PARANOIA

A belated holiday gift from Andrew Babb of Hoody Hoo Cartoons to PARANOIA fans: a brilliant, must-see Flash animation of the "Mister Bubbles" Troubleshooter briefing presented in the core rulebook's introductory mission.

Andrew writes, "I've also managed to create a version [of the briefing] that can be downloaded and played on a Sony PlayStation Portable -- turning a PSP into a PDC, so to speak." (The PDC, or Personal Digital Companion, is the indispensable electronic assistant for every Alpha Complex citizen.) "I thought it would make a good show of how a portable device could be used to show briefings and the like."

Andrew previously made the excellent PARANOIA-inspired TreasonHackers Flash cartoon in March 2002. He based it on a strip from the long-running Knights of the Dinner Table comic. (I talked about "TreasonHackers" on this blog in December 2004; scroll down to the December 9th entries.)

I passed Andrew's "Mister Bubbles" link along to Greg Ingber of the Traitor Recycling Studio. Greg responded, "That is, like, the greatest thing ever. I'm going to send this link to everyone I've tried to explain PARANOIA to."

Multiple commendation points to Andrew for his superior work!

On this Annual Month-12 Seasonally Adjusted Mandatory Inspection Day Recreation Interval, I award the coveted status of Hero of Our Complex to the following individuals, organizations, and entities signifying citizens to be named later:

• Dan Gelber, Eric Goldberg, and Greg Costikyan, designers of the original 1984 edition of PARANOIA and now co-owners of the PARANOIA property. (Eric and Greg administer the license, with Dan as silent partner.) They have presided over the current refashioning of Alpha Complex with endless patience, generosity, and intelligence.


• Mongoose Publishing, which has published more PARANOIA material in 17 months than West End Games did in any five or six years of the 1980s and early 1990s.


• The Traitor Recycling Studio, a loyal collective of over a dozen hardy writers who truly get PARANOIA -- a dismayingly rare gift. (What is more painful to read than a PARANOIA article by someone who just -- doesn't -- get it?) In the coming year the Traitors may expand their purview beyond PARANOIA; I'll keep you posted.


• Jim Holloway, the One True PARANOIA Artist. For the artwork in the current line Jim has risen to my every challenge and surpassed my every expectation. Long may he continue!


• My wife, Beth Fischi, who has helped edit and lay out most of the PARANOIA books to date, and who collaborated with me on the eponymous mission in WMD, the finest roleplaying supplement I've ever been involved with.


• Paranoia-Live.net, still the unrivaled Elective Activity or Pursuit Club for all Alpha Complex citizens, loyal or otherwise.


• The reviewers, who do more to publicize PARANOIA than anyone else, and whose insightful comments improve the line. Keep it up! (There is at this writing no published review of the STUFF equipment book, hint hint.)


• The players and readers -- well, duh!


• The cast and crew of the Fox TV medical drama House M.D. -- not because they have anything to do with PARANOIA; I just like the show.

This completes the scheduled portion of our award ceremony. Interested citizens may now shower praise on these deserving individuals, organizations, and entities.

Zzzz... Huh? What? I haven't posted in a week and a half? Oh. I attribute my despicable tardiness to layout chores on The Underplex, a 48-page PARANOIA location sourcebook by Paul Baldowski of the Traitor Recycling Studio. As Paul reports on his fine PARANOIA site, Omega Complex, The Underplex appears this coming March; he even has a screenshot to prove it.

The Underplex is a network of abandoned corridors, unmapped rooms, and officially nonexistent facilities that interpenetrates the entire underground city of Alpha Complex. Diligent laborers build rooms and dig tunnels; inattentive bureaucrats later order new construction, which happens to block access to the old. Over decades -- or perhaps after just minutes after a strong HPD & Mind Control propaganda campaign enforced by Internal Security -- everyone forgets about the old construction. Across the centuries, these defunct places have grown into a jigsaw network. Traitorous secret societies, grossly deformed mutants, High Programmer harems, and other refugees escape from Alpha Complex into this darkened parallel world. This is the Underplex.

