PARANOIA

With Year of The Computer 214 fast drawing to a close, The Computer's loyal servants in Power Services are making excellent progress on their latest Five-Year Universal Illumination Optimization Plan to upgrade the fluorescent bulbs in all public facilities in Sectors AAA through CZZ and associated sectors, subsectors, and corridors to new energy-efficient Hyper-Mercuron bulbs. (Rest assured the gas in these bulbs is only minimally radioactive and in no important way more toxic than their precursors, given reasonable maintenance.) To constructively address an unexpected 20% shortage of Hyper-Mercuron gas production, and to rectify consequent temporary shortfalls in FYUIOP milestone completion achievements, The Computer has wisely instructed all affected sectors to repeat Year 214 indefinitely until further notice. Thank you for your cooperation -- and keep those lightbulbs clean!

(The following opinions are by me alone, Allen Varney, and don't necessarily represent those of PARANOIA's owners or publisher.)

In 2008 there was essentially no PARANOIA news at all until just this month, when Mongoose Publishing suddenly produced three new books in two weeks: Alpha Complex Nights 2, Big Book of Bots, and The Thin Green Line. (A fourth book, Mandatory Mission Pack, will appear in January 2009.) All these supplements were designed by Mongoose's gifted staff writer Gareth Hanrahan, who had a banner year with a well-received new edition of Traveller, as well as the webcomic Fish for Fish and a new blog, Figures of Text. All these books also featured covers by the One True PARANOIA Artist, the incomparable Jim Holloway.

Though there was little news to report this year, we can expect wonderful things in 2009. In his 2008 State of the Mongoose post, CEO Matthew Sprange brought the news:

PARANOIA has always been an odd duck for us. You see, when publishing RPGs there is a set formula you can follow as to how many supplements you will sell, based upon how many main rulebooks have sold. With the exception of Flashbacks, PARANOIA does not follow this. At all. The main rulebook is one of our bestselling titles of all time, but the supplements, while cheerful enough at the sales end, are disproportionately low compared to the rulebook. Clearly, this is something we need to take a look at, and as 2009 is PARANOIA’s 25th Anniversary, it seems like the perfect opportunity!

First up will be a 25th Anniversary rulebook. Don’t panic, this is not a new edition per se, and if you want to stick with your current rulebook, you’ll find it works just fine with everything else coming for PARANOIA in the future. We are twiddling a few bits and pieces in the rulebook, including moving Zap and Straight games to an appendix, while concentrating on Classic (all future supplements will follow the Classic mould too). There will be a limited-edition version of this book to mark the anniversary, and we are currently putting together a plan of what this will include (we are currently investigating the possibility of using Rebellion’s recording studios...). If you are a PARANOIA fan, you will not want to miss this one, as we are packing a lot into it.

That will be the Troubleshooters taken care of. Later in the year, two more rulebooks will appear – the second covering IntSec troopers, the third High Programmers (there was actually a lot of debate about the third, as Vulture Warriors were the first choice – but when Gareth Hanrahan suggested that High Programmers might play like an insane version of Yes, Minister, he won the argument hands down). Each will form its own ‘sub-line’ in Alpha Complex, with its own set of scenarios appearing throughout the year, each providing a very, very different take on Alpha Complex as a whole.

This is an experiment in expanding the scope of Alpha Complex, while staying true to the roots of PARANOIA itself. The analogy we have used is actually some of White Wolf’s games – if PARANOIA is the World of Darkness, then IntSec troopers, High Programmers and, of course, Troubleshooters are the equivalent of Vampire, Werewolf, and Hunter (won’t say which is which, of course!). If this idea proves popular, we may add some new dimensions to Alpha Complex.

I think this is an inspired approach, entirely in keeping with the Mongoose edition's avowed goal to expand the range of experiences players associate with PARANOIA. I won't be involved with these three (!) new rulebooks, but I'm confident Gareth will do a terrific job, and I look forward to reading them.

PARANOIA continues to hold the gaming community's respect. This past fall, among 1,100 core rules sets, the Mongoose PARANOIA edition rose as high as #10 in the comprehensive RPG.net Game Index. At this writing, the rulebook stands at #16 among core rules sets, #40 among all 11,117 indexed products. The Flashbacks hardcover reprint collection is #30 among 2,542 adventures, #296 overall. Meanwhile, the leading fan site, Paranoia-Live.net, still simmers in a low-key way, though it has declined with the departure of most of its original High Programmers.

For me, the most exciting development of 2008 -- my 30th anniversary in the roleplaying field, counting from my humor article "Pond War" in Metagaming's magazine The Space Gamer #19 (Sept-Oct 1978) -- has been the chance to work again with several writers from the Traitor Recycling Studio, the gifted bunch who wrote almost all the books in the first two years of Mongoose's PARANOIA support line. Our new satirical humor site, Ninjalistics, is still finding its way, but all goes well. Last week, "Six additional political operatives die in separate accidents unrelated to Karl Rove" became our first article to get more than 1,000 hits, and its affiliate link earned our first US$1 of income, of which I was foolishly proud. Anyone who enjoys the PARANOIA style of humor will find Ninjalistics worth a look.

Of course, for me and all the Traitors, PARANOIA remains our first love. Though we have moved in many different directions, in 2009 we'll still follow the game closely, and I expect we'll enjoy it a lot.

Labels: yearinreview

This December 29, 2008 Washington Post report about the US government's Occupational Safety & Health Administration over the last eight years, "Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction" by R. Jeffrey Smith, includes a lovely character portrayal that should inspire every PARANOIA Gamemaster looking for a Troubleshooter team's next briefing officer:

In 2006, [John L.] Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations.

Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. "We'll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened," said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter.

In an interview, Foulke denied falling asleep at work, although he said he was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed. His goal, he said, was to create the best agency he could, partly by putting in place "performance metrics" not previously used at OSHA.

Foulke said his senior staff appeared "pretty enthusiastic," but he acknowledged that there were grounds for tension with others. Leadership, he said, is "taking people down a path they don't want to go, until you get them to a place where they realize this is where they need to be."

Attention, Power Services personnel seeking pinups for your Faraday-shielded office cubicles: photos of electrical towers at Pile of Photos.

Labels: powerservices

West End Games, in its original 1981-1994 incarnation, was PARANOIA's first publisher. After the company went bankrupt, many tumults followed. These seemingly culminated earlier this year, when various flamewars prompted current owner Eric Gibson to announce a tempestuous departure from the industry. However, Gibson has now posted a West End video update on YouTube that announces West End Games is not dead. In the video, Gibson describes his current publishing plans for Bill Coffin's long-awaited Septimus space-opera setting and the transformation of the venerable D6 roleplaying system into an "OpenD6" system.

Sincere good wishes to Eric Gibson and to all those who hope to see West End make a full recovery.

Trendspotting firm CScout Japan has published a few excellent photos of Central Processing Unit's Sector RJX Supplementary CompNode 13, where The Computer's loyal servants recently increased salient Normalized Transportation Efficiency quotients by almost 0.75% year-on-year through the ingenious expedient of renormalizing all figures from "number of vehicles" to "number of wheels" and then assigning high-priority lanes to vehicles that are missing one or more standard wheels, or rather (to use CPU's preferred new Parlance Upgrade) are "highly wheel-efficient."

--What? Oh, wait. These are photos of Tokyo's traffic control center. Oops.

Labels: cpu

You know all the old cyberpunk stories, where the targeting recticle would wander over the screen before zeroing in on the guy you want to shoot? At a Best Buy, there was a camera with "smile detect." You turn it on, and if there's a person with a face in camera view, a little orange recticle wanders over the screen and focuses on them, and when they smile automatically takes a picture.

I'm heartened that the commenters in this RPG.net forum thread instantly moved into PARANOIA-speak.

I don't guarantee you'll find great interest in this RPG.net forum thread, "What would Alpha Complex call Santa Claus?" But there it is, so there.

Labels: santaclaus

Having just shipped the PARANOIA supplement The Big Book of Bots (.PDF preview), Mongoose Publishing has now made available .PDF previews of the three other PARANOIA books shipping this month, all written by Gareth Hanrahan:

• Alpha Complex Nights 2


• The Vulture Squadron sourcebook, The Thin Green Line


• A Swiss Army knife-style toolkit for the Gamemaster, the Mandatory Mission Pack

You'll need a .PDF reader to view these previews. I like the free, lightweight SumatraPDF, but that's just me.

Many years ago, for some forgotten game magazine, Greg Costikyan, original co-designer of PARANOIA, reviewed the primordial children's boardgame Candy Land. Now, on his blog Play This Thing, Greg has been drawn back, moth-like, to the bright flame of Candy Land. His trenchant sociopolitical/ludographic analysis -- I really shouldn't say "rant" -- treats Candy Land in terms many of us had never previously contemplated nor even imagined possible, and, indeed, perhaps were not meant to know:

To begin with, let us view Candy Land as a mathematical entity. It is very nearly a Markov chain, a stochastic process in which, given the current state, future states are independent of past states. (It would be a pure Markov chain if the deck were shuffled after each play; instead, it is a crippled Markov chain coupled to a push-pop stack.) As such, it is a metaphorical representation of the fundamental ideology of the United States; the past is no constraint on the future, and each individual should strive resolutely for personal advance despite whatever the past may hold. [...]

The characters represented in the game, through whose desmesnes the players pass, are all representations of sickly, in many cases objectively repulsive, sweets: Princess Frostine, the Gingerbread People, Mr. Mint, Gloppy the Chocolate (formerly Molasses) Monster. There's a clear message to the American child here, one our business establishment is at pains to transmit through all forms of media -- most importantly, of course, through the thundering waterfall of commercial blandishment none of us is permitted to escape, whatever media we peruse. That message is, of course: CONSUME. Consume candy. Consume everything.

There's much more, and I admire Greg's insights throughout his ran-- uh, piece. But this latter excerpt -- about Candy Land as propaganda for consumerism -- seems obvious, like observing Monopoly promotes capitalism and Life teaches social conformity. Candy Land is perhaps more interestingly considered as many children's earliest introduction to the very idea of a game, the agreement to accept arbitrary restrictions on play. I wonder what damage that has done?

Perhaps the main damage is commercial. Candy Land is the gateway drug to Life, Sorry, Monopoly and the rest of the Parker Bros./Milton Bradley pantheon. Most of these "classic" games (excepting Clue, Mastermind, and maybe Stratego -- oh, and Scrabble, of course) are dull designs. As such, they have conditioned generations of Americans to think of boardgames as trivial and boring. But I wouldn't necessarily fault Candy Land for that. As Greg observes, the game's purely random play suits its target audience perfectly.

Labels: candy

Every year, Matthew Sprange posts his annual State of the Mongoose report. This year's report has just come out, and includes a section on future plans for PARANOIA. Go, read, comment.

Labels: state of the mongoose