This is another review of a Paranoia XP book, for those interested. If you’re not, well… skip it!
This time, I’m covering the expanded Service Group options for the XP setting, dealt with in Service, Service!
This one took me a while to read: I had it in a plastic folder in my backpack for a couple of months, dipping in for one of the Service Groups and the associated adventure, and then setting it aside for a while. It’s not that it’s a bad book—it’s a little disjointed, because each firm and each adventure was written by a different contributor and they don’t seem to have been regularized too much in the editing process—but it’s still up to the usual standards of comedic writing and fun ideas I’ve seen in other XP-era Paranoia supplements.
Service, Service! explores an innovation that was introduced into Paranoia XP. That innovation is a riff on the standard mission structure of 2nd edition Paranoia—specifically, the trip to R&D where characters are enlisted into “testing” a bunch of insane, disastrous gear prototypes that are as likely to kill them as to help them complete the mission. This, Allen Varney notes in the core rulebook, is a specific service characters perform for R&D… but they could instead be enlisted into performing other services instead, for other service firms. Say, delivering stuff for PLC, or being asked to fix the frayed wiring in a tunnel that they have to pass through anyway while hunting dangerous “Commie Mutant Traitors.”
It’s a fun, interesting twist, though one I can imagine people could happily play Paranoia XP for years without ever bothering with. Which is to say, it’s an optional set of extra torture-widgets that can be added to the game, for those who want it. I think the end result is fun, although it does show some of the pitfalls of having a bunch of separate contributors each write up one section of a book: harmonizing the contents is a little hard, and everyone treats his or her section with so much detail that the result becomes a bit hard to digest in a single go. (That’s probably even more of an issue here, since the much publicized “Traitor Studio” approach to developing the game line meant less-experienced writers were contributing material, though when I think about that, it suggests that Allen Varney must have done a really good job editing it, for that not to be more of an issue.)
In any case, I think the sections detailing Service Groups, their functionaries, and the kinds of Service Services that could be asked of Troubleshooters, could all be fruitfully boiled down (no food pun intended) into a guidebook maybe two-thirds its size without significant omissions in useful information, and without cramping the comedic Paranoia style too severely.
The book also includes missions, one for each service group. They’re a bit of a mixed bag: some, like “The Lightbulb Mission” (by Dan Curtis Johnson) and “Three Up, Three Down” (by Bill O’Dea) look like a lot of fun (er, “fun”), and most of the rest look reasonably good, but a few others (that I’ll allow to remain nameless) left me a little underwhelmed.
In the end, I’d say this isn’t a crucial supplement, and honestly at times reading through it became a bit of a slog for me—even the irrepressible insanity of Paranoia failed to eliminate the occasional feeling that it could have been pruned down a bit, and honestly while reading it I thought about how I’d trade a little bit less detail for a bigger font size in the book—but if you’re a dedicated Paranoia GM, and your group’s gotten comfortable with the standard mission structure, this book is packed with ways to throw a monkeywrench into the works and make Alpha Complex uncomfortable again.