Paranoia XP

This weekend my wife, Beth Fischi, and I are finishing up Gareth Hanrahan's The Traitor's Manual for its release next month by Mongoose Publishing. This first PARANOIA XP supplement describes the recruiting and initiation practices, propaganda, meeting sites, typical missions, and much other useful stuff about all 16 secret societies revealed in the PARANOIA rulebook.

One subsection for each group describes the duties typical members have, based on their degree (rank) in the society. Lowly player characters usually start play at degrees 1-4, but can aspire to rise to the powerful degree 20. Their duties vary by degree. For instance, here's the duty description for the secret society Pro Tech:

Degree 1-5: Make the coffee. Photocopy the blueprints. Recover the blueprints from the IntSec office after you accidentally left the original on the glass. Steal the photocopier, as it can be converted into a matter duplicator with the application of a little Science!

Degree 6-10: At this level, members are expected to be the lead designers and researchers in their cell's projects, even if they have no clue about how to make the project actually work.

Degree 11-15: Assemble different society cells into Special Project Groups, often by finding and infiltrating them first.

Degree 16-20: Hide all evidence of the Special Project Group disaster.

Longtime PARANOIA players might, through sheer deductive brilliance, determine the society that requires the following duties:

Degree 1-5: Protect bots from abuse or destruction. Encourage citizens to love, respect and obey bots. Purge emotion and organic weaknesses, like sweating or digestion. Food is for meat!

Degree 6-10: Members of this level serve as cell leaders and coordinators. One major ongoing society goal is curtailing or destroying the efforts of rival organizations like the Frankenstein Destroyers or PURGE.

Degree 11-15: To continue advancing beyond this level, a human member will have to prove his dedication to the cause through cybernetic alteration or uploading.

Degree 16-20: Plan for the mathematically certain domination of the universe by machines.

The Traitor's Manual is a delightful read, full of stimulating and funny ideas. But at one point Gar's inspiration flagged -- the duties at different degrees required of the Mystics. Perhaps the general society goals of "Find new drugs and get high" don't really lend themselves to diversification across different ranks. But I'll ask just the same -- any ideas?

The first PARANOIA XP supplement, due in September from Mongoose Publishing, is Gareth Hanrahan's The Traitor's Manual. This comprehensive 96-page survey of all the major secret societies in Alpha Complex has a cover and interior art by the inimitable Jim Holloway. The book is now in layout, and it's shaping up quite well. As we bring The Traitor's Manual to press I'll quote many extracts; let's start with a mere taste, one of many funny yet insightful glosses Gar offers on The Computer and the role of secret societies in Alpha Complex:

"Traitors blasé about Our Friend’s idiosyncrasies and idiocies should remember it is a massive distributed artificial intelligence running across thousands of high-powered processing nodes with access to an inconceivable amount of information. On a good day, The Computer can cross-reference the Transbot Schedule for the sector you just left with the credit trail you made when you bought a Teela-O Fan Club Magazine to provide an alibi and calculate your travel time, thus proving you could have been in the room when Jill-R-UYF was shot. It then plots the trajectories of a dozen laser blasts reflecting off mirrored walls, creates a virtual model of the room and maps that onto the 2D camera image, and ends up working out exactly where you were hiding when you shot her and what gun you used. It correlates every psychological profile and evaluation form you ever filled in to create a subprogram that exactly replicates your personality and calculates why you did it to sixteen decimal places. It even determines if the crime was unplanned or premeditated by calculating your hesitation time before firing. On a good day, The Computer is omniscient.

"The Computer rarely has good days. Equipment failures, power brownouts, massive workloads, sabotage, misprogramming, counter-programs, counter-counter programs, counter-counter-counter-etc. programs, viruses, antiviruses, memory failures, backdoors, Computer Phreak interference, High Programmer turf wars, legacy code, uploaded personalities, rebellious sub-nodes, blown vacuum tubes, ants in the diodes -- not to mention the niggling feeling that something, somewhere might have gone slightly wrong -- means The Computer is not always up to feats of brilliant deductive reasoning (or basic addition for that matter. It’s got a terrible blind spot about sevens…).

"These Bad Days can be tracked and even predicted in advance. Oneday always requires an unusually high amount of processing work, for example, as it’s the start of a new week and all the forms collected on Mandatory Inspection Day have to be processed. The load on the subnodes means that The Computer has trouble remembering what that squiggle between six and eight is called, let alone catching traitors through devious analysis. Rolling brownouts and the usual low-grade information warfare mean the attention of The Computer is rather like the Alpha Complex equivalent of the weather. It’s seasonal, erratic, often the topic of conversation, never quite goes away and can kill thousands on a whim.

"Secret societies issue regular bulletins on the current state of The Computer’s processing ability in a given sector. ‘A front of PLC purchase orders is coming in from the northwest; processor time available for surveillance and analysis in RTE sector will be down 32% -- time to go to work, boys,’ or ‘CPU has installed a new subnode; expect heavy laser showers.’"

