Allen Varney's Blog: The PARANOIA worldview

PARANOIA T1 Stay Alert by Allen Varney. Cover by Jim Holloway.

The Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA novel Stay Alert by Allen Varney (designer of the 2004 Mongoose Publishing edition of PARANOIA) has been added to the Bundle of Holding, a collection of DRM-free ebook novels by leading RPG designers, sold for a price you set yourself. Modeled on the popular Humble Bundle and similar offers, the Bundle of Holding supports indie authors as well as two fine charities.

The other nine authors now in the Bundle of Holding:

Matt Forbeck (Brave New World): the first book in his “Shotguns and Sorcery” trilogy, Hard Times in Dragon City.Jenna Katerin Moran (Nobilis, Exalted): Fable of the Swan, set in the world of her new “Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine.”Chuck Wendig (Hunter: The Vigil): a nine-story collection, Irregular Creatures.Stephen D. Sullivan (one of the original TSR D&D crew and co-founder of Pacesetter Ltd.): an action-filled romp called Tournament of Death.Sarah Newton (Legends of Anglerre, Chronicles of Future Earth, Achtung Cthulhu): Mindjammer, a transhuman space opera based on her recent FATE rulebook of the same name.Rafael Chandler (Scorn, Spite): a hard-boiled vampire sf-horror-crime novel, Hexcommunicated.Mur Lafferty (the Warcraft and WoW tabletop RPGs, the Storyteller games): Playing for Keeps, a satirical superhero novel in Seventh City, where it gets hard to tell the good guys from the bad.Derek Pearcy (In Nomine): a Neal Stephenson-style superhero novel, Hero Worship.Aaron Rosenberg (the ENnie-winning Lure of the Lich Lord, Races of Destiny for D&D): the first book in his space opera series, Birth of the Dread Remora.

All books are DRM-free and offered in Kindle, ePub, and .PDF versions. For one price you set yourself, you get the whole collection in all formats, and you help support our charities: Reading is Fundamental and Child’s Play. You can learn more about the charities and the books at the Bundle of Holding site — but hurry. The Bundle of Holding has less than a week left to run, and then it’s gone.

The Computer’s loyal servants in Technical Services have discovered Communist sabotage of various timekeeping devices across Alpha Complex. Doubtless the traitors, who will doubtless soon be apprehended, intended to sow doubt in The Computer’s doubtlessly accurate chronological fidelity. Because all these devices display different degrees of error, Central Processing has ordered a complex-wide reset, requiring Year 214 to be repeated from the beginning.

After the publication of the introductory anthology A1 The Computer is Your Friend in early January, nothing of import happened with PARANOIA through most of 2012. But stay tuned, because a large project is afoot, or soon to climb to its feet. Should it happen, PARANOIA will have a strong 2013. As always, The Computer commends all loyal citizens for their cooperation.

Citizens! For the annual post-prandial consumer frenzy called “Black Friday,” The Computer’s loyal citizens in Production, Logistics, & Commissary are putting the entire Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA novel line on Amazon on sale! Through Monday, November 26, 2012 you can purchase Gareth Hanrahan’s PARANOIA S1 Reality Optional, Allen Varney’s T1 Stay Alert, and WJ MacGuffin’s Y1 Traitor Hangout for the Amazon Kindle family for just US$0.99 apiece. The introductory anthology PARANOIA A1 The Computer is Your Friend remains $0.99 as well. Go forth and show your loyalty — on a budget!

Loyal citizen and stalwart reviewer Petri Wessman has posted a glowing mini-review of PARANOIA novel T1 Traitor Hangout. Some choice selections:

It leans more on the “zany” side than the other books, somewhat mimicking the “Zap” style of gameplay in the new PARANOIA edition. Since that style isn’t my favorite, I wasn’t really expecting much of this book, to be honest… but I must say I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s an extremely fun book, and isn’t at all as much “Zap” as I had feared. [...]

