Asking the Agency to Avoid Pesky Problems of Free Will

23 Jun, 2025

Triangle Agency, a fabulous corporate horror game, has two ways to roll the dice: using an Anomalous Ability, the supernatural powers all Agents have, or Asking the Agency to perform a Reality Alteration Request. In order to do the second, one must describe a Causality Chain - a mundane series of events that leads to your desired outcome.

In the last session I ran, I got stuck on a particular line from the text from the regulations on how to Alter Reality appropriately. It reads as follows:

The Agency cannot directly interfere with people’s “free” will. It is much harder to influence someone’s mind than it is to manipulate systems that affect demographics or crowds. Your goal can be to affect a person (“This construction worker is exhausted...”) but the causality must be external (“...because a flock of loud nocturnal birds has taken up residence in her yard.”)¹

The scenario in our session was as follows. A gentleman who had lost his memory was stuck in a holding cell at the local police department, and my Agents wanted to pretend to be his legal representation. However, he had not actually asked for representation yet, so (after dressing themselves appropriately thanks to a Fashionable Relationship), they decided to Ask the Agency to have a junior police officer set a flag in the system saying he had asked for representation because he was paranoid about it, having forgotten earlier.

However, this rubbed me the wrong way in the moment, as the police officer was still being made to act by the request. I let it ride, but had an itching feeling that we could have done better with this mechanic. I had a wonderful conversation this afternoon with Caleb Zane Huett and Sean Ireland about this, and I'm writing my interpretation of that conversation here. I hope this post will be helpful to other GMs hoping to appropriately grant Reality Alteration Requests in the future!

Earning the Result

When chatting with Caleb, he made a great point that I think is applicable to pretty much any RPG, not just this one. One must earn one's successes by either a) roleplaying your way into a situation where it makes sense or b) deciding how it impacts the world; otherwise, they have no emotional impact. The clever planning of OSR-style play is an example of the former, and many mechanics in many games decide the latter, as rolls often impact the world (often through impacting your character).

In Triangle Agency, Anomalous Abilities are all about getting yourself into a place where those Abilities are useful. For example, to activate the Whisper Ability "Say Again?", you must first get the target of the ability to say something, but at that point, you may then try to get them to say something else and mean it. You therefore spend time roleplaying to make this happen - my player with this Ability often spends time in game simply asking people questions like "could you please show us to Greenhouse 5?" in order to get what he wants.

On the other hand, Ask the Agency requires you to think through the consequences of how the ability affects the world. It is earned by figuring out what it means for your game. Let's talk about what I mean by that.

Extrinsic Motivation Zone

It is okay for people to act as part of a Causality Chain so long as they're fully motivated by external events. The Agency can't make people do things, full stop. But it can set up the world in such a way that the only reasonable option is to behave in the way that it wants.

One example Caleb suggested for my junior officer scenario was as follows (lightly edited for blog posting rather than Discord):

In this case it would be fun if he'd been repeatedly reprimanded because a computer bug flagged ever NOT marking a request for counsel as a negative on your record, so people everywhere are marking it constantly to not get in trouble, causing more problems in the judicial system beyond this moment.

One core feature Caleb pointed out to me is that this Causality Chain therefore has impacts on the rest of the world, and you should always do this! This is crucial! The Agency is literally changing the entire world, whereas Anomaly abilities are usually just impacting one person.

Ask Why, and then Ask Again

In order to create a great Causality Chain, keep asking "why?" Why did the police officer mark that flag in the system? Well, it's because he was nervous about being reprimanded. Why was he nervous about being reprimanded? Because he got reprimanded before for the same error? Why did that happen? A bug in the system caused the flag not to be set, and then someone was wrongfully released.

Good Causality Chains add consequences and truths about the world. By pushing past the last person who acted to ask why they did that and what external sources caused that to happen, you get really interesting results.

Essentially, there are two ways the Agency can affect the world: general trends or actual, physical events. Trends are super useful for behavior, and physical events are great for physical obstacles. If you've arrived at one of those two things as the target's reason for acting, you're set! If not, you may need to keep asking why.

Why Bother With All This?

It is important for the fiction that the Agency cannot look inside people's brains, including your Agents. This is why Agents can get away with doing what they're doing if they violate Agency rules! The Agency must work through them, but they can't actually make the Agents do anything directly. This is core for the game's themes and, as a side consequence, adds extra bits to the world when done well.