PARANOIA

On the Mongoose Publishing forum, Mongoose CEO Matthew Sprange has posted his latest annual overview of the PARANOIA publisher's status. The lengthy State of the Mongoose 2010 discusses plans for Mongoose's many roleplaying lines in sober and pragmatic terms. Here is Matthew's discussion of PARANOIA:

This one has been a funny old fish for us. We announced that, as part of PARANOIA’s 25th Anniversary, we would be breaking the game into three ‘flavours,’ covering Troubleshooters, Internal Security and High Programmers. The idea was that core books for PARANOIA have always done exceptionally well, but the supplements never followed suit. With three core books, PARANOIA would naturally become a more frontline product set.

It has so not worked out that way!

Troubleshooters sells as well as a core book for PARANOIA ever has, but Internal Security and High Programmers, both complete core books, do about 20% better than an average supplement.

This is very frustrating for us because these two are damn good books -- High Programmers especially is a work of art from Gareth Hanrahan, and it deserves far more attention than it has received. After all, allowing players to use ULTRAVIOLET-level characters with all the power and resources of Alpha Complex at their disposal – what is not to like? The cover, done by Chris Quilliams, has especially nailed the game. In fact, PARANOIA creators Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan have said they consider that cover to be the best of any PARANOIA book, published at any time.

And yet gamers are still treating the game as second-fiddle to Troubleshooters…

For 2011, there will four books released for PARANOIA, roughly one every quarter. Two will be brand new adventures (likely for Troubleshooters and High Programmers). The other two will be fulfilling a commitment to keep the classic PARANOIA adventures in print, and have the titles Flashbacks Redux, and Flashbacks Redux Redux. They won’t have the same content as the original Flashbacks books, and will include not only the earliest PARANOIA adventures, but some of the favourites from the XP years as well. The first is due to appear in January and will include YELLOW Clearance Black Box Blues and, my personal favourite (and taking centre stage for the cover art, again by Mr Quilliams), Me and My Shadow Mark IV.

We remain interested in expanding PARANOIA to other territories, but the question always comes back asking what we can do with it. We remain fairly convinced that there is a decent PARANOIA graphic novel or comic strip in there somewhere but, despite several draft scripts, we still have not found the hook.

We’ll keep plugging away at it though. That is the new Mongoose mandate!

Matthew concludes, "Mongoose has taken some knocks over the past few years but the important thing is that, to quote Morpheus, we are still here. Not dead yet. Not all of our peers can say the same thing."

Labels: state of the mongoose