Saturday, October 25, 2014

Paranoia Kickstarter

I recently heard about a Kickstarter to reboot the classic dystopian RPG:
Paranoia!
Paranoia is a game that came out of the Communist paranoia of the early 1980s. It is one of those strange RPGs you only seem to be able to play at conventions with complete strangers, because no gaming group has enough wierdos per capita to want to run through a whole campaign of it. Its kind of like a mixture of the movie Brazil, Cube and D&D. Strange, but good stuff. Good for an occasional one-shot adventure, especially. The best part about it is that each character has six clones, so there's lots of opportunity for hilarious death scenes and backstabbing between players.


Here's a blurb from the actual Kickstarter which does a pretty good job describing the game:

Paranoia is a roleplaying game set in a darkly humorous future. In Paranoia, a well-meaning but deranged computer desperately protects the citizens of an underground warren from all sorts of real and imagined enemies. You play one of The Computer's elite agents. Your job is to search out and destroy the enemies of The Computer. Your worst fear is that The Computer will discover that you are one of these enemies.

Paranoia: A light-hearted game of terror, death, bureaucracies, mad scientists, mutants, dangerous weapons, and insane robots, which encourages players to lie, to cheat, and backstab each other at every turn. 

Is that fun? Trust us.

Even though I I've backed them, I'm not suggesting you back the Kickstarter, as I can't account for their track record. There have been others versions of Paranoia that I thought were less than great (*cough* Mongoose Publishing *cough*), but as a loyal subject of The Computer I'm hoping these guys have what it takes to update Paranoia into our bright, secure, and totally not over-reaching surveillance state future.


No comments: