Tag: West End Games

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

• First edition core
• Gamemaster Screen Adventures
• Vapors Don’t Shoot Back
• The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues
• Send in the Clones
• Acute Paranoia
• Clones in Space

I would say that this is where it got silly, but it’s Paranoia, so it was already pretty silly. I will say that this one feels a little like someone just threw their hands up and decided to give zero craps, which is maybe not entirely a good thing – yes, a certain meh-just-go-with-it spirit is explicitly part of the game, but maybe giving just one or two craps might help? Anyway, let’s get into it and we’ll see what we can make of it.

So, the backstory for this adventure is that a doohickey called the Transdimensional Collapsatron was discovered as part of a long-dead High Programmer’s possessions and accidentally activated, and it transported three wizards from Dimension X to Alpha Complex. Yes, wizards. You know, guys in robes and pointy hats who can make stuff happen by chanting and waving their hands. They’re part of this sci-fi comedy game now. See what I mean about this being maybe a step too far in the sure-throw-it-in way of thinking?

But okay. Wizard magic (“Shaping the Force,” in their own nomenclature) works on the same rules as mutations, though wizards are actually good at it, and know some entirely new spells/mutations like throwing fireballs, spreading magical darkness, and communicating across language barriers. The GM is cautioned to make it clear to the players that the wizards, while certainly an intimidating outside-context problem, aren’t all-powerful – they act stressed when they have to fast-cast something, their magical force fields shrink a little every time they deflect damage, sometimes their spells just plain go wrong and cause a big mess that they clearly didn’t intend, and so on. Don’t get the players so demoralised that they won’t even have a go at them, basically. You can’t have their efforts go badly and hilariously wrong if they won’t make them in the first place!

Like most adventures so far, this one comes with half a dozen pregen characters, though here they are a bit more flavourful than usual since they are not-too-subtly also meant to fit fantasy stereotypes – we have a grumpy short guy who likes messing around with tech, a gung-ho Femme Fatale member with lots of combat training, a happy-go-lucky runt with sticky fingers and a mutation that makes him super-persuasive, a big dumb meatbag who’s immune to psychic influence… All good stuff, and like I said, a little more interesting than the usual selection of samey, one-dimensional little backstabbing nitwits. Like I keep saying, the game designers chose an incredibly narrow premise, and while that’s great for making the game distinct, it also makes it very challenging to come up with material for it after a certain point. The way these supplements keep dragging in more and more things that don’t strictly belong in a “classic Paranoia adventure” (though keep in mind that things stayed purely “classic” for maybe two or three books before the drift started; by Vapors Don’t Shoot Back, the players were already boarding a pirate ship) is a pretty direct result of that, I’d say.

The adventure starts with the wizards, their moronic lizardman flunky Randy in tow, appearing at a vehicle repair facility (they interrogated some clones demanding to be given “transportation home” and this is the confused directions they got). The players get sent in after them, get saddled with a bunch of shell-shocked civilians who glom onto them and keep getting in the way, and get some sense of what the wizards are capable of. They also follow them into the facility where they have to deal with malfunctioning and psychotic bots. The wizards ultimately teleport away.

The second altercation with the wizards happen at a power station, where the wizards managed to plug in the Transdimensional Collapsatron but couldn’t get it to work properly, resulting in some other fantasy thing being transported in. A few suggestions are given, from a bunch of hungry hobbits to a fire-breathing dragon. The players will have another inclusive altercation with the wizards, though this time they might also be able to communicate a bit with them – the wizards are beginning to despair of getting home under their own power and so are thus more receptive to anyone who might even conceivably be willing and able to help. Either way, they eventually disappear again.

Through it all, the Computer is being unhelpful as usual, but it’s also being rather less… Computer-y. What I mean is, it keeps being sarcastic and abusive in its pronouncements rather than doing its usual dissonant-serenity, “you are mistaken, citizen. No one is screaming. The Computer is your friend” thing. That’s another thing that makes this adventure feel like it was just cobbled together by someone who just didn’t feel inspired at all by the setting as it as.

The third time the wizards show up, it’s at a travel information office (they wanted information on how to travel back home, but… well, that was a bit of a non-starter). There, they’ve managed to capture a powerful psychic mutant who they feel is a little closer to their own kind, so when they flee this time, they’ll leave Randy behind to take her with them instead. Randy can tell the players approximately what is going on, though of course he’ll do it in the slimiest way possible so that they doubt every word. Also, as an additional complication, a bunch of sleeper agents from a rival Alpha Complex also try to capture the wizards and the players end up having to fight them for the privilege of losing them all over again.

