PARANOIA

Mongoose Publishing CEO Matthew Sprange's latest blog entry mentions the forthcoming 25th Anniversary "Black Missions" edition of PARANOIA:

Charlotte [Law, staff editor] has been slaving away at the new PARANOIA rulebook (for Troubleshooters), as well as the Limited Edition version, entitled Black Missions. This comes with a free disc that has oodles of PARANOIA material on it, from complete supplements, to forms, to sound files of The Computer speaking (all recorded at Rebellion's own studio), to video interviews with some PARANOIA luminaries - and lots more!

I have asked my secret society leaders to obtain a list of the DVD's contents soon so I can post it here.

Labels: 25thanniversary

Loyal citizen Duane O'Brien, on his blog Chaotic Neutral, describes his success in running PARANOIA at Kublacon using, for the first time, the Straight play style. (Straight, you'll recall, is the darkly satiric style modeled on films like Brazil and THX-1138 and books like Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.)

My experience running PARANOIA told me that people expect Zap-style games, with heavy clone deaths. [...] A typical scenario averaged 32 player deaths. [...]

Before the session started, I made it clear that this was going to be a different kind of PARANOIA game [...] In this Alpha Complex, you don’t kill people. You never have. Violence is something visited upon other citizens by IntSec goons in riot gear. Sometimes things get blown up, but those were treasonous acts done by terrorists. You’re an accountant, who for some unknown reason got assigned the task of escorting this famous guy someplace. [...]

The game had a suitable level of tension, as the players really were intent on keeping their clone alive, and as they immersed themselves in the plot points and seriousness of the setup. Player Deaths: 1 [...]

When queried for feedback, [the players] all indicated they’d had a great time, and that it was a very different kind of PARANOIA. As a GM and game designer, the experience taught me many things, but most of all it taught me that Straight PARANOIA Can Work. I intend to try it again, with one caveat: Next time, the game description will be more explicit about the fact that the game is Straight. I may even list it as a straight horror game, depending on the scenario I put together.

Commendation point, Duane!

On the Guardian (UK) website, "Observer" columnist Robert McCrum posts the saddening account of the stressful composition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the attendant health problems that killed Orwell, age 46, soon after the book's 1949 publication.

Barnhill [a house on the Scottish island of Jura], overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. [...]

The typing of the fair copy of "The Last Man in Europe" [the original title of Nineteen Eighty-Four] became another dimension of Orwell's battle with his book. The more he revised his "unbelievably bad" manuscript, the more it became a document only he could read and interpret. [...] "I am not pleased with the book but I am not absolutely dissatisfied... I think it is a good idea but the execution would have been better if I had not written it under the influence of TB [tuberculosis]." [...]

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle "the grisly job" of typing the book on his "decrepit typewriter" by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. [...]

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 (five days later in the US) and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell's health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone.

There's a nice entry over at the always-fascinating Grognardia old-school gaming blog entitled In Praise of Jim Holloway", long-time and much-loved PARANOIA artist.

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In other PARANOIA news, the 25th Anniversary celebratory edition is coming together nicely. The text is all done, the accompanying DVDrom is being assembled, and Will the Layout Guy is working away on an updated look for the game.

We're also about to get seriously rolling on the first of the two new rulebooks, the INTSEC book covering BLUE agents. If you've any questions or there's anything you'd really like to see in such a book, now's the best time to comment.

Internal Security police tracking known felons, potential felons, and nonfelons-just-waiting-to-fell will be interested in a Saudi Arabian inventor's implanted "killer tracking chip" that tracks "undesirables" via GPS. The Model B version can also remotely terminate them with a cyanide capsule.

Though every loyal citizen understands the authorities would never abuse such power, nonetheless the German patent office has refused a patent for this ingenious R&D scientist. Spoilsports.

Could have sworn I'd blogged this earlier this week, but it seems I just tweeted it on my Twitter feed, which has consumed much of my waking attention.

(Via io9 and loyal citizen David Boyle. David also links to the PediSedate medical headset that sedates children while they play videogames, but you've seen that one by now, right?)

