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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.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Rob MacD's alternate PARANOIAs 

Loyal citizen Rob MacDougall, who participated bravely in The Toothpaste Disaster PARANOIA Lexicon game in 2004, has posted three inventive PARANOIA variant settings on the gaming blog Claw Claw Peck.

First up is "Slave Complex of the Under There":
Black Tunnels descend from the surface world to the Crimson Caves of Blood. Below lie the Ochre Delves, the Azure Sepulchre, and the Temples of Elemental Indigo. The descending levels of the Under There represent a kind of, let’s say, “security clearance” for the pecking order of the dungeon. Under constant surveillance by unblinking beholders, ogres bully hobgoblins who bully goblins who bully bootlicking kobolds, who get stuck cleaning elf-gunk out of the death traps. It’s like high school with gelatinous cubes.
Then a steampunk PARANOIA, "Alpha | State," that will ring true to fans of the indie RPG a|state:
One hundred years after Babbage, one hundred years after Lord Byron’s coup, the Alphan Empire is a steam-driven superpower stretching from Barbados to Bangalore. At its heart squats perfidious Alpha, the not so Green and Pleasant Isle, and at Alpha’s heart sprawls the Empress, the city-sized analytical engine that rules and mothers the Empire. And oh, does it need mothering. For the paranoid Empress imagines a thousand perils to her binary virtue. Bomb-throwing Luddites! Bearded onanists! Filthy communards! And behind them all, the agents of another analytical AI: the Empress’ libertine continental nemesis, the Turk.

And finally "Alphaville," which, if you haven't already clicked through based on the two summaries above, just read it.

Man, it makes me yearn to return to Brave New Complex, the huge campaign supplement of variant Alpha Complex settings the Traitor Recycling Studio put together a few years ago. Nothing came of that -- no market -- but perhaps somehow, in some alternate timeline, that book actually got published.

Comments:
New Brave Complex Strikes Back! The Return of the New Brave Complex! New Brave Complex Forever!
 
And yet the only PARANOIA supplement I ever wanted to purchase was Brave New Complex. Go figure...
 
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