Cubicle 7 launched a Kickstarter for a new edition of The Laundry Files RPG on 10th April (2024). Based on a series of novels by Charles Stross, this Lovecraftian spy themed game was originally published using Chaosium’s Basic Roleplay System back in 2010, but like all things the genesis of the game was a few years earlier.

I met Charles Stross, virtually speaking, in the early 2000’s through a blogging platform called LiveJournal. Think of it as the Facebook or Twitter of that era. I guess we must have mutual friends in common and we got chatting (re: commenting) on each others posts. I didn’t realise he was an author at this point, nor the creator of such classic Advanced Dungeons & Dragons creatures like the Githyanki which was originally published in White Dwarf magazine in the 80’s before being included, along with a few other Stross-created monsters, in TSR’s Fiend Folio book.

I discovered he was about to release a novel called “The Atrocity Archives”, which was released in Hardcover on 25th October 2004, and ended up picking up a copy in January 2005. I devoured it quickly and was instantly enamored with the setting, which initially struck me as a British version of Delta Green (a fantastic conteporary era setting for Call of Cthulhu by Pagan Publishing, although it’s now been spun off as it’s own game from Arc Dream Publishing). Even from this solitary book I thought it’d make a great setting for a roleplaying game.

I think it must have been sometime in 2006 that I lent the book to Dominic (McDowall-Thomas) whom I’d managed, by then, to rope in to coming on board Cubicle 7 with me. Dominic was one of my closest friends at the time, and had been doing a great job with some freelance bits for me which led me to offering him a share in the company to get him involved on a deeper level. Dom also really enjoyed the book, and we both grabbed the second book in the series, The Jennifer Morgue, when it was released in November 2006. The Jennifer Morgue just concreted my belief that the series would be a great RPG setting and in early 2007 I approached Charles about the possibility of licensing the series.

Charles was pretty receptive to the idea and Dom and I met up with him in Edinburgh in March, whilst we were attending Conpulsion, a tabletop games convention held at the University, to talk about things in more detail and also finally meet face-to-face.

Gareth Hanrahan also became involved in the project at this point, as he put in a 2010 interview “I was at Conpulsion in Edinburgh one year, and Angus was there too. He went off for a Very Secret Meeting with Charlie Stross, and came back that evening looking very pleased with himself. I was already a fan of the Laundry novels, so I cornered Angus round the back of the trade hall and implied that nonspecific horrible things would befall him if he had the Laundry license and didn’t let me work on it. It worked. So, kids, if you’re looking to break into the gaming industry, try threatening publishers.” (Random Encounter with Gareth Hanrahan, OgreCave 2010)

2007 was a very busy year for Cubicle 7 as we were also deep in the process of negotiations with the BBC for the Doctor Who/Torchwood/Sarah Jane licenses. This both helped and hindered things with The Laundry license. On one hand we could show Charles some great mock-ups of what we were planning to do with Doctor Who, and the theory that Doctor Who would help throw a much larger spotlight on the other games we’d also be publishing, but it also meant that Doctor Who took up the lion share of our time to give us the best chance of acquiring the license. Dom and I were still a couple of years away from going fulltime with Cubicle so all of this was being done whilst balancing or day jobs and (in Dom’s case) family commitments.

2008 rolled round and we’d been talking to Chaosium about licensing Call of Cthulhu for a range of British sourcebooks (which became the Cthulhu Brittanica line) and also the BRP system to use in a standalone rulebook for The Laundry, as BRP was the obvious choice (at the time) for the game due to not only its cross-compatibility with both Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green but also for the feel and style of The Laundry itself.

I was bouncing emails back and forth between Chaosium on one side, and Charles on the other, making sure that any license kept each parties own IP solely their own amongst other things. Charles was also up for writing a new short story to be included in the rulebook if his schedule allowed for it. We also managed to recruit Jason Durall, who had written the Basic Roleplay Rulebook, to handle the rules for The Laundry and John Snead who wrote a brand new magic system for the game among other things.

The Chaosium license was finally signed in May 2008, and The Laundry license in November 2008, so we were finally all set to 100% move forward with the game.

On the 1st April 2009 Dominic and I took the plunge, moved away from London to Swindon, and (thanks to the financial backing of Rebellion Studios) took Cubicle 7 fulltime. A week later Charles supplied us with the text for the next book in the series, The Fuller Memorandum, to allow us to incorporate that into the game (The Fuller Memorandum was released in 2010) and things were shaping up nicely.

Dom and I looked at the various gamelines we were developing and split them between us to better concentrate our efforts on the workload. I ended up looking after the Cthulhu Britannica range and Dom was line developing The Laundry. Gareth was doing a magnificent job on the writing for The Laundry and we received a fantastic cover for the main game from Malcolm McClinton.

We finally made a public announcement about the game in March 2010, letting the world know that The Laundry RPG was on its way in July 2010! Like so many things in the RPG industry our hope of a summer (and thus in time for Gen Con) release was a little optomistic, but it did make it out before the year was up!

Once the game was out in the wild it received some cracking reviews, which given Gareth and the teams work on the book were great to see. It was also nominated for a host of awards, including Best Cover Art and Best New Game (which it won a Silver Award for), as well as an honorable mention for Best Game, at the ENNIES in 2011.

The game went on to be supported by a host of adventures and sourcebooks by Gareth Hanrahan, Jason Durall, Andy Klosky and others – which titles such as The Agents Handbook (2011), Cultists Under the Bed (2012) and License to Summon (2012).

By the time for Chaoisum contract was up for renewal I’d already left Cubicle 7 for a few years. Chaoisum had changed ownership and the new terms on offer were very different from the one the company had signed a decade earlier. Cubicle 7 ended up selling the Cthulhu Britannica range of books to Chaosium and didn’t renew the BRP license for The Laundry, so the game line ceased and went out of print.

In 2019 a new Laundry RPG was released in France (and in French) called La Laverie, which used the Powered by Apocalypse system by a company called 500 Nuances de Geek. This raised some hopes that we might see The Laundry return as an RPG in English, but all remained quiet.

Then in July 2023 Cubicle 7 announced a second edition of The Laundry was in the works, using a new inhouse system called C7D6. Which leads us to now, with the new Kickstarter campaign having gone live on 10th April (2024) and funding in just over an hour. The campaign (as I write this) still has 19 days left to go and is already four times over it’s original goal with a number of stretch goals unlocked.

Charles has now written 13 novels in the series (the last of which, “Season of Skulls”, was published in 2023) and a number of novellas. If you’ve not read any of his books then I highly recommend picking up a copy of the book that started the whole journey – The Atrocity Archive – and being introduced to one-time IT Consultant and now occult field agent for Q-Division, Bob Howard and get prepared for an Earth changing journey.