It’s a fun and well-written situational comedy, with Clarence acting as the naive foil to all sorts of crazy stuff. Sure, people get incinerated, terminated and killed in various other ways — but it’s still a lighthearted romp.

Commendation point, Petri!

Too-long-didn’t-read: “Alpha Complex,” Dan Curtis Johnson’s authorized PARANOIA-themed playset for Fiasco, is now available as a free download from Bully Pulpit Games.

Fiasco is Jason Morningstar’s tabletop storytelling game of “Coen Brothers roleplaying.” From the Bully Pulpit Games site:

Fiasco is inspired by cinematic tales of small time capers gone disastrously wrong — by films like Blood Simple, Fargo, The Way of the Gun, Burn After Reading, and A Simple Plan. You’ll play ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control. There will be big dreams and flawed execution. It won’t go well for them, to put it mildly, and in the end it will probably all go south in a glorious heap of jealousy, murder, and recrimination. Lives and reputations will be lost, painful wisdom will be gained, and if you are really lucky, your guy just might end up back where he started.

Fiasco is a GM-less game for 3-5 players, designed to be played in a few hours with six-sided dice and no preparation. During a game you will engineer and play out stupid, disastrous situations, usually at the intersection of greed, fear, and lust. It’s like making your own Coen brothers movie, in about the same amount of time it’d take to watch one.

Of course you’re thinking, “Gosh, what a perfect match for PARANOIA.” So was Dan Curtis Johnson, author of “Mister Bubbles” in the 2004 Mongoose Publishing PARANOIA rulebook and contributor to several of its supplements, with such acclaimed missions as “Stealth Train” (from the Crash Priority supplement), “The Lightbulb Mission” (Service, Service!), and above all, “Hunger” (WMD).

Dan is a fervent Fiasco fan, as shown by his memorable blog posts recounting past games, such as “Objective Zebra,” “What’s in Kaku Inlet,” and “Manna Hotel” (where Dan was joined by comics writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction as well as Wil Wheaton — yes, that Wil Wheaton). For years he’s wanted to compose a Fiasco “playset,” a collection of story elements that recasts the game in a different setting. Published playset topics range from an Antarctic base to Beverly Hills to mythic China to the Salem witch trials. In creating “Alpha Complex,” Dan drew on a wide range of published PARANOIA material, and he managed to allude to all his previous work for the game.

“Alpha Complex” is authorized by the PARANOIA owners and the RPG licensee, Mongoose Publishing. The “Alpha Complex” playset is available for free download from Bully Pulpit Games, and will eventually be posted to the official PARANOIA development blog and here on the Ultraviolet Books site. “Alpha Complex” isn’t the first playset that crosses Fiasco with another RPG — that would be “Bookhounds Fiasco” by Kenneth Hite and Will Hindmarch, a crossover with Ken’s Pelgrane Press Trail of Cthulhu supplement Bookhounds of London.

Indie Press Revolution sells Fiasco for $12 in .PDF, or in hardcopy (bundled with the .PDF) for $25. Fiasco designer Jason Morningstar and a cast of writers with poor impulse control have produced many other free Fiasco playsets.

A couple of related plugs: Jason is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for his latest RPG, Durance. And feverishly productive novelist Matt Forbeck has offered to design a new Fiasco playset as a stretch goal for his own current Kickstarter, a trilogy of convention-based murder mysteries called Dangerous Games.

A couple of interesting PARANOIA-related blog posts from the last few days:

Unconscious sexism in feedback mechanics

On Gaming as Women — "a collection of thoughts on womanhood and (mostly) analog gaming" — Darla Magdalene Shockley has a short essay on unconscious sexism in RPG design, and specifically in player feedback mechanics. She uses PARANOIA's Perversity point system as her example, not that she accuses the game itself of sexism (whew!):

I absolutely adore PARANOIA. It is an incredible amount of fun. This is also not intended as a criticism of anyone who has GMed PARANOIA for me. There have been several, and they were all great GMs, and are amazing people. At least one even identifies fairly strongly as a feminist.

