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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Sector Zero 

The secret is out: Sector Zero is the next PARANOIA mission collection from Mongoose Publishing, due in late August.

The name, "Sector Zero," is Alpha Complex slang for Troubleshooter punishment duty. If someone in power has vindictively made sure you get assigned missions nobody else wants to go near -- no, I mean even more not-going-near than the usual PARANOIA hose-job mission -- then observers might jocularly remark (where The Computer can't hear them) that you've been "sent to Sector Zero."

Understand: The Computer itself doesn't recognize the concept of "punishment duty." It doesn't issue assignments from a cruel desire to punish; after all, citizens should be happy to serve Alpha Complex in any task. Emotion-based retaliation threatens good order and provokes unhappiness, which is itself punishable by cool, compassionate termination. When a citizen survives the many legal "corrections" described in the PARANOIA rulebook, The Computer, in its wisdom, considers the slate clean. It gives you a fresh start, a fair chance to repent of your treasonous ways -- assuming you have any brain cells left to do so.

But The Computer often issues duty assignments based on requests placed openly by high-clearance citizens -- or covertly by high-degree secret society officers. These guys carry grudges. They carry customized grudge luggage. A Troubleshooter team that happens to offend someone powerful (like that could ever happen) might unknowingly be lining themselves up for a nice one-way trip to Sector Zero.

In the 32-page Sector Zero collection (originally announced under the mistaken title Mission Inscrutable), the Troubleshooters face three different yet uniformly undesirable missions, written by Gareth Hanrahan, Saul Resnikoff, and Jeff Groves of the Traitor Recycling Studio. (The excellent Jim Holloway cover on the Mongoose Sector Zero page credits Gareth alone, but he says they'll fix that before publication. Saul and Jeff, rest easy. What could go wrong?)

Citizens with long memories might recall the blog post "Exile in Alpha Complex" from the April, 2005 archives. (Scroll down to April 19 for the entry.) The comment thread for that post was the direct inspiration for Sector Zero.
Posted by: Allen Varney / 2:55 PM

Comments:
Two things:

Is the pattern of "Yellow binding for mission books" going to be permanent?

Is that cover set in stone? Because it's kind of irritating that there's a word over a guard's face so that we can't see his expression.
# posted by Blogger John Doe : July 15, 2006 5:55 PM
 
(Trying to post this comment a second time...)

The pattern isn't "yellow binding for mission books"; it's "each book's cover is colored with the next color in the security clearance spectrum." Mission books with non-yellow covers include WMD, Flashbacks, and Service Service.

No idea about the Mongoose cover design.
# posted by Blogger Allen Varney : July 17, 2006 12:03 AM
 
The computer logo thingy on the cover edge background... It seems irritating. I like the picture, though :)
# posted by Blogger irve : July 17, 2006 4:33 AM
 
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