Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Rob MacD's alternate PARANOIAs 

Loyal citizen Rob MacDougall, who participated bravely in The Toothpaste Disaster PARANOIA Lexicon game in 2004, has posted three inventive PARANOIA variant settings on the gaming blog Claw Claw Peck.

First up is "Slave Complex of the Under There":
Black Tunnels descend from the surface world to the Crimson Caves of Blood. Below lie the Ochre Delves, the Azure Sepulchre, and the Temples of Elemental Indigo. The descending levels of the Under There represent a kind of, let’s say, “security clearance” for the pecking order of the dungeon. Under constant surveillance by unblinking beholders, ogres bully hobgoblins who bully goblins who bully bootlicking kobolds, who get stuck cleaning elf-gunk out of the death traps. It’s like high school with gelatinous cubes.
Then a steampunk PARANOIA, "Alpha | State," that will ring true to fans of the indie RPG a|state:
One hundred years after Babbage, one hundred years after Lord Byron’s coup, the Alphan Empire is a steam-driven superpower stretching from Barbados to Bangalore. At its heart squats perfidious Alpha, the not so Green and Pleasant Isle, and at Alpha’s heart sprawls the Empress, the city-sized analytical engine that rules and mothers the Empire. And oh, does it need mothering. For the paranoid Empress imagines a thousand perils to her binary virtue. Bomb-throwing Luddites! Bearded onanists! Filthy communards! And behind them all, the agents of another analytical AI: the Empress’ libertine continental nemesis, the Turk.

And finally "Alphaville," which, if you haven't already clicked through based on the two summaries above, just read it.

Man, it makes me yearn to return to Brave New Complex, the huge campaign supplement of variant Alpha Complex settings the Traitor Recycling Studio put together a few years ago. Nothing came of that -- no market -- but perhaps somehow, in some alternate timeline, that book actually got published.
Posted by: Allen Varney / 2:56 PM

Comments:
New Brave Complex Strikes Back! The Return of the New Brave Complex! New Brave Complex Forever!
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : June 30, 2009 2:40 AM
 
And yet the only PARANOIA supplement I ever wanted to purchase was Brave New Complex. Go figure...
# posted by Anonymous Zild : July 01, 2009 1:22 PM
 
Post a Comment

Copyright © 2004-8 by Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg. All your rights are belong to us. No bloody Creative Commons here! Bwahahaha!
No, seriously. If you make non-commercial use of stuff here, that's fine, but we reserve all commercial rights, and all rights to prepare derivative material on things posted here. In addition, posters of comments must be aware that we reserve the right to use whatever material they post here, and/or derivative works therefrom, in PARANOIA, supplementary products, licensed products, or derivative work, without any compensation whatever, for all time to come and throughout this universe and any alternate universes that may be discovered. At our discretion, and without obligation, we may, if it strikes our fancy, make a good faith effort to credit you for stuff we use, but we can't promise it won't slip our minds, in the hurly-burly of meeting deadlines. (Actually, we intend to do that, but it's possible we'll screw up.) By posting comments, you grant us a non-revocable, perpetual, non-exclusive license to use whatever you post, in whatsoever fashion we deem useful, here or in any other forum, in PARANOIA or in any and all future products, including but not limited to derivative works, and specifically but not exclusively including the microbrewery beer, ale and porter; salty and sugary snack; and tattoo design rights deriving therefrom. Woohoo! Is that enough legalese for you? The Computer is Your Friend.

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?