PARANOIA

On the Paranoia-Live.net fan site the recent power struggle between Psion and Anti-Mutant has gone back and forth. Today, my informants tell me, is the ultimate showdown.

You'll recall that this storm began about three weeks back when the enigmatic hacker AlphaOne opened up the Secret ULTRAVIOLET Diaries of P-L.net doyens Jazzer, Fargmania, and Takyn-U-RUN. Mutant forces led by Psion's saulres purged all three and briefly took over P-L.net, until rivals in Anti-Mutant, led by Biggles, took back the forums in the name of genetic purity. The ousted saulres has since been wandering from topic to topic, seeking to confront Biggles in a final struggle for true and unquestioned dominion.

Citizens, I have good reason to believe that struggle will at last erupt into open violence! Check the Paranoia-Live.net forums periodically throughout the day, follow the confrontation to its fitting conclusion, and pray with the rest of us that normalcy will soon return.

Edit March 30: I couldn't get Google to translate this Bulgarian Wiki page about PARANOIA (the page is not Russian, despite anything some high-clearance American dolt may have said before). Any idea what it says?

Whoops! Disregard previous announcement: Psion's control of the increasingly tumultuous fan site Paranoia-Live.net has proved short-lived. Citizen Biggles, now an ULTRAVIOLET High Programmer with Internal Security, has taken control in the name of Anti-Mutant. Clearances are changing across the board(s).

Where, where will it end? And, given this is Alpha Complex, any wagers on how?

Troubleshooters wounded by traitorous attacks always heartily welcome the sight of a docbot, or else make panicky exclamations easily mistaken for cries of welcome. Alpha Complex scholars cleared to study Old Reckoning documents may be interested in this predecessor of docbot technology, the SRI International trauma pod:

SAN FRANCISCO - The Pentagon is awarding $12 million in grants on Monday to develop an unmanned "trauma pod" designed to use robots to perform full scalpel-and-stitch surgeries on wounded soldiers in battlefield conditions.

The researchers who pitched the Defense Department on the idea have prepared a futuristic "concept video" that seems straight out of a teen fantasy game, showing with full color and sound effects the notion that robots in unmanned vehicles can operate on soldiers under enemy fire and then evacuate them. [...]

SRI researchers caution that the project remains at least a decade away from appearing on any battlefields. Surgeons will need to manipulate the robot in real time, using technology that prevents any delays between their commands and the robot's actions. The "trauma pod" has to keep connected wirelessly without giving away its position to the enemy, and it has to be nimble and hardy enough to perform under fire.

Still, some of the initial technology is already being put to use in hospitals, and the goal of the initial $12 million project is relatively modest — researchers hope to show that a surgeon, operating the robot remotely, can stitch together two blood vessels of a pig.[...]

SRI spearheaded the Pentagon's first such endeavor to develop a "telesurgery" system in the 1980s. The resulting robot, dubbed the da Vinci Surgical System, proved to be too bulky and too dependent on too many humans to be used in battle. But the Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) approved the da Vinci in 2000 for civilian medical use and surgeons now use the $1.3 million machines in about 300 hospitals worldwide to remove cancerous prostates, repair faulty heart valves and other procedures.

While sitting at a da Vinci console, usually just a few feet from their patients, surgeons look into a binocular-like monitor to view three-dimensional images transmitted from inside the patient by a camera at the end of one of the robot's arms. The doctors slip their hands into stirrups to guide the robotic arms armed with the camera and precision surgical tools.

To get something like this into battle, researchers will spend the next two years modifying the da Vinci so only a single surgeon is needed to operate the robot.

The Pentagon, which spent $3 billion on unmanned aerial vehicles between 1991 and 1999, is expected to spend upward of $10 billion through 2010. Under a congressional mandate, the Defense Department is pushing for one-third of its ground vehicles to be unmanned by 2015.

(Thanks for the link to Greg Ingber, who recently joined the Traitor Recycling Studio and will contribute to the forthcoming rules supplement Extreme PARANOIA.)

As you see from this Paranoia-Live.net forum list, Psion has formally taken over the leading PARANOIA fan site. Citizen saulres's announcement. Users should register their mutations immediately.

However, perhaps guided by the enigmatic hacker AlphaOne, certain Anti-Mutant factions appear to be working behind the scenes to topple the new regime.

Don't ask me to explain. Just don't.

I can't think of a way to make a post about One Ring wedding bands relevant to PARANOIA, unless we cast it as yet another bizarre and comical misapprehension by the Romantics of Old Reckoning customs. But I had to post this somewhere. Egad. (Via Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Electrolite.)

