Reading Paranoia XP: Alpha Complex Nights

This is another review of a Paranoia XP book, for those interested. If you’re not interested in a review of a 20-year old game book, well… skip it!

In this case, I’ll be discussing the adventure collection Alpha Complex Nights, designed by Gareth (Ryder-)Hanrahan!

Paranoia XP: Alpha Complex Nights

So far, the only adventure collections I’ve discussed are the two Flashbacks collections, which compiled classic adventures from previous editions of Paranoia. Alpha Complex Nights is a little different: it’s a single-author collection, and it’s a collection of new adventures. I’m pretty sure every other adventure collection that came out for the line was, like this one, filled with new adventures.

Gareth (Ryder-)Hanrahan has been a dependable writer of adventures for many game systems over the years, and he clearly knows the Paranoia milieu well, as well as having internalized a lot of things that made Paranoia XP distinct.

Spin Control 

This first scenario begins with a food fight, progresses through a conspiracy centered on sporks (yeah, sporks, those fork-spoon things), and explodes into a whole techno-zombie apocalypse schtick. It’s wild. Like a lot of Paranoia scenarios, I would need to convert it to notes with lots of bullet points if I were ever to run it: it’s floridly verbose, which I guess was just the house style for Paranoia adventures at the time. But it’s funny and ridiculous and has a lot of elements that the GM can throw at the players all at once. 

My First Treason 

The second scenario is a sort of send-up of Harry Potter in the form of a mini-campaign in which the players play junior citizens in the creche, being trained up to citizen status. By mini-campaign, I mean that it contains four adventures, each of which take place during one year of the characters’ lives. One fast-forwards a year to get to the second scenario, then once again to get to the third and the fourth respectively. The scenarios are as zany and demented as you can expect for a Harry Potterish story set in Alpha Complex. I would be tempted to actually make it a group’s first game, though maybe that misses the point that this definitely offers variety to a group who’s got a lot of experience of playing red-clearance Troubleshooters. Anyway, it looks like a fun time. 

Sweep of Unhistory

This last scenario is also more of a mini-campaign than a single adventure. In it, the Troubleshooters are frozen and they and their clones wake up in different future scenarios, ranging from a few years after their freezing, all the way to a world a million years in the future when humanity is extinct and intelligent cockroaches rule the Earth. It is absolutely bananas and very memorable, though again it’s the kind of thing I think works best if you’re running it for player who’ve played standard Paranoia a lot, because much of the fun is derived from players discovering how Alpha Complex has changed in each future time period.