Reading Paranoia XP: Big Book of Bots

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

This time, I’m dealing with The Big Book of Bots, the supplement that makes robot player characters an option in your game. 

Big Book of Bots is another Paranoia XP book that postdated the end of Allen Varney’s involvement in the line. As with Thin Green Line, Gareth Hanrahan (now known as Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan), was the author, and though the cover art was still by Jim Holloway, the interior art wasn’t (and is definitely missed: not that Alison Blackwell’s work is bad—it isn’t—but because Holloway’s style was so definitive of the line).

The proofreading and layout, though, looks like it was rushed, or done by people not up to the task, or perhaps both. The content is… well, it’s not bad exactly, but it isn’t terribly inspiring. Usually I enjoy Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan’s work, but this particular book felt as if it’d been outlined and then quickly written to fit the outline, boxes being ticked along the way as each section was done. Bits are inspired—I love the way “Treason” is handled, and how a bot’s ability to go against its Asimov Laws changes as a function of the bot’s trustedness in the eyes of Friend Computer—but though it’s been a while since I read it, I feel like my favorite bits were actually adapted from the earlier-edition supplement The Bot Abusers’ Manual… a book that, despite being late-2nd edition Paranoia, actually seems to do a better job of facilitating in-game fun than its XP line equivalent. (This might be the only such case!) 

In any case, after having read Big Book of Bots, I don’t feel totally confident that I could confidently run a game of Paranoia XP with one or more bot player characters. (The adventure at the end of the book, especially, didn’t inspire me.)

Your mileage might vary, or it might not, but either way, this absolutely isn’t a must-have book. It covers some edge cases, gives some structure for an alternate type of player character, yet I suspect it didn’t get all that much use by people actually playing and running Paranoia XP games. I could be wrong, of course—correct me if you knew better—but the book did disappoint me a little bit.