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I should preface this, however, by saying that this isn't like other games' equipment manuals. There are no player-available charts and lists where phrases like "The Flying Midget of Doom does X amount of damage over Y squares in Z directions for Lambda number of turns" abound. There are no rarity tables, no required cost adjustment algorithms and nothing that says, "A Soylent Truncheon in Excellent Condition does 1d3.14159 damage more to Sentient Rutabagas" or other workmanship-related issues. This, I think, is a good thing.
The book does start with a handy chart, however, on the inside of the front cover - a chart helpfully entitled "What can I buy for X credits?" This is ok, though in 20/20 hindsight I'd have replaced it with a chart entitled "What can I buy at my security clearance?" I was asked this question more by my players than I was asked "What can I buy for X credits?" Still, not every group is the same as mine, so some people probably got more use out of it.
It starts off with some blurbs on how an auction - typically a freewheeling capitalist institution that doesn't quite belong in the Soviet-Union-on-happy-pills atmosphere of Alpha Complex - functions in said atmosphere. I expect that these would be handy fallbacks in case the GM can't come up with anything off the top of his or her head. There is also a disclaimer on the biggest problem I have with this book - that the GM information and the player information is all squashed together in each item's entry. Each item in Stuff follows a basic template: a C-Bay window on one side of the entry with a collection of numbers and names, an advertising pitch, sometimes purchaser comments and a "Customers who purchased this item also purchased" line. Under all of this is a paragraph labeled "GM Only" wherein are critical bits of information such as what's cleared for which security clearance, how much it costs, what it does, and various mishaps that can occur if the PCs bollocks things up. Not that that ever happens in the bastion of perfection that is Alpha Complex, naturally. The out of game problem I had with this is that sometimes I wanted to give the players the book and let them make shopping lists of what they wanted while I sorted something else out - secret notes, what have you. But even though I generally trusted my players, I couldn't trust the natural progression of the human eye when reading English - we look downwards while reading, which can lead to accidental breaks in the line between GM and player information. Actually knowing such things is forbidden and punishable by clone termination, but sometimes it's hard to prove someone knows something without coming off as a complete git. Thus, in order to preserve the petty informational security that comes with Paranoia I have to read off this stuff myself. While that allows me to practice my auctioneer voices and patter, it eats up a lot of time.
Now that I've gotten the review firmly off on the bad news foot, I'd like to jump the other way into what's good about it. The first thing is, obviously, that now there are dozens more dangerous widgets to throw at players and to have them throw at each other. The stuff in Stuff is divided into 15 sections - some are straightforward, like Weapons and Ordnance and Vehicles, while some are more arcane, like McDs. Weapons and Ordnance is, conveniently, the first section in the book. I'm not sure what the procedure was for putting the sections in the order they're in, but there does seem to be a relative value system at work here - guns and spy gadgets are more important to the average player than personal gifts and medications, so they come first.
Reviewing each item in turn would be beyond tedious, so I'm just going to hit the highlights of the pages upon pages of Stuff. The first is that each section is organized alphabetically from A downwards, apart from the occasional Featured Item which occupies the front page of the appropriate section, and each item has an icon or icons next to the name indicating which play style it's ideally suited for. Weapons and Ordnance is not only the first section but the largest and features such doozies as the Soylent Truncheon and the Personal Particle Projector. The Defense section features the Remote-Controlled Troubleshooter Decoy - I'm not going to list items from every section, as that's not the point of this review, but I mention this one because this item was very popular in my group after Stuff came out. McD, by the way, stands for Malfeasance Control Device.
The last two non-item pages before the index are taken up with payment and delivery methods - this can be handy for GMs who really want to screw with players, since again in my experience the players assume that once they click the "Buy Now" button that they'll get a brown box full of packing peanuts and a U.S. Postal Service stamp containing their purchases in front of the door the next morning. Delivering items by experimental R&D methods or the two rabidly competitive Armed Forces-aligned services could provide a lot of amusement, especially when an out-of-control armored car delivering barrels of necronomicil crashes through the wall into the Housing Complex Food Vats.
There is not much art in Stuff, and what little there is is mostly devoted to sidebar-type boxes containing various Alpha Complex advertisements. There is an elaborate running gag with the B^3 ads, however, that takes a jab at the Coca Cola company. One unusual thing about this book compared to other Paranoia books is that there are no footnote gags - the black bars with one-liners present in most if not all other Paranoia XP books are absent. I don't know why, but it doesn't really bother me - most of the time I overlook those bars anyway. The cover of the book has the largest piece of art - two Citizens in a silly approximation of a Mexican standoff. One is almost unarmed while the other looks like a typical Troubleshooter - among other things he's carrying a flyswatter, a fork, a slingshot, tear gas grenades, a belt of machine gun rounds with tracers in, a spear, what looks like an RPG-7 crossed with a halberd, a katana and a hydrogen bomb. A third Citizen, this one wearing Troubleshooter kit, is crouched behind them giving the Alpha Complex salute with his gun hand and his other hand's index finger in his ear. And his fly is open.
There are two problems with Stuff. The first is the aforementioned layout issue, where GM information and player information are set closely together. I don't pretend to know why this is and I pass no judgment on any of it beyond that it makes it difficult to keep up the air of Ignorance and Fear when it's extremely easy for the eye to slip or be deliberately diverted. If the book could have been divided into a Player section and a GM section I would have rated it higher, but I don't know if that was possible.
The second problem is that this is still an equipment book - it's difficult for me to sit and read through without some great impetus to do so. I have trouble sitting and poring over numbers and potential disaster for 120 pages when it comes to running a role-playing game. The Mutant Experience is similar but easier on the eyes because it's funnier, it's half as thick, there are more amusing drawings, and there's more immediately useful non-list information. Still, as equipment books go it's head and shoulders above most of the rest because it's funny, but its humor isn't one I can enjoy at length.
One final thought for this: it's a great book to use in the Sadistic R&D Equipment Pachinko Game, which is played thusly. You, the GM, select some widgets from Stuff or elsewhere and put some of them over each slot in the metaphorical board. Each slot is a player. You and bystanders can quietly make book on who will end up with what, since just about anyone who's heard of Paranoia knows that they don't want to get stuck with the thing nobody can identify. Put in three of those and watch the fur fly.
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