PARANOIA

I'm quite late in hearing of this game -- it's hard keeping up with the ever-jumping indie press roleplaying scene -- but here's another entry in the growing list of roleplaying games that, like PARANOIA, set player characters at each others' throats.

Designer Jason Morningstar, who runs Bully Pulpit Games, of Carrboro, North Carolina, will soon start selling his lighthearted fantasy RPG called Drowning and Falling. "The Drowning and Falling roleplaying game is filled with challenges. Every challenge poses the risk of drowning or falling -- you will fall, you will drown, or you will triumph. This means that all challenges take place near things to fall off of or things to drown in, or perhaps both."

Power 19 questions for Drowning and Falling; actual play thread. Note the references to PARANOIA toward the bottom of the actual-play page.

Drowning and Falling is a charity project. "All proceeds from sales of this game, after taxes and production costs, will be donated to ORBIS International," Morningstar writes. "The mission of ORBIS is to eliminate avoidable blindness and restore sight in the developing world, where 90% of the world's blind live. They do this in part by operating a completely awesome flying eye hospital in a converted DC-10. Visit ORBIS to learn more!" Morningstar already offers a free text version of Drowning and Falling under a Creative Commons license.

The secret is out: Sector Zero is the next PARANOIA mission collection from Mongoose Publishing, due in late August.

The name, "Sector Zero," is Alpha Complex slang for Troubleshooter punishment duty. If someone in power has vindictively made sure you get assigned missions nobody else wants to go near -- no, I mean even more not-going-near than the usual PARANOIA hose-job mission -- then observers might jocularly remark (where The Computer can't hear them) that you've been "sent to Sector Zero."

Understand: The Computer itself doesn't recognize the concept of "punishment duty." It doesn't issue assignments from a cruel desire to punish; after all, citizens should be happy to serve Alpha Complex in any task. Emotion-based retaliation threatens good order and provokes unhappiness, which is itself punishable by cool, compassionate termination. When a citizen survives the many legal "corrections" described in the PARANOIA rulebook, The Computer, in its wisdom, considers the slate clean. It gives you a fresh start, a fair chance to repent of your treasonous ways -- assuming you have any brain cells left to do so.

But The Computer often issues duty assignments based on requests placed openly by high-clearance citizens -- or covertly by high-degree secret society officers. These guys carry grudges. They carry customized grudge luggage. A Troubleshooter team that happens to offend someone powerful (like that could ever happen) might unknowingly be lining themselves up for a nice one-way trip to Sector Zero.

In the 32-page Sector Zero collection (originally announced under the mistaken title Mission Inscrutable), the Troubleshooters face three different yet uniformly undesirable missions, written by Gareth Hanrahan, Saul Resnikoff, and Jeff Groves of the Traitor Recycling Studio. (The excellent Jim Holloway cover on the Mongoose Sector Zero page credits Gareth alone, but he says they'll fix that before publication. Saul and Jeff, rest easy. What could go wrong?)

Citizens with long memories might recall the blog post "Exile in Alpha Complex" from the April, 2005 archives. (Scroll down to April 19 for the entry.) The comment thread for that post was the direct inspiration for Sector Zero.

On RPG.net, Neil Lennon has posted a review of Paul Baldowski's PARANOIA location supplement The Underplex. Ratings: Style 3, Substance 3 (Average). Oh well... The review is thorough and offers useful insights. Commendation point, citizen!

Though this has nothing to do with PARANOIA -- please keep reading, citizen, thank you -- I'm pleased to report that Famous Non-PARANOIA Game Designer James Wallis (co-designer of Once Upon a Time: The Storytelling Card Game, founder of Hogshead Publishing and the Diana Jones Award, publisher of R. Sean Borgstrom's Nobilis, and author of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen among others) now has a blog. And not just any blog -- it's not only fun, it's worthy. And he needs your help!

"At the end of July I'm going to walk the length of the Pilgrims' Way, 120 miles from Winchester Cathedral to Canterbury Cathedral," James writes. [That's in England, my fellow North Americans.] "It should take me about a week. And I'm going to do it without a map or, for that matter, GPS, sat-nav, Google, or technology of any kind, barring a mobile phone which will be set on 'receive.' I'll be walking blind, trusting to faith, signposts, and the advice of strangers, much as the medieval pilgrims would have done.

"The purpose of this is to raise a metric [ton] of money for charity, specifically for Cancerbackup, a cause which is much in my thoughts right now."

Attend carefully, citizens, to James's next words: "You can sponsor me by pledging funds, with the option to only pay up if I finish the walk and don't, for example, accidentally fall over the White Cliffs of Dover. Or you can e-mail me a pledge based on something more idiosyncratic: a quid for every squirrel I see along the way, perhaps, or a tenner every time a farmer tells me to get orf his orchards.

"I'm hoping you can help me to spread the word and stuff. If you're in a group or on a mailing list whose members, you think, either may have heard of me or may have respect for acts of heroic stupidity like this, then please point them at my blog.

"If you feel like it, come and join me for a day or half-day of walking. We'll be heading through some of the most attractive areas of southern England, at a time of year when it's at its absolute best, with railway stations close to the start and end of each day's walk and many good pubs in between. Drop me a line if that sounds like fun.

"Any help you can give me in making this walk as successful as possible, whether financial, spiritual, or literal, means an awful lot."

Recognizing the worth of James's cause, and in appreciation for his great services to the roleplaying field, I am pledging cash for his trip. I urge all PARANOIA fans to do the same. I only wish I could join James on his walk. Go, go in my place!

"I just wrote the words 'Zombie Propaganda skill' and meant it," writes Mongoose Publishing staff designer Gareth (The Traitor's Manual) Hanrahan on his blog. "I've got rules and everything."

Gareth offers no explanation. Yet such a statement may send premonitory shivers up the spine of living PARANOIA fans, who know the current edition offers Propaganda skills for many and various ideologies. What could Gareth mean? What might he be working on, at what length, for release when, and with how many zombies?

I'm sorry, citizen. That information is not available at your -- yeeAAAAARRGH!

Via loyal citizen AIEEE on Paranoia-Live.net, this YouTube film clip showing actual American anti-Communist propaganda films from the 1950s. Alpha Complex carries forward these worthy efforts, courtesy of The Computer's loyal servants in Housing Preservation and Development & Mind Control. Remember: Traitors are everywhere!