However, we are all socialized very strongly to view women in certain ways. We expect women to be responsible, do the boring administrative work, and in general shut down the fun. We emphatically do not expect women to be silly. So women are less likely to be silly, and everyone is less likely to notice when they are. The PARANOIA GM (despite being quite the stand-up guy) is less likely to notice and reward it.

Of the many comments, none (so far) specifically criticize PARANOIA. A comment from wundergeek, who has fought a long and often lonely battle against sexism in the RPG field, summarizes the consensus:

[F]eedback mechanics are something that, on their face, should benefit men and women equally. But when sexism is present at the table, even unconscious sexism, they can wind up highlighting social inequality and making women feel bad about their contributions to the game. That's not because the mechanic is sexist. It's a breakdown in the system caused by meta issues at the table.

Topless Robot on atypical RPG settings

On the pop-culture site Topless Robot — which, despite the name, is work-safe — James Daniels lists 6 Excellent Tabletop Role-Playing Games with Atypical RPG Settings. PARANOIA is #2, right after Deadlands. "PARANOIA is much more about fun than silly things like 'success' or 'survival,'" James writes. Commendation point for your wise priorities, citizen!

Mere days after the release of the Emergency Bathroom Break Requisition form, The Computer's loyal servants in the Central Processing Unit service group — specifically WJ MacGuffin, author of PARANOIA novel Y1 Traitor Hangout — has compiled a comprehensive Yellowpants Mandate List (.PDF link). Commendation point, WJ!

Fans of CPU efficiency auditor Clarence-Y will appreciate this comprehensive .PDF list of all Alpha Complex mandates mentioned in the "Yellowpants" stories (including both Traitor Hangout and the "Hay Fever" novelette in A1 The Computer is Your Friend). This free seven-page document also includes sidebars with a handy primer on the PARANOIA setting. Present this list to prospective citizens of Alpha Complex to guarantee proper behavior on arrival. This version 1.0 of the Yellowpants Mandate List is dated February 28, 2012; CPU workers will update the list as new Clarence-Y stories appear.

The Yellowpants Mandate List, the Bathroom Break form, and preview samples of all our novels are available on our free Ultraviolet Books downloads page.

For all your unscheduled urgent on-the-job sanitary needs, The Computer's loyal servants in Technical Services have made available this free Emergency Bathroom Break Requisition Form TS-2952-445, as seen in the Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA novel T1 Stay Alert, the short story "Rule Zero" (in the promotional anthology A1 The Computer is Your Friend), and doubtless many immortal works still ahead. Download this free form, distribute it to all your workers of YELLOW Clearance and below, and start enforcing mandatory hygienic responsibility!

Thanks to loyal citizen WJ MacGuffin, author of PARANOIA novel Y1 Traitor Hangout, for his fine formification.

Under a new imprint called Ultraviolet Books, I've launched a new line of ebook novels and stories based on PARANOIA, the classic satirical science-fiction roleplaying game of a darkly humorous future. So far, in the ten weeks since launch, I've been marketing these new tie-in novels to the gaming community, which is already familiar with the game. But in the longer term, I dearly hope to reach out and appeal to the Goodreads community -- the readers, especially the science fiction fans.

Originally published in (appropriately) 1984, PARANOIA is a cross between Karl and Groucho Marx -- a bracing remix of Aldous Huxley and The Office -- George Orwell meets Terry Pratchett. Set in Alpha Complex, the future underground city ruled by an insane Computer, PARANOIA books present light-hearted stories of backstabbing, treachery, Bouncy Bubble Beverage, Emergency Bathroom Break Requisition forms, and Internal Security "Friendly Tap Justification" forms (to be completed after truncheon use). If you like reading about repressed teenagers groping sparkly vampires, this book will touch you in the bad place. But if you like Philip K. Dick and think Survivor needs a higher body count, your friend The Computer requires you to enjoy PARANOIA.

