This covers warfare on two very different planes, the kick-in-the-door-and-shoot-the-tentacled-horror-from-beyond-space heroics of Special Forces, and the agenda-to-agenda conflict in committee rooms that decides what the Laundry - and other parties - want to get out of the mission.

The Special Forces section allows you to create characters who are SAS or SBS (or any other part of UKSF - the UK's Special Forces directorate), who can turn up when the amateurs from the Laundry mess things up and put out a call for OCCULU support. There's a fairly strong suggestion that it makes sense for players to have two sets of characters, their mainstream Laundry characters and the knuckle-dragging doorkickers. The whole section is well written, well informed, and occasionally laugh out loud funny (Some of the humour is likely to pass you by if you aren't British, and possibly of a certain age. For instance, SAS slang for magic is 'animal', and that's never explained. But Brits like me will be sniggering over the reference to 'Animal Magic', a kid's TV show baack in the 70s. There's not a huge amount of this, but it is there.). And it doesn't just stop at character creation, it looks at how occult operations might be different from conventional operations - such as using radar-altimeter equipped 40mm BATSTOP rounds to set up a mid-air no-go area for flying horrors, or why in a conventional operation you would want to be in a ditch during a firefight, but when taking on a horde of shambling zombies you would want to be behind it. This is really well thought out.

Next up is an SF scenario, On Borrowed Time - an alien installation just appeared next to the UK Jungle Warfare training base in Brunei, and the last message from the Laundry team sent to investigate was that they were under attack, so the players get to airdrop in to find out what happened to them, and kill it. It's not bad, but there's a strange mix of quite simple shoot-it-now and we-need-to-think-really-carefully-about-this.

And then we're back to the green baize tables of Westminster committee rooms. The basic Laundry Files includes a really well thought out mechanic which gives you a budget for missions, which can be augmented by the use of your Status (a character stat) within the Laundry. So while it is possible to exceed your budget and call in OCCULUS support (or whatever) for every mission, the downside is that you will then find your supervisor complaining loudly when the bill for said OCCULUS support (or whatever) comes out of their budget. Which can mean not getting sent on that Computational Demonology training course your character really wants to go on. It's really neatly self-balancing, you can abuse your budget, but there will be consequences. And it really fits the bureaucratic ethos of the Laundry.

As Above, So Below extends this mechanic. You now can call on more than just your own Status stat, you can draw on your department's Status, plus that of your mentor, if you have one. And the section runs through a whole range of mentor types, from Deeply Scary Sorcerors, to MPs and Ministers (dangerous), the opposition (MI5 and MI6 that is - very dangerous), to journalists (flee, you fools!). And if your Status grows high enough, then you too may be promoted to management and expected to sit on the committees that decide Laundry policy for the next expedition to the Plateau of the Sleeper, or, more likely, the precise wording to the latest amendments to standing procedures for paperclip audits.

Putting players on high level commitees for operational policy is the main focus, and the suggestion is that they should again have a parallel set of characters, each with their own agendas, whether departmental or otherwise. Which is fine, not sure I'd want to roll it out a lot, but worth playing with from time to time. What I'm not sure about is whether I like the mechanic used, which uses a set of playing cards, which are given values for agendas and issues, with the idea being to trump other people's agendas and issues, possibly in combination with other players. It sounds workable, and I may just be having an irrational reaction to the playing cards, but cards aren't used anywhere else in the game. I think I'd be tempted to rewrite it to something closer to Status if I wanted to play it repeatedly.

And the last part of the supplement are two more scenarios, the first with the players themselves on a low-level committee, and the second using the dual level committee play mechanics. In Hot Potato, the characters end up one one of those committees everyone tries to avoid, in this case setting up the government bunkers for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, but something's gone wrong with a Compulsory Purchase Order (USAians think eminent domain) and suddenly the press are all over it, when they shouldn't even know the Laundry exists. There's a leak in the committee, and the players are on a mole hunt. But this mole may be burrowed much deeper than they imagine. In Fire Drill, a Laundry agent sent on a mission to Kazakhstan disappeared several months ago, but has now been caught on the dashboard camera of an embassy car. The committee has to decide whether to focus on recovering him, carrying on his investigation (cases of spontaneous human combustion, possibly linked to a Russian rocket company) or whatever, a decision which the agent characters then get to implement it. There's a lot of flexibility built into this, possibly too much, the threat can be anything from the odd spontaneous human combustion, to world threatening. I think it might have been better to take a little of the flexibility of the threat out in order to concentrate attention on the flexibility of the mission planning - which is what the scenario is supposed to be showcasing. Which is not to say it's a bad scenario, just that it may be trying to do too much at once.

