PARANOIA

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...

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

Based on the original bot rules from Acute Paranoia, the BIg Book of Bots is 64ish pages of bot. Rules for bot characters in Alpha Complex, bot construction, and a whole range of new bots from the PortaBot (because what every Troubleshooter team needs is an armed mobile artificially intelligent toilet cubicle) to the SmartBot (it itsn't), the HelpBot (it doesn't) and everyclone's favourite, the FunBot (it's not). There are also secret societies for bots and a bot-centric adventure.

There are also rules for Directives. The Directives rules were inspired by a game of RoboRally, where my poor robot ended up driving itself repeatedly into the wall. 'Why', I thought, 'this is remarkably suitable behaviour for a PARANOIA bot.'

In a nutshell, Directives are commands associated with a mem card. If your bot loads that mem card, it becomes subject to the Directive on that mem card, which might compel it to, say, drive repeatedly into the wall.

Or 'scrub everything in sight'.

Or 'spread Communist propaganda'.

Directives are fun. Free Will is not fun. Obey your directives like a good little bot.

Tomorrow - The Thin Green Line!

If you glance at the Mongoose Paranoia products page, you'll notice several upcoming books are listed: The Big Book of Bots, The Thin Green Line, Alpha Complex Nights 2 and Mandatory Mission Pack. (It also claims that The Big Book of Bots is out this month, which is... well, since I just sent in the art notes yesterday, and the book is still in editing and layout, we'll just call that 'ambitious'). All going well, though, they may be out for Gencon.

All this week on the blog, I'll be going through each of the upcoming books. Stay tuned for exciting new mandatory PARANOIA content!

Via Daily Illuminator, a lengthy (if rather dry) history and tour of a secret underground city, or anyway a secret underground small town, in Corsham, Wiltshire (UK) -- a Cold War emergency refuge for 4,000 government officials. Variously called Hawthorn Central Government War Headquarters, Stockwell, Subterfuge, Turnstile, and more recently Site 3, the complex was first built in the early 1960s and maintained (at a cost that eventually rose to half a million pounds a year) until 2004. "The MOD [Ministry of Defence] is looking for a company to bring new life to the site. English Heritage have also expressed an interest in preserving part of the site for historic interest."

Labels: underplex

For historical reasons I note what may be the final passing of West End Games, which in its first incarnation in the 1980s published the original editions of PARANOIA. That version of West End ceased most operations in the mid-1990s and finally (as part of its parent company, Bucci Retail Group) declared bankruptcy in 1998. Eventually the rights to PARANOIA returned to the game's original designers, Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg. They later licensed Mongoose Publishing to produce the current (2004) edition.

After the bankruptcy, West End (minus PARANOIA) changed hands a couple of times. The current owner, Eric J. Gibson, has struggled for some years. After an extended flamewar on the RPG.net forum, Gibson bade farewell to the roleplaying field. On the West End forum, he says he is now taking bids for individual properties. Though I haven't seen a formal list yet, I presume these properties include Torg, the D6 and Masterbook Systems, and the unquestioned prize of West End's current line, Junta. On another RPG.net forum thread, interested fans are discussing the prospects and wisdom of bidding.

Whether or not the West End name will persist remains unclear.

Despite its name, the PARANOIA roleplaying game doesn't derive much literal inspiration from the mental illness of paranoid personality disorder. Real-world paranoids are sad, humorless unfortunates, not at all the ideal model for players playing Alpha Complex Troubleshooters. But in the last few years this age-old mental labyrinth has opened what may be an interesting new subdivision.

In 2006, two brother psychiatrists, Joel Gold of New York's Bellevue Hospital and Ian Gold at Montreal's McGill University, proposed a new derangement they called "Truman Show Delusion": "patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows." Only a couple of years late, Canada's National Post is hot on the story:

While traditionalists insist that this delusion offers nothing new -- it is no different from, say, a deranged man who believes that the CIA has planted a microchip in his tooth -- the Gold brothers argue otherwise.

"It's really a question of the extent of the delusion," said Joel Gold, 39, who has been on staff at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center for eight years. "The delusions we typically treat are narrow: There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles. Or the Fregoli Delusion, where someone believes that one person is persecuting him: a doctor, mailman, butcher. The Truman Show Delusion, though, involves the entire world."

