Pyramid Review
Paranoia XP
Published by Mongoose Publishing
Written by Allen Varney, Aaron Allston, Paul Baldowski, Beth Fischi, & Dan Curtis Johnson
Art by Jim Holloway
Edited by Allen Varney
256-page b&w hardcover; $39.95
It's been too long since anyone's heard the clarion call of The Computer, demanding its Troubleshooters report for one hazardously entertaining duty or another. Mongoose Publishing still serves Alpha Complex faithfully with Paranoia XP.
If you've lived in an underground cavern for the last 20 years: In Paranoia, Man is driven underground by [not available at your security clearance], but the computer overseer is completely around the twist. Convinced the "Communists" constantly threaten Alpha Complex, it enforces strict, Orwellian rules of hierarchy and behavior that make everyone guilty of some form of treason. The very people The Computer depends upon to solve its most pressing problems -- the "elite" Troubleshooters -- are guilty of secret society membership and possession of mind- and body-bending mutations, among other illicit activities. Catch-22-riddled missions invariably end in disaster, some or all of the participants dying as accusations of neglect, dereliction of duty, and treason fly (along with grenades, laser beams, cudgels . . . ). Oh, and it's funny.
Now the next generation gets to join the killi . . . er, fun. Dispensing with the game's iffier bits of history (Crash of The Computer, the Secret Society Wars), . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: November 19, 2004
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Jackson Games. All rights reserved. Pyramid subscribers are permitted to read this article online, or download it and print out a single hardcopy for personal use. Copying this text to any other online system or BBS, or making more than one hardcopy, is strictly prohibited. So please don't. And if you encounter copies of this article elsewhere on the web, please report it to webmaster@sjgames.com.