PARANOIA

Though I remain sluggish in updating this blog, I'd better post the following actual, real, nonfictional news in advance of April Fool's Day, aka "Internet Jackass Day."

The news is, Paul Baldowski's PARANOIA location book The Underplex actually physically exists -- made of atoms and everything. This fine 48-page supplement is now, or will soon be, available at your game store and over the Internet.

Meanwhile, I have yet to hear field reports of January's PARANOIA player-character generation rules supplement, Criminal Histories. Loyal Paranoia-Live.net citizen Thom-OTT posted a great backstory for his online character that he created using the Criminal Histories Prehistory Pachinko. Anyone else?

April Fool's is tomorrow, and with any luck I won't have any PARANOIA news that can't wait until the day after. Meanwhile, look sharp and be skeptical.

On this blog a year or so ago I discussed the "ransom" patronage scheme that game designers Greg Stolze and Dennis Detwiller had devised to fund various game projects. Now the illustrious Wolfgang Baur, former RPG designer for Wizards of the Coast and TSR, former editor of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, and one of the most talented writers in the field, has started a new patronage design project on different lines.

Rather than seeking a group-pledge ransom for an existing project through Fundable.org, Wolf is soliciting donors who will collectively pay him (through PayPal) for a custom-made d20 fantasy adventure he writes to their specifications. All donors get an exclusive electronic copy of the completed adventure, which won't be available any other way.

As Wolf describes on his new blog, "Open Design," what you pay determines your level of influence on his design:

• Subscribers (those who pay $5) can indicate the adventure level they prefer.


• Members ($10) can also vote on a title and setting from a list of choices.


• Standard donors ($20) can also name two monsters from any d20 source, and Wolf will labor heroically to include at least one in the adventure. Other benefits: "Please indicate your favorite play style: intense combat, puzzles and traps, heavy roleplaying, or clue-driven investigation. Your name will appear in the adventure credits."


• Patrons ($50): "As a patron, you will have deep access to the design. Please send your choices for level, title, monsters, and style. You may also send a short, 100-word encounter description or major villain description for consideration. Your review will be requested for the final design, your name will appear in the cover credits, and you may suggest a title for the next installment in the series."

Wolf Baur's longtime friend and fellow TSR/WotC alumnus, Jeff Grubb, poured water on this idea:

Think of the Holy Father of Rome nattering at Michelangelo about the subject matter in the Sistine Chapel and you have a good idea of where this is going. Now imagine writing for fifty Popes, all commenting at the same time, and you see where the inevitable nightmare of this plan unfolds. Game design moves into a new century - in this case the 15th Century, in Venice. Obviously, this is will end in tears.

Thanks for the cold shower, Jeff. Personally, I wish Wolfgang all good fortune in this project, and I'll follow his success closely.

"Snakes on a Plane," the movie, is now "Snakes on a Plane: The RPG."

This has nothing at all to do with PARANOIA. But you'll thank me anyway.

Graham Walmsley has created a new, free, highly original roleplaying/drinking/card game, Euthymia. Inspired by Straight-style PARANOIA among other sources, Euthymia ("a state of psychological normality; neither happy or sad") casts players as citizens of the oppressive police state of Euthymia, which is ruled by a powerful Committee.

Euthymia was an entry in the Game Chef 2006 competition, which just finished. The annual Game Chef contest challenges entrants to design, in one week, a complete, playable RPG according to certain restrictions. (History of the Game Chef contest.) This year the theme was "time," as in a game playable to completion in a certain specified time (Euthymia takes ten one-hour sessions), and the game's premise had to include certain specified "Ingredients" from a couple of lists. Euthymia used the ingredients "glass," "committee," and "emotion." The game uses a bottle of wine or liqueur as a play device, which makes it a good double-bill with Bacchanal by Paul Czege (who wrote it under the pseudonym M. Paul Buja).

Check the whole field of Game Chef entrants on 1000 Monkeys 1000 Typewriters, a fascinating site where you can spend hours browsing hundreds of short and intriguing free RPGs.