No, it's not a dungeon! Instead, the inspiration here is the modern movement of urban exploration -- of getting into storm drains, steam tunnels, abandoned factories, military bases, and other built landscapes where you're not supposed to go. The Underplex isn't a place to go "adventuring." In its relentless search for traitors, The Computer dispatches into these tunnels many teams of loyal Troubleshooters, Armed Forces squads, and Internal Security teams -- all through separate entrances. Picture it: They're all feeling their way through the darkness, scared out of their wits; they're all heavily armed and ready to shoot anything that moves; two teams stumble on one another....

The Underplex describes this mapless labyrinth: the environment, residents, gear you need to explore it, and more. It includes a complete mission that kicks off an Underplex exploration campaign.

As in other PARANOIA books, each two-page spread of this supplement will include a terse little slogan, an atmospheric or comedic one-liner, at the bottom right. I call them "fortune cookies." See any past PARANOIA book for examples. Currently I have a good supply of generic Alpha Complex fortune cookies suitable for any product in the line, but I'm looking for funny fortunes that relate specifically to the idea of exploring unknown underground tunnels and caverns. Please post your suggestions in the comments, Mongoose Publishing won't pay you anything or give you a free copy of anything, but if you give your real name and I use your suggestion, I'll try to credit you in The Underplex.

Oh. My. God. From Houston, Texas, via RPG.net, the Ultimate Gaming Table.

With -- hosanna! -- Ultimate Gaming Table Building Instructions!

Well, the Traitor Recycling Studio now has an undercover member. In real life he works for a Catholic school, and when his boss found out he writes for a (gasp!) roleplaying game, she hit the roof and bounced twice. So he's going into stealth mode and trying to separate his real name from PARANOIA, especially in search engines -- though I have to think that particular genie is already long out of the bottle.

You know this unfortunate Traitor as Citizen Biggles on Paranoia-Live.net, and he hosts FriendComputer.net, and he's the principal author of the January PARANOIA supplement Criminal Histories, so it's not like he's got a secret identity or something. I suppose it's still safe just to call him "Bill." But I'd guess I'd better not use his full name too often any more on this blog, and maybe I'll edit some old posts to remove his last name. I'll ask you all to refrain from mentioning his last name in the comments, too. I genuinely wouldn't want bad Google mojo to blight his career. (Unfortunately, it's too late to take his name off the Criminal Histories credits.)

Sheesh, what a totally asinine situation. But it's ironically characteristic of Alpha Complex....

Tonight I have at long last finished laying out the 64-page PARANOIA character creation rules supplement Criminal Histories, by Citizen Biggles and the Traitor Recycling Studio. I'm two months late on my deadline, which won't help my report to Friend Mongoose at debriefing.

It was the tables, okay? Criminal Histories features a "Prehistory Pachinko" that generates a detailed background for your Troubleshooter, including NPC citizens who like or hate you, past felonious activities, and a trail of evidence other players can use to uncover your misdeeds. The Pachinko consists of eleventy-billion separate 1d20 tables. The tables were my idea, and Bill did a great job with them. But omigod, the tables, the tables....

My desktop publishing layout software is the generally excellent Adobe InDesign CS. (Warning: This page crashes my Firefox browser!) But in the last many days of unsatisfying congress with InDesign's table editor, I have become all too closely acquainted with its quirks. Get this: If you place a large table on the page, then enter text in one single table cell that is just one character too long, the entire table vanishes from the page as "overset" text. And many, many table cells in Criminal Histories were far more than one character too long....

But citizens, share with me this happiness pill! Criminal Histories is now done done done done, and though my lateness has already caused a delay from its originally scheduled December appearance, the book may yet make its newly rescheduled January slot. Now it's straight on at high speed to the next book on the schedule, The Underplex by Paul Baldowski (of Omega Complex). I'll talk more about Underplex soon. For now, I'm soooo glad it has only a couple of pages of tables....