Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

These photos from China are alarmingly reminiscent of life in our beloved Alpha Complex.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 3:18 PM (1) comments

Sunday, June 24, 2007

The Ultimate PARANOIA shopping list 

Allen's planning to assemble full list of items from the various PARANOIA sourcebooks. Volunteer here to help.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 4:15 PM (0) comments

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

BRAVE NEW WORLD at 75 

Allen points to this article in the New Atlantis about the origins and influence of Huxley's Brave New World, which was of course a major influence on the origin of PARANOIA. It's long, but well worth a look.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 8:43 AM (0) comments

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

You Appear To Be Missing A Torso, Friend Citizen. Is Everything OK? 

The US military is developing a robot with a teddy bear-style head to help carry injured soldiers away from the battlefield.

The linked article has an annotated picture of the...thing, including the Teddy bear face designed to be reassuring. It's not.

It's a perfect illustration of a PARANOIA DocBot, though.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 8:19 PM (2) comments

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Oh, Those Wacky Commies 

High Programmer Varney finds the strangest things. The article, Bigger is Begger: Seven Insane Soviet Projects, describes such projects as a whole city constructed in five years, the world's largest H-Bomb and the Caspian Sea Monster.

Some is chillingly familiar to any PARANOIA player. 'Later a book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be recalled because in the downtime Stalin had ordered all the main characters shot.' (A instance of Friend Computer based on Uncle Joe could be a horrible antagonist for a Straight game.)

My personal favourite of the projects is the proposed new Parliament building:
'Designed by Vladimir Tatlin (1885 - 1953) in 1920, the Monument to the Third International [wiki] was a gigantic spiraling iron structure intended to house the new Soviet government. Taller than the Eiffel Tower (and the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building) at more than 1,300 feet, this curving, funnel-shaped structure was meant to encase three successively smaller assembly areas rotating on industrial bearings at different speeds, faster or slower according to their importance.

Rotating once a year in the lowest level was a giant cube for delegates attending the Communist International from all over the world. A smaller pyramid, rotating once a month above it, would house the Communist Party’s executives. The third level - a sphere rotating once daily - would house communications technology to spread propaganda, including a telegraph office, radio station, and movie screen. Unfortunately the giant structure would have required more iron than the entire Soviet Union produced in a year, and was never built.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 6:38 AM (1) comments

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