The Agency also assigns you with a Competency, which defines the rules by which you are expected to conduct yourself. Of course, every character also has a Reality, which represents the ever-present effects of their personal responsibilities.
Gameplay during this open test period is focused around Anomaly Retrieval Missions, in which Agents are sent to investigate and apprehend Anomalies while keeping Loose Ends to a minimum.
Face the Horror without Fear: Death isn't a setback in Triangle Agency, although the Demerits associated with abusing your Life Insurance will certainly be noted on your Employee Evaluation. We hope you don't get recommended for Probation!
This project is in Open Delta, the purest and most symmetrically balanced of all test editions. We want to share this introductory content with you in order to hear community feedback while we prepare more for the full release!
What to expect in this test kit:
- Learn about the mysterious Triangle Agency and your role in advancing its mission in the Field Agent Manual, featuring the basic game rules and loads of flavor and backstory, as well as important regulatory information for compliance with Agency standards and practices.
- Build your Agent with our unique ARC system by selecting three pieces representing your Agent's Anomaly, Reality, and Competency. In this test kit, you can create up to 729 unique character combinations, including:
- 27 supernatural, scary, and fun Anomaly powers that you can use to reshape reality;
- 45 Prime Directives and Sanctioned Behaviors provided by the Agency to reward commendable behavior and punish careless Agents; and
- 20 Reality Features to enrich and enrage your personal life.
- Receive advice from the Agency on how your GM can prepare and run Missions using the General Manager Toolkit, including examples of reality-warping Anomalies and ways to bring an Agent's Reality to life.
- 16 Useful print-outs for Agents and GMs
- All included, this Delta Test is 90+ Pages! Just remember: reading pages out of order is dangerous, and reading pages without numbers is forbidden.
If you want to play a Tabletop Roleplaying Game that lets you explore the spooky and celebrate the silly, collect some friends and give it a go! Make sure to let us know how it goes on Twitter at @hauntedtablegames, Instagram @hauntedtable, by joining our Discord community at discord.hauntedtable.games, or in the comments below!
Why Donate? We're releasing this test kit as Pay-What-You-Want because it's still in development, but as you can see there's a whole game's worth of content already here! Any donations will go directly toward making the game bigger and better before final launch.
And if you REALLY want to help, please share your thoughts in our post-play survey here.
Design & Writing: Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland // Illustrations: Nathan Rhodes and Ryan Kingdom // Layout Elements: Michael Shillingburg // Layout (Rules Text): Caleb Zane Huett // Layout (ARC Pages): Sean Ireland
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- FAQ & Design Supplement Added - Other FixesMar 03, 2023
- What's ahead for Triangle Agency?Dec 06, 2022
- PDFs Now SearchableDec 02, 2022
- Quick FixesDec 02, 2022
Comments
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This looks awesome (and appears to be inspired by Control, which is always good). Out of curiosity, will there be some sort of guide to help newer GMs homebrew the game? Also, how much content will be in the final product and how much will it cost?
How homebrew friendly is Triangle Agency? Been working on a homebrew concept and looking for a system to use to drive it. It has that control vibe with individuals bond to some object. Is it fairly easy to homebrew anomalies for this system?
If you're talking about Anomalies (to capture), homebrewing those is easy! If you mean Anomalies (Character piece) those are a little tougher. In the final game, each of the 9 Anomalies have 21 abilities total. Making a new one is a pretty big undertaking, but it's possible!
Overall, I think TA has lots of room to add stuff in, but homebrewing it with a full reskin/overhaul is going to be challenging. The mechanical design is tied pretty closely to its specific story world. I'm interested to see what people come up with, though!
Look forward to seeing the full release. Think my players from grad school looking for something more combat focus but really love the presentation here and control vibes. Would love to take a crack and homebrew something from TA. Tried with gurps but proved to be lil too much and wasn’t getting anywhere. Think the anomalies I came up with would translate well to TA actually.
Will there be character types that impact technology/records/knowledge?
There are some abilities mixed throughout the Anomaly options that concern this stuff, but not a dedicated Anomaly. The final rules have the same 27 character pieces as the Delta Test does.
Thanks!
How is "combat" typically handled? Is there a turn order, or is everything just kind of loosey-goosey go with the flow?
Hi there! High-pressure situations like combat are primarily narrative (whoever has something to try does it) but there is some guidance for how GMs can best keep it flowing in the GM Toolkit part of the Delta. There's a little more guidance in the upcoming full version as well, but combat doesn't require turn order.
Read the Polygon article. Looks interesting. Backed. Best of luck!
Thank you!!!
Hi! I have a question! I might have missed it in the rules, but do you choose from the Triscendence Chart whenever you use a Quality Assurance to change it? Cause if so, can't anyone always use QA's to get a triscendence... to get them more QA's? Like if you rolled 5 3's... use 2, get 3 back.
Hi, Flux! Triscendence only activates when you roll three 3s naturally. Adjustments can make the roll stable (no chaos is generated at three 3s) but not Triscendent.
Thanks! Read back on it and the book does totally say this, our eyes must have
not had clearancemissed the box that said this of our own volition. Thanks a million!An excellent beta- sorry, Delta- with a fully playable and flavorful game and mechanics that really emphasize the intended tone! There are some things I'd like to see updated soon, like a clarification on how Burnout works (It doesn't affect Chaos generation or cancel out Triscendance, so what does it do?) and more details on Probation and Demerits. That said, what's already here is solid and intriguing enough that I'm awaiting those updates with excitement!
