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Okay, now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about Paranoia. Paranoia hits people hard. They love this game so much that many fans will immediately jump into the doublespeak used in the game without stopping to explain it. Imagine mentioning you enjoyed the last season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and suddenly everyone starts yelling at you in Klingon. It’s authentic, weird and just a little terrifying. So for those who aren’t familiar, let’s start with the basics.
Paranoia is a satirical science-fiction role-playing game set in a place called Alpha Complex. Alpha Complex is, in theory, a utopia run by a machine known as Friend Computer. Alpha Complex is, in fact, so perfect that Friend Computer needs crack troops, so-called Troubleshooters, to root out its many enemies - Communists, mutants and members of strange secret societies - who wish to end its enlightened rule.
The twist? Everyone in Alpha Complex, especially those Troubleshooters, are both mutants and members of a secret society, including the aforementioned Communists, who aren’t so much socialist revolutionaries as cargo cultists, worshipping the pop culture detritus of the Soviet Union like ushanka hats whilst adopting thick Russian accents.
This was a gonzo premise in 1984 when the first edition of Paranoia, designed by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, was released and most role-playing games were still taking their first wobbly steps out of fantasy dungeons. By the mid eighties though West End Games were challenging the notions of what an RPG could be with the likes of Ghostbusters, Star Wars, and indeed Paranoia, putting the focus more on story-telling and genre simulation.
Paranoia’s creators certainly had ideas far beyond the gritty, subterranean crawls of Dungeons & Dragons and reading that first edition it’s not hard to picture Costikyan, Gelber and Goldberg cracking jokes in the back of Professor Gygax’s class as he lectured everyone on the serious business of playing elves.
Paranoia flies in the face of so many of the rules, written and unwritten, of RPGs. I still remember when I first cracked open the rulebook as a young nerd. Here, players were told to betray each other at every opportunity and to advance their own agendas above all. GMs were expected to be petty and arbitrary, hiding behind in-game bureaucracy and an out of game desire to mess with their friends. Whilst missions were built to put characters into deathtrap after deathtrap often with a no-win ending waiting for them after all that trouble. Characters died so often they were given half a dozen clones and would often run through all six within the confines of a single session.
My mind was blown. Could a game like this actually be fun? Like many others I soon found out the answer to that was both a resounding yes and so much more.
‘My first experience with Paranoia was running the 2nd Edition box set as a freshman in High School,’ said Chris O'Neill, creator of Mazes and Kobolds Ate My Baby. ‘I can clearly remember gleefully killing Chef-Boy-RED over and over as the player kept saying innocuous, but obviously treasonous, things to the automated kiosk.’
‘It’s 1998, or maybe 1997? I’m 14, or maybe 13?’ said Chant Evans, freelance RPG writer and co-founder of Ex Stasis Games, ‘Our RPG group is just back from the schools AD&D tournament at GenCon UK because we're the extreme type of nerds. Our regular DM’s older brother offers, with a glint in his eye, to run “something different” for a change of pace. Three hours later we’re all about four clones deep and every crack in our social network has been driven wide open and some of them have been cathartically purged. Some. This, I realize with my mind exploding like experimental classified equipment, is not D&D.’
‘Back before I had played any game other than AD&D,’ said Kevin Kulp, lead designer of TimeWatch and Swords of the Serpentine, ‘a very distinctive full page advertisement appeared in Dragon magazine. It was for Paranoia second edition and showed the cover art by Jim Holloway. “Sure it’s a one joke game…” the ad declared. “But it’s a REALLY funny joke.” I was sold. I bought a copy before I ever played at a con. I returned my copy three times for missing pages, duplicate pages, falling-out pages. They had some printing issues, I didn’t care. It was the funniest game I’d ever read, it was in on its own joke, and it made me desperate to play. D&D felt like running someone else’s game; Paranoia felt like running MY game.’
‘I remember buying the original Acute Paranoia back in high school, in the mid to late 1980s, and ran Me and My Shadow, Mark IV,’ said WJ MacGuffin, lead designer of the new Paranoia: Perfect Edition. ‘I fell in love with Paranoia on the spot! I can count on one hand the number of times I played instead of running a game, but it has always held a special place in my heart. That means I'm both excited and intimidated to help run the show these days.’