Barcelona's OFFF digial arts festival and design conference has been staged annually since 2001. To honor the corporate sponsors of the 2009 festival, held a couple of weeks ago, the Dutch creative studio Onesize created a marvelous OFFF 2009 sponsor title video, which the festival organizers accurately summarized:

An extremely inspired eight-minute piece where art and branding converge in the most wise way possible. The work mixes video and 3D under a retro aesthetic where everything fits just perfectly.

The PARANOIA player quickly perceives in this video the essential R&D practicum: Try crazy stuff and see what happens.

(Via William Gibson and Errolson Hugh on Twitter.)

Loyal citizen David Boyle alerts us to the Shockball, a non-tauntable electrosphere undoubtedly popular in Junior Citizen creches:

Shockball is basically catch for the brave and the hard. This red metal-studded ball contains a hidden wickedness -- that is rather given away by the name. Turn it on and then start throwing it to one another, and at some random point in the all-too-near future, the person catching it will get zapped. You never know when it's going to 'go live,' so it turns Catch on its head - instead of worrying whether or not you can catch the ball, now you'll worry about what will happen if you catch the ball. This rubber-coated landmine has been the cause of lots of shrieks in the office -- though oddly, they seem to come before the person's even caught the thing. There's nothing like a bit of anticipatory fear to spice up a game!

Needs two AAA batteries (not included). Price 15 British pounds. Not for sale in USA (boo!).

Labels: funball

The Computer extends a CPU-approved Official Commendation to High Programmer Gareth (Mytholder) Hanrahan, designer of the forthcoming 25th Anniversary rulebook PARANOIA: Troubleshooter and many fine PARANOIA supplements. Edel Ryder, Gareth's lady love and collaborator on the Fish for Fish webcomic, announced on her Twitter feed a development likely to improve Overall Average Happiness nearly as much, in certain respects still to be defined, as a new PARANOIA book:

Committing publicly to life-long love. @mytholder and I are engaged.

Congratulations, Edel and Gareth!

Labels: happyhappyhappy

You can be sure this 1961 issue of Treasure Chest, with its alarming book-length treatise on "Communism: Threat to Liberty," is still well-thumbed in Internal Security's Department of Unspecified Threat Assessment.

Novelist and comic-book writer Peter David has his own equivalent of "PARANOIA in the real world" called "Captain Irony and the Irony Watch." His Captain Irony entry for May 7, 2009:

In Washington State, one of the departments at the University of Washington–in order to save money–has had all its phones removed. You can now only reach the professors through e-mail (or by stopping by.) You can no longer call them.

Which department? Glad you asked.

The communications department.

Loyal citizen Saul Resnikoff tracked down the University of Washington campus newspaper's April 7 story, "Cutting the lines of communication: Department saves money by disconnecting phone lines."

Dark Roasted Blend, a site about "weird and wonderful things," has posted a photo feature about "Underground cities and bunkers: Living down below." This goes with several similar features they've run in years past, such as July 2007's "Abandoned tunnels and vast underground spaces." We've linked to several of these individual locales before, but it's nice to have them conveniently accessible in one spot.

(Those intrigued by the newer feature's reference to the underground cities of Cappadocia may wish to read my 1994 Dragon magazine article "Turkey's Underground Cities.")

Loyal but footloose citizen Elle-R-KNO has returned to the leading PARANOIA fan forum, Paranoia-Live.net, with a worthy project. She's defined an XML file format -- a "Document Type Definition" -- to mark up PARANOIA character sheets.

Do you code XML? If so, please stop by the topic Proposal: XML Character Sheet standards to look over Elle-R's work and offer creative ways to expand on it.

Mongoose has posted details of the forthcoming PARANOIA 25th Anniversary rulebook written by Gareth Hanrahan. Due for publication this August, this is the first of three independent, free-standing anniversary rulebooks, focusing on RED-Clearance Troubleshooter missions. Later rulebooks, not yet scheduled but also to be written by Gareth (get to work, Gareth!), will cover GREEN/BLUE Internal Security investigators and ULTRAVIOLET High Programmers.

(This post is a few days late because Blogger wasn't accepting my new posts. Treason point!)

Labels: 25thanniversary