How to Create a Character in Triangle Agency: Your Complete ARC Guide

Triangle Agency doesn’t hand you a character sheet — it hands you an HR onboarding file. Your Agent isn’t a hero with a stat block; they’re a haunted corporate drone who polices reality on behalf of a mega-corporation that probably knows exactly how expendable you are. If you’ve ever wondered what it’d look like if a paranormal investigation agency had a proper org chart, compliance officer, and mandatory performance reviews, this is that game.

Character creation in Triangle Agency is built around the ARC framework — three interlocking choices that define who your Agent is, what they can do, and what’s quietly falling apart in their life. This guide walks you through the whole process step by step, from your pre-session conversation through the final box on the Onboarding Questionnaire. Whether you’re a lifelong D&D player picking up your first narrative game or a TTRPG veteran looking to understand how ARC makes Triangle Agency tick, you’ll find everything you need here.

If you’re completely new to the system, it’s worth reading our full introduction to Triangle Agency and the 10 things to know before playing before diving into character creation — they’ll give you the world context that makes ARC choices much easier.

What Is the ARC Framework?

Every Agent in Triangle Agency is defined by three components, and the acronym tells you exactly what they are: Anomaly, Reality, Competency. Each one covers a different dimension of your character, and each one is mechanically active during play — this isn’t background flavour, it’s the engine your character runs on.

Your Anomaly is the supernatural phenomenon your Agent resonates with. It’s the impossible thing you can do, the weirdness that makes you useful to the Agency in the first place — and probably the reason you got flagged for recruitment. Your Reality is your normal life: the relationships, obligations, and fragile routines that exist outside the office. It’s also where burnout lives. Your Competency is your current position in the Agency hierarchy — your job title, your sanctioned behaviours, and the taboo that can get you penalised for stepping out of role.

The design philosophy here is that the best drama lives at the intersection of all three. Your Anomaly might be perfectly suited for a mission, your Reality might be completely undermined by that same mission, and your Competency might actively forbid the cleanest solution. That tension isn’t accidental. It’s the whole point.

Step 0: The Table Conversation

Before anyone opens their character sheet, Triangle Agency assumes you’re going to have a real conversation with your group. This is the game’s equivalent of a Session Zero, and it covers three things the game can’t decide for you.

First: your setting. Triangle Agency can take place in your own hometown, a place you’d like it to be, a fictional city, or the default Ternion City — the Agency’s sprawling HQ hub that is, in the game’s own words, “hard to miss and not included on maps.” Your setting shapes what counts as everyday life versus a genuine paranormal incident.

Second: the definition of “normal.” This one matters more than it might sound. Does your table treat ghosts as ordinary background noise or as classified anomalies? What about AI, persistent debt, or climate collapse? Deciding what’s Anomalous before play starts prevents a lot of confusion mid-mission, and it sets the tone for whether this is a dry corporate thriller or something weirder and more surreal.

Third: ARC overlap. The game leans into its corporate anti-union vibe by strongly encouraging players not to duplicate ARC picks. If two Agents share an Anomaly, a Reality, or a Competency, the team loses some of the mechanical variety that makes the system interesting. Talk it through beforehand.

Step 1: Get Your Character Sheets

Triangle Agency uses a multi-page set called the Character Organization Sheet — or the Triangle Agenda, as some groups call it. Each player needs one complete set, and the game actively wants you to treat it like an employee file. The official form-fillable PDFs are available through Haunted Table’s website, and there are fan-made Google Sheets versions well-suited for online play.

A standard sheet set includes a primary reference page, an Anomaly Abilities page, a Reality and Relationships page, a Competency Self-Assessment page, and an Onboarding Questionnaire. Tabs, sticky notes, and highlighters are not just acceptable here — they’re on-theme. Your Agent has paperwork. Lean into it.

Step 2: Choose Your Anomaly

Your Anomaly is the supernatural phenomenon your Agent resonates with. Choosing one does three concrete things. It grants you three starting cleared abilities, which you copy directly to your Anomaly Abilities page. Each ability comes with a small question that functions as micro-backstory — a one-line answer about how that power manifested in your life. It also defines how you can spend extra successes on your rolls to trigger Anomaly-specific effects during play.

