PARANOIA as a skin for Legacy, which is a version of the Apocalypse Engine.
Discuss.
Or not. Probably not.
Legacy is a game of post-apocalypse storytelling with shared and playbook-based mechanics for actions – like Apocalypse World. However, Legacy extends the vision to turn the game into a generational story. You not only have a Character Playbook, you also have a Family Playbook.
You have certain abilities from Family and Character alike, as well as standard and specific gear to choose from. You run your character as a key voice of the family, and run the Family as a key player in the world.
It only seems to be a small step into the realm of Service Groups or even different Complexes, taking the Apocalypse to Friend Computer and his equally paranoid rivals.
Maybe it’s just me. I’d quite like to give PARANOIA a more serious spin – not too serious, but just enough. Terry Gilliam levels of seriousness; layered with dark humour and desperation. People driven to their physical and mental limits by doublespeak.
You have a Service Group Playbook to determine the course of the global landscape and a Troubleshooter Playbook for more gritty, ground-level mission play. These would be mid-level management type Troubleshooters, with enough influence for someone to listen, but not enough to run absolutely rampant and without control.
I imagine the idea will get no further than this blog post. I’m just throwing it out there.
I’m 40-pages from finishing Legacy. Once I have finished reading, I think I’d like to give it a go before reviewing it. If it worked well, maybe I’d like to give skinning it a go…
I think most of the work would go into creating thematically tweaked Family Playbooks, as you could pretty much use the character-focussed Playbooks as they come.
It would be interesting to try seeing how the world might develop (or simply spin out of control).
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Years have passed since you posted this, but I’ve actually been thinking the same thing, as I eager await my copy of the 2nd edition of Legacy, which I backed on Kickstarter (and which comes with so many alternate-settings that I was almost surprised there wasn’t a Paranoia-scented one).
That said, the vague idea in my mind was that the Secret Societies would be the “families,” perhaps each tied to a specific High Programmer or something. (I’ll have to have a better look at the Legacy system before I know if that’d be workable.)