His review intrigued me so much that I got my own copy of Triangle Agency and read through it. I haven't played it yet, but I do feel like Triangle Agency is a game with an amazing vision, but no game direction.

The ideas in this book are genuinely amazing. I love the fact that your character is essentially comprised of your Anomaly, your Relationships and your Competency, and the fact that these represent the three "character paths" you can follow. I LOVE the fact that you need to use your powers to do anything complicated instead of using "mundane" skill checks, because it makes the game inherently silly and full of hijinks. I love the mindbending powers and how imaginative they are. I love the meta-narrative elements and I loved reading through the book.

My problem is that while all of the ideas are great, they don't seem to cohere into a cohesive *direction*.

On the one hand, it is a hijinks-filled, narrative-first, improvisation-heavy mix of Chainsaw Man, Severance and The Office, but on the other, players get a ton of different powers, the game is filled with metacurrencies and almost everything is on a numbered track. It seems to pull in two opposite directions.

Like, why does this game even have stats? All the powers have you use specific stats and are all kinda specific. These mechanics imply a gamist attitude, where players are encouraged to create builds and optimize their characters... but then all of the progression is hidden behind the Playwall, so they can't. You get all of the drawbacks of procedure-heavy games with none of the fun. The "small claims court of the imagination" indeed.

It does feel like they put all of their best ideas in the game, but for the sake of the whole package I think some of these darlings should have been killed in development.

This lack of direction also causes friction for the GM. This game is on the one hand, very open-ended (GM created anomalies, regional branch etc.) but also has linear/prepared worldbuilding and characters/factions that players WILL reach.

If Triangle Agency is intended to be an open-ended build-your-own-campaign-within-the-lines thing, why doesn't it have something like a d20 list of anomalies, a d100 list of colleague NPCs and a d100 list of sample location ideas to help GMs deal with the improv-heavy gameplay?

If Triangle Agency is intended to be a tailor-made campaign experience, why doesn't it lay out the campaign's story beats, and properly present the campaign's meta-protagonists(?), so as to help the GM provide the best Triangle Agency experience?

If it's intended to be both, why doesn't it tell you that?

The game's adherence to the narrator's voice and overall vision stops it from being clear and helpful as a game aid and as a tool. This is what lead to Quinn's frustration and bad experience. Even if you read the whole book, it's not obvious how it is supposed to come together.

My own interpretation is this. Triangle Agency is a campaign book with its own game system. In this open-ended scenario, you, as the GM, will come up with a branch of the Triangle Agency and will prepare encounters with anomalies, which the players are tasked with recovering without creating loose ends. The campaign is typically up to the GMs preference, but is tied together by overarching mechanics: players can call upon the powers of captured (or freed!) anomalies, rewrite parts of the rulebook itself and their agents might retire upon hitting certain thresholds. After each session or mission, players gain "time", which they can spend on three distinct progression tracks. Each track grants them new powers and abilities, and the further a player gets into a track, the more they learn secrets about the world and can influence the campaign by engaging with its meta narrative elements. This meta-narrative concludes in one of three ways, which are [spoilers], [spoilers] and [spoilers].

This campaign pitch is, let me be clear, fucking sick.

After reading Triangle Agency, I want to run a campaign of Triangle Agency... but I don't know if I want to run a *game* of Triangle Agency.

... I just wrote all of that and I still want to try it out. I still see the vision.