Reading Paranoia XP: The Traitor’s Manual

Back with another review of an old RPG book. If that interests you, check it out, otherwise feel free to skip it.

This time, I’m looking at the Traitor’s Manual.

Paranoia XP: The Traitor’s Manual

The Traitor’s Manual was published in the same year as the Paranoia XP core rulebook. It details the “Secret Societies” of the setting, (at least) one of which every character is supposed to be a member. It may seem like an odd book, if you’re accustomed to the Classic/2nd edition style of play, since in 2E Secret Societies are all easily summarized in a single short paragraph each: they’re essentially cartoonish and bumbling conspiracies in that edition.

Well, they’re still bumbling conspiracies, but since the Paranoia XP line was designed with an emphasis on promoting “Straight” style play (and what I suspect is a slightly less gonzo form of “Classic” than what was played by a lot of 2E groups who never quite fell into “Zap” mode), it makes sense that the Secret Societies would warrant some filling-out. Thank goodness Mongoose and Varney didn’t go all the way to turning them into full-on “splats” in the White Wolf Games sense, of course—that would’ve been overkill—but the book does provide at least a few pages of information on each. I can dig that: they’re a venerable part of the setting, after all, and an important source of trouble for characters. 

The book’s writer/designer, Gareth [Ryder-]Hanrahan, goes into about the right depth of for most of the Secret Societies. For those of us in 2018 who’ve been relieved by the movement toward more rules-light and epigrammatic RPG writing, it’s still a lot of material, but by the standards of the time, it’s not that much. 

(There’s actually a chunk of information he wrote for the book that got excised (to conserve pagecount, apparently); it dealt with social/recreational clubs in Alpha Complex and their links to the Secret Societies. The file was hosted on the Mongoose website, and still is there if you hunt around for a link offsite, but since they don’t make it easy and it could disappear anytime, I’m mirroring the file at the end of this post, along with one other related file.) 

All that’s really missing, though—as the blogger at Refereeing & Reflection notes—is some material on the core rulebook options for one’s Secret Society to be “Spy from another complex” or “Programs Group” (which isn’t a Secret Society per se but involves a bunch of people who’re busy doing favors for High Programmers). As the blogger notes, those are both fun options, and also very fitting for a “Straight” game, so their exclusion is surprising, but not a massive issue.  

If you’re new to running or playing Paranoia, or only run one-shots, I doubt you need the book: it’s more a case of players maybe reading up on a Secret Society after they ascend a few levels within it, if they’re interested… that is, something to consider if you’re running the game in a sort of miniseries or extended-campaign type setup. That’s not to say it’s not a useful book for the Gamemaster, of course: there are some suggestions for possible types of Secret Society missions for characters of different ranks within each given Society, and it is an amusing read. But it’s definitely supplementary, and you could presumably run Paranoia XP for some time without ever bothering to read more about (or delve deeper into) this aspect of the game. 

All the material I’ve discussed  is marked as “Infrared Clearance,” meaning it’s player-facing(-ish). The “Ultraviolet Clearance” section includes only two things: a three-page summary about what to do with Secret Societies in a Paranoia game—short but sweet—and an adventure titled “Down and Out in Alpha Complex” which for some reason surprised me, though maybe it shouldn’t have. The adventure is a funny, interesting concept which essentially takes the characters’ status as Troubleshooters and turns it on its head, in a way I won’t give away except to say I found it very clever. It’s actually clever enough that it kind of bucks the Mission structure that the game imposes on it, since the action progresses less in “scenes” and more in potential disasters that the characters choose to weave their way through.

One of the “scenes” is basically, “Characters might try X; here’s how it could work but (because this is Alpha Complex) is much likelier go horribly, horribly wrong.” That said, because it involves turning the average Paranoia adventure structure on its head, it feels like the kind of adventure that makes more sense to run after your players have gotten accustomed to the typical adventure structure in Paranoia. That said, it’s an odd choice for inclusion in this book, since the characters immediately end up being cut off from their Secret Societies as part of the setup. I feel like maybe an adventure that put Secret Societies at center stage—or even just a few sets of  pregen characters with Secret Society Missions perfectly tuned to clash and cancel one another out, with some discussion of the fine art of designing more like that—might have made more sense.    

The art, of course, is Jim Holloway, and it’s great, with much better scan quality and presentation than in the core rulebook. 

The book deserves a spot in your collection if you run Paranoia often, aspire to a “Straight” game of a little greater length and depth, and if you think your players would be willing to read a few pages to get some use out of more information on the Secret Societies… or if you’re willing to extract the necessary to impose on them, as they advance through the ranks, something like a natural progression of into the trouble and insanity involved in their Secret Societies.   

Okay, that leaves just one thing—okay, two: the supplementary, free PDF files, which include:

• the excised chapter on Social Clubs in Alpha Complex, and 
• the corrected Player Handouts from throughout the Traitor’s Manual.

I believe that these two files are the only PDF supplements for this book. The latter, incidentally, was necessitated by a layout problem. (I did wonder, as I read the book, whether the wonky layout in some of the handouts was some kind of running joke about the incompetence of most Secret Societies’ members, or maybe some really vague hint that they’re all using the same ancient, broken mimeograph machine down in the Underplex to print off their pamphlets. Turns it out was just Varney’s first time laying out a book with a particular piece of software, plus a specific software incompatibility, and presumably Mongoose dropping the ball on the page proofs—that, or assuming the same thing I did about an obscure in-joke going over their heads.)