The core rulebook offers nine Anomalies, and most players report the choice being genuinely difficult. The options range across very different playstyles — a character built around a networking-and-data Anomaly is going to feel completely different at the table from one who resonates with time or memory or physical space. Take your time here.

Writing Prompt for Your Anomaly

A useful question to sit with before committing: What impossible thing does your Agent do when nobody’s looking, and why hasn’t the Agency disintegrated them for it yet? The answer to that second part usually tells you something true about your character’s relationship with the organisation.

One important detail: abilities have a “practiced” checkbox that only becomes relevant after your first mission. Don’t worry about it during character creation — it’ll make sense once play starts.

Step 3: Choose Your Reality

Reality is your normal life. It’s the job, the family, the routines, and the obligations that are supposed to still be running smoothly while you’re off containing metaphysical disasters on company time. Picking a Reality does three mechanical things.

It gives you a Reality Trigger: a pattern of self-sabotage or burnout that shows how missions are straining your life. It gives you a Burnout Release: the specific way you decompress when work and weirdness have pushed you too far. And it establishes three starting Relationships — named people in your life and how fragile each connection currently is.

Examples from the Core Book

The Realities in the core book cover a range of mundane situations with built-in dramatic potential. Caretaker gives you a dependent you bring everywhere and a constant undercurrent of guilt about what you’re exposing them to. Overbooked builds around juggling a civilian job alongside Agency work, constantly failing at one or both. Romantic creates complicated webs of crushes and needs, with a character who’s always trying — and failing — to please someone.

Each Reality comes with a list of questions for fleshing out your home life, and a track for how those relationships might fail over time. The burnout system is worth paying attention to: if you mark all the boxes in your current Reality, that chapter of your life is effectively over. You’ve burned it down, and you have to choose a new Reality — representing the kind of life upheaval that happens when you’ve been fighting paranormal threats on a corporate salary for too long.

Step 4: Define Your Relationships

This step is part of choosing your Reality, but it deserves its own focus because Relationships are mechanically tracked and socially distributed across your whole table. You create three named Relationships by answering the questions on your sheet. One — your closest Relationship, assigned a Connection value of 6 — is explicitly your emergency contact. The other two get a Connection value of 3 each.

Here’s the part that makes Triangle Agency feel different from most TTRPGs: you also decide which Relationships will be portrayed by other players and which ones belong to the GM. Your closest relationship might be played by the person sitting to your left. This creates a web of mutual investment in each other’s normal lives, and it means the Agency’s missions feel genuinely threatening to things that matter — not just stats on a page.

Many tables keep emergency contact information front-and-centre throughout play. When something goes badly wrong on a mission, that’s who the Agency calls.

Step 5: Choose Your Competency

Competency is your current corporate role — how the Agency classifies you on the org chart. It’s the job title your character resents updating on LinkedIn. Choosing a Competency gives you a set of sanctioned behaviours and a prime directive, which describe what you’re expected to accomplish on missions. It also gives you a specific taboo: something you’ll be penalised for doing because it conflicts with your role or violates corporate policy.

Mechanically, Competency determines when you’re actively working against your character’s own best interests and controls how you spend your Quality Assurance points to improve rolls. It also gives you nine points of Quality Assurances — the dice-buffing stats — to allocate across categories, which happens through the Self-Assessment questions in the next step.

Think of Competency as something like D&D’s class structure, but with built-in roleplay constraints baked into the mechanics. Your taboo isn’t just flavour — it’s a genuine consequence waiting to happen.

Step 6: Complete the Self-Assessment and Onboarding Questionnaire

This is where Triangle Agency earns its reputation for tone. The Self-Assessment is a set of nine questions tied to your Competency, and your answers determine how your nine Quality Assurance points are distributed. You answer honestly — or at least in character — and then mark boxes and allocate points accordingly. The questions are framed as corporate performance review language, and they are absolutely designed to make you feel slightly uncomfortable about your Agent’s situation.

The Onboarding Questionnaire is a second page of corporate-style questions about your Agent’s history and outlook. The game provides example answers for players who aren’t comfortable improvising character voice on the spot, which is a considerate touch. The explicit guidance is to answer truthfully so that the GM and your fellow players understand your Agent — these questions are hooks in disguise.

