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About PARANOIA
- "Why It's Fun to Get Shot Six Times" (Gamegrene.com)
- Actual Play: Mister Bubbles
- Actual Play: Mister Bubbles (another run)
- Actual Play: Trouble With Cockroaches
- Actual Play: Origins 2006
- Actual Play: Story Games for Everybody
- Actual Play: Me and My Shadow Mark 4
- "Troubleshooter" (PARANOIA fanfic by ReverendSpencer)
"Sell me on PARANOIA"
- RPG.net forum 01/2006
- RPG.net forum 08/2006
- RPG.net forum 11/2007
- Paranoia-Live.net 09/2005
- Mongoose forum 09/2005
- Mongoose forum 11/2005
- Mongoose forum 03/2006
Useful forum threads about PARANOIA
- New at GMing...any tips?
- Advice needed
- New to PARANOIA
- I want to GM, but I need some info
- Curious about GMing a game
- First-time PARANOIA GM
- GMing PARANOIA for the first time!
- Handy list of useful links
- RPG.net forum advice
Fan sites
- Paranoia-Live.net
- Omega Complex
- FriendComputer.net
- Traitor Recycling Studio
- CPU Central
- ""Mutant Maker" character generator (screen)
- Another character generator (.PDF)
- Mission blender
- "Mr. Bubbles" briefing
- Standard equipment list
- Handy links for new GMs
- "New player" tournament handout
Reviews of the Mongoose Publishing PARANOIA rulebook:
Reviews of Mongoose PARANOIA supplements:
- Traitor's Manual:
Evan Waters, Cedric Chin, JamPaladin, Neil Lennon - Crash Priority:
Evan Waters, Cedric Chin, JamPaladin - The Mutant Experience:
Matthew - PARANOIA Flashbacks:
Neil Lennon, Matthew - STUFF:
Matthew - WMD:
Seafloorian - Extreme PARANOIA:
David Graffam - Service, Service!:
Matthew, Neil Lennon, Seafloorian - Criminal Histories:
Matthew - The Underplex:
Neil Lennon - Gamemaster Screen:
Neil Lennon - The Little RED Book:
Neil Lennon
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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Maid RPG
I wish I'd attended Gen Con this year. People are talking about an indie RPG that debuted there, Maid: The Roleplaying Game by K-Neko Design. It's an English translation, by Ewen Cluney, of the Japanese Maid RPG, designed by Ryo Kamiya and originally published by Sunset Games. My ears perked up when I heard someone describe it as "PARANOIA in maid outfits."
At this writing, the Maid website is only a placeholder. On his blog in April 2008, Cluney (who has already published many anime-inspired games) described the Maid premise:
Cluney's blog also recounts the Maid Gen Con debut.
Going by the description, it sounds like Maid plays less like PARANOIA and more like My Life With Master crossed with TOON or Teenagers From Outer Space and maybe a bondage manga. Still, I'm intrigued, in a non-otaku, non-fetishist way. Anyone care to comment on Maid, specifically the PARANOIA comparison?
At this writing, the Maid website is only a placeholder. On his blog in April 2008, Cluney (who has already published many anime-inspired games) described the Maid premise:
In Maid RPG, the players take on the role of maids who serve a Master who lives in a mansion. That’s the basic setup, but what ensues is often an excuse for the most bizarre chaos imaginable. This is a game that embraces randomness. Characters have random Special Qualities, ranging from Freckles and Glasses to Stalkers and Cyborgs. During the game, characters earn points of Favor by pleasing the Master, and one of the things they can spend Favor on is causing Random Events.
The English version of Maid RPG is going to be a compilation of the core rulebook and both supplements from the original Japanese version. That means it’ll include not only the core rules, but optional rules for butlers, randomly generated masters and mansions, seduction, costume changes, and special items, plus a grand total of 17 scenarios and three replays, and more besides.
Cluney's blog also recounts the Maid Gen Con debut.
Going by the description, it sounds like Maid plays less like PARANOIA and more like My Life With Master crossed with TOON or Teenagers From Outer Space and maybe a bondage manga. Still, I'm intrigued, in a non-otaku, non-fetishist way. Anyone care to comment on Maid, specifically the PARANOIA comparison?
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Animalball podcast interview
I'm late in mentioning that the loyal citizens at the gaming site Animalball, who have been PARANOIA fans since the earliest West End Games days, did an interview with me, Allen Varney (designer of the 2004 Mongoose Publishing edition of PARANOIA), as Episode 55 (August 2, 2008) of their long-running Animalcast podcast series. I got to talk with hosts Mike and Kyle about the history of PARANOIA, its decline at West End in the late 1980s, and our aim to redeem it at Mongoose. I also managed to slip in a plug for the new non-PARANOIA, non-gaming web project I'm working on with several of the PARANOIA writers from the Traitor Recycling Studio.
