Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:
- First edition core
- Gamemaster Screen Adventures
- Vapors Don’t Shoot Back
- The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues
- Send in the Clones
It turns out I was wrong in thinking this was an early sourcebook. It has some rule and setting additions, but mostly it’s a bunch of adventures. Well, that suits me fine. I’ve started to think that while published adventures aren’t usually very good for actually running, they probably serve as the best way to expand a game. What better way to understand new material than to see how it’s meant to be used?
That said, the book does start out with some new rules. First, we get a rundown of how the computer tests its servants to see if they have gone insane from its abuse yet, which it does by abusing them. Until they go insane. The “treatment” can verge from being hauled off and lobotomised to being handed a party hat and told to engage in five minutes of Fun to relieve stress. Failure to have Fun in the correct way is, naturally, treason.
Next, and related to the above, is a section on drugs, where it’s also established (possibly for the first time?) that clones are kept drugged to the gills 100% of the time to keep them from having unauthorised feelings.
We get a bunch of new secret societies, including the Earth Mothers, who want to bring back natural reproduction and gender roles, and the Femme Fatales, who also want gender roles in the sense that they want women’s role to be running everything and men’s role to be run. The Knights of the Circular Object cosplay being fantasy heroes, Trekkies cosplay being… take a guess, and Groupies just fawn over celebrities a lot. The Sy-B-LNG Rivals are higher-numbered clones who want to kill their precursors and take their place. You can’t be in that last one, but your clones might be.
We get rules for playing as bots. Bots are build with a rudimentary point-buy system where you need to decide things like your size, form of locomotion and what the closest thing you have to hands is. You don’t get skills, but you can be outfitted with programs that function like them, but which also kind of take you over while active (as in, if you load a fighting program you can’t address any problem except by trying to fight it until it’s run its course). You are also saddled with Asimov Circuits that force you to serve Man no matter how much you’d rather blow him up. There is a sample adventure for a group of bots that makes it clear that they’re as perpetually hosed as everyone else in Alpha Complex – it’s just that the threat over their head is to be declared “malfunctioning” instead of “traitor.”
Segueing into the adventures, first up is Me and my Shadow, Mark IV, where the players are set to guarding the egotistical super-tank robot Mark IV for twelve hours. And of course something goes wrong every hour, on the hour. A gang of Communists attack! A scrubot insists on trying to clean Mark IV so vigorously that it’ll get lobotomised from it! A bratty school class run all over the place! A component falls off Mark IV and it has a nervous breakdown until the component can somehow be reattached! A group of entitled ULTRAVIOLET joggers demand that Mark IV be removed from their morning route (and they’ll edit the Computer into backing them up if necessary)! The Communists come back with reinforcements!
I’ll admit it – at a certain point I was chuckling from reading it.
Other adventures include The Harder They Clone, where the players hunt down a motorcycle-driving, rock’n’roll-singing madman; Warrior of the Night Cycle, which has a High Programmer start a ninja clan based on old movies; Whitewash, where the players are supposed to paint a wall black, but neither they nor they nor the officer in charge can afford to admit to the Computer that the wall is not already black, so before they can carry out the mission they need to figure out what it is from the latter’s desperate hints; and The Second Coming, where they tangle with a clueless machine empath who has been convinced that he’s the Computer’s messiah. Miami Laser has the Troubleshooter team getting put in a completely phony documentary meant to showcase the glamorous life of heroic Troubleshooters, without being told that it’s anything but a regular mission but with execution as punishment for not acting like a square-jawed action hero. Of special note are An ARD Day’s Night and its sequel Reboot Camp, where the Computer crashes and comes back online confused. So the idea for the ill-fated The Crash storyline was there early on, huh?
All in all, this is great stuff. I feel like at this point, the writers had figured out that Alpha Complex, played straight, simply didn’t have enough range to support a game – but that there was endless hilarity to be mined from taking a situation or character that absolutely didn’t fit into Alpha Complex and shoehorning it in anyway. With a usually-homicidal Alpha Complex spin to it, of course.
Next up is Clones in Space, which I think was actually the earliest Paranoia product I read back in the day. Let’s see how I like it the second time around.