Newbie Keeper seeks experienced Laundry Files Keepers' advice!

[ChrisFixedKitty]

Very newbie DM here. I seek your wisdom, or at least semi-helpful group head-scratching and muttering at my problem!

I'm cobbling together a campaign from my imagination and the pre-written modules. We just started. My players are beginning as a party experiencing their first Incident as civilians, all working (and often living in the rooms above) a block of shops and businesses where Baddies are afoot. I intend to bring them into the tent at the end of the Incident juuuust enough to get bits and bobs of training and be monitored, but then released back into normal life for 4 days/week at whichever place of business they were in before. Y'know, until they get sent to do stuff.

Have any of you run the Laundry HR intake of your players? Recommendations on to preserve the Laundry flavor with at least bits of each person's interview? How do I keep this fun or eliminate the turn-waiting boredom? I'm contemplating giving them all a very quirky questionnaire and then starting the interviews with my husband's character, since I can give him the questionnaire a few days before. Not a very complete solution, but that's as far as my brain is going on this one. Other ideas? Better ideas? 

Thanks in advance. 

Yours in ISO-9001 meta-hell,

Chris F.

[1d8+DB]

So apparently no love for 'The Laundry' on this forum.

What did you eventually end up doing?

 

[Hexelis]

I love The Laundry, but only ran it once.

[nclarke]

I tend to read the C7 forum for material about the Laundry personally. I run it about twoo or three times a year at conventions and probably once for a short (8 week) campaign at the club. I think I've answered this question over there.

I never do the intake stuff beyond the first ever session several years ago now as it's more interesting to start in media res.

[g33k]

There are other games which have 1:1 GM:player scenes; particularly-notorious is "Shadowrun," where the hacker/decker type has an extended Matrix-run, usually solitaire, for a subjective multiple-hour event.  Mid-adventure... there is, IMHO, not a good solution.

Luckily, the "HR Intake" situation is different.  It happens AFTER your first adventure/arc, BEFORE the next.

Honestly, I'd try to run those as a series of genuinely 1:1 occasions -- e-mail'ing and phone-calling, online-chat, video-call, and/or face-to-face meetings.  Don't try to fit it in during your gathered/group gaming-session(s) -- as you note, there's liable to be a lot of boredom for everyone else!  It's still likely to be hard on YOU, time-wise!

Alternatively, you could run it as a non-traditional (from an HR standpoint) "group exercise" interview....

"Right.  You lot -- this is your interview.  Unfortunately, we are severely short-staffed at the moment -- zombie stenographers are remarkably voracious eaters when possessed by a non-computationally-bounded spirit ! --  and we just cannot give each of you a solo interview... until we can requisition and reprogram more zombies, we simply haven't the manpower.  Personpower.  Entitypower.  You know what I mean!  Fortunately, we've got some latitude at the moment.  Our previous Director has issued an "any statute or regulation" memo, allowing us to use, well... any statute or regulation.  I expect the new Director will reverse that memo... as soon as she finishes the exorcism.  But for the next few hours, at least, we can use these reg's!  So, this is your court-martial... I mean, interview.  We'll change the regulatory status as soon as the sitting Director is a fully-corporeal 3-dimensional time-occupying being once again, and commute your sentences into employment contracts."

etc...