PARANOIA

Check out these US government security awareness posters. There must be some good way to work these into your PARANOIA games. Ideas?

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here that Mongoose Publishing had posted new .PDF files on its PARANOIA Web page, all free downloads supporting the big 256-page hardcover mission collection PARANOIA Flashbacks. At the time, I thought these files didn't include the handouts for "Me and My Shadow Mark 4" and the book's new "Pre-PARANOIA" introductory mission. It turns out those handouts were there -- they just got folded by mistake into the downloads for Send in the Clones and Alpha Complexities. Now Mongoose has broken out all the files properly, and all has returned to perfection in Alpha Complex.

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

Last week I pondered publicly on the contents of the spring 2006 PARANOIA supplement. This supplement is Collapsatron, a Zap-style mission collection that will reprint and update the classic 1986 West End adventure Orcbusters, by Ken Rolston. Should I include new missions, I wondered, or reprint another good early adventure, Clones in Space (1986) by Erick Wujcik? The comments were split down the middle. In light of a dozen tedious factors I won't bore you with, I've decided (unless countermanded by the Powers That Be) to go with Clones in Space.

What with the many early masterpieces resurrected in PARANOIA Flashbacks and the updating of HIL Sector Blues (1986) as the BLUE-Clearance section of Extreme PARANOIA, Collapsatron will almost complete the task of reprinting all the worthy early PARANOIA material from West End. Oh, someday I might hope to bring back Edward Bolme's People's Glorious Revolutionary Adventure (1989) (no room for it in Collapsatron, alas) -- I like some bits of The DOA Sector Travelogue (1989) -- and we shouldn't overlook stray oddments like the Form Book (1988). But once Mongoose restores Orcbusters and Clones, gamers who weren't around in the 1980s will apprehend pretty much the entire glory of the early line.

My immediate problem is, I don't have the text of Clones in Space. I've seen all the bootleg .PDFs circulating on the net, but they're all just image scans, not remotely of OCR-able quality. Does anyone out there have actual ASCII/HTML text of Clones in Space? If so, please get in touch with me at APVarney (at) AOL (dot) com.

Taylor McKnight offers over 3,100 buttons for free download from his website. He has a page of game-related buttons, but as of now he lacks -- horrors! -- he lacks PARANOIA. Sad, sad. Can some kind graphics wiz use the Button Maker or similar tool to devise a button(s) that plugs this site, The Computer, Alpha Complex, Paranoia-Live.net, or any other relevant paranoid game concept? Upload the completed button to Taylor's site, and let us know about it in the comments!

PARANOIA Gamemasters, connoisseurs of proper psychological conditioning of players, may find it pleasant to fantasize about (but never to implement, no!) Dance Dance Immolation. It's "an adaptation of the popular arcade video game Dance Dance Revolution, but with fire! Basically, you play DDR; when you do well, the computer shoots big propane blasts up into the air. When you do poorly, it shoots you in the face with flamethrowers. Yes, you, as in your actual corporeal body. And yes, flamethrowers, like the kind that are on fire."

(Thanks for the link to Greg Ingber of the Traitor Recycling Studio.)

I live in Austin, Texas, where as I write we are battening down for Hurricane Rita. Early on, NOAA's National Hurricane Center projected a direct hit on Austin, but at this writing it appears the storm will hit further north. Only weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississipi, Rita is provoking panic. People here, 120 miles inland, are buying up canned food as though the levees were about to burst and put the whole city underwater. Except we're, er, well above sea level....

Austin resident Bill Harris, who writes the terrifically misnamed Dubious Quality blog, talks about the insane 14-hour traffic jams out of Houston, where drivers would make better progress if they just got out and walked.

I expected only to post here that Rita might knock me offline for a day or so. But in the event, I found a genuine PARANOIA connection. Following Bill Harris's link to a NOAA page of different StormTrack path projection models for Rita, I browsed the public comments on that page. (Warning: not work-safe and not for the faint-hearted.) What a flamewar! Amid three or four different kinds of flaming, one "Infidel" identified his opponents as "nothing but heartless puppets of the communist party," and linked to this page of Current Communist goals cited in the Congressional Record for January 10, 1963. Representative A. S. Herlong, Jr. (1909-95; D-Fla.) read into the record these perfidious goals, revealed in W. Cleon Skousen's Naked Communist (Salt Lake City, 1961).

Friends, here we see the exact peril The Computer fights against, to protect all Alpha Complex!

Mongoose Publishing has posted the cover (by the One True PARANOIA artist, Jim Holloway) for the forthcoming 128-page service group supplement Service, Service! Click on the thumbnail to see a larger reproduction. Good work, Jim!