Thanks to Kyle and Mike for making my first audio interview pleasant and not in any way career-destroying. At least not yet.
(For reference, my one previous interview was a Paranoia-Live.net webchat conducted online in September 2004, shortly after the Mongoose edition appeared.)
Thanks to Kyle and Mike for making my first audio interview pleasant and not in any way career-destroying. At least not yet.
(For reference, my one previous interview was a Paranoia-Live.net webchat conducted online in September 2004, shortly after the Mongoose edition appeared.)
Labels: interview
Monday, August 11, 2008
Mandatory Mission Pack
Did I make rash promises about getting all these blog entries done in a week? Time for me to report for termination I fear. Before I toddle off to the disintegration booth, though, I'll talk about the Mandatory Mission Pack, possibly the strangest of the four upcoming PARANOIA books.
The Mandatory Mission Pack is a collection of bits of Alpha Complex that can be dropped into any mission on the fly. So, there's a whole chapter on corridors and corridor encounters, briefing and briefing rooms, weird locations and weirder rumours. It's all the bits of Alpha Complex that you never noticed before because you were busy shooting those Commie Mutant Traitors. The book is aimed (with the precision of an Armed Forces smart bomb) at the busy Gamemaster who has his own nefarious mission in mind, but needs some extra weirdness for spice.
And there's plenty of weirdness. (Writing a whole chapter on corridors does that to you.)
Anyway, I've an appointment with Friend Computer's Laser Fun Zone. Laters!
The Mandatory Mission Pack is a collection of bits of Alpha Complex that can be dropped into any mission on the fly. So, there's a whole chapter on corridors and corridor encounters, briefing and briefing rooms, weird locations and weirder rumours. It's all the bits of Alpha Complex that you never noticed before because you were busy shooting those Commie Mutant Traitors. The book is aimed (with the precision of an Armed Forces smart bomb) at the busy Gamemaster who has his own nefarious mission in mind, but needs some extra weirdness for spice.
And there's plenty of weirdness. (Writing a whole chapter on corridors does that to you.)
Anyway, I've an appointment with Friend Computer's Laser Fun Zone. Laters!
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Tokyo's underground storm tunnels
Thanks to the anonymous loyal citizen (is that a contradiction?) who linked to this collection (on the visionary futurist design blog Inhabitat) of incredible photos of Tokyo's stormwater tunnels, a strikingly Alpha Complexian sewerscape.
Labels: underplex
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Service, Service! mandates index
Loyal Paranoia-Live.net citizen No. 5127, a vigorous and persistent indexer of all things PARANOIA, has just posted to the RED-Clearance forums an index to mandates listed in Service, Service!, the 128-page supplement about Alpha Complex service groups. The index originally appeared in the Gamemaster-only forums.
Mandates, you'll recall, are the small perks/burdens assigned to an individual Troubleshooter based on his service group. For example, a Power Services character might be given the permission and obligation to inspect all light fixtures. All mandates are intended to prove useful for either the PC himself or for his rival Troubleshooters to use against him, depending on circumstances.
One of these days I need to pour all of No. 5127's handy indexes into InDesign and make them available as a free .PDF download. Yeah, I'll get to that right after the handouts for WMD, which I've had on my to-do list for -- hey, I missed its third birthday! Happy birthday, to-do-list entry!
Mandates, you'll recall, are the small perks/burdens assigned to an individual Troubleshooter based on his service group. For example, a Power Services character might be given the permission and obligation to inspect all light fixtures. All mandates are intended to prove useful for either the PC himself or for his rival Troubleshooters to use against him, depending on circumstances.
One of these days I need to pour all of No. 5127's handy indexes into InDesign and make them available as a free .PDF download. Yeah, I'll get to that right after the handouts for WMD, which I've had on my to-do list for -- hey, I missed its third birthday! Happy birthday, to-do-list entry!
Labels: mandates
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Alpha Complex Nights 2
Next on the cavalcade of upcoming PARANOIA releases is Alpha Complex Nights 2, a pair of lengthy missions revolving around giving your players enough rope to hang, er, I mean lots of authority and responsibility.
