Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:
- First edition core
- Gamemaster Screen Adventures
- Vapors Don’t Shoot Back
- The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues
Our trip through classical Paranoia continues. This time, we’ll see some adjustments to the basic concept that will stick around for a while, as well as parodies of bureaucracy and show business. Also poop. A surprising amount of poop.
The background for Send in the Clones revolves around recurring background character Teela O’Malley (Teela-O-MLY-6, technically). She’s sort of the setting’s all-purpose media icon – if some reference needs to be made to what passes as pop culture in Alpha Complex, it’ll probably involve her. Essentially, she’s the human equivalent of that Bouncy Bubble Beverage stuff that everyone in Alpha Complex is apparently always guzzling. Here, she’s decided that a superstar like her deserves immortality, and since good citizens are limited to six clones, she’s founded a secret society called the Clone Rangers who exist to create endless clones of her.
Still, all that takes a while to become relevant, because the players’ initial mission is completely unrelated. They are to go down into the sewers and search for the source of a pirate transmission that is broadcasting traitorous (and out of tune) songs through the PA system. The players spend the first act wading through sewage and dealing with traps set by a deranged Javere expy (he’s dedicated his life to hunting down a clone for stealing a loaf of synthbread!) before finding the pirate radio station. It’s set up in the abandoned studios of cancelled children’s program Captain Botaroo, which featured a jolly, German-accented robot executing commies and traitors. Needless to say, Captain Botaroo is still around and will be activated in short order.
The actual guilty parties are a gang of heavily armed prepubescent kids who are basically just doing it for a lark. The GM is instructed to really screw with the players’ heads about whether they really want to commit mass infanticide, all while the kids are cheerfully shooting at them and Captain Botaroo is running amok. Then, out of nowhere appears Teela O’Malley who gets the kids to settle down and then disappears as mysterious as she came.
Once back home, the players get haranged for a report, and if they admit to having met Teela, they are promptly scheduled for execution since they’ve been consorting with a traitor (not that that’s public knowledge, but fairness and reason don’t really exist in Alpha Complex). Still, they’ll grudgingly pardoned at the last second and sent to assassinate Teela. Aha, but first they need to get their gear for the mission.
That, as it turns out, is the entire second chapter. The players first have to navigate a Kafka-esque nightmare of offices, forms, and unhelpful bureaucrats before they can even get their basic ammo. Then they get sent to pick up the experimental equipment, which includes things like a force field that needs to be plugged into a wall socket and will black out all of Alpha Complex, a tiny robot that attaches itself to your shoulder as a “morale booster” (and records everything you say, and will totally snitch on you), and a sonic blaster that has a 25% chance of getting stuck each time it’s fired, requiring you to smash it against a wall to make it stop wailing.
It also includes the funbot, which is an automated morale officer who tags along and tells the same unfunny jokes over and over. If people fail to laugh, it starts spurting laughing gas at them. It randomly throws cream pies at people. Whenever the GM decides it would be either funny or convenient, it also runs off in a random direction. And of course, the players are responsible for it on pain of death. If it does get broken, they get treason points, and another funbot is promptly dispatched to the scene, as obnoxious as the last one.
This is also where the CRUD (Clone Recycling Unlimited Delivery) system is introduced. Apparently someone realised that while giving the players backup clones was a nice way to not have to go easy on them, having to roleplay a new clone getting activated and making its way to wherever the party currently is was still terribly inconvenient. So in this module, the R&D department has started outfitting Troubleshooters with sensors that check their vital signs, and when one dies a new clone is dispatched by means of high-speed pipe, effectively plopping down right where the last one expired. There’s a note that of course there is no reason why this should always work perfectly and that there’s all sorts of mischief the GM can work with clone replacement, but at least this way she won’t have to think about it if she doesn’t want to. And also, I feel like it just adds something to the dehumanising nature of it that you’re not just replaceable but instantly replaceable, that your untimely death isn’t even a brief hiccup.
Anyway, chapter three is the actual freaking mission. The players are sent to Alpha Complex’s entertainment division, where they deal with a few Hollywood caricatures and get put on a game show with convoluted rules and live weapons, the prize for which is to get to meet Teela. The first half is a quiz with laughably easy questions that you can, however, only answer by pressing the right button first, and there is no obvious way to work out from first principle what’s the right button. The second half is a sort of basketball match where lethal force is permitted, and where the players’ opponents are a bunch of towering super-soldiers. There is a specific minigame for playing out the match, complete with randomised behaviour for the opposing team, which is a nice touch.
Whether the players win or lose, they will eventually get sent to a room where Teela is supposed to be, but it turns out to be three different rooms and the first two the players enter have secret society meetings in them. The first is for a group called the Pepsi Generation, who I think would probably be a lot funnier to me if I knew anything about Pepsi commercials circa 1985. The second one is for the secret society that one of the players are part of, and they promptly get outed and have to decide who to shoot at. Fun times.
On the third try, the players find Teela in the middle of a ton of incriminating evidence about her mass-cloning business. The players chase her down to her cloning facility in the sewers (that’s why she was at the Captain Botaroo studios – they were right next door and she was checking to see what the ruckus was about) where they have to fight dozens of deformed Teela clones, her brainwashed minions, attackers from the Pepsi Generation, rampaging scrub bots, and whatever else the GM can come up with. And then someone brings down a wall and the whole place gets flooded with sewer water.
The adventure ends with the players getting out of the stinking mess and back home, where they either get executed for failing the mission (if they can’t prove they killed at least one Teela), executed for succeeding in the mission (Teela has somehow managed to get back in the Computer’s good graces, so the whole mission has been memoryholed) or executed for all the other traitorous stuff they probably got recorded doing.
The book ends with a few thoughts from the developers. Most notably, they mention that they initially thought about how they were going to retcon the destruction of Alpha Complex at the end of The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues (there was canonically more than one Alpha Complex in the first edition, but the one that got destroyed also explicitly had a Teela O’Malley in it), before they came to a liberating realisation: no one actually cared. Alpha Complex is a silly place and the last thing it needs is actual continuity. Given how poorly later modules that did try for a metaplot were received, this was probably a thought they should have held on to…
Well… I don’t know. I felt like this one kind of dragged, especially with the second part. Certainly to read, but I think it’d probably be annoying to play, too. I get that the idea is to get the players frustrated with just how impossible it is to get anything done in Alpha Complex, but I feel like they’d get less entertainingly frustrated and more bored. That’s not to say that there isn’t a ton of fun stuff here – the funbot is wonderfully obnoxious, the killer game show is inventive, and the fight in the cloning facility is cool and bizarre – but all the different parts fit together a little awkwardly.
Oh well. Next up is what seems to be the first attempt to write a sourcebook as opposed to an adventure module. Stay tuned for Acute Paranoia!