Finally, the players corner the wizards in an R&D facility just as they’ve managed to get the Transdimensional Collapsatron to work, and they all get sent back to Dimension X. It’s your basic fantasy setting, in spite of the pulp-sci-fi name, though befitting Paranoia it’s got a black comedy slant to it, with everything run by comically-sociopathic wizards who treat their human “herds” with the same care and compassion that the Computer treats its cloned citizens. There is also Randy’s species, who are the wizards’ evil soldiers and enforcers.

Once back home, the wizards are once more on certain footing, but they’ve exhausted themselves and aren’t up for dealing with the players right now, so they yell for some lizardmen minions to come help them, and strike a quick retreat into their dark evil dungeon (because of course they have a dark evil dungeon) along with the Transdimensional Collapsatron, leaving the players to deal with the mooks and get their bearings. Once they have figured out where they are (Randy is still with them and can advise), they don’t have much choice but to embark on a dungeon crawl to secure their way back home. Fortunately, a bunch of R&D clones and a bot got accidentally brought along, so there’ll be both someone capable of rigging up the TC and a power source to connect it to… assuming the players can keep them from being killed or destroyed, of course.

So it’s a dungeon crawl, and in most respect a fairly linear and basic one – the players pass through one chamber after another, blunder into traps (theoretically they can avoid them, but that’s unlikely to happen, so the best they can hope for is surviving them), fight monsters, and maybe find some loot along the way. There is magical healing items sprinkled throughout, to make up for the fact that there’s not going to be any instant clone replacements. Some of the more memorable encounters are a gelatin cube (not a gelatinous cube, gelatin. Raspberry-flavoured, in fact), a succubus (lucky that Alpha Complex clones get stuffed full of hormone suppressants that render them immune to such temptations), an over-friendly and near-invincible dog whose drool causes all metal objects to rust into uselessness, and two tribes of talking penguins who try to get the players to side with them. One room has a mixed bag of monsters sitting around waiting for it to be time to walk off on their patrols – they’re the wandering monsters of this dungeon, see? Oh, and at one point, there’s an orc, to justify the title, but he’s actually the dungeon chef and can’t put up any kind of fight.

In the end, the wizards turn out to have vacated the premises when the players got too close to their sanctum, having left the Transdimensional Collapsatron and a note telling the players to just take it and bugger off home. So presumably they do. The epilogue suggests that the Computer then sends them off on new and deadlier adventures in other dimensions, teasing a supplement called Vulture Warriors from Dimension X. I’m pretty sure that’s a joke, but there is in fact a second-edition supplement with that name…

Anyway, this was fun and all, but… yeah. It felt a bit too gimicky, despite my stated position that the best adventures so far have been the one who have been slightly gimicky. I guess the part that’s missing for me is the thin line of logic tying the obvious inspiration to the realities of Alpha Complex? Like, in all the other adventures, when something wildly out of genre turned up, there was always some sort of fig-leaf explanation for why it totally made sense, honest, and that just made it funnier. Here, wizards aren’t, e.g., powerful mutants who just happen to wear robes and carry staffs for spurious reasons. They really are wizards. Nor are they exaggerated, parodied or otherwise ridiculous like the aliens in Clones in Space were. There’s no joke there, is what I guess I’m saying, beyond them simply being in the game in the first place – which is strange and disjointed, but not really funny, per se.

Oh well. Next up is the final book published for the first edition, HIL Sector Blues. We’ll see if that’s a return to form.

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

• First edition core
• Gamemaster Screen Adventures
• Vapors Don’t Shoot Back
• The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues
• Send in the Clones
• Acute Paranoia

Moving along through the first edition of Paranoia, we reach the point where Alpha Complex was officially not large enough (or at least, not diverse enough) anymore, and the game felt the need to explore brave new horizons. Specifically, it ventured into Earth orbit. Funny thing, that was the first place Cyberpunk went off to, too, when it came around a few years later… Anyway, there will, naturally, be bug-eyed monsters and evil computers (well, more evil than usual). And explosive decompression. A lot of that.

Before anything else, we get one of those choose-your-own-adventure portions that have sadly gone out of fashion. Awww, that’s nice.

The adventure proper starts with the players needing to escort a traitor to his execution while he spouts cryptic-yet-ominous phrases. The book cheerfully tells you that this has nothing to do with anything that will follow, but it’ll drive the players crazy trying to figure out how it all factored in. Heh.

The players then get sent after traitorous High Programmer Bette-U-LYF, who is actually a recurring character – she was one of the shadowy figures screwing with the players back in The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, though none of that has any relevance here (especially since that one likely ended with Alpha Complex blowing up, and is thus even less canon than anything else in Paranoia). She’s escaped to orbit, where a bunch of old space stations are still floating around.

Since the players won’t have access to the CRUD system introduced in Send in the Clones up there, they get their full clone families sent along with them, which is kind of like trying to herd along a class of hyperactive children. The GM is instructed to act out each player’s most annoying habits, though that sounds to me like it might breed genuine and non-fun ill-will… Still, it’s an interesting variation, and like the game points out, it does put the players to the choice of whether to execute some of their clones to restore order when needed, even though that uses up their “extra lives.”

So up the players go, into the first space station. It’s a relatively harmless one, where most of the dangers are in the form of schmuck bait – the players, after all, don’t even know that the Earth revolves around the sun, or indeed that the sun exists, so they have approximately zero knowledge of how to safely navigate a space station without accidentally blowing themselves out an airlock. In the course of their explorations, they’ll encounter a hatched alien egg and accidentally trigger a very life-like (as in: they will have no way of knowing that it’s not real until it ends and they realise that they’re not dead) simulation of the station crashing to the ground.

They eventually manage to catch a shuttle to the next station. There are two unhatched alien eggs in the shuttle. They actually won’t hatch while on route, but they’re located in the dark behind the passenger seats, and they keep pulsating and making creepy noises. Muahahaha.

The second station is a bit more dangerous. It’s populated by bots who have set up their own society, complete with different backbiting factions – one who wants to bring their broken-down controlling Computer back online, one that wants to prevent that from happening, and one that just hates humans on general principle. The latter isn’t quite as much of a problem as it seems, since the bots are under the impression that the players are “androids,” but of course that means that they might try to perform “maintenance” on them, which will include replacing some of those highly obsolete arms and legs with the latest model…

Also, the Computer-loyal bots have gotten it into their heads that the players are the Chosen Ones who will awaken their master from its “slumber” (it’s in pieces all over the floor, so that’s unlikely to happen, but that’s why you call it faith). Which, as it turns out, is less of a cushy job than it sounds, since they’re meant to awaken it by being ritually sacrificed before it. And then the other factions attack. And the alien who hatched from the egg back at the first station. So mayhem, basically.

The players hopefully manage to limp along to a third station, which is run by a functioning Computer that is even more of a hardass than the Alpha Complex Computer. It’s got a problem, though it won’t admit to it – it keeps getting boarded by these annoyingly bulletproof aliens called the Shmegegi. Those eggs that keep turning up aren’t theirs, incidentally, but they are laid by a species they use as servants and attack dogs. Anyway, the station Computer decide that the players can probably fix the whole thing somehow and throws them at the alien ship.

The players stumble through a weird alien menagerie of bizarre creatures (galactic travelers who have bought passage on the Shmegegi ship) before finally encountering the Shmegegi themselves. Who are stuffy British stereotypes, only with lots of tentacles. They are here to steal Earth’s women, their own having gone extinct, but they are too uptight and proper to do anything as uncouth as force themselves on them, so their plan is more about awkwardly courting them in old-fashioned ways. They’re keeping Bette-U-LYF captive for this purpose (she originally hoped to broker some sort of deal with them to get back in the Computer’s good graces, but it hasn’t worked out).

The Shmegegi “torture” the players by subjecting them to tacky and low-brow subjects, which the Shmegegi consider the most painful thing imaginable. When that doesn’t work, they are brought before their leader, the McShmegegus, who rants at them about how they will take over the world and how the players have a chance to be first among their servants. The players can accept, but then they’re fitted with brain implants that blow up their skulls if they so much as think about being disloyal to the Shmegegi, and sent back to Alpha Complex, where they’ll somehow need to convince the Computer that they’re still its loyal citizens. It probably won’t work, is the uptake.

The alternative is to follow Bette-U-LYF’s lead and escape to commandeer some “pie fighters” from the last platform, in which they can engage the alien ship in battle and eventually drive it off. Having done that, they have saved the Earth, at least until the aliens invariably return… but of course, they have no way to get back down there, and will inevitably starve to death unless they think of something really brilliant. If they do think of something really brilliant and get back to Alpha Complex, of course, the Computer rewards them with an even more fatally dangerous mission.

I got to admit, I love this one. It really manages to hit every single space-adventure cliche in the book while still being fun and surprising. It probably does herald the game’s drift away from Alpha Complex in the later half of the second edition, but honestly, I’m not sure I care enough about Alpha Complex to be overly bothered by that. We’ll see if I end up eating my words.

