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
- Acute Paranoia
- Clones in Space
I would say that this is where it got silly, but it’s Paranoia, so it was already pretty silly. I will say that this one feels a little like someone just threw their hands up and decided to give zero craps, which is maybe not entirely a good thing – yes, a certain meh-just-go-with-it spirit is explicitly part of the game, but maybe giving just one or two craps might help? Anyway, let’s get into it and we’ll see what we can make of it.
So, the backstory for this adventure is that a doohickey called the Transdimensional Collapsatron was discovered as part of a long-dead High Programmer’s possessions and accidentally activated, and it transported three wizards from Dimension X to Alpha Complex. Yes, wizards. You know, guys in robes and pointy hats who can make stuff happen by chanting and waving their hands. They’re part of this sci-fi comedy game now. See what I mean about this being maybe a step too far in the sure-throw-it-in way of thinking?
But okay. Wizard magic (“Shaping the Force,” in their own nomenclature) works on the same rules as mutations, though wizards are actually good at it, and know some entirely new spells/mutations like throwing fireballs, spreading magical darkness, and communicating across language barriers. The GM is cautioned to make it clear to the players that the wizards, while certainly an intimidating outside-context problem, aren’t all-powerful – they act stressed when they have to fast-cast something, their magical force fields shrink a little every time they deflect damage, sometimes their spells just plain go wrong and cause a big mess that they clearly didn’t intend, and so on. Don’t get the players so demoralised that they won’t even have a go at them, basically. You can’t have their efforts go badly and hilariously wrong if they won’t make them in the first place!
Like most adventures so far, this one comes with half a dozen pregen characters, though here they are a bit more flavourful than usual since they are not-too-subtly also meant to fit fantasy stereotypes – we have a grumpy short guy who likes messing around with tech, a gung-ho Femme Fatale member with lots of combat training, a happy-go-lucky runt with sticky fingers and a mutation that makes him super-persuasive, a big dumb meatbag who’s immune to psychic influence… All good stuff, and like I said, a little more interesting than the usual selection of samey, one-dimensional little backstabbing nitwits. Like I keep saying, the game designers chose an incredibly narrow premise, and while that’s great for making the game distinct, it also makes it very challenging to come up with material for it after a certain point. The way these supplements keep dragging in more and more things that don’t strictly belong in a “classic Paranoia adventure” (though keep in mind that things stayed purely “classic” for maybe two or three books before the drift started; by Vapors Don’t Shoot Back, the players were already boarding a pirate ship) is a pretty direct result of that, I’d say.
The adventure starts with the wizards, their moronic lizardman flunky Randy in tow, appearing at a vehicle repair facility (they interrogated some clones demanding to be given “transportation home” and this is the confused directions they got). The players get sent in after them, get saddled with a bunch of shell-shocked civilians who glom onto them and keep getting in the way, and get some sense of what the wizards are capable of. They also follow them into the facility where they have to deal with malfunctioning and psychotic bots. The wizards ultimately teleport away.
The second altercation with the wizards happen at a power station, where the wizards managed to plug in the Transdimensional Collapsatron but couldn’t get it to work properly, resulting in some other fantasy thing being transported in. A few suggestions are given, from a bunch of hungry hobbits to a fire-breathing dragon. The players will have another inclusive altercation with the wizards, though this time they might also be able to communicate a bit with them – the wizards are beginning to despair of getting home under their own power and so are thus more receptive to anyone who might even conceivably be willing and able to help. Either way, they eventually disappear again.
Through it all, the Computer is being unhelpful as usual, but it’s also being rather less… Computer-y. What I mean is, it keeps being sarcastic and abusive in its pronouncements rather than doing its usual dissonant-serenity, “you are mistaken, citizen. No one is screaming. The Computer is your friend” thing. That’s another thing that makes this adventure feel like it was just cobbled together by someone who just didn’t feel inspired at all by the setting as it as.