In October 2001 British writer M. John Harrison, known in SF/fantasy circles for his Viriconium novels and other fine works, posted on the Fantastic Metropolis site an interesting article called "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium." Having only just stumbled on Harrison's article, I was struck by its parallels with the PARANOIA rulebook:

The great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren’t was countries with people in them....

The commercial fantasy that has replaced them is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else’s metaphor, or realise someone else’s rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, “Yes, but what did Sauron look like?”; or, “Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?”; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien’s images. You have brought them under control....

Games are centred on control. “Re-enactment” is essentially revision, which is essentially reassertion of control, or domestication....

“What would it be really like to live in the world of…?” is an inappropriate question, a category error. You understand this immediately you ask it of the inscape of, say, Samuel Beckett or Wyndham Lewis. I didn’t want it asked (and I certainly didn’t want it answered) of Viriconium, so I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You cannot learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because—like Middle-earth—it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on offer.

Viz. the PARANOIA rulebook: "Alpha Complex is not a place; it is a state of mind."

Though I have been negligent in maintaining this blog over the last couple of weeks, owing to onerous and dispiriting deadlines elsewhere, I'm happy to say Paul Baldowski of Omega Complex is taking up the slack. Paul wrote the forthcoming PARANOIA location book The Underplex, which should hit your game store's shelves imminently. (Well, probably only one shelf.)

The Underplex describes a labyrinthine network of abandoned rooms, blocked corridors, and accidentally misplaced subsectors that interpenetrates and coexists with the inhabited portions of Alpha Complex. Paul's 48-page sourcebook describes Underplex geography, the denizens therein (deformed mutants, abandoned feral children of High Programmers, frankenstein bots, and much more), the gear Troubleshooters need to explore this place, and a kickoff mission, "The One," that launches a whole Underplex campaign.

At Omega Complex, Paul is currently running outtakes from and ruminations on his supplement, his first published work. Drop by and have a look behind -- I mean, under -- the scenes.

According to an Associated Press news story by Ben Fox, the US military is citing possession of a Casio wristwatch as evidence of potential ties to terrorists:

Common Casio watches, some worth less than $30, have become part of the often ambiguous web of evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. military cites the digital watches worn by prisoners when they were captured as possible evidence of terrorist ties. Casios have been used repeatedly in bombs, after all, including one used by the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center attack; the explosive device was set off on a Philippine Airlines flight, killing a passenger.

Wearing a Casio is cited among the unclassified evidence against at least eight of the detainees whose transcripts were released by the Pentagon after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Associated Press.

The prisoners, who stand accused of links to al-Qaida or to the Taliban in Afghanistan, say they have been shocked that wearing a cheap watch sold worldwide could be used against them.

"Millions and millions of people have these types of Casio watches," Mazin Salih Musaid, a Saudi detainee, told his military tribunal.

Even guards at Guantanamo wear Casios, noted Usama Hassan Ahmend Abu Kabir, a Jordanian accused of belonging to a group linked to al-Qaida, the terror organization that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.

"I have a Casio watch due to the fact that they are inexpensive and they last a long time," the 34-year-old detainee told a tribunal. "I like my watch because it is durable. It had a calculator and was waterproof, and before prayers we have to wash up all the way to my elbows."

[...] The U.S. Department of Homeland Security advised airport screeners and law enforcement in January 2005 to be aware that some altimeter-equipped Casios, whose model numbers were not disclosed, could be used in explosives, as could another unspecified brand of watch that doubled as a butane lighter. The advisory singled out Casio because it's inexpensive, widely used and easy to find, Homeland Security spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich said.

But that's precisely the problem with citing particular models of Casios as evidence, some bomb experts say - there's nothing unique about their use in time bombs. In fact, many household items with timing functions, including such devices as microwave oven timers, can be modified to set off bombs, said David Williams, a retired FBI agent who worked on the first World Trade Center bombing investigation.

[...]Even if Casios were pulled off the market worldwide, terrorists could easily switch to other commonly available products to make timers for bombs, Williams said. "You give me a half-hour in a supermarket and I can blow up your garage."