Reading Paranoia XP: The GM Screen, Mission Blender, and Mandatory Mission Pack

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

This time, I’m covering the GM Screen and Mission Blender booklet, along with the Mandatory Mission Pack book. 

Paranoia XP GM Screen & Mission Blender

One of the harder-to-get items in my collection of Paranoia XP books is the Paranoia XP Game Master’s Screen, which, in the tradition of GM screens, came with an insert booklet titled “Mandatory Fun Enforcement Pack.” I think the reason it’s so hard to find now is because that booklet is so famously good, funny, and insane. 

It’s essentially a large set of tables that you can use as a random mission generator: there’s everything from Secret Society Missions and Service Services to Locations and Complications. Alan de Smet actually put together an automated version of it, which you can see here. (I actually want to try replicate it, not because it’s not great, but because I’m curious to see how it works for other kinds of games, and especially was tempted to run a Paranoia game set in an alternate Alpha Complex.)

After that welter of tables, there’s set of basic forms that should be familiar to seasoned players of Paranoia: glancing at them, I think they mostly recapitulate and update the typical forms from earlier versions of Paranoia. It’s unfortunate that Mongoose didn’t (or couldn’t?) embrace the kind of terrible-immersiveness of the forms in the Forms Pack produced by West End Games: I think Alpha Complex forms with malfunctioning carbon backings, on easily-torn paper, and forms that are different on each layer (“Citizen, what do you mean, ‘misprinted’?”) or where “safe” answers on the front page result in check marks for treasonous answers on the back page. That would be wonderfully funny (and aggravating) for any group. Maybe the price of getting forms printed up is simply too high. (You’d think the price would have come down by 2008, but maybe not; still, this is something I keep in mind for the day when I finally am running Paranoia with real life people in the flesh: it’s filed away into my list of props to do up.)  

As for the screen, it’s fine: you can get a pretty good idea of Paranoia XP‘s mechanics by looking at it, including stuff that is likely to slip a GM’s mind, like Tension Levels, specific credit amounts for rewards and penalties that Troubleshooters are supposed to receive for services performed, Clone backup costs, and charts with hit locations, armor types, and a Treason Chart. Also, I think it’s the kind of stuff a lot of Paranoia Gamemasters handwave and ignore, and that’s fine too. Though I tend not to run games with a screen, I feel like with Paranoia it’s actually a good idea, if only so that your players are more paranoid and uncomfortable. It’s a feature of the game, after all.

Compared to the thing of beauty that is the 25th Anniversary Screen, this one’s a bit flimsy and the player-facing side is slightly uninspiring—mostly just text with bits of typical Friend Computer catchphrases visible—but it does the job, I suppose. I’d probably be likelier to use the 25th Anniversary screen, with or without the XP screen concealed behind it if I found a need for the tables there, just because the art on the later edition is so much nicer-looking. That said, it’s still better looking—albeit flimsier—than the screen released for the latest Mongoose edition of Paranoia. 

Mandatory Mission Pack

There’s not much to say about the Mandatory Mission Pack except that I think it would be a handy addition to any Paranoia GM’s arsenal.

The author, Gareth Hanrahan, assembled what’s pretty straightforwardly a grab bag of Catch-22 situations and trouble—ammo for any GM looking for something to throw at his or her Troubleshooters. It includes weird Briefings (Rooms and Officers), insane Secret Society Missions, terrible Corridors, bewildering and frustrating Offices, and baffling Rumors (General, Mission, Conspiracy, and Weird in nature). There’s also a table of random names in the back. As the very brief introduction suggests, it pairs really well with the Mission Blender booklet that was included in the Paranoia XP GM screen. 

What I find interesting is that this something that’s now very much in vogue in “old-school” gaming circles: a book full of tables of crazy stuff to toss players’ way. Personally, I dig it, and it’s one of the books I feel is probably the most useful to a GM who tends to wing it or make up his or her own missions: there’s tons of inspiration to be found here, even for a GM who’s reluctant to do the obvious thing and just lift things from this book and use them directly. (Why anyone would be reluctant to do that, I don’t know, but some people surely are, for whatever reason.)

It seems to be pretty late in Paranoia XP’s run, when Allen Varney and Beth Fischi were still involved in the editing, but Jim Holloway was no longer doing the internal illustrations. I still miss his art, but the illustrations here are competent and fun and they work for me. 

I think that’s all I really have to say about the book. I think it’s good, worth having, and a great resource for a GM running Paranoia XP with any regularity. 

Well, that’s it for now.