I'm getting quite far ahead of myself by even bringing this up, but Amazon.com has posted a listing for a putative PARANOIA supplement, allegedly titled "Mission Inscrutable", supposedly to be published in May 2006. The title "Mission Inscrutable" is incorrect. The correct title for the May 2006 PARANOIA release is Sector Zero. "Mission Inscrutable" was an early placeholder title Mongoose used in its draft 2006 schedule before we agreed on a book for that slot. There is no project titled "Mission Inscrutable" on the actual schedule, and I don't plan to use that title (nor ever parody Mission: Impossible) while I'm packaging the line.

No, I'm not going to say yet what Sector Zero is about. I welcome groundless speculation.

In mulling over the contents of a particular supplement in next year's PARANOIA support line, I'm trying to decide whether to include two or three new short missions written by the Traitor Recycling Studio, or instead reprint and update the classic 1988 West End Games adventure Clones in Space by Erick Wujcik.

I was going to explain all the pros and cons, but actually it may be more useful if you just give your gut reaction to this bald expression of the notion. Knowing nothing but what I've already said, which would you prefer: new stuff or Clones in Space?

Mongoose Publishing has posted no less than eight new .PDF files for free download from its PARANOIA Web page. These files are all for the big 256-page hardcover PARANOIA Flashbacks, a huge collection of the best PARANOIA adventures from the old mid-'80s West End line, lightly and tastefully updated for the new rulebook. The files consist of the pregenerated Troubleshooter player characters, maps, and associated infrastructure for the missions The YELLOW Clearance Black Box Blues, Send in the Clones, and Vapors Don't Shoot Back -- though Mongoose, with British charm, spells it "Vapours."

The original file I provided to Mongoose also included the handouts for "Me and My Shadow Mark 4" and the new "Pre-PARANOIA" introductory mission. I don't know yet whether Mongoose plans to make those available as well.

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

I'm starting to lay out Criminal Histories, this December's 64-page character background supplement by Bill O'Dea and the Traitor Recycling Studio. This book, especially designed to enhance two- to four-player PARANOIA games, lets players generate a complete background for their Troubleshooters, including old jobs, how they got promoted (or demoted) out of them, bonus skills and specialties, contacts, and past treasonous acts their fellow Troubleshooters can investigate. (If that last bit doesn't strike you as alluring, consider that now your teammates will have past treasonous acts you can investigate!)

One short section of the book deals with the tic, the small personality trait or nervous twitch that immediately identifies your character. Anyone who hangs around your character for more than a few minutes certainly notices your tics. A tic is noticeable by definition.

Through some happy coincidence or touch of genius, the published tics the Traitors have presented to date have been -- what's the word? -- annoying. "Always talks about vidshows." "Estimates values of objects aloud." "Relieve all stresses with cleansing group activities." "Memory like a goldfish."

I'd like to present a bunch more example tics in Criminal Histories. No, more than you're thinking. A whole bunch. If you post your ticcy suggestions in the comments and I use them in the book, Mongoose Publishing won't pay you or send you a free copy of anything, but if you include your real name (or e-mail it to me at APVarney [at] AOL [dot] com), I'll try to list you in the credits. If I remember.

On his site Poet RPG in late February of this year, Minneapolis writer Eric Zawadzki followed up his unusual roleplaying exercise "When 19th-Century Writers Play Mage: The Ascension" with a new series, "When Members of the Bush Administration Play PARANOIA." This turned out not to be political flamebait, but instead an engaging PARANOIA mission that amused readers regardless of their politics.

Through July 14 Eric posted 27 episodes of this saga. He led his Troubleshooters through multiple hilarious crises, until I ruthlessly, heartlessly recruited him into the Traitor Recycling Studio. While he worked on a fine mission and other contributions you'll see this October in the upcoming supplement Service, Service!, Eric left his poor Poet RPG Troubleshooters hanging. After that he and his collaborator Matthew Schick spent some time redrafting their fantasy novel Lesson of the Fuel, which Eric says they've been working on together for fifteen, that's FIF-TEEN, YEEEARS.

But now Eric is back from a writers' conference on Maui, and after a two-month lapse he has posted the newest Bush Admin PARANOIA episode, "The Coveted Position." He says he intends to finish the mission in the next couple of weeks. Go, Eric, go! It's great stuff, but I think we're all glad it won't take fifteen years.

The fine online science fiction magazine Strange Horizons has an article by Jeremy Adam Smith called "The Ten Stupidest Utopias!" Any PARANOIA Gamemaster can find inspiration in this litany of misguided utopian movements from Plato's Republic to William Gibson's cyberspace. The City on the Hill, Nueva Germania, Herland, New Babylon, the Postwar American Suburb, the High Frontier -- all these bright and optimistic thinkers propounded models of strong social control The Computer must have studied closely.

