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

Thursday, August 28, 2008

North Korean propaganda posters 

Comrades! Via Jason Kottke, who in turn stole link like running-dog capitalist pig from Foreign Policy Passport blog, glorious collection of North Korean anti-American propaganda posters! Let's extensively raise goats in all families!

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 4:25 PM (0) comments

Mark Rein-Hagen's SOSGeorgia.org 

Not PARANOIA-related, but quite cool: Via my esteemed fellow game designer Matt Forbeck, news of a worthy new project by Mark Rein-Hagen, co-founder of White Wolf Game Studio and designer of most of the first-generation Storyteller RPGs. Rein-Hagen now lives with his wife and child in Tblisi, capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia -- you know, the one the Russians invaded this month. He has set up a fine website, SOS Georgia, to document the chaotic aftermath and promote relief efforts.
Here at SOS Georgia we are striving to present the true facts about what is really going on, stories from refugees and people on the scene, contact information for source for journalists and a way for supporters of Georgians around the world to connect with one another, exchange ideas and make plans for protest and rallies. Most of all we are trying out best to keep Georgia free from Russian occupation and annexation and continue our progress as a democratic and independent country with strong ties to the West.
Learn about the situation and what you can do: http://sosgeorgia.org/
Posted by: Allen Varney / 1:47 AM (0) comments

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:
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?
Posted by: Allen Varney / 3:20 PM (2) comments

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.)

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 3:32 PM (0) comments

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!
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 7:20 PM (1) comments

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.

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 3:03 AM (0) comments

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!

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 10:02 AM (1) comments

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.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 6:58 PM (0) comments

Copyright © 2004-8 by Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg. All your rights are belong to us. No bloody Creative Commons here! Bwahahaha!
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