Comrades! To be seeink vhat Alpha Complex architecture vill look like after glorious Rrrevolution, under rrrightful authority of proletariat masses from vhich all power is sprrringink, closely study Vorld Vide Veb site Unrealised Moscow! (Varning: Ewidently designed for monitors three feet vide, at least vhen wiewed in Firefox.)

Moscow architecture from the 1930s to the early 1950s undoubtedly occupies a central place in domestic construction of the socialist epoch. Its specific nature and scope is the most outstanding illustration of the socialist Utopia in architecture. This period saw the work of the greatest Soviet architects: B. Icfan, A. Schusev, I. Zholtovsky, the Vesnin brothers, I. Fomin, L. Rudnev, I. Golosov, V. Schuko.

[...] The specific nature of the architectural process of this period was determined wholly by ambitious government schemes. In order to realize them, extensive architectural contests were held and architects of diverse orientations and schools of thought were invited to tender their projects.

Considered today, it is clear that the best examples of this architecture, most of which never got beyond the drawing board, are more profound and interesting than the ideological norms within the constraints of which they were devised. Behind many grandiose projects one may often discern the desires of those endowed with power to affirm the greatness of this or that historical epoch.

Comrades! See gargantuan examples of brrrutalist technocrrratic architecture rrraised to incomparable, stupendously imprrractical grandiosity! Be notink Palace of Soviets entry 1 and Palace of Soviets entry 2:

The Palace of Soviets [Dom Sovetov] was planned to be the largest building in the world. Its height was to reach 415 metres -- higher than the tallest buildings of the time, the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. The building-postament was to be topped by a 100-metre statue of Lenin.

The construction of the Palace of Soviets developed into an independent economic and scientific field. This system included special laboratories dealing with optics and acoustics, for the development of special construction materials such as "D.S. steel" and "D.S. brick," mechanical and ceramic-concrete works.

Glorious comrades! Also be notink unbuilt People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry, House of Books, and Hotel of Moscow City Soviet! Vitness in Hotel entry canonical foreshadowing of Alpha Complex:

According to legend, Stalin was shown both versions of the facade of the building on one sheet, and placed his signature of approval on both, as a result of which the facade of the completed hotel was asymmetrical.

Comrades! In 2006 vill be appearink glorious new PARANOIA Sectorbook, to be describink for Gamemasters many new locations in Alpha Complex. Sectorbook AAA (first in series!) vill be describink Alpha Complex seats of power, centers of influence of running-dog service group lackeys of capitalist pigdog Computer (ack-ptooey!). May Sectorbook AAA truly be aspirink to spirit of ideological architecture shown in Unrealised Moscow!

Comrades, rrrally to cause! Post in comments locations you are vishink to see described in next year's Sectorbook AAA!

Update March 26: I love this blog! A minor crisis had arisen regarding Mongoose Publishing's upcoming release of PARANOIA Flashbacks, a 256-page hardcover compilation of the best first- and second-edition PARANOIA adventures released by West End Games in the mid-1980s, lightly and gracefully updated to the XP rules.

Flashbacks will reprint the classic original illos by Jim Holloway, the PARANOIA artist beside whom all others pale. Unfortunately, Mongoose was having trouble scaring up good scans of the Holloway illustrations for the 16-page insert booklet in West End's original first-edition PARANOIA Gamemaster Screen (1984 -- or was it 1985?) -- the art for the RED-Clearance missions "Robot Imana-665-C," "The Trouble With Cockroaches," and "Das Bot." Jim no longer has his original art, so yesterday evening (Friday) I put out an emergency distress call here for fresh scans from an actual, original, 1984-or-maybe-1985 paper copy of the West End GM Screen insert booklet.

Friday night was not the most propitious time to send out this call, yet I got a response in 45 minutes from the worthy Michael Croft, who sent me about 15 ginormous scans (grayscale and line art) in mind-bogglingly fine-grained detail. I feel confident Mongoose can make good use of these. As you can see from the comments on this thread, there was no shortage of other volunteers, either. It is heartening to know such loyal citizens are out there.

Soon all the classic PARANOIA missions will be back in print, and (thanks to Michael) all with classic Holloway art!

Security specialist Bruce Schneier quotes today's Wall Street Journal:

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government has advised airplane pilots against flying near 100 nuclear power plants around the country or they will be forced down by fighter jets. But pilots say there's a hitch in the instructions: aviation security officials refuse to disclose the precise location of the plants because they consider that "SSI" -- Sensitive Security Information.

"The message is; 'please don't fly there, but we can't tell you where there is,'" says Melissa Rudinger of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a trade group representing 60% of American pilots.

