Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:
Today, we’re going to tackle the classic adventure The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. It’s got involuntary dance parties, cargo-cult recording studios, malfunctioning gadgets and a dungeon crawl. Awwwwww yeah.
The backstory for the adventure is that a bunch of secret societies and High Programmers are bickering over a wooden box full of Old Reckoning music recordings. This may, no joke, lead to the complete and permanent destruction of Alpha Complex (though that will be not so much retconned as sort of cavalierly ignored in later supplements, for obvious reasons). Low stakes, horrific human cost – it’s definitely Paranoia. Anyway, the players will not actually get sent after the Black Box, but it’ll keep showing up, and each player’s secret society will be chomping at the bit to get hold of it, thus encouraging them to try to get hold of it even while trying not to look like they’re trying to get hold of it.
Much like the previous published adventure, the module is divided into four missions. The first one, Bop Till You Drop, has the players sent to stop a series of pirate broadcasts of imitation commercial advertisements that is connected to a different traitorous scheme involving the Black Box. To be specific, the scheme is that the cafeteria food throughout Alpha Complex has been dosed with a drug that causes involuntary dancing (it makes very slightly more sense in context). The real plan is to play the contents of the Black Box once the drug starts kicking in, creating a Complex-wide dance party. The second part is likely to fail through a combination of the players’ involvement and other secret societies making a grab for the Box, but of course no one is in a position to stop the drug itself, so the mission culminates in massive chaos as hordes of people do “the Polypeptide Boogie” while the Computer is freaking out and working at cross purposes with itself in trying to get everone to cut that out. I love it.
The second mission, I Was A Mutant For The FBI, sees the players sent to infiltrate a group of mutant traitors that don’t actually exist, equipped with an assortment of clunky gadgets that are supposed to grant artificial versions of mutant powers (some do, some do but in a less than helpful way, others do something completely different). What they do find when they get to their destination is a deal about to go down for possession of the Black Box, which immediately gets attacked by rival secret societies, leading again to massive chaos which the players end up taking the blame for. They’re put in front of a firing squad. And then called away to their debriefing, where their superiors tolerantly admit that they were probably not to blame. And then they’re sent back to the firing squad, because Alpha Complex of Paranoia is like the Imperium of Warhammer 40,000 in that INNOCENSE PROVES NOTHING!
The third mission, No One Here Gets Out Alive, has the players get yanked away from their execution again, this time to get hastily issued a new mission – a subversive from Outside was captured during the last mission, and he’s been offered a stay of execution if he’ll lead a group of Troubleshooters through the abandoned, decaying stretch of corridors that lead to a way Outside. The prisoner’s help is vital, because the way is full of pitfalls, malfunctioning machines, deranged hermits, and secret society members lying in ambush (which is to say, it’s effectively a dungeon…). He has, of course, every reason to try to get the players killed along the way so he can flee, but never fear, he’s been outfitted with a remote-controlled bomb that the players can set off if he misbehaves! Oh, wait – someone replaced it with a smoke bomb. Also, his weapons, which are meant to be disabled, somehow turned out to be fully functional. Enemy action, or just incompetence? Honestly, who around here can even tell?
The players also get two bots sent along with them. The bots are maximally unhelpful while also having juuuuuust enough vital skills and information that the players have to work with them. Also, they quickly start to hate each other and plot each other’s deactivation.
Anyway, the mission ends with a massive shootout with the secret society members who are guarding the exit (and who have, just as a running gag, the Black Box in their possession), followed by the exit being bombed by Vulture Squadrons (the Computer’s shock troops; effectively, the people who come down like a ton of bricks on any player who tries to ignore the Computer and do things in a sensible way) to close it up, which instead just serves to blast an even bigger hole in Alpha Complex. Also, the Black Box gets lost in all the commotion. Oh well.
The final mission, Why Don’t We Do It In The Road?, consists of an oddly incoherent set of orders that amount to going Outside and getting hold of a whole bunch of Black Boxes and also a Corvette. What do those have in common? Nothing, actually, but two rival High Programmers gave the Computer their missions simultaneously, and the Computer got confused and mushed the two of them together. So out into the wild green yonder the players go. They need to gain the cooperation of one of two post-apocalyptic survivalist gangs, one who are a schizofrenic mix of dopey hippies and rugged cowboys, and one who want to be badass bikers but who have long since run out of fuel and motor parts so they just sit on their ramshackle bikes and push them forward with their feet. Yes.
If the players can swing that, they’ll find a self-maintaining recording studio populated by a bunch of nitwits who know how to act like they’re running a recording studio but have no clue how to do actual, well, recording. And, at the other end of the quest, they’ll find a gas station guarded by a pair of aritifical intelligences, one of whom runs an invisible floating super-tank. It’s all calculated to end with the players fleeing for dear life back to Alpha Complex with absolutely everyone hot on their heels, at which point the Computer panics and thinks it’s being invaded by Commies. At which point the module instructs you that you can either wuss out and pull a deus ex machina to defuse the situation, or you can just… not do that, and let Alpha Complex be destroyed, because why the hell not?
I’ve got to admit, I love this one. It’s got it all, including the malfunctioning gadgets (oh yeah, the artificial mutation gear is just the beginning!), a whole bunch of running gags (for instance, every mission ends with one of the players’ “quest giver” NPCs being executed or otherwise dying, until their finanl debriefing – if they do get to it and it didn’t all just go up in a giant fireball – consists of them sitting in an empty room for a few hours while the Computer pointedly pretends that their entire mission never happened), and just generally all the best sort of madness. Still not sure Paranoia is my sort of game, but reading through it has a lot of chuckles.