At the end of last year I attended the Dragonmeet event in Kensington. In previous years, I attend purely as a visitor; but, on this occasion I attended as a guest of Arion Games. I have been writing for Arion for the historical adventure game Maelstrom, so planned to do my bit running an adventure. I have to admit, I went there having never run a game at a convention before. If anyone involved experienced any trauma as a result, I can only apologize. I don’t think it went too badly in the end. I did have a bit of a struggle choosing an adventure to play. There book includes an adventure – but, anyone with even a vague knowledge of Maelstrom will have played and read it. The sort of person willing to play a Maelstrom game may very well have some foreknowledge of the game. Both Graham Bottley, the man behind Arion, and I have written short adventures for Maelstrom, but I didn’t necessarily want to run those either. If I could get someone interested in the game, they’d want to download some material – and knowing those adventures in advance… I don’t know – it just didn’t seem right.
So, instead, I opted for writing something completely new. My making that decision presented a new issue, because I had only a fortnight to write and prepare that adventure. I could write something from scratch or see if I had something lying around the house already. My mind settled on my incomplete Avignon supplement for PARANOIA. I had the skeleton of an adventure written for that. Admittedly, the adventure – and campaign – set events in 1397, and the standard Maelstrom game happens in the middle of the 16th century, but this would be a one-off con adventure, so it didn’t matter.
I wrote several pages of notes, sketched out a bunch of maps, and created characters of a non-combative nature to keep the game entertaining without resorting to a sword to solve everything. The character’s would be pilgrims visiting Avignon seeking forgiveness for their sins. A cardinal would offer then forgiveness if they simply completed a single night of babysitting for the 6 year old son of a high ranking noble. I imagined medieval ‘Home Alone‘.
I knew I wanted to add some intrigue, so taking a PARANOIA leaf out of the book, I created secret missions for everyone and secret equipment, too. To simplify communication of the secret stuff, I wrote everything on stickers and put them on the front of ordinary playing cards. I could give each players a hand of cards that they could reference throughout the game and I could, maybe, reuse later on.
The adventure worked out well. I don’t think anyone zoned out or lost interest. I tried to keep my focus moving around the table and opted for a less serious stance to keep the energy flowing. I didn’t try to simulate accents and claimed the characters had enough grasp of the basics of French not to need to struggle with language. The 6-year old proved to be an irritating pain in the butt. I’m reasonably certain kids in the Medieval times did act this way, though kids of nobles might have done. I’m sure spoilt and demanding translates through the ages. In the end, two characters almost achieved their objective and another did, but suffering serious personal injury in the process – almost losing his right arm to a lucky sword swing. I spent a lot of time screeching as the 6-year old and being a right little shit. I suspect the adventure went well without necessarily promoting the actual nature of the game – though, Maelstrom promotes simplicity of mechanics and I definitely displayed that by hardly touching the dice at all. I also identified a definite gap in the market for a Maelstrom gaming screen.
So, I now face the question – should I take all the work I did for the Avignon supplement and rework it for Maelstrom?
Take some of this CyberClean stuff – cyberclean.tv, scale it up to the size of a medium sized dog and make it artificially intelligent. Then, assign it to both the Equipment and the Hygiene Officer – or just one of them. Or both, but in shifts. The unnatural pooch – nicknamed Clean Sweep after some dog from an Old Reckoning infotainment series – looks like an enormous lump of bright yellow silly putty, with four formless leg-like appendages, but no apparent head or sensory equipment. Indeed, the Sweep seems to swap ends when least expected.
The material has cleaning and anti-bacterial properties such that wrapping it around almost anything lifts off surface dirt immediately, but also gets at those hard to reach bits. It can clean almost any material – from fabric through plastics to metals, as well as a range of organics, like timber, flora or skin. Apply it to a filthy weapon to get it sparkling clean, or remove ground in stains from your uniform. Try it on floors, keyboards, tankbot tracks, dirty Commie mutant traitors and more besides.
Yeah, when you get skin in contact with it, it sometimes pulls out hairs, the greasy content of pores and the occasional ill-protected eyeball or toenail. Occasionally, cleaning a weapon results in a thorough external and internal clean that might possibly include removal of bullet-sized pieces of metallic grit. Possibly, if used on careful signed and identified R&D equipment, it might remove surface paint, labelling and ink – leaving you with a sparkling clean device and a world of opportunity remembering how to use it, or deactivate it. And sometimes, the great yellow lump goes wandering off and tries to make friends with citizens of senior security clearance to your own, cleaning anything and everything for the Good of Alpha Complex. It should respond to it’s handler, if addressed by name, and has a series of security protocols in place to ensure the absolute safety of all citizens, so there’s nothing to worry about. Unless the handler’s dead, or missing – or gets incorrectly reassigned after the original handler suffers a fatal accident.
The official PARANOIA Dev Blog posted about Petri Wessman’s blog where you can dig up all manner of PARANOIA book reviews. I’m reasonably sure I’ve mentioned it before – largely because the review of ‘The Underplex‘ came over as entirely reasonable:
This is by no means a “must have” book for Paranoia, but neither is it bad.
I’m not going to argue with that. The blog contains numerous other reviews on all manner of books, games, films and other sundries – so, well worth surveilling.
It was ever so kind of Citizen Shart to point out that Mongoose has hit DriveThruRPG / RPGNow with a very pleasant surprise:
Just thought you’d like to know Mongoose has just reduced price of ALL THEIR PRODUCT DOWNLOADS at RPGNow/ DriveThruRPG by about 40%. This includes PARANOIA and Classic PARANOIA lines (25th Anniversary & XP editions).
According to Mongoose site, this is a PERMANENT price reduction.
So, in the words of a Romulan ambassador, “There will never be a better time.” If you don’t already own them all for real, or didn’t manage to get hold of (almost) everything on DVD when the Limited Edition trilogy came out, now would seem an ideal moment to head over to the store and stock up on those missing gems of recent PARANOIA infotainment.
I managed to read a short story over breakfast, using the Stanza app on my iPhone. I don’t manage to do anything quite so significant during breakfast any day of the week, but on Sunday… well, it impressed even me.
I read ‘The Defenders‘ by Philip K. Dick. If it hasn’t been mentioned somewhere in a PARANOIA bibliography before, it needs to be appended. I’m sure it has.
Our world has descended into nuclear war. The Cold War went hot, and the Soviet and Allied forces struck fast and hard with weapons that rendered the surface uninhabitable. Mankind found a place to live deep beneath the ground, protected in great bunkers. Civilisation exists within layers of habitation beneath the earth. People live desperate lives, eating synthetic food, existing for their work bathed in artificial light. Stooped, tired and angry, they do what they can for the war effort, manufacturing weapons for transportation to the surface – where the Leady armies of both sides continue to battle. The artificial life-form known as the Leady can exist in the radioactive wasteland of the surface and continue to fight for the just cause of those struggling below. In time, the Leady will triumph and then their task will be to rebuild and cleanse the surface. Until then, the people strive to live from day-to-day, working hard, absorbing daily news reports from the war above like sponges, and hoping one day to see the Sun again.
I can see a touch of PARANOIA, a smattering of Terminator. Dick plays with themes he has used before, but the short tale makes for an enjoyable read – and when you reach the end, you know the conclusion could go no other way. You could have PARANOIA use the Leady concept to mean no one see the Outdoors. The Computer simply can’t risk lives sending anything up there but robots. It isn’t safe, it wouldn’t be right – to risk anyone out there would be to waste precious resource and serve only to create more casualties that benefit the cause of the enemy.
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