Check how well this passage matches your vision of Alpha Complex:

In the 1920s, Futurism mutated into more rigorous and less flamboyant architectural and design movements like the Bauhaus. The Taylorist urban designs of that period were each a nightmare of mathematical perfection, but few went as far as the Swiss theoretician Le Corbusier. His 1935 book The Radiant City was dedicated, simply and tellingly, "To Authority" -- this during the years of Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler. To Le Corbusier, a world of standardized building materials and assembly-line production required military-style industrial and social centralization. The inhabitants of his ideal Radiant City -- "a machine for living in" --would reside in self-contained high-rises containing fitness, cultural, educational, and social facilities that would unite all social classes, cultures, and spheres of life in a single geometric grid. It is in many ways the natural descendent of severe, mathematical Renaissance utopias like Campanella's 1623 City of the Sun, in which a priest class, reminiscent of Plato's philosopher-kings, would monitor the city's virtue from a tower at its center. In the 20th Century this social and architectural vision would be harshly criticized even as it shaped buildings throughout the First and Second Worlds, such as self-contained high-rises on the outskirts of London (dissected by J.G. Ballard in his 1975 novel High-Rise), Czech communist panelaky, corporate office parks, and federal housing projects. Each imagined a kind of gleaming social egalitarianism; in time they crumbled and came to express savage social and economic disparities.

Smith concludes by observing, as many have before, "Utopia is never more than what we are; the people in them will always be just like us."

Last month Mongoose Publishing released the 128-page PARANOIA rules supplement Extreme PARANOIA, which dramatically opens out the game with rules for creating and playing characters of all security clearances from ORANGE through VIOLET. Next month brings the 128-page supplement Service, Service!, a big book about the eight sprawling service group bureaucracies in Alpha Complex. It offers new firms, typical NPC personnel, eight complete missions, and new "mandates" rules that make service groups more important. And in December comes the 64-page Criminal Histories, a supplement for players that lets you give your character an entire background of allies, enemies, bonus specialties, and prior felonies.

As PARANOIA's line developer and packager, I regard both these upcoming books as important personal milestones.

Milestone 1 -- page count surpasses "good" West End books: Service, Service! will bring the total page count of Mongoose's PARANOIA line to 1,262 pages -- all in the 14 months since the current edition debuted at Gen Con Indy 2004. Of these nearly thirteen hundred pages, let us leave aside the 256-page hardcover reprint collection PARANOIA Flashbacks and the 40 pages or so of Extreme PARANOIA that updates portions of Ken Rolston's 1987 West End supplement HIL Sector Blues. That still leaves 930 pages (give or take) of pretty much all-new material. It's all good.

Compare this total of 930 pages with the aggregate page count of the good or okay books in West End's PARANOIA line before its egregious decline into imbecility in the late '80s and early '90s. I count in this list first- and second-edition PARANOIA (144 pages each, if you include "The Compleat Troubleshooter" booklet in the second-edition boxed set); the first-edition Gamemaster Screen with its 16-page book of RED-Clearance adventures; Vapors Don't Shoot Back; The YELLOW Clearance Black Box Blues; Send in the Clones; Acute PARANOIA; Orcbusters; Clones in Space; HIL Sector Blues; The DOA Sector Travelogue; Alpha Complexities; and arguably The People's Glorious Revolutionary Adventure.

These 13 products together, the cream of the West End line, comprise 840 pages. Mongoose has not only reprinted most of that (and we'll get to the rest someday), but it has also added far more good material in a year than West End managed in almost five years. Even if you argue much of the current rulebook doesn't count as "new," we'll still move comfortably into the majority with Criminal Histories.

Milestone 2 -- matching Ken Rolston: Ken, the legendary West End line editor who established the distinctive PARANOIA tone and wrote several of its best books, supervised the line from 1984 until he left West End in 1988. He masterminded the entire first-edition line as well as the second-edition rules set -- basically ten important products. Criminal Histories in December will mark my own tenth product as Mongoose's PARANOIA guy, and I fully intend to hang around into 2006. I assert the current line matches Ken's run in both number and quality.

In 2006 the Mongoose line will also outstrip the number of good West End books (13), though it will take several years yet to beat the total number of all published West End PARANOIA products (something like 34, depending on how you count reprints and accessories). And matching West End's nearly ten-year timespan will take us -- hold on, let me work this out -- almost nine more years.

As for the most important milestone -- surpassing the 150,000 copies of PARANOIA West End sold in all editions -- well, the roleplaying market today is far more challenging than in the 1980s. But things look okay so far. Well, fair. We'll see.

Yes, I am thinking about this too much!

Last night I had an interesting online conversation with Greg Ingber of the Traitor Recycling Studio (he contributed "Emergency Disaster Response Teams" to Extreme PARANOIA):

Greg: Is there any chance PARANOIA is used to train our soldiers overseas?

Me: Oh god. That would be... uh... boy, I hope not.

