I had one of those PARANOIA moments while out roleplaying last week. Asked what games we could run, I went through various options and mentioned PARANOIA. The immediate reaction – “Isn’t that more of a one off?”. Well, that rather depends, I suppose.
To go off on a tangent, my sons wargame. They wargame irregularly these days, as Magic seems the game of the moment, but they still do and cart their great black 40K boxes around filled to the brim with plastic figures. In the past, I have offered non-Warhammer models to them, fully painted, and been snubbed. ‘Yes,’ they’ll say, ‘it is a vicious flesh-rending android in disguise, but it doesn’t have a plasma cannon and a chain-sword.’ If the figure doesn’t fit the stats and equipment, they’re not interested. Even if you use the same not-right model for a whole unit – thus clearly identifying the type of troop they represent – it isn’t good enough. I could never get them to see the point. They could buy models from anywhere or – shock horror – make them or print them or something, and then it would cost so much to create a full army. Why link one thing to another when it’s all about creativity and imagination.
My roleplaying mind works the same way. Why can’t I run a Doctor Who game with the Gumshoe system? Or Star Trek with Traveller? Or Primeval with QUERP? And, why can’t I play a more serious strain of PARANOIA over more than one mission? Or with a different system? For a hobby about imagination, sometimes the systems create their own bottleneck to creativity, especially those systems with a ‘name’. Got a great system intended to run a game about a certain TV or literary property? Dump it and improvise. Create something new and pepper it with house rules to make it work – then note down those that really work and use them again next time.
So, yes – I’ll be running PARANOIA at some point. And, rather than running a one off, I’ll break the ‘rules’ and try for something a little different… another mission after I’ve finished the first one!
[Professor Stone and colleagues at Yale University] have now succeeded in building [an anti-laser].
[The] device focuses two lasers beams of a specific frequency into a specially designed optical cavity made from silicon, which traps the incoming beams of light and forces them to bounce around until all their energy is dissipated.
In a paper published in the journal Science they demonstrated that the anti-laser could adsorb 99.4 per cent of incoming light, for a specific wavelength.
So, we now have a device that can deal with those pesky RED Clearance lasers, but can’t handle a different wavelength. R&D, no doubt, can guarantee that the 0.6% failure to dissipate won’t be a problem. As all loyal citizens know, at least 87.5% of all Commie Traitors can’t shoot straight to begin with…
From: BBC News – Technology, 17 Feb 2011
The Troubleshooter team, while engaged in a mission of particular danger and excitement, draw the attentions of a High Programmer. At particularly awkward moments amidst the action / investigation / mayhem / explosive decompression / heart-rending emotional exchange the team encounter INFRARED Clearance cannon-fodder / RED Clearance administrative personnel / communication rockets / DiploBots / annoying advermercial PDA scumware downloads / experimental mind-altering message delivery pharmaceuticals. The missives to the team ask probing questions of a single member of the team, most commonly communicated through other members (“There a mandatory download here from Gly-Karq Crunchy-Moist Bars. Gary-O – the download wants to know if it’s safe? Is it safe? Is it SAFE?! Oh, and whether I want to download the Gly-Karq toolbar.”).
The encounters / questions pass from member to member, complicating actual incidents within the proper mission. Then, two-thirds of the way through, one of the Troubleshooters (probably the one who already has a weight of suspicions and malice aimed in his/her direction) receives a direct command from The Computer to go directly to Hygiene Cubicle SVZ-4451 for an important mission update. The High Programmer makes a direct and brazen request of the Troubleshooter to drop the current mission and report directly to his sub-node. The ULTRAVIOLET Clearance citizen has watched the Troubleshooter’s performance closely and believes he (or she) would make an ideal new member of his Program Group. The rendezvous at the sub-node will provide important debriefing, re-equipping and assignment to a new team / mission / sector / Security Clearance / Service Group / sub-arm of a Non-Administrative Regulatory Function.