Together, these two pages deliver more tone and character depth than most systems pack into their entire creation process. By the time you’re done, you’ll know exactly who your Agent is, what they want, and what they’re one bad mission away from losing.

How ARC Works in Play

Understanding why each choice matters becomes clearer once you see how the framework operates during sessions.

Every roll is tied to a Quality and to one of your three ARC components. Your Anomaly provides special uses for extra successes, turning a strong roll into something genuinely surreal. Your Reality can sometimes let you ignore penalties when a situation aligns with your mundane life and civilian expertise. Your Competency can impose penalties when you act against your role or break your taboo — and it controls how you spend Quality points to improve rolls in the first place.

The interplay is the point. Building a character where your Anomaly, Reality, and Competency are all in comfortable alignment produces a smooth operative who doesn’t generate much drama. Building a character where those three things are constantly in tension — where your powers make your job harder, your personal life punishes your mission choices, and your corporate role actively forbids your most effective solutions — produces a character worth playing for a full campaign.

When you’re making your ARC selections, the best framing is this: How will these three things clash in the worst possible way? That’s the drama engine your Agent runs on.

Tips for Players Coming from D&D

Triangle Agency sits in a very different design space from D&D 5e or Daggerheart — it’s a narrative investigative game rather than a tactical dungeon-crawler, and character creation reflects that. If you’re making the jump, a few translation points help.

Treat your Anomaly like a D&D subclass or a focused spell list. It’s a power package that defines your playstyle and doesn’t change often. Treat your Reality like a Background plus Bonds and Flaws turned up significantly — you track how your life falls apart in real time, not just in backstory. Treat your Competency like a corporate-flavoured class with built-in roleplay constraints that have mechanical teeth.

The biggest shift is that Triangle Agency doesn’t have a list of actions you’re optimising. It has a list of relationships you’re managing. If you’re used to thinking about character builds in terms of action economy or damage output, it’s worth consciously setting that frame aside. The tension here is social and situational, not tactical.

If you’re comparing systems at the narrative end of the spectrum, Call of Cthulhu and Blades in the Dark make interesting reference points. Triangle Agency shares CoC’s investigative structure and Blades’ focus on crew dynamics and consequential clocks, but the corporate frame gives it a tone that’s entirely its own.

Optional: Building the Branch Together

Some groups extend Session Zero by co-creating a Branch — the local Agency office that serves as your team’s base. This involves additional sheet templates for shared NPCs, custom tracks, and office-specific flavour. Some tables also ask each player to create a few supporting cast NPCs during character creation, then decide which other player or the GM will portray them during missions.

This optional layer reinforces one of Triangle Agency’s best design ideas: everyone at the table is tied into everyone else’s lives. Your Agent’s emergency contact might be played by someone whose character is also tangled up in a completely separate mess, and that intersection is where sessions get interesting.

For new groups, it’s worth getting through a few sessions before adding Branch creation. For groups who’ve played investigative or narrative TTRPGs before, it’s worth building in from session one.

Your Agent Is Ready to Clock In

Character creation in Triangle Agency is one of the more distinctive processes in the current TTRPG market. The ARC framework forces a kind of character design that most games leave to optional flavour — you aren’t just deciding what your character can do, you’re deciding what they stand to lose and why they’ll be bad at their own job. That’s the premise.

By the time you’ve worked through your Anomaly, Reality, and Competency, answered the Self-Assessment honestly, and built out your Relationship web, you have a character who feels genuinely specific. Not a build, not an archetype — a person. Probably a person who’s about to have a very bad week.

Welcome to the Agency. Please report any anomalous phenomena to your line manager within 24 hours.

Continue Your Journey

• What Is Triangle Agency? A Complete Introduction to the TTRPG — Start here if you’re still deciding whether this game is for you.
• 10 Things to Know Before Playing Triangle Agency — Key context before your first session.
• Step-by-Step Character Creation in Daggerheart — How another narrative-forward system handles character building.
• Call of Cthulhu vs. Delta Green — If Triangle Agency’s investigative tone appeals to you, this comparison is worth reading.
• Session Zero Strategies: Setting Your Campaign Up for Success — Make the most of that pre-game conversation.

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What does your Agent’s ARC look like? Share your Anomaly, Reality, and Competency combination in the comments — and tell us which relationship you’re most worried about losing by session three.