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.
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!
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.
Vapors Don’t Shoot Back has the hapless player get stuck in a “tournament” between two High Programmers, Nevo-U-MYN-6 and Black-U-BRD-5. The contest is as bitter as it pointless, being fought to the death (preferably that of the High Programmers’ various pawns, but possibly their own as well) over what amounts to secret bragging rights among the select group of ULTRAVIOLET citizens who know or care what’s going on. The players, of course, have no way of knowing this except maybe at the very end; their master, Nevo-U, is perfectly capable of masking his self-serving agenda as official, Computer-sanctioned missions, including by having Computer terminals give the orders. It’s pointed out that similar tournaments can be used to justify the GM’s own adventures, or just to explain oddities and bizarreness around Alpha Complex. Heh.
In Mission One: Standard Tournament Elimination Round, the players are sent on a mission to kill a bunch of traitors (who are actually another Troubleshooter team who have been told that they’re on a mission to kill a bunch of traitors). I note with some regret that there doesn’t seem to be any outrageous malfunctioning equipment issued for this mission. Ah well. The players have to survive a ride with driver who has a serious need for speed before being sent down an extremely elderly elevator to a warehouse where they’re on a collision course with the enemy team. Unbeknownst to both of them, some actual secret society traitors are at work in the warehouse, looking to blow up the roof so that the algae vats on the next floor collapse into the warehouse, covering everything in nutritious goo. Also, the warehouse has a bunch of stubborn sorting robots who might try to pick players up and put them on shelves at inopportune moments. All in all, though, it’s not terribly interesting, just an opportunity to shoot things.
In Mission Two: The Cheating Begins, Nevo-U finds out that Black-U has located one of Nevo-U’s most valued assets, a miniature computer core that he uses to test programs before uploading them into the Computer proper (which is terribly treacherous – the Computer doesn’t like competition, even miniaturised competition!). It’s hidden in an old weather station Outside, and Black-U has a bunch of security troops heading that way. Nevo-U hastily sends the players to fetch the computer core first – on the pretext of an official Computer mission, of course. This chapter is a bit more interesting and includes things like the players (who, let’s remember, have probably never even been Outside before) having to figure out skydiving from watching a single vague education video before being flung out of a plane, possibly even with their parachute strapped on the right way.
This one is a little more funny, and it does give us our first canonical view of what Outside is actually like. Which is, honestly, fairly idyllic, all things considered – the players can run into a lot of hostile predators, but none of them are horrifically mutated. Also, there are savage survivalists with bows and arrows, so at least some parts of humanity have only been reduced to the Stone Age, not the depressing state of Alpha Complex. Heartening to know!
Anyway, if they can nab the computer core and get it back to Alpha Complex, they promptly get arrested because the Computer (or at least the parts of the Computer that they’re dealing with at that particular time) has no recollection of sending them on a mission. A hint that things are Not What They Seem… though in all honesty, it’s probably not that unexpected that the left hand does not know what he right one does in Alpha Complex…
Still, with some invisible help from Nevo-U the Computer suddenly “remembers” the very important mission it sent the players on, and dispatches them on Mission Three: The Finals. Nevo-U has found Black-U’s hidden headquarters, which is… on a facsimile of a pirate ship floating in an underground reservoir. Crewed by robot pirates, and commanded by Black-U himself with a parrot-bot on his shoulder. The players, who have never been near enough water to swim in before, are forced to make their attack on jetskis, all while artificial underwater geysers erupt to indicate where a cannon ball has supposedly dropped (which can still knock one of those non-swim-enabled players off their jetski if they get hit by one).
Okay… yeah… this is the good stuff. This is what I come to Paranoia for.
Anyway, if the players win the day, they can search the ship and find evidence of the illicit tournament. The module ends on a cheerful note that if they do anything as silly as try to present that evidence to the Computer, the best thing that can happen is that they get ignored, and the worst thing is that they get executed after a lengthy show trial – because clearly, anyone making absurd accusations against above-all-suspicion ULTRAVIOLET High Programmers must be a traitor!
All in all, fun enough, though maybe lacking a bit of the punch I remember from reading these modules as a wee lad… the spectacular finish aside, of course. Still, it’s early days yet. I definitely recall things getting a lot freakier.
I don’t feel up for anything ambitious this week, so let’s read a fairly short little booklet, namely the Gamemaster Screen Adventures for the first edition of Paranoia. As the name implies, they’re really just an add-on to the, well, Gamemaster screen. Still, it’s the first supplement released for the game, so it might be interesting to see what direction it set off in.
So trust no one and keep your laser handy, because we’re going back to Alpha Complex!
There are three different adventures. In the first one, Robot Imana-665-C, the players get sent to repair an ailing robot. Precisely what is wrong with the robot and what it’s supposed to do when it’s functioning properly is, of course, beyond their security clearance, but it is heavily implied to them that it’s some sort of super-dangerous combat bot. It’s actually a sort of ambulatory fridge, but a series of mishaps and accidents have led to that information getting lost along the way, so now the people in charge of the robot have no idea and can’t afford to admit that they have no idea, so they’ve called in some Troubleshooters to either fix it or take the blame for having irrevocably broken it.
The actual problem with the bot is that its visual sensors have broken down, and it’s under strict orders to not cooperate with anyone without verifying their clearance level (which in Alpha Complex means, check which colour their clothes are), and it can’t verify anyone’s clearance levels because its visual sensors aren’t working. It can, however, be broadly reasoned with if some tact and patience is employed, and then all that remains is to replace the visual sensors. Which means first requisitioning a replacement, and getting the wrong parts, and arguing with requisitions about whose fault it was, and then getting the right parts but with the wrong installation instructions, and arguing with requisions about that. Alpha Complex!
Anyway, if the players manage to persevere and try ridiculous plans for long enough, and none of them succeeds at sabotaging the mission for their secret society, they might actually get through the whole thing alive. Oh, and anytime someone acts suspiciously, they get strabbed into a “Debriefing Station,” which is to say a human-sized enclose pod that measures their vital signs to check for duplicity while the Computer very gently and cheerfully questions them.
The second adventure is called The Trouble with Cockroaches. In it, the players are scrambled to deal with a fiendish act of sabotage in the form of some secret societies unleash cockroaches in Alpha Complex before the saboteurs try to shoot their way clear and escape to Outside. They get outfitted with some ridiculous experimental weaponry, including a few that places the operator well within the area of effect (as well as one weird… thing that fires one bullet straight up and another straight down, then pulls them both back again before being rendered useless), and sent to hold the line against the traitors.
This is basically a combat scenario with much shooting going on, but it’s got a Paranoia flavour through people shouting silly slogans, seeming allies turning on the players at the least opportune moment, and the Computer broadcasting helpful encouragements like, “with modern medical care many of you may once again lead at least marginally productive lives!” Cockroaches aren’t actually involved, but there are drawings of them peppered all over the pages, including an especially thick bunch right over a section titled, “WARNING! READ THIS CAREFULLY!” Heh.
The final adventure is called Das Bot: Nearly a Dozen Meters Beneath the Sea. The players get sent in a leaky old “u-bot” to investigate suspicious underwater activity just off the coast. They have to bring along an entitled, high-strung arteeest of a filmmaker as part of their cover story, and the u-bot’s brain shortcircuits at the worst possible time, forcing them to have to figure out the controls for it by trial and error before they all drown. There’s supposed to be a chart for the u-bot control panel included, but it’s not part of my PDFs. And I actually bought these off drivethroughrpg like a good boy and everything! Shameful.
Anyway, should the players survive that, they arrive at an undersea lab occupied by a bunch of explorers from a race of acquatic mutants who have built a civilised, pacifistic, enlightened, and all-around un-Alpha-Complex-like society on the ocean floor. The players might try to capture one of them for interrogation, or might even find common cause with them if they belong to the right secret societies.
All in all, these are all fun and set the tone for Paranoia. I note that they’re already rather less serious than the adventure in the core rules were, with ridiculous gadgets and clueless rebels rather than stone-cold killer combat vets and grimdark cyborg overlords. Also, apparently amphibious underwater civilisations are canon, insofar as Paranoia has anything as structured as canon.
Continuing our wallowing in nostalgia, this time we’re going back to 1984. In more than one way, as it happens – because we’re going to be looking at Paranoia!
Yes, Paranoia, to this day the world’s premier comedy roleplaying game! It’s got a special place in my heart, in fact, since lazily snarking at stuff is my default mode of commentary, and Paranoia is written entirely in that tone. In fact, I wouldn’t wonder if I didn’t semi-consciously imitate it for a lot of sections in Monstrous Mishaps. It’s honestly a bit odd that not more games lean into the ridiculousness that always seems to creep into roleplaying, no matter how straight-faced it tries to be; let’s face it, when you have half a dozen players who are barely paying attention to what the GM is saying and whose most immediately accessible mechanic is rolling attack, things are always going to be primed for farce.
The game came in a box, because again, we’re in The Before Times here, and games always came in a box with a few pamphlet-sized books in it. Possibly by the time the 90s rolled around, it was realised that the GM might need something heavy and sturdy to hit players over the head with if they got rowdy? But regardless, the books presented here are the Player’s Handbook, the Gamemaster’s Handbook, and the Adventure Handbook.
PLAYER’S HANDBOOK
Straight off the bat, we’re introduced to Alpha Complex, a massive underground bunker existing after some vaguely defined disaster, where a population of survivors endure under the guidance of a deranged Computer. People are no longer born, they are vat-grown in batches of six identical clones, and once they’re old enough to work they are assigned a colour-coded security clearance from INFRARED (black), through RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE and INDIGO to ULTRAVIOLET (white). Any and all information is available only if you meet its security clearance, and knowing too much is treason. All equipment and vehicles, likewise, are painted in the colour of its minimal security clearance, and using (or wearing) something beyond your clearance is treason.
Treason abounds just generally. Some people have hidden mutations, which is treason (did the Computer say you could diverge from the regulated human genome?!). Some people are members of secret societies, which is treason. A nefarious force known as “the commies” is constantly scheming to overthrow the Computer, and lending them any sort of aid and comfort is definitely treason.
The Computer employs special agents called troubleshooters for odd jobs. Troubleshooters are sent at intractable problems and frequently get shot full of holes in the line of duty. Nonetheless, it’s a great honour to be a troubleshooter. The Computer says so, and disagreeing with the Computer is treason. The PCs, needless to say, are going to be troubleshooters. They are also going to be mutants and members of secret societies. This will make their lives very interesting, and probably quite short.
We’re given a brief example of play, which includes the players shooting a squirrel on the assumption that it’s an alien invader (knowledge of anything outside of Alpha Complex is treasonous, you see) and we’re informed of three ways that this game differs from those: firstly, it’s comedic, secondly, the other players are not on your side and in fact probably more dangerous to you than the NPCs, and thirdly, you have five “spare characters” in the form of your character’s clones that means that getting killed isn’t quite so much of a big deal.
Character creation involves rolling a bunch of stats, your Service Group (basically your day job – none of them are all that interesting), your mutation and secret society, and then putting some points into your skills. Stats are your basic ones: Strength, Resilience, Dexterity, Agility, Moxie (intelligence… but this being Paranoia, it’s more like low cunning) and Chutzpah (effectively charisma, but technically more like shamelessness). Skills have an interesting system whereby the first few points you put into them go into increasingly narrow categories before you reach the point where you have skills like “laser pistols” or “fishing.” That’s nicely realistic, in a way that is admittedly probably wasted on this game.