The third time the wizards show up, it’s at a travel information office (they wanted information on how to travel back home, but… well, that was a bit of a non-starter). There, they’ve managed to capture a powerful psychic mutant who they feel is a little closer to their own kind, so when they flee this time, they’ll leave Randy behind to take her with them instead. Randy can tell the players approximately what is going on, though of course he’ll do it in the slimiest way possible so that they doubt every word. Also, as an additional complication, a bunch of sleeper agents from a rival Alpha Complex also try to capture the wizards and the players end up having to fight them for the privilege of losing them all over again.
Finally, the players corner the wizards in an R&D facility just as they’ve managed to get the Transdimensional Collapsatron to work, and they all get sent back to Dimension X. It’s your basic fantasy setting, in spite of the pulp-sci-fi name, though befitting Paranoia it’s got a black comedy slant to it, with everything run by comically-sociopathic wizards who treat their human “herds” with the same care and compassion that the Computer treats its cloned citizens. There is also Randy’s species, who are the wizards’ evil soldiers and enforcers.
Once back home, the wizards are once more on certain footing, but they’ve exhausted themselves and aren’t up for dealing with the players right now, so they yell for some lizardmen minions to come help them, and strike a quick retreat into their dark evil dungeon (because of course they have a dark evil dungeon) along with the Transdimensional Collapsatron, leaving the players to deal with the mooks and get their bearings. Once they have figured out where they are (Randy is still with them and can advise), they don’t have much choice but to embark on a dungeon crawl to secure their way back home. Fortunately, a bunch of R&D clones and a bot got accidentally brought along, so there’ll be both someone capable of rigging up the TC and a power source to connect it to… assuming the players can keep them from being killed or destroyed, of course.
So it’s a dungeon crawl, and in most respect a fairly linear and basic one – the players pass through one chamber after another, blunder into traps (theoretically they can avoid them, but that’s unlikely to happen, so the best they can hope for is surviving them), fight monsters, and maybe find some loot along the way. There is magical healing items sprinkled throughout, to make up for the fact that there’s not going to be any instant clone replacements. Some of the more memorable encounters are a gelatin cube (not a gelatinous cube, gelatin. Raspberry-flavoured, in fact), a succubus (lucky that Alpha Complex clones get stuffed full of hormone suppressants that render them immune to such temptations), an over-friendly and near-invincible dog whose drool causes all metal objects to rust into uselessness, and two tribes of talking penguins who try to get the players to side with them. One room has a mixed bag of monsters sitting around waiting for it to be time to walk off on their patrols – they’re the wandering monsters of this dungeon, see? Oh, and at one point, there’s an orc, to justify the title, but he’s actually the dungeon chef and can’t put up any kind of fight.
In the end, the wizards turn out to have vacated the premises when the players got too close to their sanctum, having left the Transdimensional Collapsatron and a note telling the players to just take it and bugger off home. So presumably they do. The epilogue suggests that the Computer then sends them off on new and deadlier adventures in other dimensions, teasing a supplement called Vulture Warriors from Dimension X. I’m pretty sure that’s a joke, but there is in fact a second-edition supplement with that name…
Anyway, this was fun and all, but… yeah. It felt a bit too gimicky, despite my stated position that the best adventures so far have been the one who have been slightly gimicky. I guess the part that’s missing for me is the thin line of logic tying the obvious inspiration to the realities of Alpha Complex? Like, in all the other adventures, when something wildly out of genre turned up, there was always some sort of fig-leaf explanation for why it totally made sense, honest, and that just made it funnier. Here, wizards aren’t, e.g., powerful mutants who just happen to wear robes and carry staffs for spurious reasons. They really are wizards. Nor are they exaggerated, parodied or otherwise ridiculous like the aliens in Clones in Space were. There’s no joke there, is what I guess I’m saying, beyond them simply being in the game in the first place – which is strange and disjointed, but not really funny, per se.
Oh well. Next up is the final book published for the first edition, HIL Sector Blues. We’ll see if that’s a return to form.