Greg: I bet you there is a PARANOIA campaign going on in Iraq right now. If not, we should see about collecting some money to send PARANOIA to bored soldiers over there.

Me: Heck, just send them .PDFs. I don't know whether they have reliable net access there. If they do, I might ask on the blog.

Greg: Dude, they have unprecedented net access. It's one of the good things the military has done... really helps morale when you can IM your spouse/girlfriend on a regular basis. And there are a bunch of soldier blogs that have gained a lot of attention.

Me: Huh. I hope the attention isn't from the Iraqi opposition.

So I'll ask here. Is any reader of this blog currently in the American military and stationed abroad? And for everyone: Do you know of any US soldiers abroad who are even now playing PARANOIA? I refer, of course, specifically to the roleplaying game and not their general life condition.

I just know I'm leaving this blog open to a useless and inappropriate political flamewar, but I couldn't resist this story from MSNBC.com's Hurricane Katrina blog:

"The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s decision to ask evacuees to call (800) 621-3362 or browse to www.fema.gov to start the process of filing a claim for disaster assistance was greeted with disbelief by most relief workers we talked to, who noted that most of these people don’t have ready access to telephones.

"It turns out, according to a Red Cross worker here [...] that the call to the FEMA number does not open a claim; it results in a package containing the claim form being mailed to the address of the evacuee.

"Since the evacuee is in a shelter, mail service has been suspended in many of the hardest hit areas and some of the homes are likely still under water, it seems clear that those claim forms won’t be mailed back any time soon."

(NB: As reported on BoingBoing, the FEMA online application process requires Windows and Internet Explorer 6. If you have a Mac or Linux box, you can't even apply to have the package mailed to your underwater dwelling.)

I post this only to inspire PARANOIA-related mission ideas. Before you post political flamebait, think about the unlikelihood that your views, expressed on a blog about a roleplaying game, would persuade anyone, anywhere. It won't happen, so please hold off on the political stuff, okay?

As happens seemingly ALL THE TIME, another loyal PARANOIA fan has emerged from lurker-dom with a great new support tool for players everywhere. One "Space Butler," newest citizen of Paranoia-Live.net, posted: "A friend and I have been working on a Random Character Generator that outputs a .PDF for easy printing."

In addition to publicizing the program, he also wants feedback on how to improve it. (You'll need the free Adobe Reader software to read the output .PDF.)

Last month Dan Curtis Johnson of the Traitor Recycling Studio took part in a Cinemasports filmmaking competition in San Jose, California. Dubbed "the Iron Chef of filmmaking," Cinemasports San Jose gave competing teams ten hours, start to finish, to make a film lasting no more than three minutes and 20 seconds. The finished film had to incorporate three specified elements:

1. Someone eats something yellow


2. Mistaken identity


3. A howl in the distance

On his highly entertaining blog, Scribbles and Lies, Dan recounts the epic story of his team's production of the short film "Yellow." The film incorporated all three elements, and even measured 3:20 -- if you count in base 12. (Cough.) The curious and courageous can download the complete film.

By the way, the DC comic Legends of the Dark Knight is currently serializing "Snow," a five-part Batman/Mister Freeze story Dan wrote with JH Williams III. The story is drawn by Seth Fisher.

RPG.net publishes fan-written reviews of roughly thirty gazillion roleplaying products, but nobody there has reviewed any recent products in the PARANOIA line. (The most recent, Cedric chin's review of Crash Priority, dates from December 2004.)

A large squad of designers, along with artist Jim Holloway, have worked hard on this year's PARANOIA line, with standout results -- The Mutant Experience, PARANOIA Flashbacks, the STUFF equipment book, the landmark Extreme PARANOIA rules supplement, and especially the Straight mission collection WMD. I wish more gamers knew these books exist.

It's partly my own fault that no one reviews these supplements; I've recruited many of the likeliest reviewers into the Traitor Recycling Studio, so they've become contributors. Oops! But I know I must have missed a few of you out there. If you'd like to let other gamers know what you thought about any of these books, I ask you to write up your thoughts and submit them on RPG.net's "Write a review" page, or on the review site of your choice.

My wife signed up on some website to volunteer to test new consumer products before their release. Last month she tried the first, a shampoo and conditioner that made her itch all over. This month the company sent her a small box of odd little packets of dishwashing detergent. Each packet is about the size and shape of a baby turtle and made of water-soluble plastic. You plop one into your dishwasher's main detergent cup, and the packet dissolves in the wash to release the soap inside.

The package has a stern boldface warning: Hands must be dry before handling. Do not unwrap or cut.

I read this and, for some inexplicable reason, thought of the many new experimental products developed by The Computer's diligent scientists in Research & Design. How, do you think, would these detergent packets work in Alpha Complex? Alternately, have you ever volunteered for/been subjected to real-world trials that reminded you of R&D?