I played with some friends, it was really fun, i really like how the demerits influence your interactions,
spoiler
but in the GM tool kit it's not really clear how overwhelm interacts with the insurance policy
To answer your question while avoiding spoilers: It activates it! That effect causes death, which means it specifically triggers that policy.
If you ever have questions about GMing, join us on the Discord! Our community discusses rules a lot and both designers are there to answer questions.
This Delta test kit is what ultimately made me pledge on Kickstarter. When I read the Catalogue entry, I was in love.
Thank you!!! I'm so glad you've enjoyed the game so far.
I say this not as a knock to the writing or the presentation which definitely has a lot of love and heart put into it, but are there any plans for a quickstart or "dressed down" version of the rules for the GM side?
The flavor is excellent but an official quickref/cheatsheet will all the rules in a concise source would be wonderful. (For example, In this demo, as far as I can tell, Harm resolution is only described in the player book, not in the GM book.)
Thank you for reading and congratulations on the KS!
Not any time soon! Right now our focus is entirely on getting the full book finished. I bet you wouldn't be alone looking for something like this, though, and I recommend asking around our Discord if someone has made something like that for their home games.
I see, thank you for your reply. Good luck with the final book. o./
Any chance of Solo Rules?
There's going to be a solo game in the Triangle Agency setting created by Alfred Valley! This particular game, featuring Field Agents and General Managers, is in part about the relationship between those two groups, and so a direct translation of this game to solo wouldn't really work for our goals. I hope you'll enjoy the new solo game when it comes out next year, though!
I look forward to it
I saw this on Kickstarter. Was interested, but since the core book in print comes with dice (which I don't want/need), I sadly had to pass on it. I hope if you get it into stores and/or on Amazon I can pick it up down the road. In the interim, I grabbed this to get a feel for the game.
get the pdf?????
If I just wanted the pdf, I would have pledged for just that.
I don't understand. Because a fantastic game that is deeply thematic and richly developed has dice you don't want it? I don't need them either, but as a dice goblin I'm always happy to have another set. And at the Complete Set level, you will be able to keep them in the Normal Briefcase, so they won't even be rattling around the gamespace.
I never said I didn't want the game; I said I'm happy to pick it up via Amazon or retail later on (if it becomes available that way). How is that saying I don't want it? I'm glad everyone else is happy to get dice, and whatever else. I have no interest in any of those things. I just wanted to get the core book, and that's it. That's not possible via the KS, so I'm happy to wait to get it at a later date.
You can now order the book on its own on our pre-order page: https://triangle-agency.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Not even done reading the Agent's Manual yet (and haven't played), but I have to say this stuff is gorgeous and thrilling. The graphic design is incredible - I gawked at every Anomaly icon - and so cohesive that it starts to feel immersive. The writing is sharp, perfectly hitting the tone that made Portal so funny, and succeeding wonderfully where lots of other media attempting that style has felt derivative and tired. I love the concept of traits being resources instead of ratings. I REALLY love the double edge of every roll possibly accruing Chaos, enabling the GM to do fun stuff to make the baddies badder. I don't think I've been this hyped to run a game since I first discovered WoD as a teen. Really inspiring stuff, y'all. Can't wait to see how it develops (and give some feedback once I play)!
Thank you so much!!! This is so kind. We look forward to hearing about your games!
I don't remember when was the last time a game book made me so excited to play a game. The graphic design, the corporative art, the weird d4 resolution system, the two books all come together to tell a magnificent story and hook you into a fantastic world.
Mage the Ascension was one of the things that got me into the hobby and Apocalypse Keys is a recent game I am in love with, but Triangle Agency has the most compelling Technocracy/DIVISION I have ever seen, a high point in my one of my favorite genres of fiction.
I can't wait to play this game and I will for sure make a podcast review after I do. Until then I would fight to preserve reality and maintain stability.
This is such a kind review!!! I'm so glad you're enjoying it. Please let us know if you make a podcast episode about the game!
This game is incredible. The vibes are immaculate, and the design is innovative and exciting.
Could the PDFs be made searchable at some point? Usually I would CTRL+F a lot during GM'ing to find what I need but this is unable to be done with the current PDFs.
(Love the system so far!)
Yes! It looks like in fixing the issue with the GM PDF from yesterday, we created this one! This should be updated in about fifteen minutes.
Thank you so much!! So excited!
Hi, just wanted to let you know that the new PDF uploaded for the Field Agent manual is no longer able to be searched again.
Thanks again for letting us know! It should now be searchable once again.
For playing online what do you recommend?
Anything nearish to Triangle Agency mechanics on roll20?
This is a good question!! For playtests, we've been using simple dice rollers and video calls! Roll20 can totally handle it in the "you can roll 6d4" kinda way, but a digital play method is something we're hoping to figure out when we crowdfund the full game!
I had the absolute joy of playtesting this! It's everything you could hope for from an absurd satirical bureaucratic nightmare. I played as a newly-sentient robotic barista who by the end of the mission had been assigned to live inside the skin of a CEO. Definitely check it out.