Paranoia readthrough: HIL Sector Blues

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

We have reached the end of the first edition of Paranoia, and in a lot of ways the last supplement published before the second edition feels almost thoughtful. Many parts of it seem to be taking stock of what’s happened up until now and try to isolate the essence of the game. Many others seem to be considering what other directions you could go in and how you might take the setting and do something completely different with it. I’m not sure any major conclusions are reached, but you can definitely see the developers squinting at this strange thing they’ve created and trying to figure out where to take it next.

For a start, this book is actually not about playing hapless RED-clearance Troubleshooters who run around without a clue and blow themselves up. Instead, it introduces the opportunity to play veteran BLUE Internal Security troopers, given halfway decent training, outfitted with halfway decent gear, and provided with support and intel that halfway works. It would be a book about high-level play, except of course in Paranoia it’s effectively impossible to ever reach a higher level.

With these sorts of characters, the book suggests, you might actually last long enough to play a campaign as opposed to a one-shot, and to that end it introduces HIL Sector as a setting for it (Alpha Complex being, as Send in the Clones admitted, less of a consistent setting and more of a state of mind). HIL Sector is an ordinary Alpha Complex sector in most ways, but it’s isolated by the invention of “transit tubes” that speed vehicles along electromagnetic tracks and are the only consistent way of getting around the sector. The transit tubes were poorly designed to start with, are now in terrible repair, and the High Programmers responsible for the whole mess have instructed the Computer to ignore all reference to them, so getting in and out of HIL Sector is now problematic. The place is, thus, semi-isolated and self-contained, all the better to keep the players bumping into the same NPCs and visiting the same places over and over.

The book outlines some suggestions for designing a Paranoia adventure, specifically but not necessarily one in HIL Sector. It suggests that a good adventure have two important parts: firstly, the actual situation the players are sent into, and secondly, the complications and running gags that give it the proper Paranoia flavour. It provides a handy list of the latter for HIL Sector, among others the aforementioned transit tube system, which comes with “random encounters” in the form of ways the journey can go terribly wrong; the communications system, which the players will be reliant on for information and support and which will constantly disconnect their calls, transfer them to the wrong people, or put them on endless hold; and Fed-R-ALL, a hapless courier who’s charged with delivering needful equipment by means of a lethally dangerous rocket bike, usually ending up delivering the cargo scorched and melted.

There’s a list of the various departments that the IntSec troopers will be relying on, like the motor pool and the forensics lab, and some of the dysfunctional personalities who are crewing them. They’re essentially all you need for a police procedural, Paranoia-style; they’re all unhelpful, idiosyncratic and very bad at their job, except for the one randomly occurring wise and dependable person, just to really make them worry. The GM is also instructed to keep track of who the players end up getting on the bad side of, and have those people spend the rest of the campaign making them miserable in whatever petty way they can.

For some sci-fi flavour, one of the department is the Mutant Registry, where the players can go to requisition the assistance of a registered mutant for special purposes. Of course, the mutants are all cheerfully insane, and of the two officials in charge of the Registry, one hates mutants and is scheming to get them all killed, and another wants to recruit them to his personal team of X-Men. Because Paranoia.

We get a list of randomly occurring NPCs that can turn up whenever it’s least convenient. Most of them are ones that have previously been seen in other supplements, like the ULTRAVIOLET joggers from Acute Paranoia and the three wizards from Orcbusters. Another possibility is a bunch of hapless RED Troubleshooters doing the kind of thing that groups of players usually do (which in this game tends to involve a lot of gratuitous destruction).

Speaking of, as part of creating a slightly more functional kind of game, we get some reasons why IntSec officers aren’t quite as dysfunctional as Troubleshooters. Firstly, we get instructed that when dealing with higher-clearance citizens like other BLUE IntSec troopers, the standard practice of just shooting them and claiming that they were traitors won’t wash – you need to provide some sort of evidence to the Computer and get issued a “termination voucher,” then you can shoot them. Forging the evidence is very possible, though. Secondly, the team leader has the ability to override the weapons triggers of all lesser team members, and so can actually enforce some discipline at least part of the time.

We get some basic instructions for how to come up with IntSec missions. Basically, you can do just about anything that Troubleshooters normally do (like hunt down Commie mutant traitors), and just about anything that the characters in cop shows normally do (like bust black market deals in stolen drugs).

Then, we get instructions for how to turn Paranoia into a miniature skirmish game. Which is meant to be done partly by using mounted carbon cutout pieces and tin figurines that West End Games were apparently hawking, and partly by turning your entire house into a scale model of the Alpha Complex, with all your various furniture representing different sorts of locales. I… am honestly not sure if they’re serious about this or if they’re doing a bit. With this game, it’s a little hard to tell sometimes.

We get three mini-adventures. In First Blood, And Then Some the players get sent to stop the rampage of a commando from an enemy Complex named Ram-B-EAU-3, who unfortunately has all the powers of a cliched action hero. Their best chance of stopping him is when he reaches the cells of the traitors he’s meant to free, because they’re a bunch of useless idiots that will seriously cramp his style as he tries to get them out of Alpha Complex. In IntSec Agents at the Earth’s Core, the players have to stop a mad scientist who insists on field testing his experimental device, which will unfortunately cause mass destruction if activated. He’s got a bunch of reprogrammed bots with him for support, so the players will somehow need to infiltrate the power station where he’s holed up and disable his device before he can activate it. Claiming to be some sort of officials out to supervise the test might work – he doesn’t quite get how much trouble he’s in, since from his perspective he’s just gotten the job done despite everyone around him being difficult and raising unreasonable objections. In One of Our Petbots is Missing, finally, the players get sent out to find a High Programmer’s missing petbot. What they’re not told is that it’s only officially a petbot. In a looser, more unofficial sense that can’t be admitted to without breaking regulations, it’s an adult T-Rex. It still acts like a puppy, but when it wags its tail it tends to wipe out entire crowds of bystanders. Heh.

So that was HIL Sector Blues, and that was first edition Paranoia. I guess all in all, I’d call it a great idea that often struggled to be realised. There were definitely a lot of moments that were laugh-out-loud funny, but the game always seemed to struggle with the tightness of its premise, with the sameyness of its characters and the drabness of its setting. It was at its best when it presented something that was entirely at odds with the brainwashed-drones-in-overalls baseline, but sometimes (like with Orcbusters) it went too far with that and ended up losing its flavour entirely. I still think it must be a terribly difficult game to run and write for, and I’m honestly kind of impressed at how much stuff the developers have come up with for it over the years.

But let’s put it aside for now, and trade the colour-coded overalls for neon and chrome – because next month, we’re starting our Shadowrun readthrough! Stay tuned.

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