While in communication with the High Programmer, the rest of the team get sent to a location directly adjacent to the Hygiene Cubicle (assuming they didn’t just follow the Troubleshooter anyway) where Control believe a specific threat may manifest at any moment. As they search, the team come under fire from hidden assailants – and mid-firefight, the Troubleshooter with the offer emerges from the cubicle. The team might well wonder whether he’s turned to the other side / been brainwashed / undergone techno-psychological reprogramming / been replaced with a doppelgänger / gone rogue on illegal meds / shown his true colours for the first time and come out as a supporter of a glorious Communist revolution. The Programmer will deny all knowledge of the communication if contacted and all evidence of the conversation will be scrabbled / erased / destroyed / disintegrated / replaced with re-runs of Teela-O‘s 1000 Finest Moments / near undetectably altered to make it look like the Troubleshooter was trying to blackmail the High Programmer on some trumped up charge of lese majesty.
Troubleshooter Central Control has implemented a new resource integration and management system (RIMS) for which the Troubleshooter team has been selected as test subjects, along with several other teams. The system, a sub-node of a division of a lesser matrix of The Computer, takes all the information about the resources available and the tasks currently requiring attention, from Commie attacks and outer wall breaches through to pedestrian transit hygiene operations and ambient habitat temperature monitoring malfunctions.
Everyone gathers at Control prepared for the shift ahead, then intermittantly new jobs come through on the team PDAs. On completion of a task, the team need to log off and awaiting a new job. The system juggles the available teams and the incoming tasks, trying to figure out the most efficient application of resource against mission priorities. Of course, the system isn’t working in sync with the PDAs or Alpha Complex internal clocks, or forgets it has teams available temporarily, or duplicates a team and assigns them too much work, or assigns phantom teams in support of the Troubleshooters in high hazard locations, or assigns the wrong skill templates to the team members resulting in allocation to inappropriate activities, or goes into a short term loop returning the teams, via circuitous route, to repeat the same task claiming ‘ac7ivi7y inc0mpl3te’ on the previous occasion.
The RIMS tries to fit the best teams to the most appropriate tasks, but matters become more complicated when Commies launch an attack on WXV Sector by breaching the north wall. The team find they’re constantly being assigned high priority menial tasks while passing through areas of heavy fire and open combat. Teams assigned to the conflict seek help and assaults by Commies complicate travel, but the RIMS feedback indicates increasing concern over service level failures. The Troubleshooters have to keep to their assigned roster of jobs and keep them all at green status for fear of reprisal. At the same time, they face increasing danger in moving from one location to the next, especially when the conflict with the Commies begins to render direct routes impossible, despite the RIMS persistance that they’re used to maximum travel efficiences.
Having stared down the Vultures guarding the door and made it into the room, the Troubleshooters watch the Briefing Officer keel over halfway through the mission brief, without explanation. He’d been telling them about the Commie infiltration of a sub-level warehouse facility in AKZ Sector, gone boggle eyed, then collapsed like a stone. After lying on the floor for a moment, he probably starts spurting blood out of all his orifices, or exudes a foul smelling, but innocuous, gas, or starts to make a strange keening whistle, or spasms violently, and randomly, or turns into a brain-hungry zombie. Whatever happens, the Troubleshooters find themselves in a briefing room with a senior clearance administrator knowing full well they have a couple of trigger happy Vultures right outside the door…
Perhaps if the Troubleshooters can patch in a link to Troubleshooter Control or through to The Computer they can present the evidence for their innocence and get out of this situation with their skins, clearly proving that the briefing officer’s subordinate personal assistant killed him with poisonous micro-needles, or he suffered lethal radiation doses from a key fob he got at his last Sierra Club meeting, or his psychokinetic mutant power caused massive swelling of his pineal gland, or a HPD & MC operative spilt a noxious chemical in the vent under the officer’s briefing station, or a Death Leopard member called Rubik has set this whole room up with a series of fiendish bowel-churning booby-traps and anti-personnel devices, or he had lupus.
If they can get a solid case together and enough evidence, it shouldn’t be problem to get themselves cleared of his death and get right on to that mission they never quite got all the details for.