PARANOIA

Explaining your roleplaying system through Two Cows.

Labels: cows, RPGnet

Kind of odd to be browsing this interesting RPG.net thread, "'Federal Space' - Shadowjack's alternate Trek setting," where the poster outlines his interesting refashioning of Star Trek using cartoony sketches -- and then, in Shadowjack's third post in the thread, to suddenly encounter myself. The last image link in that post compares his quest to make Trek realistic with my own incessant advancement of Straight-style PARANOIA. Ah, Shadowjack -- we few, we happy few, we band of brothers....

Loyal citizen Thomas Hancock writes, "Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four coming to a high school near you! Convicted Pennsylvania judges closed county-run juvenile detention center, brought in private-run detention facilities, sentenced kids to them for kickbacks. Note name of detention facilities: PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. With Child Care like this, who needs prisons?"

[T]he judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

See also blogger Jon Taplin on the Prison-Industrial Complex.

Just a quick note to say that the Jim Holloway cover for War on [INSERT NOUN] is up, and - as usual for Jim - it's beautiful.

Technical Services personnel who seek photos to post at their oil-soaked refurbishing stations will enjoy these spectacular night-time images of Japanese oil refineries.

I can't believe we PARANOIA Famous Game Designers never thought of mobile termination booths with immediate onsite organ harvesting.

In May 2007, reporter Mary Nam of station KOMO in Seattle, Washington, visited the Iron Mountain storage facility in a former underground mine in rural Pennsylvania. Her six-minute Iron Mountain news report is on YouTube, courtesy of some enthusiastic 9/11 conspiracy buff. In addition to the remains of Flight 93, the facility preserves original Elvis records and (no joke) Bill Gates's photo collection, and probably your own holiday snaps and third-grade report cards.

This chipper little public-relations exercise boasts that the facility has never had a security breach, but it fails to mention Iron Mountain's record of data losses while transporting data to and from this and other storage facilities.

I almost thought for a moment about explicitly making a connection to PARANOIA here, but I assume that's unnecessary. Why don't people send me these things faster? This clip already has 1.4 million views!

On his Omega Complex fan site, a fun post by Paul Baldowski (designer of The Underplex) highlighting the potential uses of Google Latitude (Maps, Earth, et al) technology in Alpha Complex:

Latitude could provide an interesting take on Aliens-style motion sensors, allowing you to know the location and movements of almost any citizen - but also allowing them to see where you are. Briefing officers might hack the software to record them as present in the briefing room, despite their staying in bed halfway across the sector, a sub-routine shifting the locator dot every now and again to keep the Troubleshooters guessing before they finally reach an empty room. Records will show the briefing officer was there, while the Troubleshooters face the wrath of IntSec or The Computer because they utterly failed to achieve their objective (due to complete ignorance of whatever they were supposed to be doing!).

Given a Little Latitude.

Labels: google

Game designer Keith Baker, creator of the Eberron D&D campaign setting, is embarking on a round-the-world trip in 2009, and he wants to support himself by running games in exchange for hospitality. He's organizing the trip on a blog called Have Dice, Will Travel:

I've got two goals here. First, I want to meet gamers from as wide a range of backgrounds and geographic locations as possible. Second, I want to see interesting places. As such, there's two levels of visit I've got in mind.

If you're an ideal subject, then I'd like to have some time to get to know you and your home. As such, what I'd like is hospitality (be it couch or floor space) for three nights. One of those nights, I will entertain you and your friends - running Eberron or [Over the Edge], playing Gloom, whatever you want. Another night, I'd like YOU to entertain ME. What is it that you feel I should see in your home? Not necessarily the biggest tourist attraction - but the thing YOU thing is most interesting. Is there a game YOU want me to play that I'm not going to find anywhere else? Something that inspired you as a gamer? Or just the Biggest Ball of Twine in Oslo? The third day, I'll rest and mind my own business... look at things that have caught my eye. In the meantime, I'm always will to talk about gaming, Eberron, or what have you. Needless to say, you're welcome to spread these three days out over your gaming group; I'm happy to spend a night on three different sofas, as long as my goal is met.

Of course, I'm simply not going to have time to spend three days with every interesting person (and I'm sure there will be many people who just don't fit on my travel map). So I'll also be looking for flyby visits - crashing just one night while I'm en route, either running a game for you or just hanging out and talking.

