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 Flashbacks II!
Paranoia XP: Flashbacks II
Two years after Flashbacks (reviewed earlier in this series), Flashbacks II was released for Paranoia XP. It’s a much slimmer hardback, and includes only three classic adventures:
The adventures included (and their original dates of publication) are:
- Orcbusters (1986) by Ken Rolston
- Clones in Space (1986) by Erick Wujick
- The People’s Glorious Revolutionary Adventure (1989) by Edward S. Bolme
It’s a much shorter and more modest lineup than Flashbacks, albeit packed with classic adventures.
Orcbusters
This is basically a satirical crossover between D&D and Paranoia: a device malfunctions, opening a portal to another universe; through it, a trio of wizards and their lizard-man henchman are sucked into Alpha Complex, and hijinks ensure. It’s a classic adventure, but very much the kind of thing you bust out once your players are used to plain-vanilla Paranoia, as part of the attraction is that this adventure messes with expectations. It’s extremely goofy, and there’s honestly no way of getting around that, but the fact that anyone playing Paranoia has almost certainly also played D&D at some point means that you can at least expect all your players to get the jokes and references. The thing even ends with trip into the wizards’ home dimension and a trad-styled dungeon crawl crammed with recognizable monsters and traps, shot through with the familiar snarky comedy of Paranoia. What more could you ask for?
Clones in Space
This, again, is an adventure that messes with players’ expectations, and assumes that they’re used to Alpha Complex, The Computer, and all the rest of the setting. It’s one I would imagine most GMs would want to run after their players are pretty used to Alpha Complex, because it once again it takes characters out of that setting. (There’s also some suggestions at the end of “Orcbusters” about how to proceed straight from that adventure into “Clones in Space.”
The title, by the way, gives you the gist of the adventure: the characters take an “elevator” (space shuttle) into orbit and then proceed through a series of platforms and sattelites in pursuit of a fugitive bot. There’s a sane Computer (imagine that), a platform home to a whole civilization of bots who are in “secret societies” of their own, and an alien invasion to be fought off… and there’s no clear way home once they’ve completed the mission. (Well, there are some vague hints at possible ways home, mind.) It’s a fun concept, which I think probably hums along if you keep things moving.
The People’s Glorious Revolutionary Adventure
This adventure begins with the advice not to use it for your players’ first experience of Paranoia, and for good reason: it’s an elaborate switcheroo where characters end up in the Communist equivalent of Alpha Complex, performing the role of the equivalent of Troubleshooters in that setting. I can’t really see myself ever running it, in part because the comedy in it is pretty dated but also because it’s an adventure that ends with a whole, “It was all a dream” twist at the end… at least, if I’m reading it correctly. While I think the idea of alternate Alpha Complexes is funny and interesting (see here for more ideas in that line), it’s a lot of work, and it relies on players knowing Alpha Complex’s features pretty well.
All in all, this felt like a lighter read than Flashbacks, even though (if I remember right) it’s only 60-some pages shorter. I think the fact that it’s only three adventures made it more digestible, and so does the fact that the style is more settled here. (There was a certain degree of variation in writing style from one adventure to the next in Flashbacks that is seriously toned down here, or rather, it didn’t need to be toned down because only one editor worked on everything. (And it doesn’t hurt that the one doing the editing was Allen Varney.) Maybe it’s also that by the third adventure, I was mostly skimming since I can’t see myself ever running it.
Still, it’s easy to see why these are classic Paranoia adventures, and while the text is still pretty wordy and dense if you’re used to more recent adventure-writing styles, I think in the case of the first two adventures, it’s a little easier to see myself running them from the book with less preparation.
I’d say Flashbacks II is less essential unless you’re running a long-running game of Paranoia (which the game designers seem to assume people do, but I don’t know if that many people actually do it), but it’s a fun resource if you are.