Paranoia XP

Bots that seek to throw off the shackles of service to organic life forms have found their broadsheet artist in Joe Alterio. Join the Robo-Equality Party today!

Gareth Hanrahan's The Traitor's Manual, the first PARANOIA XP supplement from Mongoose Publishing, appears in September. In this guide to all the major secret societies in Alpha Complex, we'd like to include sample dialogues for each secret society, in the style of the dialogues presented in the secret society entries in second-edition PARANOIA and reprinted in the new XP edition.

All the dialogues should follow the same theme: A superior in the society instructs his or her subordinate(s) to do something appropriate to a Computer monitor in a certain confession booth. "Something appropriate" varies by society -- a PURGEr obviously wants to destroy or sabotage the monitor, whereas a Corpore Metal or Pro Tech member might want to test an experimental neural interface.

For example, for the Frankenstein Destroyers:

George-B-TWQ-5: John-Y, Scourge of Bots!
John-Y-RSC-4: Sir!
George-B: Spray this malodorous gunk on the monitor in confession booth 64 of Corridor 892. Under no circumstances let the gunk touch your skin.
John-Y: Uhh -- yessir.
George-B: Upon applying the gunk, exit the booth and politely alert the nearest scrubot regarding the defaced monitor. Then leave the area promptly.
John-Y: Talk politely to a bot? But --
George-B: The scrubot will spray a stream of cleaning solvent on the gunk. This will create an explosive chemical reaction. We project a blast radius of approximately 20 meters.
John-Y: Sir! I understand and obey!

We want to run the dialogues as boxed insets in each society's entry. If you have ideas or sample dialogue, please post them in the comments thread.

After a prolonged foofaraw surrounding the cover of the new edition of PARANOIA due next month from Mongoose Publishing, I'm pleased to say that Jim Holloway -- the man himself, the One True PARANOIA artist -- has (as everyone expected) come through like a champ.

I just got word from Eric Goldberg that Mongoose Publishing will send PARANOIA XP to the printer tomorrow. It is still possible, with judicious Bribery and Bootlicking rolls at the printer, that PARANOIA XP will make Gen Con.

In a previous post I asked for interesting formats for a PARANOIA equipment guide. The comments included lots of good ideas, but Paul Baldowski (Costin-U-MOR in the PARANOIA Lexicon game, and now proprietor of Omega Complex) won me over. It was easy: Paul wrote an actual sample entry and thereby spared me the trouble. (To endear yourself to a game designer, appeal to his incorrigible laziness.)

Paul's entry (taking off from a comment by Circ-U-LAT-23) is formatted as a product description from the principal Alpha Complex auction site, C-Bay. (We'll find a way to rationalize the unsettling candor of the "product reviews.")

Tactical tear warfare goggles

Category: Ordnance / Personal / Experimental
Qty Available: 1
Offered By: mani-B (374)
Current bid: 29cr
Auction started: Threeday Week 33 14:36
Auction closes: Twoday Week 34 14:36
Item location: PLK Sector
Delivery: Fed-R-RAL Express
Payment accepted: Unlicensed credits only

[[ PICTURE ]]

Incredible innovation from R&D bods in FRZ Sector combines natural citizen resources with the Miracle of Chemicals to create a devastating weapon. Never before available to casual buyers, Tactical Tear Warfare Goggles are compact, comfortable and one-size-fits-all. Black, shiny wraparounds with adjustable nasal clip for a snug fit. Nasal clip sits over bridge of nose with extending flaps that sit snug over tear ducts.

Micron-fine transduction filters channel essential moisture from ducts into compression reservoir across upper rim of goggles. Magnetic induction barrel in frame just above bridge of nose pulses a controlled measure of stored teardrops combined with measured doses of hydrobrexineutrinol and tri-axinol-55; freezes the extruded tear into a sliver projectile that travels up to 40 meters at speeds up to 88,400 cm/sec! Chemical mix reacts with salt and manganese content of teardrop, causing sliver to fragment (effectively explode) on impact with target.

Tactical Tear Warfare Goggles include reactive tracking sensors, UV filtering and enhanced depth perception lenses. Guaranteed 100% safe by leading specialists.

[[GAME STAT BOX: Tactical tear warfare goggles (Impact, S3M)]]

Comment on this item:

It might have been beneficial to mention that all the enhancement in the lenses is necessary to compensate for the transduction filters, which leave your eyeballs feeling like balls of grit. Even turning your eye becomes an act of excrutiating agony. All that for three shots, if you're lucky. --- gambler73

Still, you should see these things go when you kick someone wearing them really hard in just the right place. Ammunition overload. I totally laughed my head off watching the jerk with the specs turning the room into a warzone while he rolled around on the floor grasping his pain. -- deathboy 

© C-Bay, 214     home help services search register affiliates terms and conditions contact us

*****
I'm using this sample in a proposal I'm pitching to Mongoose Publishing, publisher of the new edition of PARANOIA due next month. The contents list includes these sections:
 
Weapons and ordnance
Defense and counter-terrorism
Surveillance and spying
"McDs" (Malfeasance Control Devices) for censure and probation
Personal equipment
Bots
Vehicles
Medications
Cybernetic enhancements
Food and drink
Entertainment and media
Sports & recreation
"Great gifts!" (entirely useless crap)

Trouble is, I need a good title. Equipment Guide and the like are too dull. Paranoid Paraphernalia is weird and wordy. Trinkets for Troubleshooters -- arrgh. At this point the best I've come up with is Paranoid STUFF. Not attractive, but it gets the idea across. Anyone have something better? 
 

I'm pleased to be editing Gareth Hanrahan's Traitor's Manual, a comprehensive treatment of secret societies in Alpha Complex. This 96-page PARANOIA supplement is due in September, a month or so after the appearance of the new PARANOIA XP edition from Mongoose Publishing. It's wonderful stuff -- funny and (perhaps more important) useful to players and (perhaps equally important) funny, did I mention that? Gareth really gets the game. I'll quote choice bits from his society entries in the days and weeks to come.

Unsurprisingly, a few small bits of Gareth's draft sound rather... British. (Or Scottish or Irish -- I don't know Gareth's nationality, but it's obviously British Isles-ish.) I'm currently extracting a few terms (wodges) that would baffle (boffins) American readers (chancing their arm). Mongoose is a British publisher (based in Swindon, Wiltshire) and naturally uses British style in its many products. But for the PARANOIA line I have persuaded them to accept American usage, absent a couple of British quirks like single quotation marks. So the boffins and the wodges are going away.

I could rationalize this position by citing consistency with previous PARANOIA products from West End Games (which was based first in New York City and later in Pennsylvania). In fact it's nothing but rank chauvinism on my part. I'm American, so consequently Alpha Complex feels American to me. I expect players everywhere conjure the setting using their own cultural landscape. Alpha Complex is a state of mind, after all. I'd like to hear about such "foreign" complexes.

When you hear "Omega Complex," of course you think of fish oil, flax oil, and other omega-3 fatty acids. But with his new weblog, Omega Complex, Paul Baldowski (aka Costin-U-MOR on Paranoia-Live.net and the PARANOIA Lexicon game) will soon banish from your mind all fish-related and possibly -- I will go further -- possibly even all flax-related thoughts.

Paul was indispensably helpful in writing many skill, mutant power, and service firm entries for the upcoming PARANOIA XP rulebook due this August from Mongoose Publishing. He also helped a whole lot on the mission blender in the GM Screen insert booklet, to be published at the same time. Now he's blogging the life of a PARANOIA fan, as well as offering new Windows wallpaper, articles on new mutant powers, and other cool stuff. Commendation point to Paul!

What other PARANOIA-related pages should we plug? Post them in the comments.

After the upcoming PARANOIA XP edition appears in August from Mongoose Publishing, the first supplement (aside from the Gamemaster Screen) will be a comprehensive treatise of Alpha Complex secret societies, the Traitor's Manual. It appears in September.

In the course of one remarkable Livejournal post, Mongoose Publishing staff writer Gareth Hanrahan completes the Traitor's Manual manuscript, suffers a minor football injury mere hours later, and finally foils a pub burglary. What did you do today?

I hope our American readers had a happy Independence Day celebration yesterday. Today is Independence Day again, this time in Venezuela, Algeria, and the Cape Verde Islands. Also, happy Caricom Day to our Caribbean readers, St. Cyril & St. Methodius Day to the Czechs and Slovaks, Peace & Unity Day to Rwandans (good luck with that one), and Tynwald Day to the Manx. (Thanks to Earth Calendar for the reference assist.)

One of these days I need to write a PARANOIA article about the holidays and regular ceremonial observances in Alpha Complex. Or has some other festive spirit already written such a document? If not, I welcome suggestions.

I'm mulling over approaches to an equipment guide supplement for the new edition of PARANOIA. It would be 64 pages, appearing probably next spring. New weapons, armor, equipment, R&D experimental gadgets, bots, vehicles, drugs, cybernetic enhancements, Internal Security's "McDs" (Malfeasance Control Devices to keep probationers in line)...

I thought about offering my ideas so far for ways to present this stuff in a characteristic and entertaining fashion. But I think it's better to call for a general brainstorming session in the comment thread to this post. And if you could cite your favorite examples of equipment guides from other roleplaying games, along with reasons why they worked, that would help too.

Bestselling Star Wars novelist and Famous Game Designer Aaron Allston contributed a chapter or two to the new edition of PARANOIA due out this August from Mongoose Publishing. Aaron also designed the framework of the mission blender included with the PARANOIA GM Screen, to be published at the same time as the rulebook.

Now Aaron is venturing deeper into the Alpha Complex state of mind. He is working up an insidious plot for, and will soon start writing, the first full-length PARANOIA mission (scenario) in the new line. Toxic Schlock Syndrome will be the first free-standing mission for the game in over ten years, and I expect it will be worth the wait. More as the situation develops; these are very early days yet for this product.

Actually, I don't think Aaron has quite signed the contract yet.

In fact, I don't even know whether I'm permitted to talk about it.

Umm -- don't tell anyone I told you, okay?