The Sleeper on the Plateau, part of the Laundry Files series mythos, is an alien god sleeping in an ancient temple on a pyramid on a plateau on a planet far, far from here, whose awakening will herald CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars come right and the Old Ones awake. GOD GAME BLACK is the codename for Laundry operations to stop the awakening. The supplement covers a range of Laundry related stuff, primarily bringing the game up to speed with developments in the novel series through The Apocalypse Codex, in which an American megachurch tried to to wake the Sleeper.

We start off with External Assets, the non-Laundry contractors such as Persephone Hazard, aka BASHFUL INCENDIARY, whose existence is revealed to series hero Bob during Apocalypse Codex. Assets tend to be experts in their particular area, so character generation provides for them to be more powerful than a raw Laundry recruit. On the other hand they can't pick up a phone and call for OCCULUS, their whole point is that they're deniable (or that's the cover story, anyway). Next up are rules for traditional magic. Magic in the Laundry Files is a computational process, and Laundry agents get to run it on their iPhones, isolating them from the Eaters in the Dark. But if you aren't a Laundry agent and need to provide your own hardware, then you can run it on raw brains, which is precisely what the Eaters like.

And then we get to CODICIL BLACK SKULL, a whole section on the history of the Sleeper, and humanity's contact with the plateau (which mostly consists of people dying horribly, or not-dying horribly). One oddity here is that 666 Squadron, who perform regular reconnaissance of the plateau using gate spells and the White Elephants (aka nuclear armed Concordes) is referred to as Squadron 666, which is neither British, nor American, usage, there's one or two other typographical oddities, but nothing critical. There's also a very minor problem with 666 Squadron's history, but you have to be extremely well read on the RAF to spot it.

Which brings us to the Black Chamber. They’re not so much our sister agency as our psycho ex-girlfriend turned bunny-boiler. The Apocalypse Codex. Remember what US foreign policy was like in the heart of Cold War - We don't care if you're channeling Hitler at seances and dropping democracy activists out of helicopters, any anti-communist is a true friend of America's - now apply that to contact with the Cthulhu Mythos. The Black Chamber's primary field agents are either human drones, remotely piloted via the black mark, or non-humans, who don't have any rights in US law, and so can be extorted into service - cf Ramona Random in The Jennifer Morgue. Think In order to save humanity, it became necessary to destroy our humanity. The chapter gives the complete structure of the Black Chamber, and rules for character generation if you should want to play a Black Chamber campaign, potentially including care and feeding of the demon the Black Chamber bound into you in order to ensure your loyalty. If you use the Black Chamber as an American version of the Laundry, then it’s best to embrace the Strangelovecraftian weirdness. ... While the Laundry hunts down possessed sheep in a rainy field in Essex, the Black Chamber’s off fighting DEEP SEVEN in the Colorado Mountains, or blowing up large chunks of the Middle East. Go weird, loud, and paranoid.

Pre-history is next up, or rather pre-Laundry History, so the history of the Invisible College, from the 13th Century through to WWII and its metamorphosis into the Laundry. As this covers the main 1920s era of Call of Cthulhu, there are brief rules for creating agents of the Invisible College in that era, plus a rogue's gallery of the movers and shakers in the creation of the Laundry, such as Major General JFC Fuller, who here gets the option of running the Laundry or being interned as a Nazi sympathizer, and Claude Dansey of MI6 - Spiteful and often cruel, he has a special dislike for intellectuals and academics, which makes his position in the Invisible College rather awkward, along with Ian Fleming, Denis Wheatley, and Aleister Crowley.

The Phoney War covers how to handle the period where the laws of nature start to change as CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN draws closer and ideas for how to cover that in campaigns - it looks pretty much compatible with The Annihilation Score and The Nightmare Stacks, even if written before them.

And the supplement ends with two really good scenarios. Think of the Children is set in an academy (a privately-run, government-funded school - hugely controversial, perfect choice) controlled by the Golden Promise Ministry, the Christian(-ish, sort of not really) megachurch trying to raise the Sleeper in The Apocalypse Codex and can run either immediately prior to the events of the book or just after. Appropriately for a quiverfull ministry, the academy is another string to Golden Promise's bow, a different way of coming at waking the Sleeper by using psychically aware kids. Then one of the kids tries to make contact with the Laundry by taking a character's family hostage. Only there's multiple layers to this plot, and stopping it is going to present the players with a real moral dilemma. The final scenario is The Moral High Ground and runs in parallel with Apocalypse Codex. A handful of Golden Promise agents try to kidnap an exiled Tibetan expert on the mythology of the plateau and its intersection with Tibet, and when the main mega-massacre plot is stopped by Bob and Persephone, launch an attempt to reach a ruined monastery on the plateau and wake the Sleeper from there. Stopping them means paradropping a mixed Laundry/SAS team onto the plateau. And the record of teams surviving the plateau is not good.

It's a bit mixed thematically, but everything here is pretty good, and some of it really should be core to a Laundry Campaign. That last scenario ties in really well with the special forces stuff from As Above, So Below.