Viva La Revolution
The Troubleshooters find themselves trapped in YUC Sector when a revolution overthrows The Computer. To survive, they must adapt to a strange new world where The Computer is the enemy, traitors are the good guys, and…well, that’s actually the full extent of the changes, apart from the greater incidence of food shortages and public executions. You never appreciate Friend Computer until it explodes in a shower of sparks…
The Communist Cafeteria Conspiracy
A sector-wide panic over a Commie Mind Control Ray and the machinations of an ambitious high-clearance citizen combine to give the Troubleshooters control over a prestigious cafeteria. They’re supposed to use it to track down the nefarious Commie Mind Control Ray, but they get caught up in the usual problems of running a cafeteria – assassins, artillery emplacements, mutant uprisings… you know, the usual.
Viva La Revolution
The Troubleshooters find themselves trapped in YUC Sector when a revolution overthrows The Computer. To survive, they must adapt to a strange new world where The Computer is the enemy, traitors are the good guys, and…well, that’s actually the full extent of the changes, apart from the greater incidence of food shortages and public executions. You never appreciate Friend Computer until it explodes in a shower of sparks…
The Communist Cafeteria Conspiracy
A sector-wide panic over a Commie Mind Control Ray and the machinations of an ambitious high-clearance citizen combine to give the Troubleshooters control over a prestigious cafeteria. They’re supposed to use it to track down the nefarious Commie Mind Control Ray, but they get caught up in the usual problems of running a cafeteria – assassins, artillery emplacements, mutant uprisings… you know, the usual.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Bots and more bots
Bot-related topic the first: Go and see Wall-E. It's a fantastic depiction of Alpha Complex in spaaaaace. Seriously, kids' movies get all the best far-future post-apocalyptic dystopian nightmares in spaaaaaace.
Bot-related topic the second: Glory in Jim Holloway's wonderful cover art for The Big Book of Bots. It's a botspotter's dream illustration. See if you can find Astro Boy...
Bot-related topic the second: Glory in Jim Holloway's wonderful cover art for The Big Book of Bots. It's a botspotter's dream illustration. See if you can find Astro Boy...
The Thin Green Line
One vague plan that's occasionally kicked around at Mongoose is the idea that we do PARANOIA splatbooks - the R&D Mad Scientist's Handbook or Everything You've Wanted To Know About IntSec Is Classified Above Your Security Clearance. Such plans tend to founder on the rocky reef of 'how the hell do you make a book about Power Services fun?' Part of the problem is that the day-to-day activities of most Service Groups are so different from the mission-oriented gameplay of PARANOIA.
There's one obvious exception, though, and that's the Armed Forces, hence the upcoming Thin Green Line sourcebook. Troubleshooters get sent to an exotic sector, meet interesting people, and terminate them. Armed Forces grunts do the same thing, only with more firepower (the equipment section of Thin Green Line, for example, expands the damage table well past 'Vapourised' into the heady reaches of 'Nuked' or 'Planet-cracking Catastrophe'.)
As well as the True and Official HIstory of Alpha Complex (revised) and lots of Armed Forces stuffs, the book also covers those famous Heroes of Our Complex, the Vulture Squadron Warriors! You can even - gasp - play a Vulture Warrior (please note: playing a Vulture requires an awful lot of enthusiastic shouting and even more enthusiastic shooting; Vulture Warriors are not recommended for players with a caffeine intolerance or high blood pressure).
The book's rounded off with an ULTRAVIOLET-level discussion of the Enemy, that nefarious yet nebulous military threat to Alpha Complex, and an Armed Forces mission, Full Reflec Jacket.
Tomorrow - Alpha Complex Nights 2
There's one obvious exception, though, and that's the Armed Forces, hence the upcoming Thin Green Line sourcebook. Troubleshooters get sent to an exotic sector, meet interesting people, and terminate them. Armed Forces grunts do the same thing, only with more firepower (the equipment section of Thin Green Line, for example, expands the damage table well past 'Vapourised' into the heady reaches of 'Nuked' or 'Planet-cracking Catastrophe'.)
As well as the True and Official HIstory of Alpha Complex (revised) and lots of Armed Forces stuffs, the book also covers those famous Heroes of Our Complex, the Vulture Squadron Warriors! You can even - gasp - play a Vulture Warrior (please note: playing a Vulture requires an awful lot of enthusiastic shouting and even more enthusiastic shooting; Vulture Warriors are not recommended for players with a caffeine intolerance or high blood pressure).
The book's rounded off with an ULTRAVIOLET-level discussion of the Enemy, that nefarious yet nebulous military threat to Alpha Complex, and an Armed Forces mission, Full Reflec Jacket.
Tomorrow - Alpha Complex Nights 2
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