The next one is Orcbusters, where… the players are magically transported to a fantasy dungeon crawl. Okay, wasting no time there, I see…

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

• First edition core
• Gamemaster Screen Adventures
• Vapors Don’t Shoot Back
• The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues
• Send in the Clones

It turns out I was wrong in thinking this was an early sourcebook. It has some rule and setting additions, but mostly it’s a bunch of adventures. Well, that suits me fine. I’ve started to think that while published adventures aren’t usually very good for actually running, they probably serve as the best way to expand a game. What better way to understand new material than to see how it’s meant to be used?

That said, the book does start out with some new rules. First, we get a rundown of how the computer tests its servants to see if they have gone insane from its abuse yet, which it does by abusing them. Until they go insane. The “treatment” can verge from being hauled off and lobotomised to being handed a party hat and told to engage in five minutes of Fun to relieve stress. Failure to have Fun in the correct way is, naturally, treason.

Next, and related to the above, is a section on drugs, where it’s also established (possibly for the first time?) that clones are kept drugged to the gills 100% of the time to keep them from having unauthorised feelings.

We get a bunch of new secret societies, including the Earth Mothers, who want to bring back natural reproduction and gender roles, and the Femme Fatales, who also want gender roles in the sense that they want women’s role to be running everything and men’s role to be run. The Knights of the Circular Object cosplay being fantasy heroes, Trekkies cosplay being… take a guess, and Groupies just fawn over celebrities a lot. The Sy-B-LNG Rivals are higher-numbered clones who want to kill their precursors and take their place. You can’t be in that last one, but your clones might be.

We get rules for playing as bots. Bots are build with a rudimentary point-buy system where you need to decide things like your size, form of locomotion and what the closest thing you have to hands is. You don’t get skills, but you can be outfitted with programs that function like them, but which also kind of take you over while active (as in, if you load a fighting program you can’t address any problem except by trying to fight it until it’s run its course). You are also saddled with Asimov Circuits that force you to serve Man no matter how much you’d rather blow him up. There is a sample adventure for a group of bots that makes it clear that they’re as perpetually hosed as everyone else in Alpha Complex – it’s just that the threat over their head is to be declared “malfunctioning” instead of “traitor.”

Segueing into the adventures, first up is Me and my Shadow, Mark IV, where the players are set to guarding the egotistical super-tank robot Mark IV for twelve hours. And of course something goes wrong every hour, on the hour. A gang of Communists attack! A scrubot insists on trying to clean Mark IV so vigorously that it’ll get lobotomised from it! A bratty school class run all over the place! A component falls off Mark IV and it has a nervous breakdown until the component can somehow be reattached! A group of entitled ULTRAVIOLET joggers demand that Mark IV be removed from their morning route (and they’ll edit the Computer into backing them up if necessary)! The Communists come back with reinforcements!

I’ll admit it – at a certain point I was chuckling from reading it.

Other adventures include The Harder They Clone, where the players hunt down a motorcycle-driving, rock’n’roll-singing madman; Warrior of the Night Cycle, which has a High Programmer start a ninja clan based on old movies; Whitewash, where the players are supposed to paint a wall black, but neither they nor they nor the officer in charge can afford to admit to the Computer that the wall is not already black, so before they can carry out the mission they need to figure out what it is from the latter’s desperate hints; and The Second Coming, where they tangle with a clueless machine empath who has been convinced that he’s the Computer’s messiah. Miami Laser has the Troubleshooter team getting put in a completely phony documentary meant to showcase the glamorous life of heroic Troubleshooters, without being told that it’s anything but a regular mission but with execution as punishment for not acting like a square-jawed action hero. Of special note are An ARD Day’s Night and its sequel Reboot Camp, where the Computer crashes and comes back online confused. So the idea for the ill-fated The Crash storyline was there early on, huh?

All in all, this is great stuff. I feel like at this point, the writers had figured out that Alpha Complex, played straight, simply didn’t have enough range to support a game – but that there was endless hilarity to be mined from taking a situation or character that absolutely didn’t fit into Alpha Complex and shoehorning it in anyway. With a usually-homicidal Alpha Complex spin to it, of course.

Next up is Clones in Space, which I think was actually the earliest Paranoia product I read back in the day. Let’s see how I like it the second time around.

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

• First edition core
• Gamemaster Screen Adventures
• Vapors Don’t Shoot Back
• The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues

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!

Previously on our Paranoia readthrough:

• First edition core
• Gamemaster Screen Adventures
• Vapors Don’t Shoot Back

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.

Having covered the original Paranoia box and the adventures that came with the Gamemaster’s Screen, it’s time for the first full-length adventure. Mind you, when I say “full-length,” I still only mean like 30 pages long, brevity still being a virtue back in the eighties.

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.