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The book begins with six new Mandatory Bonus Duties for Troubleshooters. These, it seems, are long overdue, and a fresh way to generate inter-party chaos. The old MBDs go back to the second edition of PARANOIA, but play options have expanded considerably since then. I think GMs will appreciate these new, torturous team member assignments. What you get: advertising & branding officer, agent provocateur, alertness officer, financial officer, medical officer, and public relations guy. The description for each MBD is loaded with potential, and I found this section to be a pleasant surprise to kick off the book.
The next chapter describes in general the uneven and peril-filled climb (and descent) through the different security clearances. Like everything in Alpha Complex, you’re damned no matter how much power you can glean for yourself. Simple rules for creating characters at any security clearance are presented here, along with an expanded list of the benefits of the Access attribute.
Next up is a listing of the housing situation for Clearances RED through VIOLET. Brief as it is at four pages, I found this section very useful and enjoyable. There may be nothing better for making PCs feel at home in their security clearances than to describe their apartments, or in the case of higher-clearance citizens, their subsectors or even larger areas.
However, it’s in this section that the first of the graphics problems crops up. I’m sure the designers are well aware of the problem by now, but there’s a large and painfully low-resolution image to be found here. Encountering this, I began to flip ahead through the book to see if there were others like it. Unfortunately, there are a couple more pieces with the same pixilated look to them. Others elsewhere look smudgy or too dark, a problem that could have been easily solved with a quick adjustment of their levels in Photoshop. This where the big hit on Style points comes from, and I should mention that I struggled with that decision. Had the images been cleaner, the book would have earned an easy 4 for presentation. (Well, except for one other thing. Keep reading.)
Otherwise the layout is compact and easy to navigate, with little wasted space. In spite of the black and white printing, sanserif typefaces and three-column clutter, I have the sense that I’m getting a lot of bang for my buck. As a GM, what I really want from my RPG books is information, and there’s that aplenty. This goes not only for Extreme PARANOIA but also for the entire game line. What I first took for ‘aesthetically challenged’ I now regard as high value.
The next chapter discusses the Happy Fun Job Placement Center which is of course another way to torment your players as they rise through the ranks. Brief but brutal, it contains some new (but classic) aptitude tests containing the kinds of catch 22s that will make PCs think twice about ever seeking a promotion or new job assignment.
Next is a chapter cut from the Traitor’s Manual concerning social clubs. This chapter is also found on the Mongoose Publishing website. Citizens have free time, and these are Computer-approved hobbies and other diversions to liven up the hours after the day’s work shift. No need to review this section really, since you can get it for free and judge for yourself:
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/parasocialclubs.pdf
Most of the book to this point lays foundations and speaks in general about life and work at the various security clearances. Here begins more in-depth looks at the kinds of play opportunities available for PCs above RED, starting with Clearance ORANGE.
Gah! There’s a page missing here. Page 40 is a repeat of the introduction on page 3. Okay, this is part of the reason I had to go with a 3 Style rating, but you can find the missing page here:
http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/Page_40_for_Web.pdf
It’s the kind of error that I can understand and even forgive from a player’s point of view, but it shouldn’t happen on a final draft. In PARANOIA terms, somebody would be activating a new clone about now. So, where were we?
Here begins a more in-depth yadda yadda… starting with Clearance ORANGE. From here on, the book follows a formula. Each chapter starts with a particular security clearance and gives you the basic slaps and bennies for that clearance, a character dossier, a list of fun and funky equipment that becomes available, and notes on how clearance affects secret society membership. Following these are a few pages that provide specific ways to run missions and other types of adventures for characters of that clearance. For instance, running ORANGE characters as vidshow stars, YELLOWs as retail sales managers, GREENs as members of Emergency Disaster Response Teams, BLUEs as Internal Security Troopers, INDIGOs as R&D mad scientists, and VIOLETs as executives.
BLUE troopers were covered in the first edition supplement HIL Sector Blues, which I owned back in the day and had some fun with. BLUE Troopers are essentially beefed-up Troubleshooters with greater responsibility and authority, but just as likely to get skewered and roasted in the line of duty. This is by far the largest single section of the book, and seems to consist of quite a lot of updated-but-reprinted material from HIL Sector Blues, including a couple of quickie missions. New PARANOIA players or those who have never read HIL Sector Blues will probably enjoy this section, but I’m not impressed with reprinted material to an extent that the only new PARANOIA book that I’ve neglected to pick up is Flashbacks, a collection of missions from earlier editions of the game. However, I realize that this is just my bias and it has no way affected the Substance rating I’m giving Extreme PARANOIA.
Some of the descriptions take the form of games-within-games, such as the ORANGE vidshow stars and retail sales managers. I didn’t appreciate the approach taken in each case, as they sometimes change the format of play in ways that I found awkward. In spite of this, I found each section easy to mine for game ideas and certainly informative about what there might be for PCs to do at each security clearance.
The last page briefly discusses the AlphaNet, the Alpha Complex equivalent of the internet. It’s a little out of place, but it’s a satisfactory way to finish off the book.
The book achieves what it sets out to do and more, which is always a good thing in my opinion. Certain clearances are paid greater attention than others, but I came away from it with a much better sense of each security clearance’s place in Alpha Complex than I have found in any other PARANOIA supplement I’ve read in the last two decades. I do recommend it, even to gamemasters who may not ever consider allowing their PCs to rise in clearance.
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