Determined to find a way out of the Catch-22, the pilots' group sat down with a commercial mapping company, and in a matter of days plotted the exact geographical locations of the plants from data found on the Internet and in libraries. It made the information available to its 400,000 members on its Web site -- until officials from the Transportation Security Administration asked them to take the information down. "Their concern was that [terrorists] mining the Internet could use it," Ms. Rudinger says.

(Thanks to Morbus at Gamegrene.com for the link.)

Heroic Paranoia-Live.net R&D researcher Greymist08 has brought forth an intriguing, and even partly coherent, stab at rules for designing bot player characters in PARANOIA XP. Like all right-thinking citizens, Greymist repudiates the Bot Abuser's Manual rules from the latter West End days, taking an approach a bit closer to Greg Costikyan's superior bot-PC rules in Acute PARANOIA (1985).

Greymist's efforts so far are reasonably functional but still sketchy. That said, I don't anticipate finding room on the XP product schedule for robotic PCs until about (urgh) 2007. (Why yes, I do have the schedule planned through 2007.) So meantime, how about we all try Greymist's rules to see how well they work?

California programmer Eddie Murphy (skip the easy jokes, please), aka emurphy, has kindly posted an automated PHP-based PARANOIA XP character generator on his home page, zenith.homelinux.net. Read the Paranoia-Live.net announcement. If there are features you'd like emurphy to add, friendly encouragement may help. Thanks, emurphy!

If you are new to the PARANOIA roleplaying game -- if you are visiting for the first time the leading fan site, Paranoia-Live.net -- I warn you, the ever-active forums there have recently taken an odd path. Secret society conspirators have purged High Programmer Andy "Jazzer" Fitzpatrick. Shadowy power plays have busted several citizens to INFRARED Clearance. Weird in-character topics like "The M in CMT" seem to allude, enigmatically, to ulterior stuff we're not cleared to know. Forum citizens are posting secret messages and drawing battle lines. Bring up a list of forums and you'll see the announcement "Attention all citizens... please congratulate Araltaln on his recent termination as a large traitor."

Don't ask me to explain any of this. Just don't.

As I say, if you're visiting there for the first time, subdue your confusion and just wait for the foofaraw to blow over. Oh, and look at a couple of new, foofaraw-spawned sites promoting the distinctive Alpha Complex versions of the Sierra Club and the Communists. You think you're confused? Imagine someone innocently googling for these historic institutions and stumbling on these sites....

I was wondering when I could talk about the new PARANOIA card game that Mongoose Publishing will bring out at this year's Gen Con in August. Because Mongoose has just announced the card game at the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas, now I can finally talk.

There isn't really much to say about it yet.

So, uh, stay tuned!

Mongoose Publishing has just added a couple more items to its growing section of free PARANOIA XP downloads:

• Jim Holloway's new cover for PARANOIA Flashbacks, the forthcoming 256-page hardcover collection of classic West End adventures, lightly updated to the new XP rules. Jim, the One True PARANOIA Artist, has reworked his 1985 "Birth of Teela" cover from Send in the Clones. (125K .PDF)
• The list of changes and corrections in the second printing of the PARANOIA XP rulebook, titled "Service Pack One." This includes the complete new one-page index by Saul Resnikoff that replaces the first printing's sadly inchoate effort. (276K .PDF -- yeesh, I should have tried to compress that a bit more.)

You'll need the free Adobe Reader to view these .PDF files.

This Gamespot story about Warren Spector's new computer game company, Junction Point Studio, has a notional connection to PARANOIA -- Warren and I co-wrote the 1985 first-edition adventure Send in the Clones (to be reprinted this May in PARANOIA Flashbacks). Afterward Warren went on to work at TSR (where he helped manage the AD&D 2nd edition revision), then at Origin Systems and ION Storm, becoming a legendary producer of computer games best known for Deus Ex. PARANOIA features a running gag about Famous Game Designers, but Warren has become genuinely famous. (Meanwhile, 20 years later, I'm still working on PARANOIA. Hmmm.)

However distant and contrived this story's connection to PARANOIA, I felt like maundering on about it purely because it surprised me to see a news story mention me. Gamespot reporters Curt Feldman and Tor Thorsen, trying to suss out a reason why Warren chose the name "Junction Point," happened on my bibliography:

[A] clue to Junction Point's current project may lie in Spector's past. One of his coworkers while working at TSR [actually Steve Jackson Games -- AV] was one Allen Varney, who cowrote a module for the cult sci-fi role-playing game Paranoia with Spector. According to Varney's online resume, he also handled "principal design" on a game called "Junction Point" while at Looking Glass Studios (then Looking Glass Technologies) at the same time as Spector. Varney describes the game as "[a] massively multiplayer fantasy role-playing game, changed in midstream to a single-player science-fiction role-playing game," which was canceled in 1997.

