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 Crash Priority, designed by the “Traitor Recycling Studio”!
First off, it’s worth explaining what the Traitor Recycling Studio was. From what I’ve read, Allen Varney organized a game of Lexicon set in Alpha Complex, dealing with something called The Toothpaste Disaster. (You can see it here.) This was actually a sneaky way of finding some good writers who were interested in, and well-versed in, Paranoia, who formed the core of the Traitor Recycling Studio. (I don’t know whether everyone in the group participated in the Lexicon game, mind you.)
Some of the people involved have remained active with Paranoia or with RPGs in general. Paul Baldowski has launched his own game lines, like The Cthulhu Hack, The Dee Protocol, and ___________. W.J. MacGuffin cowrote the Red Clearance Edition and helmed the most recent (“Perfect”) edition.
Anyway, The Traitor Recycling Studio was basically a crowdsourced group of freelance writers recruited from the ranks of Paranoia fandom. It was a really clever gambit.
As for the adventures in Crash Priority, they’re sorted into play modes or playstyles.
Stealth Train is a “Straight” mode mission by Dan Curtis Johnson—possibly the first mission published for that mode of play—and it delivers on that. In it, the characters are tasked with guarding a supposedly invisible “stealth” train. (If you know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, you know how this goes.) There are twists galore and it gets progressively messier—a very not-invisible train arrives, but so do some secret society members and a video crew or two and more—and eventually it’s less a question of whether the mission will fail and more a question of how and when. Because it’s a Straight Mission, characters have to try grapple with all this without just shooting everyone who complicates their lives, which means the GM gets to really aggravate them. In the nicest, most fun, enjoyable way, of course.
Traitor Backup by Beth Fischi and Allen Varney is another Straight mission. The gist is that Computer launches an initiative aimed at keeping morale up: to offset the annoyance of long wait times, people waiting to be served must be served drinks every 30 minutes. The Troubleshooters are assigned to do this… in a Termination Center that stinks because a bot destroyed the bathroom preventing a prisoner escape. Things, of course, spin out of control, because this is Paranoia, and by the end the termination center is blown up, the prisoners escaped or dead, and the PCs on the hook for unsatisfactory drinks service. A true screwjob, and one I’d happily run for any group familiar with the setting.
Patch Job by Paul Baldowski is a Classic-styled mission involving troubleshooters being tasked to take control of a tube (train) station that has been “sabotaged.” Well, actually, it’s been taken under the control of a mutant. Except he’s not a mutant, he’s something much more dangerous. With IntSec riding them hard, they need to figure out what the guy is, deal with him, and take control of the station, hopefully without releasing a crew of comm-victs (drugged, reeducated traitors).
Andy Fitzpatrick‘s Random Access Mission is another Classic mission. This one plays with the standard structure of a Paranoia mission, meaning it’s most suitable for very experienced players who’ll have some frame of reference for understanding just how bizarre and mixed-up the stages of this mission are. A computer virus wreaks havoc on the sector, and characters will be lucky if they figure out for themselves what the mission is before their final debriefing. It’s absolutely bananas, and to be honest I found it amusingly confusing as I read it, but I think I get the idea.
Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk is a Zap-mode adventure by Jeff Groves. Although Zap eventually became the dominant playstyle for Paranoia, it is the least appealing to me. Still, I have to admit I was amused by the idea of a trio of Troubleshooters modeled off the Three Stooges being the most incompetent troubleshooter team in Alpha Complex. How you react to that concept is pretty indicative of how you’ll feel about the mission: