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.
We’re staying in the magical realm of Aysle for a while longer, because Queenswrath is a collection of short adventures set there. A “queenswrath” is apparently an Ayslish legal concept whereby a figure of ultimate authority – which has been exclusively Ardinay or Uthorion-as-Ardinay for the last few centuries – issues a general command for any valiant heroes who are available to go and deal with some dire and pressing threat to the realm or haunting and sinister mystery. So… it’s a quest, is what it is. Each one is started with an in-character description that the players will presumably find posted in an inn or however that works, and then follows the actual nuts and bolts.
In The Unholy Order pilgrims visiting a certain Irish monastery have been mysteriously vanishing. This turns out to be because an evil sorcerer, hoping to weaken the faith in Honourable religions, have killed all the monks and reanimated them as skeletons, and is now using them to kill any pilgrim who stops by. So the players find a monastery where only one of the monks will talk to them while the others are shuffling around in silence with their hoods pulled down, and in the middle of the night they will be invited to see a “secret miracle” that will just consist of them having their throats slit. It’s very Gothic. I approve.
The Fall of a Storm Knight has Tolwyn of Tancred, still the non-High Lord NPC who gets the most exposure, apparently betraying Ardinay. Except it’s actually an evil doppelganger posing as her. And yes, there will be a scene where both of them are pointing at each other and going, “I’m the real one! Kill her!”
The Tunnel is just a sort of linear dungeon through the Dover-Calais tunnel between England and France, where the players have to fight their way past harpies and a cyborg troll (it got hit with a double axiom wash from Aysle and the Cyberpapacy) before they can establish that the far side is controlled by Cyberpapal troops and that, all in all, it’ll probably be best to guard it carefully.
The Essence of Evil has the players recruited to free the spirit of Merlin from Stonehenge, except it’s actually Morganna Le Fey who’s trapped there. The reason she’s trapped is that Stonehenge is a Core Earth hardpoint, so it’s actually less magical than the realm around it, making Morganna too weak to escape. An interesting touch there. Anyway, Morganna will possess an innocent girl and leave the players to either come up with a way to non-lethally pacify her (gain Honour), kill her along with the host (gain Corruption) or let her leave to help Uthorion. The last is presumably the worst option, but I dunno, for a legendary enchantress her stats are pretty awful…
The Winged Terror sends the players to investigate who’s killing Ardinay’s ambassadors to an elven community. Not sure why there are “elven communities” in England – the game does have a habit of just handwaving why creatures native to the invading cosm has just appeared all over the realm even when they wouldn’t reasonably have been part of the invasion forces. Anyway, the reason for the deaths is that one of the elves is scheming to have his people defect to Uthorion’s side, so he’s convinced a griffin to attack and kill Ardinay’s envoys to plant strife between them.
A Blanket Across Time has mummy attack a security guard at a museum in Oxford. It turns out that it’s been sent by one of Doctor Mobius’ overgovernors to steal an Eternity Shard in the form of the baby blanket of Moses that’s part of one of the exhibits. There is some gratuitous Nile Empire intrigue about how the overgovernor actually wants the Eternity Shard for herself and doesn’t mean to hand it over to Mobius, but it’s not really relevant to the mummy-hunt.
Beachhead is an underwater adventure where a Corrupt uvwe (a seal-shifter, apparently) has had the bright idea of creating a gospog field from the corpses of uvwe slain during unrelated circumstances. The players will need to stop his soggy gospog from terrorising ocean-side communities. It’s kind of cool, but I feel like I could have used some more information on the uvwe, here – I went back and checked the main Aysle book, but no, they’re not mentioned there.
In Holger the Dane a wicked dwarf wizard is trying to awaken Danish folk hero Holger from a curse that has him turned to stone, and then convince him to fight for Uthorion against the “evil” Ardinay. This is presented as standing a decent chance of working, so I guess Holger isn’t that bright… Anyway, the players will have to storm or sneak into the castle of Kronborg which the dwarf has taken over and filled with his Viking minions.
The Horn of Darkness sees the city of Visby suffering a strange plague that’s actually caused by a “black unicorn” poisoning the drinking water with magic. Uthorion has also sent a succubus from Orrorsh to serve as the unicorn’s bodyguard. The pair hangs out in the Trojeborg Maze, which… isn’t really what the writers seem to have thought it was. Like, it’s not an actual labyrinth with high walls you can get lost in, it’s a complicated stone formation laid out on the ground. Ah well, it was before the Internet.
In The Crystal Obsession, the players are sent to deal with a crystal skull that holds the spirit of an evil Aztec sorcerer. Since smashing the skull will just release the spirit, they instead have to place it in a remote region which Ardinay will then declare it illegal to enter on pain of death. I can’t help it notice that while Great Britain is described as still having a functional government, Ardinay is pretty free about throwing out orders. It’s probably too much to hope for that this is Uthorion’s Darkness Device whispering in her ear, right?
