PARANOIA

Troopers get much, much bigger guns than Troubleshooters, so we need a much, much bigger Collateral Damage table for those unfortunate occasions when a player rolls really badly with a tacnuke shell. Think of it as a Rolemaster fumble table for cone rifles. Suggestions for horrible collateral damage in the comments, please.

Loyal citizen Rob MacDougall, who participated bravely in The Toothpaste Disaster PARANOIA Lexicon game in 2004, has posted three inventive PARANOIA variant settings on the gaming blog Claw Claw Peck.

First up is "Slave Complex of the Under There":

Black Tunnels descend from the surface world to the Crimson Caves of Blood. Below lie the Ochre Delves, the Azure Sepulchre, and the Temples of Elemental Indigo. The descending levels of the Under There represent a kind of, let’s say, “security clearance” for the pecking order of the dungeon. Under constant surveillance by unblinking beholders, ogres bully hobgoblins who bully goblins who bully bootlicking kobolds, who get stuck cleaning elf-gunk out of the death traps. It’s like high school with gelatinous cubes.

Then a steampunk PARANOIA, "Alpha | State," that will ring true to fans of the indie RPG a|state:

One hundred years after Babbage, one hundred years after Lord Byron’s coup, the Alphan Empire is a steam-driven superpower stretching from Barbados to Bangalore. At its heart squats perfidious Alpha, the not so Green and Pleasant Isle, and at Alpha’s heart sprawls the Empress, the city-sized analytical engine that rules and mothers the Empire. And oh, does it need mothering. For the paranoid Empress imagines a thousand perils to her binary virtue. Bomb-throwing Luddites! Bearded onanists! Filthy communards! And behind them all, the agents of another analytical AI: the Empress’ libertine continental nemesis, the Turk.

And finally "Alphaville," which, if you haven't already clicked through based on the two summaries above, just read it.

Man, it makes me yearn to return to Brave New Complex, the huge campaign supplement of variant Alpha Complex settings the Traitor Recycling Studio put together a few years ago. Nothing came of that -- no market -- but perhaps somehow, in some alternate timeline, that book actually got published.

Just as certain R&D biolabs fall empty for decades at a time (when a particularly enterprising mutant creation gets loose), so this blog's archives have been partly broken for about 18 months. The archive links in the sidebar, the bottom right, were correct for posts dated 2007 and earlier. But owing to some boring bug in Blogger's archive auto-generation script, posts from 2008 and later had broken links. The only way to access those months was to insert an additional "p" in front of the "public_html" part of the URL -- to wit, "ppublic" -- and I never mentioned the workaround here because it was so stupid. Now -- still with me? -- I've pulled the auto-archive script and manually inserted good links to all the archived months back to late 2005. I'll have to add another line at the end of each month, so be a good citizen and remind me, hmmm?

Speaking of tasks I've let fester for years, I do hope to finally finally finally get to the .PDF of material cut from WMD, and sooner rather than later. The text of WMD (the 2006 collection of Straight-style PARANOIA missions) is included on the 25th Anniversary CD-ROM in the Black Missions limited edition due later this year, so a new cohort of Gamemasters will join the many wondering what happened to the free .PDF download I referenced repeatedly in the text. Okay, okay. Give a guy a few years of slack, okay? I was busy all that time, wondering how to fix the archive links.

I've blogged here before about TVTropes.org, but I hadn't realized there's a TV Tropes PARANOIA page.

As before, fair warning: If you're into the taxonomy of genre elements, TVTropes will consume hours and hours.

Soon, perhaps, PARANOIA will gain distinguished company in the realm of RPGs that turn players against one another.

Pelgrane Press recently allowed its license for The Dying Earth RPG to lapse. (I did the layout for the Dying Earth rulebook and the first supplement, Cugel's Compendium.) Though the license to Jack Vance's wonderful fantasy novels currently lingers in abeyance, the fine rules system by Robin D. Laws lends itself well to characteristically Vancian interactions in other settings. Pelgrane publisher Simon Rogers is collecting opinions on new settings using the Dying Earth rules, such as this new proposal, Skulduggery, a game of "verbal fireworks and sudden reversals":

Skulduggery, Pelgrane Press’ hilarious new roleplaying game of doing unto others because they’re sure as heck planning to do unto you. [...] quick, uproarious games of treachery and oneupmanship in any setting. Fine-tuned for one-shot and impromptu sessions, it can be adjusted for longer-running series as players demand.

• The tongue is sharper than the sword. Skulduggery makes verbal persuasion as suspenseful and decisive as physical combat.


• There’s always another comeback. Don’t like the results when you roll a die? Skulduggery’s reversals-based resolution system lets you roll again -- if you can afford to pay the price. . .


• Characters in minutes. The GM hands out stacks of cards. The players trade for a few minutes. Presto: instant characters, ready to play!


• Wit wins out. Strategic deployment of dialogue snippets recharges your supply of the points you need to succeed.


• Think you’ve got it all under control? Just when they think they’re ahead, characters must face their own worst enemies—the all-consuming temptations driving them to distraction and doom.

From the moment The Dying Earth RPG appeared, gamers have connected it to PARANOIA. (See, for instance, this 2003 RPG.net forum thread on player-vs-player conflict.) Now, depending on the feedback Simon collects from his readers, the connection may become easier than ever. Drop by the Skulduggery post and comment.