I'm editing and packaging the books and writing three of them; the others published so far are by longtime designers for the RPG. The first three UV Books novels are Gareth Hanrahan's Reality Optional, Traitor Hangout by WJ MacGuffin, and my own Stay Alert, Book 1 of a trilogy called The Troubleshooter Rules. (Read a free Stay Alert preview here on Goodreads.) All these titles are previously unpublished and DRM-free. The books are available in Kindle format on Amazon, in ePub on Barnesandnoble.com (here's Reality Optional in ePub), and in both formats, plus .PDF, on DriveThruFiction.

I'm extremely pleased with the quality of the books. For the three novels published so far, the Amazon review scores are heartening: On the US and UK sites combined, Reality Optional has 15 reviews (eight 5-star, six 4*, one 3*), Stay Alert has 11 (five 5*, five 4*, one 3*), and Traitor Hangout has four (two 5*, two 3*). And these aren't just from gamers, but from citizens new to the joys and rigors of Alpha Complex. One reviewer said of Reality Optional, "If William Gibson had had an accident destroying half of his brain after he wrote Neuromancer, received a transplant of Terry Pratchett's extra lobe, then collaborated with Neil Gaiman, this book could have been the result."

The Ultraviolet Books line is the latest move in a continuing effort to redeem PARANOIA from a prolonged period of decline the RPG suffered in the late 1980s and early 1990s. After a long, harrowing stretch of editorial mismanagement, the game fell out of print. But a hardy band of fans kept the memory alive; and in 2004 we united in an energetic crowdsourced effort to return the game to its former glory. The RPG redesign worked well. In the comprehensive RPG.net Game Index, the new editions of PARANOIA currently rank #15 of 2,000 core rules sets, and #20 overall of nearly 55,000 entries.

The same spirit of redemption motivates the new UV Books novel line. This is the aspect I hope Goodreads readers will find most interesting about Ultraviolet Books: the works we take as our examples, and the legacy we hope to uphold.

In these books we're hoping to continue a tradition of smart science fiction satire that produced some of my favorite books: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth, Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Sladek's Roderick and Tik-Tok, and just about anything by Philip K. Dick or Robert Sheckley. In my view that tradition has subsided in recent decades. The audience is relatively small, and for a publishing conglomerate the finances don't make sense. But for a small, scrappy band of High Programmers -- on our own! backs to the wall! fighting The Man! -- the business case is more attractive.

Still, it’s not about the business case, and it never has been. It’s about doing right by PARANOIA -- rescuing it from its past, but more important, bringing it to a wider audience and letting the idea become what it wants to be. Like any loyal citizen, we’re all just trying to serve The Computer as best we can.

New merchant alert! New format alert! All three of the Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA novels – Reality Optional, Traitor Hangout, and Stay Alert – are now available on DriveThruFiction. DriveThru started as one of the first online stores for roleplaying games, and now, as part of the OneBookShelf empire, it has spread into comics, wargames, and (commendation point!) fiction.

The UV Books novels are sold on DriveThruFiction as .ZIP archives. Each archive contains three versions of the novel formatted for Kindle (.mobi), ePub, and .PDF. All versions have identical text, which perhaps isn't PARANOIA-like but we're okay with that. This is our debut in ePub format! (If you notice formatting problems, please let us know.)

Because the DriveThru versions of our novels are in archived format, you can't preview them on the DriveThruFiction site itself. We point inquisitive citizens to our free downloads page, where you can download free previews of all our novels in all three formats.

We plan to expand the nascent UV Books empire to other major ebook sales sites. Stay tuned. [UPDATE, two hours later: Ultraviolet Books PARANOIA novels are now on sale in ePub format at Barnesandnoble.com!]