Speaking of fishing, a lot of these are outdoor-survival type skills, actually. I guess getting sent “Outside” and having to scramble to survive in an inhospitable environment without any training was intended as a frequent occurrence?
You make skill rolls by rolling under a percentage with a d100. You can also make straight stat roll, in which case you roll a number of d10s depending on the difficulty and try to roll under a target number. Seems like there was no need for two different mechanics there, but okay. Certain stats also give you bonuses or penalties to certain groups of skills.
Character can acquire five kinds of points over the course of play: skill points that they can invest in more skills, credits that they can use to buy stuff in the limited market economy of Alpha Complex (and in the more extensive black market), commendation points that lets them get closer to a higher security clearance, treason points that lets them get closer to getting put in front of a firing squad, and secret society points that lets them aspire to higher rank within their secret society. The player is not informed when they gain any of the last three kinds.
Before every mission, the players will be given their official orders from the Computer. Each player will also be given secret orders from their secret society, which will likely contradict the official orders. They will also be assigned their equipment. This equipment will often be experimental, faulty, or something entirely different from what it says on the box. Losing or damaging equipment is treason.
The players may be assigned robot helpers, in which case one of the players will be their operator and they won’t take orders from anyone else. The operator can assign an “heir” who’ll take over as operator in case of their demise. This will give the replacement even more reason to accidentally-on-purpose push them over a cliff. However, if the mission failed because the operator didn’t assign a replacement and then got killed, he will be guilty of treason (which doesn’t sound like a big deal given that he’s dead, but his next clone will get treason points for being related to such a vile saboteur!).
The Gamemaster’s Handbook is forbidden for players to read. This is not to say that they shouldn’t, but if they admit to having read it, or show signs of knowing what’s in it, their characters will get assigned treason points for it.
The book wraps with a choose-your-own-adventure segment. Heh. I miss those. Guess we won’t be seeing them ever again, now that video games have gotten able to do the same thing only better. Ah well. Anyway, here it’s a fun way to give a taste for how the game might run. Also, I totally managed to get brownie points from my secret society for killing a guy and also turn in my other teammate for killing him, so that was fun. I got a treason point for asking how my gun worked, though. Apparently that showed a suspicious interest into classified information.
GAMEMASTER’S HANDBOOK
In this book, we get something more like the real score. Turns out, Alpha Complex started out as one of many bunkers built to survive an asteroid impact, but the asteroid’s actual impact confused the Computer responsible for ensuring its safety and made it default to some very old legacy code. These antiquated data banks gave it the impression that it was under attack by “the commies,” whoever those were. It desperately tried to warn all the other Computers running all the other bunkers, but they soon started bickering among themselves and ended up certain that everyone had been co-opted by the commies but them. The result? A hundred different Alpha Complexes, run by a hundred different Computers, all considering themselves at war with each other and all certain that enemy infiltrators are everywhere.
The interesting part here is that there is explicitly more than one Alpha Complex, which I don’t remember as being the case from later books. I think the idea here is that you can blow up one of them and then set the next time in another one without skipping a beat, and that you can change whatever you like from one campaign to the next since it can be set in a similar-but-differing-in-detail complex next door. I think the game eventually decided that it didn’t really need an excuse to have no serious continuity, though.
Clones in Alpha Complex are kept asexual by a drug regimen, and indeed have no idea that sexual reproduction is even a thing – again, new citizens are grown in vats. In fact, everyone is just generally drugged to the gills all the time, all the better to keep them happy (or at least happy-looking enough not to be executed for being treasonably morose).
Living quarters range from barracks where INFRARED citizens live, to dorm rooms for RED to ORANGE citizens, to personal cubicles for YELLOW and then increasingly snazzy digs as a citizen climbs the ladder. The Computer has cameras everywhere (whether they work or not is another issue). Food is algae-based and served in communal cafeterias, with “real” food being available only to high-ranking citizens or through the black market. Personal possessions are limited for most citizens; you can carry all your worldly goods around with you without problem (so much like an adventurer, then).
ULTRAVIOLET citizens are known as High Programmers. They are allowed to actually edit the Computer’s code, so technically they could fix the whole mess if they wanted to… but of course they’re every bit as inept and deranged as everyone else in Alpha Complex, so most of their edits are in pursuit of their own selfish, short-term goals and only manage to create more and more contradictions and inefficiencies to make the Computer even crazier and more erratic.
Next up, stats and skills get detailed a bit more. I’ll note that social skills include such items as bootlicking, con, fast-talk and spurious logic (the latter of which is the only social skill that works on robots). There are also a lot of skills for repairing or modifying equipment (the latter is, of course, treason). You end up with a pretty good idea of what you’re going to be doing, I think.
I do feel that the rules are, again, kind of crunchy and nitpicky for a game that runs mostly on rule-of-funny. I think later editions streamlined things considerably – when your chance to succeed at most things is going to be, approximately, “a snowball’s in hell,” remembering whether to add a +5% to it seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
One skill that stands out is Communist Propaganda, which is kind of like a mental virus. See, if you successfully spout Communist Propaganda at someone, you have a chance to inflicting a few points in the same skill on him… so now he’s a traitor by definition and you can blackmail him. Of course, if it doesn’t “take” then he absolutely knows that you’re a traitor and he will probably turn you in to be executed. Fine times.
The combat section starts with the declaration that Paranoia combat is intentionally simple and streamlined for easier fun! Then it goes on for ten pages of modifiers and weapon types and cover and stun and… uff. Okay, what they mean with it being simpler seems to just be that the damage system is simplified. Rather than having to count hit points, you just note your current state of being. An attack can merely stun you, it can inflict a wound, it can incapacitate you, it can kill you, or it can vaporise you (the difference between the last two being, in the former case reccussitation might be possible. In the latter… not so much).
Different kinds of armour reduce the impact of different kinds of weapons by such-and-such amount. Of particular note is reflec armour, which protects against laser… but only if the armour is partly made from a colour that’s the same as the laser’s. Remember how lower-clearance citizens can’t wear anything of a colour above their own rating? Yeah, turns out that socio-economic boundaries determine how zappable you are.
There are instructions for what happens when you die and one of your backup clones get activated, which all seems a little overly complicated and involves redistributing some skill points and making other adjustments. All very realistic within the premise of the game, but… again again, it seems to halfway ruin the whole point of having clones in the first place, since it means you still have to do some of the work of creating a new character. Again something that I think later editions dropped.
If your treason points rise too high above your commendation points, the Computer will try to execute you! You can attempt to run away and flee from Alpha Complex, but of course even if you succeed that clone is out of the game for good. However, your next clone will get a nice boost to his secret society rank, since he’s related to a hero of the resistance who the Computer could not catch.
Paranoia has insanity rules. Okay, that’s a bit unexpected. They’re not especially well-defined, though; mostly, you have to roll when the GM thinks you’ve had a serious shock, but it can’t be every time you have a serious shock, so… just when the GM feels like maybe having you temporarily cuckoo, I guess? It’s temporary, though; the Computer may be nuts itself, but it’s apparently quite good at getting troubleshooters back into some kind of working order through liberal applications of psychopharmaca.
The mutations get listed… yeah, they weren’t listed in the player’s section except by name. What, you expect to know how your own mutations work? That’s the sort of thing only a commie mutant traitor would know! Take a treason point for even contemplating it! Anyway, mutations strike a balance of being decidedly unimpressive and with a lot of inconvenient caveats while at the same time being soooooort of useful with some creativity. Which tends to be how most RPG powers are, but here it’s presumably intentional. There are things like super-senses, pyrokinesis, mind-reading, the ability to eat and digest any sort of organic matter no matter how tough or toxic.
