Series: Paranoia XP Reviews, Book-by-Book

A while back, I became fascinated with the classic RPG Paranoia. I’d seen advertisements for it in Dragon as a kid, and been curious, but of course it’d never been easily available where I lived as a kid. Well, in 2017, I ended up picking up everything in the “XP” line while it was still available—barely—through various online sellers. (The core book had gone way up in price, and a few supplements were so rare it took me a while to track down copies. Indeed, I was only able to get the Little Red Book by trading a module with someone who’d gotten a copy ages ago but had no use for it, a random gamer I stumbled across online.)

Anyway, then the books sat for about six months. I didn’t have a regular game group at the time, so I had no strong impetus to read everything immediately. However, I decided that I would write some mini-reviews of the books, as a way of getting myself to read through all these books I’d accumulated. (I did the same with the collection of Wraith: The Oblivion books I picked up, and I’ll be posting that series next.)  

CORE MATERIALS

• Paranoia XP, Service Pack 1 (Core Rulebook)
• The Little Red Book
• Gamemaster Screen & Mandatory Fun Enforcement Pack (Booklet), and the Mandatory Mission Pack
• Service, Service!
• The Traitors Manual
• Stuff and Stuff 2 – The Gray Subnets

[Character Options]

• The Mutant Experience & Form Pack
• Extreme Paranoia
• Criminal Histories
• Big Book of Bots
• The Thin Green Line

[Setting Expansions]

• The Underplex

[Mission Books]

• Flashbacks
• Flashbacks 2
• Alpha Complex Nights
• Alpha Complex Nights 2
• Crash Priority
• Sector Zero
• War on [Insert Noun Here]
• WMD

The order here is not the order in which I read the books, but it’s organized so as to make the series easier to parse. I started these reviews in 2018, and then finished the series in 2024, though I didn’t publish them until recently (early 2025). I am not sure anyone out there will have any use for reviews of gamebooks from three editions ago for this game line, but XP is regarded by many as the “best” traditional line that was ever done for Paranoia, and since the PDFs come up often enough in bundle deals, maybe it’ll be of use to someone. Mostly, though, I just wrote these posts to set down my thoughts while reading each book in the line.