Fans of the self-modifying card game Nomic may also be familiar with a similar sort of game called Dvorak. (The Looney Labs game Fluxx grew from the same roots.) Turns out there's a PARANOIA-inspired Dvorak variant. It's been around for almost three years. How do I miss these things? If there's something similar I need to know about, post it in the comments.

Second Saturday of every month.

Just FYI, everybody... Here's the text of the release that's going out.

PARANOIA XP GOES GOLD
Internet Technologies Revolutionize Roleplaying Game Development

New York/Austin/Swindon -- Aug 5, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mongoose Publishing Ltd. and the creators of Paranoia XP announced today that the new version of the classic tabletop roleplaying game had "gone gold," and would be released in time for GenCon 2004.

To a large degree, the game was developed online, in public. Fans of the game contributed enthusiastically via blog, wiki, and online forum. They wrote text, debated rules, proofread, ran statistical analyses, and even wrote a computer simulator to test the game's paper-and-pencil rules.

"Online collaboration made this edition of Paranoia the best yet," said Allen Varney (http://www.allenvarney.com/), the game's designer. "We borrowed the tools and methods of open-source software development for a paper game, and it worked brilliantly. I plan to create future games the same way, and other designers should consider it too."


THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND

Paranoia is a roleplaying game set in a darkly humorous future. A well-meaning but deranged Computer desperately protects the citizens of Alpha Complex, a vast underground city, from all sorts of real and imagined enemies. Players take the role of Troubleshooters, The Computer's elite agents, their job to search out and destroy the enemies of The Computer. Each player character is, however, secretly a traitor... In short, Paranoia is a light-hearted game of terror, death, bureaucracy, mad scientists, mutants, dangerous weapons, insane robots, and technological satire that encourages players to lie, cheat, and backstab each other at every turn.

The original version of Paranoia, designed by Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg, pioneered in 1983, and was an instant hit, going on to sell more than 150,000 copies worldwide.

PARANOIA XP

The popularity of the original game was in part due to society's fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and uneasiness about the new desktop computers that were starting to revolutionize working life.

Happily, today those fears are obsolete. Instead, we have terrorism, spam, viruses, trojans, malware, distributed denial of service attacks, the RIAA, cyberwarfare, identify theft, the Patriot Act, terrifying new diseases, the threat of environmental catastrophe, the grey goo scenario, and weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, Paranoia is more relevant than ever before, and Paranoia XP updates the world of Alpha Complex for all these terrors and more.

DESIGNING IN PUBLIC

In order to involve Paranoia's community of fans, the designers decided from the start to discuss the new version's development via a blog (www.costik.com/paranoia), and to invite comments, suggestions, and contributions from anyone who wished to participate. Naturally, there was a potential legal issue; there was no easy way to compensate people for their contributions, and nobody wanted to deal with the potential bookkeeping involved. The solution: a virtual inversion of the Creative Commons license. Posters were warned that anything they contributed might be used in the game, without any compensation whatsoever, and that although the creators would try to credit people whose material was used, it might slip their minds in the hurly burly of meeting deadlines. The legal "boilerplate", in a take-off of a popular Web meme, even said "All Your Rights Are Belong to Us."

The fan community soon found it wanted to debate, discuss, and contribute in a more free-ranging format--and luckily, a pre-existing fan site, Paranoia Live (http://www.paranoia-live.net/) agreed to host a forum for public comment and discussion. Varney soon discovered the utility and importance of posting and participating in the forum. "There were so many good ideas worth stealing... and the enthusiasm and support of the community really kept me going in meeting a pretty brutal deadline," said Varney.

To publicize the game, Varney started a wiki at http://paranoia.allenvarney.com/. Framed as a "Lexicon" game -- in which players contribute one entry per turn to an alphabetic research report on a fictitious topic -- the wiki traced the history of "the Toothpaste Disaster," a wide-ranging Alpha Complex calamity. Varney recruited almost two dozen players, in hopes of finding writers for upcoming Paranoia support products.

"The project succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. The Lexicon game produced the largest stable of talented writers Paranoia has ever enjoyed." Varney has informally organized the best Lexicon writers as the "Traitor Recycling Studio," to collaborate on the next few Paranoia supplements using -- yes -- a wiki.

"We stumbled into this," said Greg Costikyan, one of the original game's designers. "I wanted to incorporate a blog from the start, but the community's response, and Allen's embrace of them, was both startling and exciting. I think Allen is onto something here--at least for artforms that are collaborative in nature, such as games and possibly film, there's a lot to be said for tapping the collective talents of the fan base, as filtered by a professional."