Granted, they're all aboveground, but even so, the forbidding monolithic architecture of these 15 not-so-secret secret-service buildings on oObject should evoke a sense of Alpha Complex.

Comrades! All Power Serwices personnel now to be viewink photos from glorious Chernobyl-era Russian nuclear power plant near Smolensk.

Because this powerplant was completed after the Chernobyl, they paid a special attention to secure it from alike accidents. There is even a saying that “The sci-fi writers are on the second place by richness of imagination, the first place is occupied by the nuclear plant security engineers,” meaning that they need to make it safe just for some unimaginable events that not very likely to happen, but still the security system should be ready for them.

The outside structure that secures reactors themselves can stand the blast that exceeds ten times the power of atomic bomb blast, just imagine.

Ha! Glorious comrades, now to be imaginink many unimaginable ewents werry werry likely to happen in similar power plant in capitalist pig-dog (ptui!) Alpha Complex!

Labels: glorious comrades

The old Hil Sector BLUES supplement gave a list of alert codes for IntSec troopers. Some classic examples:

• Code 56 Stray petbot causing disturbance. Catch and return to rightful owner.


• Code 59 This code reserved for future use.


• Code 61 Berserk bot. Approach with caution.


• Code 69 This code left intentionally blank.


• Code 70 Reactor meltdown. Seal off sector to ensure radiation containment.

We need more codes! Codes that summarise a complex, dangerous situation in a single number, leaving absolutely no room for confusion.

No room at all.
Not a bit.
Never ever.
When a Trooper squad gets a Code alert, they should under no circumstances be confused, misinformed and/or terrified. Failure to respond promptly to a code is Treason.

The contents of the CD-rom that will accompany the limited edition Black Missions book is revealed here.

My spies inform me that the pdf version of War on INSERT NOUN is available from DriveThruRPG, which implies the print version should also be on the shelves of your Friendly Local Game Store. This 32-page mission, complete with pregenerated Troubleshooters, describes the tumultuous aftermath of the Incident, the rise and fall of the Department of Complex Operational Defence, and the deadly threat of... well, something as yet undetermined!

Any blog post titled "12 of the world's most fascinating tunnel networks" threatens to put the reader to sleep in the first paragraph, but this feature from the unusual tech-design blog OObject rewards examination. See, for instance, the 5000-year-old gold treasure tunnels under Los Angeles created by a prehistoric cult of lizard people.

(PARANOIA fans will also enjoy the OObject feature "Futuristic megastructures," including Buckminster Fuller's Manhattan Dome.)

Ah, the joys of the stand-alone rulebook. The INTSEC book is designed to stand on its own, without reference to the Troubleshooter book. However, no-one wants to see large chunks of text replicated across the two rulebooks, so I'm busily condensing and rewriting the rules down. The chapter on Mutations, for example, takes up 20 pages of the Troubleshooter book, but less than 8 pages of INTSEC.

It's almost like writing rules in Orwell's Newspeak. 'Pyrokinesis doubleplusgood margin incinerate CommieMutantTraitor, plusgood on fire, ungood selfnosefire, doubleplusungood spontaneous combustion.'

Labels: IntSec

Comrades! Somevere is beink somebody who somehow for some reason is needink to see over 1,000 labels for Soviet-era Russian and Eastern European matchboxes! Is you? Da, good!

Labels: glorious comrades

This week Mongoose Publishing posted an announcement that the current range of PARANOIA products will be retired at the end of this month, in advance of this summer's 25th Anniversary line, starting with the PARANOIA: Troubleshooters rulebook and the Black Missions limited edition.

On the Mongoose forum, this announcement prompted a question about compatibility between the forthcoming PARANOIA Anniversary rulebooks and the existing support line. Mongoose staff writer Gareth Hanrahan, designer of the 25th Anniversary rulebooks, replied:

The new rules are 95+% compatible with the previous edition. I can only surmise that most of the older supplements are sold out, and the remaining stock is fast dwindling. I'll attempt to bring Those Who Know into this thread.

Speaking of the Mongoose forum: Saturday, June 20th is Free RPG Day, where participating game stores worldwide distribute free roleplaying material. This year Mongoose has prepared a special 32-page PARANOIA booklet including quick-start rules and a brief introductory mission. On the Mongoose forum, an enterprising citizen who got this booklet in advance of the day itself (treason point!) asked about a loyalty test accidentally omitted from the Free RPG Day booklet (treason point for, uh, somebody else to be named later!). In response, Gareth posted the text of the entertaining form right in the topic. Commendation point, Gareth!

Labels: 25thanniversary, freeRPGday

Development work on the new INTSEC rulebook has commenced, and so this Famous Game Designer turns immediately to the loyal Paranoia community for support and assistance.

Instead of playing lowly Troubleshooters, INTSEC characters are heroic BLUE-clearance troopers. Now, no-one gets to BLUE without having a few skeletons in the closet. (Not to mention skeletons crammed into the waste disposal unit, or skeletons hastily buried in the food vats.) Therefore, every Trooper has a number of Treacherous Deeds in his past. These deeds may come back to haunt him, or he may be able to use his influence to have the evidence of these deeds erased during play.

We need suggestions for Treacherous Deeds! What have your Troubleshooters gotten away with in the past? What skeletons are in your characters' closets?

Labels: Community Mission, IntSec