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In Paranoia perhaps more than any other RPG it is important to keep your adventure and notes away from prying eyes and this screen does it with style. Its still only a piece of card, but the front illustration of the Computer's giant eye staring at the players is like a digital Sauron. Although it seems expensive at £10 its going to be much more impressive than a cut out corn flake packet covered in notes. Surrounding the big intimidating eye are dozens of the fortune cookie style quotes from Paranoia ( like the ones from the bottom of the page in most supplements ). These have the added effect of keeping the players looking in your direction, although they might simply be trying to read them all. And, as it says in the advertising for this screen it is "guaranteed opaque at visible wavelengths". No matter how hard the players look they will not be able to see through it.
Inside the screen the GM is presented with an array of tables detailing the sorts of things you might expect - weapons, equipment, treason and reward charts. As Paranoia is not exactly rules heavy I think most of the things you need are listed here. I would have also liked to have seen a list of information withholding and request denial excuses here for quick reference, but I guess I'm just being picky.
Inside the GM's screen the bonus goodies for this product are the Mandatory Fun Enforcement Pack. Of course, there is no real need to provide anything with a screen, but many games designers choose to include an adventure or something to encourage people to buy them. Personally I think an adventure would have been nice but the Mandatory Fun Enforcement Pack ( MFEP ) is in a way a tool to help create lots of adventures.
Firstly the MFEP includes a long and detailed Mission Blender. This is a mix of tables detailing each part of the mission generation process which you can either roll on or pick to create your own missions. It reminds me of early editions of Traveller which expected you to run games based entirely on tables and random dice rolls. With Paranoia though you are expected to pick and choose what you want from it, and if you use it to write adventures and work on them beforehand it could prove very useful indeed. I would not reccomend it for making up games on the spur of the moment though, unless you enjoy very chaotic Zap style games and don't care too much about where it is all going. As a resource for ideas though the Mission Blender is excellent.
Following the Blender are a number of forms. Normally that word makes people a shudder, but in Paranoia everybody loves forms ! Photocopy them and hand them out as you will to keep your players amused and occupied while running an adventure. There are enough Paranoia style jokes on these forms to keep your players entertained and give you an excuse to have their characters terminated over and over again.
Finally the booklet ends with a table of mutant powers and secret societies desinged as handouts for your players. This is perhaps my one criticism about this product but I'm not sure why these are provided. The less players know in Paranoia the better and providing them with a summary of every mutant power and secret society takes away some of the mystery for new players. Fear and ignorance, remember ? Its only a minor flaw but I for one will not be using these tables, let the players find this information out for themselves during game play, its much more fun.
So there we have it, the Paranoia GM screen. It stands up, it looks great and you get a neat booklet full of tables and things. Perhaps it is a luxury item but I'd reccomend every GM gets one quickly before they remove the 'XP' from the title. It will impress your players and annoy Microsoft at the same time.
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