In The Treasure of Cerne Abbas, a group of Cyberpapacy agents and a group of Nippon Tech agents have been snooping around the local chalk giant. It turns out that they both think that there is some kind of alien artifact buried under it. There is, though it’s just a message of interstellar peace and harmony and not a weapon or anything. So… Core Earth aliens are canon, I guess.
The Ghost of Bodiam Castle is a clever double meaning title. The players are sent to deal with a ghost who’s haunting a castle, but if they look into things a bit more, they’ll find out that the castle is itself a ghost – it spontaneously appeared, ghost and all, during the axiom wash, with the real thing having been transported stone by stone to America years ago. It’s not a “real” haunting, but a sort of projection of stories and fears surrounding the place. To get rid of the ghost, they have to go to the real castle in what is now the Living Land (and the hunting ground of a giant squid thing), destroy the hidden corpse of the woman the ghost thinks it’s the restless spirit of, and bring back proof of the same, in which case it realises that it’s not real and ceases to exist.
In The Golden Sickle, an island off the coast of Scotland has converted to Druidism (which isn’t a problem per se) and is being manipulated by a Corrupt noble (which is). The players need to go there, spring a Light-aligned spy from captivity, and ideally make the townsfolk realise what a greedy opportunist their mayor is.
The Music of Misery has the children of an Irish village disappearing to the sound of someone playing the flute. It turns out that it’s the work of a tribe of Corrupt faeries out for revenge against humans for making the magic go away once upon a time. The flute is a magical artifact that opens a gateway to the faeries’ extradimensional haven.
The Dragon Conspiracy, not unreasonably, is about a conspiracy involving a dragon. A bunch of Corrupt dwarves have mind-whammied the people of a village into thinking that they’re long-time friends and complained to them that they’re under attack by an evil air dragon. The dragon they’re fingering is in fact a noble fire dragon, but the dwarves have injured its throat so it can’t speak or breathe fire, and then cast a spell on it to make it resemble an air dragon. The players are sent to slay the supposed evil beast, but should preferably realise that something is hinky.
The Beasts Beyond the Light concerns a pair of political refugees from Orrorsh, who are being hunted by two werewolves in the service of Thratchen (who if you recall has covertly set himself up as de facto High Lord of Orrorsh while the Gaunt Man is dealing with his little trapped-in-a-possibility-storm situation). They’ve found out that he’s not actually reporting to the Gaunt Man, so now he wants them dead. Not sure how that’s such a big secret given that all player characters are assumed to know about it, but fine. The players are tasked with taking them to an abandoned abbey and having a big old monster movie showdown with silver bullets and holy relics.
In The Sleep of Death, a sorcerer has been robbing occult stores in London to build a sort of magical weapon of mass destruction that’s going to drive the whole city insane. He’s making use of a Hand of Glory to overpower the shopkeepers, which is an icky talisman that can put people into perpetual sleep that can only be broken if the Hand is returned to the corpse it was fashioned from. The players have to hit the books, find out how the relevant magic works, and then first clobber the sorcerer and then get the Hand back in its grave so that those snoozing shopkeepers wake up.
Assault on Urquhart has the players travel to Loch Ness, which now seems to have a real monster in it. It’s actually a water dragon in the service of a Viking chieftain, who in turn is there to raise an army of Vikings, half-folk and lesser folk to harrass any Light forces in the region.
The titular Henbane the Witch is Ardinay’s pet ferret, who is actually an evil mage out to assassinate her. The players need to figure that out and then hunt down a woman who has every nook and cranny of the keep memorised and can turn into a tiny animal.
Aaaaaaand finally, The Crown of Arthur has a vampire from Orrorsh and her ghoul minions digging up Glastonbury Tor looking for Arthur’s crown, which is an Eternity Shard. There isn’t much more to it than that, but the vampire gets a strangely in-depth backstory full of Gothic tragedy, in contrast to the far more sparse writeups most villains in this book gets. You feel kind of like she’s escaped from Vampire: the Masquerade…
Well, that’s a lot of content for a 66-page book! Most of it is really good, too. You really get a feel for what sort of place Aysle is, about the many forms that the Dark takes, and how things frequently aren’t what they seem. The way that the fantastic, extra-dimensional elements are blended with the history and landmarks of the actual British and Scandinavian countries (with, admittedly, a few fumbles on the details) is also particularly nice – this is the same thing that I liked in The Living Land, and that i missed in The Nile Empire, a strong sense of both what the realm normally is and what it’s been turned into.
Next, we’ll be heading into a full-fledged campaign. Stay tuned for The Relics of Power.
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.