And hey, as option number three, if you've got a convention going on and you're looking for a guess, well, most conventions are three days... I'd certainly be happy to run games and meet people.

Good luck, Keith! The Have Dice, Will Travel LiveJournal topic is already filling with offers, including hospitality from as far away as the Philippines and South Africa, so this may work out well. If you can host Keith for a day or three, drop by his topic and let him know!

Via economist Tyler Cowen, this anecdote of life in the Soviet Union, originally told by retired Duke University economics professor Vladimir Treml (recounted by International Monetary Fund staffer Eric S. Weisman):

Vlad loves to tell stories of how perverse incentive structures in the Soviet Union led to seemingly bizarre, but in fact entirely rational, economic decision-making.

The story I like the best is the one about the used light bulb market. For most of us, it is hard to fathom the rationale for a market in burnt-out light bulbs. But in the scarcity-driven Soviet economy, the market was entirely reasonable. Light bulbs were rarely available to individual consumers, but were obtainable for state-sponsored activities. Thus, it would be difficult to purchase a light bulb for a new lamp in one's home, while burnt-out bulbs in state-run offices or factories were routinely replaced.

So if someone purchased a new lamp and needed a bulb, he would buy a used light bulb for a small fee and replace a functioning bulb at work with the dud. He would then take the functioning bulb home for the new lamp, while the burnt-out bulb at the office/factory would be replaced with a new functioning bulb. Meanwhile, the maintenance person at the office/factory would take the used bulb and sell it on the used light bulb market.

If you haven't yet run Dan Curtis Johnson's "The Light Bulb Mission" in Service, Service!, this vignette should make you want to assemble a Troubleshooter team immediately.

On January 16 I blogged about Trinity War, a new Lexicon game run by WJ MacGuffin, designer of the PARANOIA character-creation rules supplement Criminal Histories. Now another member of the Traitor Recycling Studio, Dan Curtis Johnson (gifted author of "Hunger" in WMD and "Mister Bubbles" in the PARANOIA rulebook, among others), has posted the complete text of the Lexicon game he started in August 2007, which finally concluded last month.

"New Faith of the True Emperor," with ten players and 120 entries, is one of the largest Lexicon games yet completed, ranking with the 2004 PARANOIA masterpiece The Toothpaste Disaster. "I think it turned out great," Dan says of "New Faith." "We were all really pleased with the end result. It goes utterly completely galactically apocalyptic at the end, even as individual personal character development stories reach their fulfilling or tragic ends. And along the way, maybe, we even debated some of the game's Macguffin premise: religious faith and what all sentients should agree to believe in." (Here's Dan's background on "New Faith of the True Emperor".)

Congratulations to Dan and the New Faith authors, who have released the entire text under a Creative Commons license.

Loyal citizen David Boyle (Happy Jack on the leading PARANOIA fansite, Paranoia-Live.net) has posted in the "PARANOIA Briefing Center" forum topic a lengthy collection of miscellaneous material -- it would be rude to call it a "spew" -- useful for Gamemasters running Straight-style missions. He encompasses it all with the umbrella post title "Free Code Sevens."

It may be useful to explain this term to PARANOIA newscomers. Coined by John M. Ford in the 1985 West End Games rules supplement Acute PARANOIA, "Code 7" is Troubleshooter Mission Dispatch slang for a mission that requires seven clones to complete -- in other words, by the standards of the original edition of PARANOIA (where each player got six clone replacements, no more no less), certain death. Designers use "Code 7" to describe a mini-mission outline or, less often, an individual encounter.

David's post reminds me to mention Mongoose Publishing has just released Gareth Hanrahan's new Mandatory Mission Pack, which contains dozens of plot seeds, side encounters, weird events, and bizarre paranoid locations that can be dropped into any mission. Mandatory Mission Pack features a new cover by the One True PARANOIA Artist, Jim Holloway. Mongoose has made available a free Mandatory Mission Pack preview (.PDF link).

British writer and Big Name Fan David Langford, once a book reviewer for White Dwarf in its Golden Age, still publishes his stalwart fan newsletter Ansible. The February 2009 Ansible features this helpful tip that must have come straight from a Technical Services docbot:

Heartwarming public safety news from a writer who worked on a UK patient information leaflet for oxygen, as supplied in cylinders to hospitals: the regulator insisted that he include the words 'Do not use if you are allergic to oxygen.'