Reading Paranoia XP: Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Alpha Complex and The Little Red Book

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 two smaller (mostly) playing-facing supplements for Paranoia. 

Paranoia XP: Little Red Book

Inspired by the little red book of the real world—the sayings of Mao Zedong—this little red book is a guide to Alpha Complex for new players of Paranoia. It does a great job introducing the world of Paranoia to the unfamiliar, and it’s the kind of booklet one might have picked up a dozen of, just to hand out to players before the first session of a game, back when this book was available in stores. 

That said, I find that it’s hard enough getting players to read a couple of pages of setting information before a campaign, so I feel like if I were looking for this kind of introduction to Alpha Complex today, I’d probably be doing up a powerpoint and recording it as video, with a voiceover in the voice of The Computer. Of course, there’s no money in making such a video and sharing it on Youtube, so I guess we can’t expect Mongoose Publishing to do it, but it would be a cool project for some aspiring GM generous enough to share it with the world. 

Paranoia XP (?): Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Alpha Complex

Technically, I’m not sure whether this is an XP-line product or if it’s intended as a 25th Anniversary edition product. (The two game lines are similar and skimming this book, I didn’t see anything that clarified it either way, though I wasn’t looking too closely at the rules section. The number of rules changed in 25th edition was somewhat minimal, though I think Perversity Points were dropped—and this booklet doesn’t mention them, either.) The trade dress looks like it’s a 25th Anniversary book, but it also advertises the Troubleshooters: Black Missions edition, which was the limited edition luxury version of the core rulebook for 25th Anniversary edition. There’s not much interior art, though what there is looks fine, and is in the style of the 25th anniversary books.

Either way, the layout is a bit terrible. Most egregious is the selection of fonts used, or rather, the fact that the book was laid out as if it were going to be an A4-sized book, but it ended up being roughly A5. My eyesight isn’t the worst, but I struggled to read the text for too long at a time. One fact that balances out the criticism a little is that most people who originally got this received it as a Free RPG Day product (for 2009). It’s hard to criticize something that was free, after all. Less excusable is the missing form referred to in the Surprise Loyalty Test! section, which is on the dreaded page XX. (Industrious GMs can cook up their own sheet or find something in another Paranoia product, of course, but since this book is supposed to function as a quickstart, it’d be nice to have included the necessary form in place of, say, that last bit of interior art. 

The first half of the book is a little bit like Varney’s Little Red Book, a sort of quick tour through the rules and systems of Paranoia. The latter half of the book contains an adventure that I haven’t seen anywhere else, titled “Tube Jam.” It’s a fun-seeming and simple adventure set in the pipeworks beneath Alpha Complex, and has the same familiar screwjob dynamics of other Paranoia adventures. I think it would make a decent introduction to the game for new players, especially since so much time is spent not in the typical environs of Alpha Complex (where knowing a little lore helps), but rather in a vehicle navigating those awful tubes as they alternately flood with toxic fluids, Hot Fun, water, and sewage.