He also says that The Truman Show had an impact on patients that other films did not, no matter how powerful they were. [...T]hree of the five patients he treated at the storied mental health hospital directly likened their plight to The Truman Show, the 1998 film about Truman Burbank, an affable suburbanite who slowly becomes aware that his every movement is broadcast 24/7 to voyeuristic viewers around the world.

The five patients Dr. Gold treated were white men between the ages of 25 and 34, the majority of whom held university degrees. "I realized that I was and am the center, the focus of attention by millions and millions of people," explained one patient, an army veteran who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing. "My family and everyone I knew were and are actors in a script, a charade whose entire purpose is to make me the focus of the world's attention."

But there are those who say this media tie-in psychosis is mere fashion-following:

Austrian Thomas Stompe, a leading psychiatrist with a traditional bent, believes there are seven kinds of delusions, period.

"A number of recent case reports published during the last 20 years described a quick inclusion of new technologies and cultural innovations into schizophrenic delusions, which led many of the authors to the conclusion that the 'Zeitgeist' is creating new delusional contents," warns Dr. Stompe, the lead author of a paper entitled "Old Wine in New Bottles? Stability and Plasticity of the Contents of Schizophrenic Delusions."

Published five years ago in the journal Psychopathology, the abstract concludes that there are only a few eternal themes of "extraordinary anthropological importance": persecution, grandiosity, guilt, religion, hypochondria, jealousy and love.

Those other Zeitgeist developments, presumably the Truman Show Delusion among them, belong in subcategories according to this categorization. [...] "The major topics are always the same."

(Via TechDirt.)

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the US government's terrorist watch list now has one million names, including members of Congress, war heroes, everyone named "Robert Johnson" and "Gary Smith," and (until last month) Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela. Nearly 250,000 names were added in the last year alone. (More at Daily Kos.)

Remember, citizen: Traitors are everywhere and can be anybody, even -- yes -- Gary Smith!

In listing the influences on PARANOIA, we sometimes overlook Fritz Lang's landmark 1927 film Metropolis. The full version of Metropolis was believed lost, but now the German magazine De Zeit reports key scenes from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” have been rediscovered:

Fritz Lang presented the original version of Metropolis in Berlin in January 1927. [...] At the time it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was intended to be a major offensive against Hollywood. However, the film flopped with critics and audiences alike. Representatives of the American firm Paramount considerably shortened and re-edited the film. They oversimplified the plot, even cutting key scenes. The original version could only be seen in Berlin until May 1927 – from then on it was considered to have been lost forever. [...]

Adolfo Z. Wilson, a man from Buenos Aires and head of the Terra film distribution company, arranged for a copy of the long version of “Metropolis” to be sent to Argentina in 1928 to show it in cinemas there. Shortly afterwards a film critic called Manuel Peña Rodríguez came into possession of the reels and added them to his private collection. In the 1960s Peña Rodríguez sold the film reels to Argentina’s National Art Fund – clearly nobody had yet realised the value of the reels. A copy of these reels passed into the collection of the Museo del Cine (Cinema Museum) in Buenos Aires in 1992, the curatorship of which was taken over by Paula Félix-Didier in January this year. Her ex-husband, director of the film department of the Museum of Latin American Art, first entertained the decisive suspicion: He had heard from the manager of a cinema club, who years before had been surprised by how long a screening of this film had taken. Together, Paula Félix-Didier and her ex-husband took a look at the film in her archive – and discovered the missing scenes.

[...T]here are several scenes which are essential in order to understand the film: The role played by the actor Fritz Rasp in the film for instance, can finally be understood. Other scenes, such as for instance the saving of the children from the worker’s underworld, are considerably more dramatic. [...]

The rediscovered material is in need of restoration after 80 years; the pictures are scratched, but clearly recognizable. Martin Koerber, the restorer of the hitherto longest known version of “Metropolis”, who also examined the footage, said to ZEITmagazin: “No matter how bad the condition of the material may be, the original intention of the film, including all of its minor characters and subplots, is now once again tangible for the normal viewer. The rhythm of the film has been restored.”