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The inside of the cover features an ad for the rest of the Paranoia XP line - I don't know why this is present. The standard mock security seal is also present. Service, Service! is intended for Game Masters only, so anyone who's not cleared Ultraviolet had better leave now. Really. I mean it. I have lots of knives over here.
Now that all those low-clearance stooges are gone, the rest of us can get to work. This book is more in the vein of Dilbert or Brazil than the average Paranoia XP supplement. It starts out with a few pages on how to inflict bureaucratic torment on the hapless Troubleshooters. Anyone who's attended a university or had to fill out any sort of official forms will almost instinctively come up with other ideas - sort of a collective bureaucratic unconscious that's affixed with red tape. There's also a handy chart showing what stereotypical members of one group think about stereotypical members of other groups - and unlike the similar charts printed in games whose titles take the (Noun): the (Other Noun) format, there's nothing really offensive or hackneyed about these lists. This is a very handy starter section.
Service, Service! also introduces a nifty thing called a Mandate, which is basically a one-Troubleshooter service service which is written on a small card, much like the ones for MBDs. It affords a small benefit for a potentially intimidating task, such as "inspect all rifles possessed by the 843rd Vulture Wing and ensure they are in working order". If the Troubleshooter gets too big or effective for his britches, or the Mandate becomes boring, it can be revoked at will. I like this idea, especially the handy-dandy cards that sit out in front of each Troubleshooter and that the onus is on the Troubleshooter to remember what the Mandate is, not the GM. Plus the Mandate chapter has a section entitled "Steenking Badges" - making that reference and making it funny automatically wins a point from me. Each section has some of these mandates on Xeroxable cards, but it's just about as easy to run off the blanks and make original ones. Piling this on top of a service service, the secret society mission and the actual Troubleshooter mission can make for some interesting marionetteing. I encourage all of you to use it heavily.
Each service group gets a writeup in Service, Service!, which is organized alphabetically by group, wherein new service firms are printed, as well as NPC personnel, service services (naturally) and one miniature mission apiece. This was a pleasant surprise, as I had been wondering how the writers could fill 128 pages with service group information when service groups on average almost never came up in any game I ran. Instead of writing 120 pages of service firms and NPCs, there is a set of missions that can be used in a pinch. My hat is off to whoever came up with this idea.
To me, the Armed Forces material is the hardest to fit into Alpha Complex as a whole, but I may have a different perspective from most Paranoia GMs. The new service groups include Alpha Complex military re-enactors - an amusing idea if ever there was one - parade junkies and Very Special Forces. The Armed Forces personnel is noteworthy for the inclusion of the Power-Drill Sergeant. Just at a cursory glance, the drawing that accompanies this writeup doesn't look particularly satirical. I'll know more at this time next year, probably. The other writeup is for the infamous Vulture Squadron Warrior, which will probably see more use. The mission that accompanies this section is amusingly ridiculous and can easily end in the phrase "RUN AWAY!"
The CPU section revolves primarily around the Pointy-Haired Boss-type of character, or Max Lamb from Carl Hiaasen's "Stormy Weather". Nothing matters to these people as much as improving efficiency and sliming their way up the CPU totem pole. The NPCs are of this type. The CPU missions revolves around the ancient Zen koan, "How many Troubleshooters does it take to change a lightbulb?" The potential for mayhem is staggering - this mission was written by Dan Curtis Johnson, author of the crackin' mission "Hunger" in WMD. He's rising high in my estimation, for what my estimation is worth.
HPD&MC is next, and the redheaded stepclone of Alpha Complex doesn't disappoint. There's no one common trend to this section, apart from providing a lot of petty and generally annoying stuff that serves little useful purpose. The mission for this section is to protect a talented but childish and vindictive celebrity - I wonder if this is what bodyguards' lives are like in the real world. And as an aside, there's an odd box at the bottom of page 47 - it looks like there should be an illustration in it, but for some reason there are just a few sentences about an illustration. These boxes-without-pictures crop up a few times in the course of the book. I'm not sure whether this is deliberate or some sort of layout glitch. I'm hazarding a guess that this isn't quite what was originally intended.
Then we come to everyone's favorite thugs, Internal Security. Because the potential for terror is so high with Internal Security, it's one of the most amusing groups where I'm concerned. The new service firms are devoted primarily to vicious thuggery, and the personnel are both key so far as I'm concerned - interrogators and checkpoint guards, both of which are common in games I run. The Internal Security mission is a takeoff on film noir - think The Maltese Falcon on acid.
PLC comes next, and is unsurprisingly devoted to weaselling as many resources and as much money out of everyone and everything as possible. One thing that is slightly jarring in this section is a couple of Internal Security Mandates on the Xeroxable cards - I'm not sure why this was done either, but it's another one of those curious layout decisions that occurs in the book. The mission in this section revolves around antics in the post office, which will undoubtedly amuse some people and make for a lot of postal worker jokes.
Power Services, the section for people who want mass electrocution at low low prices, follows. Power Services is one of the more straightforward groups in Alpha Complex and most of its material reflects its concern with maintaining the grid and scamming extra juice out of whatever can be found. This section also features a memorable sidebar account of visiting a U.S. Navy submarine. This section's mission can easily feature Troubleshooters shooting themselves causing trouble and at the same time not cause replacement clones to activate. If you're that nice. It can also end in a big explosion.
Research and Design, the favorite tool of Young Frankensteins everywhere, is the most categorically insane of all the Alpha Complex service groups. Internal Security is more sadistic, but what they do usually has a point beyond "I wanted to see what would happen if I stuck some wires in it and then hooked it up to a car battery and a neutron bomb." The service groups and personnel reflect this sort of manic devotion to Science! The mission bears a sort of twisted resemblance to the [u]Sealab 2021[/u] episode "I, Robot, Really," which is all I'm saying about it.
The last group is Technical Services, one of the linchpins of Alpha Complex that nobody ever sees if they're lucky. This is the firm to use if you want to play a game full of Bob-Hoskins-in-Brazil-alikes. As one might guess, there's a distinct lack of firms devoted to major and important technical problems here - instead the firms and personnel are primarily devoted to being nosy handymen without many brain cells. This is not a problem and explains rather a lot of how Alpha Complex is so advanced and at the same time perpetually on the verge of mass entropy-induced mechanical disaster. One of the personnel entries, in fact, is an...homage...to the movie Brazil. If you've seen it you'll spot the reference in about three seconds. The mission is along these lines, and features a shocking sort of Alpha Complex briefing officer.
The book ends with an appendix describing the Alpha Complex Internet and a collection of new charts for service groups that can substitute for the charts in the core Paranoia book. On the whole I like this book, but it occurs to me that this book won't be very useful for Classic or Zap! games as most of the time these games focus on the Troubleshooters only, and only involve service groups in a sort of auxilliary sense. Troubleshooters can call upon them, but they're not the focus of the game. Plus it's very easy to override jurisdiction, the standard operating procedures and the law in any given service group in those two play styles. It occurs to me that this book would be far more useful in a Straight game, or one that isn't based on Troubleshooters.
I give this book a four for Style as despite that it's easy to read, the wildly distributed Mandates and the weird "Illo" boxes caught my eye more often than they probably should have. This might have been even lower, but fortunately the quote sidebars and Friend Computer quotes have returned from their hiatus in Stuff. For Straight games I'd rate this a 5 for Substance, but since Straight and the even more severe Grim style seem to be in the minority, I feel compelled to rate this book a 4.
