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I picked up Underplex as part of a package deal that I got from Comic Heaven, my old stomping ground in Cleveland, on the premise that it looked vaguely interesting - not as a dungeon crawl, as the book immediately tries to disown, but as an examination of the points where the Computer's steely gaze simply doesn't extend. Instead of picking a single point of inspiration, Underplex draws from a bunch of different sources and creates a nice little melange of options for Paranoia GM's to take advantage of.
Fortunately, Underplex delves only a little into the arena of D&D parody; that territory is getting a little thin, and was already covered nicely in Orcbusters in 1987. The easiest point of comparison would be the section in Logan's Run where Logan encounters the castoffs of the futuristic society that he's from, where the rigid structures of a totalitarian society get shredded up and fall into disused areas like psychotic confetti. ("Fish and sea greens, plankton and protein from the sea.") Since Alpha Complex likes to one-up its inspirations whereever it can, the Underplex is composed of a bunch of different parts of Alpha Complex outside of the Computer's view - the Necromunda-style mutant-haunted underbelly of the Dungeon, the vents and sealed-off corridors of the Trans, the natural caverns of the Deeps, and entire sectors walled off and sealed by Computer error or High Programmer caprice, whether the people inside were moved out first or not.
The entire book is packed, is the best way to put it. Instead of hammering a point to death over and over again - stop snickering, I do not do that in my reviews - the book gives you just enough to let your imagination do the rest of the work, then sprints to the next idea. An Old Reckoning military base, for instance, gives you just enough of an idea to flesh it out in your mind, then seamlessly introduces a plot complication that'll keep Troubleshooters dealing with chlorine-spewing Scrubots. Almost every section has an adventure seed to go along with it, or a mission and counter-mission for secret society members.
Most of it comes down to the willingness of the book to pick an idea and engage with it. For instance, there's a brief section of the book devoted to an exploration of a myco-society, where a single High Programmer's willingness to become one with nature has resulted in his own personal society based on fungus zombies - his citizens are happy, but utterly zonked out by the fungus. If you're looking to do a variant of Bioshock, there you go. (In fact, I would be very interested to see the authors of Paranoia work on a Bioshock game, because they've obviously got the chops to do it.) A brief section on the feral children - abandoned by high-clearance citizens who drop the hormone suppressant from their food - could easily become the seed for either Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, South Park, or Lord of the Flies, or some useful hybrid of all three. A pair of random charts on finding robots in the Underplex and getting a clone delivered to you beyond the Computer's reach can easily add an entertaining half-hour to a session with a single dice roll.
There are bits that don't quite work out. The adventure in the back feels like the setup for a larger campaign, but leaves the heavy lifting in the hands of the GM, and doesn't really do too much with the whole idea of the Underplex. (It has some beautiful items, though, including one inspired by Mission Impossible that'll take care of a few clones before the players finally figure it out.) It's only a minor disappointment, though, and creative GMs will be able to use it as a springboard into further adventure.
I should also mention Jim Holloway's artwork, which is just sterling; his style is one of the reasons why it's so easy to grasp Paranoia's concepts. A particular favorite of mine is on page 29, where a group of panicked Troubleshooters hit elevator buttons while something awful - and offscreen - approaches. Even better is his reluctance to draw people as anything but people; you can imagine seeing the people he draws on the street, as opposed to the smooth-faced fashion models you see in every piece of game art ever. That's not to say that he doesn't dip into caricature, but it's the good kind of caricature, where you can see a character's entire personality in a single facial expression.
I was initially not terrifically enthused about the return of Paranoia, but having seen what the authors have done with a short supplement like this, I'm definitely inclined to explore the game further. I can't speak for the rest of the Paranoia line, but Underplex is a dense little gem. It does more in forty-eight pages than I've seen some books do in three hundred.
-Darren MacLennan
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