I know nothing of Warren's current plans, but I expect he isn't working to resurrect that specific game. Rather, he likely chose the "Junction Point" name purely for sentimental reasons; that time at Looking Glass was generally happy, though we shipped nothing.

One correction to the Gamespot story, if anyone cares: I never worked at TSR, though I did a lot of freelance work for them. When we wrote Send in the Clones, Warren and I both worked at Steve Jackson Games. For the record, we plotted every single incident in Clones working closely together, but I wrote almost all the text myself except for the R&D sequence and the finale, which are Warren's. And I grudgingly admit he himself, all alone, invented that great highlight of our adventure and of the first-edition PARANOIA line, the Funbot.

Ever wondered what the High Programmers of Paranoia-Live.net do in their leisure time? Me neither, but it turns out Jazzer, Fargmania, and Takyn-U-RUN keep an entertaining blog on a Gray Subnet, wherein they recount their daily schemes and petty rivalries. Thanks to mysterious Computer Phreak hacker AlphaOne, you can now covertly read these ULTRAVIOLETs' sordid machinations -- and even comment without risk of speedy termination!

I originally planned to steer waaaay clear of plugging Eric Zawadski's new weekly PARANOIA XP exercise on Poet RPG, "When Members of the Bush Administration Play PARANOIA XP." I absolutely don't-don't-DON'T want political flamewars on this blog. Don't go there, I thought. Repeatedly.

But you know what? As of the second session (Episode 31, "Strangers in a Corridor," dated March 5th, 2005), Eric's dramatization is turning out to be an entertaining, very characteristic PARANOIA mission with minimal political commentary. It makes a great example of play for gamers unfamiliar with PARANOIA's unique tone. If you ignore the pun names, it's all about as political as Eric's earlier chronicle, "When 19th Century Writers play Mage: The Ascension."

"I caught a bit of hate from people who think I'm just bashing Bush," Eric writes. "I'm not. Gaming amuses me. PARANOIA XP amuses me. The idea of members of the Bush adminstration being closet gamers tickles me pink."

Mind you, he's only posted the first two sessions so far. If the whole thing turns inflammatory after this, don't come back here and start an argument.

If you're about to hit the comment button and make political orations, just pause and breathe deeply, okay?

I don't usually read the USA Today newspaper, but a passage in today's story by reporter James R. Healey, "Gas Prices Might Increase 24 Cents," about this month's upcoming record surge in gasoline prices, caught my attention:

"Petronoia is in full flower. Retail gasoline has some 25 to 28 cents a gallon in increases ahead just to catch up to what has happened with wholesale (gas prices) since Christmas week," says Tom Kloza, senior analyst at the Oil Price Information Service. [...]

"Petronoia is Kloza's description of when petroleum traders become irrationally afraid there won't be enough oil and gasoline later, so they buy now, bidding up prices."

"Petronoia"! What a great word. If someone feels like plotting a PARANOIA mission involving an Alpha Complex version of that concept, by all means let us know here what you envision.

I wonder if there are similar paranoia-like terms in other industries? Anyone?

From the Mongoose Publishing Web site:

"This is a box set of seven of the most hapless, treacherous and downright cunning Troubleshooters ever to walk the corridors of Alpha Complex. Sculpted by Bobby Jackson, these 28mm scale miniatures truly do justice to the theme and atmosphere of The Computer and its loyal followers, from Bling Troubleshooter to 'It's just a flesh wound.'"

(Detailed close-ups.)

For months I've been plugging the upcoming 192-page PARANOIA XP rules supplement Extreme PARANOIA, due for release at Gen Con this August. It's still on, it'll still be great -- but now it'll be 128 pages, not 192. I was overambitious -- actually, "foolhardy" is the word, if not "idiotic" -- for suggesting such an enormous tome. Fortunately, Mongoose Publishing has been flexible and understanding as always, and has gracefully scaled back Extreme PARANOIA's size in order to keep me out of the emergency room.

Having learned nothing from this humbling experience, I shall now boast prematurely of the contents of Extreme PARANOIA. The book (which, you'll recall, is now 128 pages) will offer six new Mandatory Bonus Duties, three new play styles, and new rules for playing characters at all security clearances from ORANGE through VIOLET. Not just Troubleshooter characters, either -- with any luck, the Traitor Recycling Studio will devise entirely new occupations designed to get higher-clearance PCs into really deep trouble.

We're still discussing these occupations. I know the GREEN section will tell how to play Internal Security GREEN goons, adapting material from Ken Rolston's respected 1988 West End Games PARANOIA supplement, HIL Sector Blues. Anything else in particular you'd like to see?