Secret societies! There are a bunch, and they’re set up to be at each other’s throats far more than they manage to be at the Computer’s. There are hyper-capitalists, machine worshipers, nature nuts (who have only the vaguest idea of what “nature” is, since they’ve never actually been Outside), mutant supremacists, and of course a few who just want to smash things up in interesting ways. Not all secret societies are even anti-Computer, per se – there is even one that worships it as a god. Membership in those is still treason since it’s unsanctioned, but you won’t get executed if you’re found out to be a member. Instead, your superiors will just file it away for if they ever feel like executing you for some unrelated reason and need an excuse. Stalin would be so proud.
There is a section of GMing advice, which is basically to do a lot of things that would make you a bad GM in other games. None of that “remember, you’re not the players’ enemy” here – you are absolutely supposed to be out to get the players and screw them over in every inventive way you can think of. In particular, you know how it’s usually best practice to set the players up and make sure they understand the situation, and interpret their actions in light of the fact that their characters are competent and non-suicidal? Yeah, we don’t do that here. The player characters are ignorant, frantic, drugged up, and the products of a dysfunctional society where everyone works at cross purpose. When they try to do anything the least bit complicated, you should demand specifics of their approach. And if they ask someone for help, then so sorry, but that information is not available at their security clearance.
Still, you are cautioned to not go too far with it. The players should usually have a chance to pull off some kind of win, just an exceedingly slim one.
It is suggested that inspiration from Paranoia scenarios can come from five genres: detective mysteries, spy thrillers, war stories, future sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Hmm, okay. I suppose I can see what they mean, but coming up with scenarios for this game strikes me as the hardest part – there is only so many directions you can take a setting that’s mostly a bunch of guys in identical overalls running around a bunch of sterile steel tunnels. That said, the sheer amount of scenarios that have been published for the game suggests it is possible to stretch it pretty far, even if I understand that the writers got sort of desperate during the late second edition…
ADVENTURE HANDBOOK
The adventure handbook, finally, starts off with a long equipment section. This game really does love its freaky high-tech toys, even if it also loves to have them malfunction. There are a ton of weapons, vehicles and bots, and rules for how to include them in combat. Like in most games, it leaves me sort of cold.
Then follows the sample adventure, Destination: CBI Sector. In it, a bunch of pre-gen characters of RED clearance are sent to an abandoned part of Alpha Complex to retrieve a missing robot. Each one, of course, also has been fed some disturbing rumours (accurate and otherwise) about the others and have their own agendas from their secret societies. They are sent along with a powerful NPC who is fully intending to get them killed along the way so they can’t rat him out for not having any intention of going through with the mission.
The mission, even aside from that, is probably impossible. It involves dealing with a rogue High Programmer turned cyborg overlord who has fortified CBI Sector to the teeth. There will be killer robots every step of the way. The players are walking into a near-guaranteed TPK. So… again, pretty much par for the course, as introductionary adventures go, except here it’s probably intentional.
Still, while I appreciate the honesty in admitting that the players aren’t supposed to get very far… I do feel like running the game that way would be kind of unsatisfying for the GM? I mean, if the players don’t get to the end, you don’t get to show them the cool stuff you’ve prepared. Or, in this game, the funny slapstick stuff you’ve prepared. It means they’ll miss the joke. That seems like a shame.
Still, I guess that’s a nitpick. The only other comment I have is that the villain, Menlo, stands out for being actually competent and terrifying. I think he might have been the first and last Paranoia villain who was played straight – in every other product I’ve seen, the bad guys are as hapless and fundamentally screwed as the players.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Honestly? Paranoia is probably not my cup of tea, at the end of the day. I’m too soft-hearted to really try to hurt my players, and I’m just not interested enough in the sort of sci-fi that the game parodies – gear porn tends to bore me, and you can’t properly appreciate a parody of something you don’t like on at least some level. Likewise, while I appreciate that the game proves that you can take a fairly limited premise and make a lot out of it, I feel like I’d get bored with Alpha Complex pretty soon. I prefer a setting that’s not quite such a challenge to put some variety in.
Still, it’s certainly fun to read, and I do appreciate it in concept.
