PARANOIA

Tonight I have at long last finished laying out the 64-page PARANOIA character creation rules supplement Criminal Histories, by Citizen Biggles and the Traitor Recycling Studio. I'm two months late on my deadline, which won't help my report to Friend Mongoose at debriefing.

It was the tables, okay? Criminal Histories features a "Prehistory Pachinko" that generates a detailed background for your Troubleshooter, including NPC citizens who like or hate you, past felonious activities, and a trail of evidence other players can use to uncover your misdeeds. The Pachinko consists of eleventy-billion separate 1d20 tables. The tables were my idea, and Bill did a great job with them. But omigod, the tables, the tables....

My desktop publishing layout software is the generally excellent Adobe InDesign CS. (Warning: This page crashes my Firefox browser!) But in the last many days of unsatisfying congress with InDesign's table editor, I have become all too closely acquainted with its quirks. Get this: If you place a large table on the page, then enter text in one single table cell that is just one character too long, the entire table vanishes from the page as "overset" text. And many, many table cells in Criminal Histories were far more than one character too long....

But citizens, share with me this happiness pill! Criminal Histories is now done done done done, and though my lateness has already caused a delay from its originally scheduled December appearance, the book may yet make its newly rescheduled January slot. Now it's straight on at high speed to the next book on the schedule, The Underplex by Paul Baldowski (of Omega Complex). I'll talk more about Underplex soon. For now, I'm soooo glad it has only a couple of pages of tables....