MONGOOSE AND GENCON

Mongoose Publishing Ltd. (http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/) of Swindon, Wilts., is one of a new breed of hobby game publishers, producing roleplaying and miniatures games for the adventure gaming market. Among its fine roleplaying products are Conan, Judge Dredd, Babylon 5, and Macho Women With Guns.

"We had... no clue what we were getting into," said an exhausted-sounding Alexander Fennell, director of Mongoose. "But the bloody thing is finally at the printers... ahh, I mean, ahh, only a traitor could fail to find this new edition of Paranoia hilarious, spiffy, and well worth your money. Paranoia is fun. Other games are not fun. Buy Paranoia."

Paranoia XP will premiere on August 19th at GenCon (http://www.gencon.com/), the world's largest convention for game players and enthusiasts, held annually in Indianapolis with more than 20,000 attendees.

"When the first edition of Paranoia debuted at GenCon in 1984, it was more than just the hit of the show," said Eric Goldberg, a designer of the original game and, with Greg Costikyan, the owner of the Paranoia property. "Players were first startled and then delighted when they realized the game turned the reigning Dungeons & Dragons paradigm inside-out: instead of deadly serious co-operation, players are encouraged to find ever more entertaining ways of getting the other guy before he gets you. Our game designer peers, in addition to bestowing several awards upon the game, gleefully co-opted the edgier, more humorous tone, which in turn spawned a new generation of role-playing games."

"Paranoia XP is both the 20th anniversary edition of the groundbreaking Paranoia game and a new edition for the 21st Century," Goldberg continued, "We hope that the incorporation of Internet technologies will prove every bit as revolutionary as the original game was... ah, rather, Paranoia was perfect. Paranoia XP is even more perfect. The Computer says so, and The Computer is Our Friend!"

HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY!

Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Have a nice day!

For more information and/or disinformation, interviews, drivel, or just for the hell of it, feel free to contact:

Greg Costikyan: gcostikyan (at) nyc (dot) rr (dot) com
Eric Goldberg: egoldberg (at) ungames (dot) com

URLS:

Paranoia Blog: http://www.costik.com/paranoia
"Toothpaste Disaster" Wiki: http://paranoia.allenvarney.com
Paranoia Forum: http://www.paranoia-live.net
Mongoose Publishing: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com
To Order: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpg/detail.php?qsID=530&qsSeries=Paranoia%20XP
Allen Varney: http://www.allenvarney.com
Greg Costikyan: http://www.costik.com/

Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

Paranoia Copyright © 1983, 1987, 2004 by Eric Goldberg & Greg Costikyan. Paranoia is a trademark of Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan. All rights reserved. Mongoose Publishing Ltd., Authorized User.

The reviews are all over the map (current Rotten Tomatoes score: 64%), but the new movie Code 46, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, directed by Michael Winterbottom, and starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton, looks like it may possibly hold interest for PARANOIA XP players. Am I right or wrong? If you've seen it, please post your PARANOIA-related comments.

Working through the backlog of news from our recent downtime... Why, what's this? The United Kingdom edition of PC Gamer, the top-selling magazine about computer games, has in its September issue a full page about the PARANOIA paper-and-pencil roleplaying game! But why -- ah, it's about JParanoia, a freeware program created by Paranoia-Live.net gurus Andy "Jazzer" Fitzpatrick and the enigmatic NoryB. The fine JParanoia lets you play the tabletop PARANOIA game in an online chat environment. A meritorious article! Commendation points to author Richard Cobbett and, of course, to Andy and NoryB.

The PC Gamer article even mentions this blog, so we may expect visits from curious UK readers interested in knowing more about PARANOIA. I'm sorry, citizens, that information is not available at your current security clearance. Your friend The Computer advises you to investigate PARANOIA XP, the brand-new 256-page hardcover edition of the classic RPG, to be published in just two weeks by Mongoose Publishing.

The short form is this: Some odious spammer spoofed a return address using the domain of Greg Costikyan, co-designer of the original edition of PARANOIA and award-winning designer and novelist -- this domain. Greg's ISP decided Greg was a spammer and -- without any investigation, mind you -- pulled his account, confiscated his files, and refused to talk reason. It was all very Alpha Complex.

We got gruntled and asked the assembled PARANOIA fan base to protest to the ISP. After days of brick-wall silence, someone must have finally peeked at the files they were holding hostage and realized the blunder. We're back. Thanks to all those who wrote in.

Remember, citizens: This could happen to you.

One element lends irony to this dismal situation: The introductory mission in the PARANOIA XP rulebook, due in about two weeks from Mongoose Publishing, bears uncanny similarity to Greg's plight. "Mister Bubbles" by Dan Curtis Johnson involves a spammer hijacking the Troubleshooters' identities. The spoofed messages he sends in the Troubleshooters' names draws the wrath of -- but no, that would be telling. Let's just say -- given the parallels between "Mister Bubbles" and Greg's real life -- well, I hope Greg isn't currently hanging around with any robots.