How to Prepare a Triangle Agency Mission

21 Jun, 2025

In this blog post, I'm going to recommend a loosely-ordered process for preparing a great Mission for Triangle Agency. This is based on my experience of creating about ten custom Missions for my table, as well as many years of GMing all kinds of different RPGs. It is also part of the blogpost bandwagon started by Weird Writer. Let me know if you find this helpful!

Find Your Adventure Seed

In order to have a place to start, you need a solid seed crystal of an idea. I'm going to be discussing preparing an Anomaly Retrieval Mission, but these ideas could also be applied to Market Disruption or Clean-Up Missions. I'm going to discuss some ways to get started and what's worked for me as I've prepared a large variety of Missions.

Start with the Focus or the Impulse

There are two main ways I've started Mission prep - the Focus of the Anomaly (gratitude for the end of the work week) or the Impulse (trapping people in an Applebee's to make them enjoy their Friday). The great thing about running Triangle Agency is that anything interesting (or even boring!) from the real world can be a great potential for Focus or Impulse! Even the most banal Focus can create interesting problems by catching Agency attention or being dramatically misinterpreted by the Anomaly.

I'm Stuck and Have No Ideas

First, don't panic. Second, I have a tool just for you! My d666 table for Triangle Agency¹ is designed for just this problem. You can roll 2-3 elements on this table and creatively interpret them to get the sparks flowing at any point of the Mission. I recently needed a place name for the Mission I'm running this afternoon and here's what I did to create it using this table:

Place? Blue, Nightmare. Blue Nightmare is a great name for a club, or the drink sold by the club. Azure Nightmare, a nightclub and rave spot that sells Day-Glo drinks

Create Your Tools

I wrote the previous table inspired by the grand D666 from BAATAG, which means it's customized to my vision of the game. This may not match yours! Accordingly, I'd recommend you also develop your own spark tables and tools for generating inspiration when you need it.

I also sometimes use a set of world anchors as further inspiration - check out that post for more details on the technique. When you want to add more thematic layers to something that already exists or you just need a new element to include in the Mission, you can roll on a world anchor table to get a motif that can be either directly or loosely connected to the topic at hand. My world anchor table looks like this:

So, let's say I need a coffee shop to be a key location in my next Mission, but I don't know how to flesh it out or why exactly it's connected. I rolled a 5 on the table, which corresponds to GrayTech, a target for Market Disruption and bit player in the grand market.

If I want it to be directly connected, perhaps the shop is frequented by the GrayTech Branch Manager, who could witness and investigate Anomalous happenings there. If I want a lighter touch, perhaps one of the baristas at the coffee shop is particularly curious and observant and a good candidate for a potential Loose End. If I just want a vaguely thematic touch, maybe the coffee shop is just struggling against the local Starbucks. Already, the coffee shop is more interesting than its generic interpretation!

Capture Your Ideas

One key concept I employ to help brainstorm and avoid the previous problem is to always write my ideas down. Inspired in large part by the GTD Method, I think it's crucial to capture ideas as soon as they come to you. I personally maintain a document in Obsidian just titled triangle agency ideas where I write down potential Foci, Impulses, or just cool moments and NPCs. This becomes a great source of inspiration if I get stuck preparing Missions later.

Ask Questions

Once you've got your Mission seed ready, then it's time to ask questions, and lots of them. We want to answer the classic journalistic questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how? Our goal at this point is to find out the people, places, and things that we want to include as components to our mystery - we'll refer to these as nodes in a later section.

Start Backwards

At this point, if you haven't already, it would be good to decide a Domain for your Anomaly (or equivalent for the other Mission types). Then, start asking questions: who knows about it? Who has witnessed it? Where else has the Anomaly been felt?

The Anomaly's Problem

One fruitful angle for inspiration is to consider the problem the Anomaly is trying to solve, and put yourself in its shoes. Usually, this problem will be related to invoking its Focus.

Think of three ways that the Anomaly is acting to achieve their goals, and then imagine why those methods haven't worked yet. Here's an example from a Mission I've run, taken directly from my notes:

• The Anomaly's goal, here, is to inspire the emotion of gratitude for the end of the workweek in its victims.
• It does this by creating an everlasting party in a Cheesecake Factory/Applebee's.
• What are three things might the Anomaly be worried about? Intruders, the Agency finding it, ruining the vibes.
• How might it solve all three of these? What tools does it have?
  • Intruders: The Anomaly's Domain is the restaurant in question, but one way that this is protected is that this only exists on Fridays. Otherwise, it's completely normal. On Fridays itself, it uses Minor Violent Anomalies as bouncers to make sure that the people are sufficiently grateful. People who come to happy hour genuinely on Fridays are trapped.
  • The Agency Finding It: This Anomaly is vaguely aware that someone out there is trying to get it, but it doesn't know who. Therefore, it is innately hostile to people who ask too many questions, as that also Ruins the Vibes.
  • Ruining the Vibes: The main strategy within the Anomaly is to grant, if possible, any party-related request that keeps the energy up and the mood high, with impossibly-created drinks, party snacks, decorations, and entertainment.

Questions Worth Asking

Here are some questions I always find it useful to ask when prepping a Mission:

• Who has been affected by the Anomaly?
• How did the Agency learn about it? How did its Impulse become known?
• How will the Anomaly protect itself? How might it escalate?
• What does the Anomaly do to achieve its Focus, and how is that misguided in some way?
• What potential Loose Ends could the Anomaly cause?
• Where might the Anomaly make itself known outside of its Domain?

Create a Revelation List

At this point, you likely have the raw material for your Mission: people, places, and maybe things that are the nodes (see, I told you we'd revisit this!) At this point, the best GM tool I know to manage these things is to construct a revelation list.

Each item in this list should be either one of your nodes or a fact you want the players to learn (most often, the Anomaly's Focus). You should then write down three clues that point to each revelation - this is a great rule of thumb to make sure your players actually find out about it². I'd recommend starting from the Domain or Encounter and working backwards. In my experience, this is a point where I start finding myself making interesting connections between my nodes as I need to make new connections. I sometimes keep referring to my tools (above) if I get stuck on what these connections should be.

For more on this approach, I'd recommend taking a look at Justin Alexander's series on node-based scenario design, from which I borrowed heavily for this post.

Don't Worry About the Encounter

In my experience, the Encounter usually takes care of itself after I've prepped all of this. I know this goes against the advice in the book, and I'm okay with that! By having a compelling Anomaly that is active and working towards a goal with lots of nodes that point to it, you'll have plenty of grist to improvise a satisfying Encounter, in my experience. If you want to make a few notes, go ahead, but I think it's best to let the Agents guide you to how the final resolution should happen.

Conclusion

Once you've done all of this, take the Mission for a spin! You'll probably still be surprised and have to improvise things as your Field Agents do things you don't expect, but with this prep work, you should be on solid footing to do so.

I hope you find this article useful and if you do, let me know in the comments or via Discord! I'd really like to hear how people use these ideas.

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