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The game places you as one of the leaders of Alpha Complex, the ULTRAVIOLET High Programmers. You are given a paycheck of millions of credits, at least one Service Group, and possible ownership of up to 5 secret societies. You have massive political power, and with power come responsibility (and blame).
You and your fellow UVs are assigned to a Troubleshooting Mission...ahem, I mean gently encouraged by The Computer to solve an ongoing Crisis (dealing with commie sabotage, increasing thumbtack production, supervising the opening of an experimental nuclear power plant), which you do by purchasing Minions from Service Groups and using them. Oh, and I guess you can use your treasonous secret society connections as well. The gimmick of course is that your Minions and secret societies are likely to start a new Crisis while solving the old one. So your goal isn't to actually solve any problems, but to present the illusion that you did, in order to present yourself in the best possible light and get in The Computer's good graces. Getting your opponents blamed for your own failures is also a plus.
To make the game more interesting, there are also other agendas you may be engaged other than merely dealing with the Crisis like a loyal clone. Your Service Group may offer you a certain Directive (waste money on our pet projects, hurt our service group rivals) they want accomplished, telling you that if you refuse, they might hand the Directive over to your rival and give him a chance to seize your Service Group from underneath you. Your secret society may be tired of serving you and ask you to do something, promising your Agent a degree promotion if you succeed. A NPC ULTRAVIOLET may offer you a chance to join his powerful Clique if you just happen to do a certain "favor". And those Old Reckoning artifacts look really impressive; maybe if you can arrange for them to get into your personal possession, you could impress other people and increase your informal influence throughout the Complex...?
There is one major limit to your political power, and that is how many credits you possess at the moment, which is generally represented by ACCESS (1 million credits=1 ACCESS). Though you can use secret societies for free, without any ACCESS, you cannot buy any Minions, leaving you unable to do anything while your rivals keep on chugging along. Though the GM is encouraged to increase and reduce the amount of ACCESS each player has to encourage balance, the mere existence of ACCESS helps to make UVs feel less powerful than the non-UV fluff implies. In at least more than one gaming sessions, many of the PCs spent themselves dry, leaving no money to their name because they spent all their ACCESS on Minions.
Managing ACCESS does introduce a sort of tension to the game (and could encourage treasonous actions such as relying on secret societies or "underfunding" Minions in order to save money), but at the costs of making UVs appear less...powerful and worthy of respect. This was a problem raised by people critical of "High Programmer" when it was announced: familiarity breeds contempt. There needs to be rules that limit what High Programmers can do, so that there will be an actual game to play, but by imposing these rules, you end up defining what a High Programmer actually is (and ISN'T), and start making him less impressive compared to when High Programmers was merely a narrative device to move the PARANOIA game along.
One answer to this problem may be to ditch the whole "credit economy" mess and let players be more freeform in their actions instead of relying on Minions. I am constantly reminded of Dan Curtis Johnson's VIOLET Supervisor rules in "Extreme PARANOIA", where each player is granted control of a service firm and is allowed to do whatever he wants (for free!) so long as he makes sure that whatever he does relates to the service firm's "Mission Statement" (that he himself crafts). The character sheet represents the stats behind the Service Firm, and when you want to do something, you just roll based on those stats, rather than have to scrounge up the cash first, or beg for The GM to print more ACCESS. In these rules, the VIOLET Supervisor is treated as a powerful entity that is not limited by petty concerns such as money, but still has certain restrictions that ensures that the players are playing a game.
Still, UV play should at least be considered, even if the rules probably could be tweaked. Gareth provided lots of fluff about how UV life works (especially a section on how Computer Programming actually works in practice), and while I won't detail it here because, well, every GM gets to decide his own fluff, it's still very interesting and helps to justify the existence of UV play in the first place. The section "What UVs Worry About" showcase exactly what drives UVs paranoid, and explains how, even when you have absolute power, you can still be just as scared as a RED Troubleshooter. UVs have to worry about "information overload", the Illuminati, Cliques, other Alpha Complexes, your power-hungry/incompetent followers, and so much more.
And the most important fear that UVs face is that...now they're at the top, there's nowhere else to go but down. The only way you can expand your power is through informal channels (impressing other NPC UVs, by seizing Service Groups from your PC rivals, becoming popular), but informal power can rise and fall at any given moment. And The Computer is constantly monitoring everything you do, watching for any sign of treason and disloyalty. Players entering into this game thinking it's just a power fantasy may very well be right, but a twisted GM can easily turn this game into a nightmare, where the UVs are in constant fear, fright, and tension.
It's probably safe to say that this sort of tension is what Gareth Hannearh was striving for (especially due to the addition of the "credit economy" which will ensure such tension), and in this case, he succeeded admirably. I recommend getting this book, at least to consider how players can still feel fear and ignorance in Alpha Complex...even when they own the Complex.
STYLE: The style for this and other PARANOIA supplements after 25th Anniversary has taken a nosedive. Many elements of this book (especially the description of the "Minions") has been blatantly copy+pasted from other PARANOIA rulebooks, leading to an incident where the UV Rules forget to fully describe how one minion ("Threat Assessors") fully work, by quoting only Internal Security's description of Threat Assessors and not the Armed Forces' description of Threat Assessors. Fan favorite artist Jim Holloway also has not drawn any pictures inside this book, and while I like the new portrayal of The Computer as deaf, dumb, and blind, other PARANOIA fans may not. That being said, I have heard that the UV rules is better formatted than Troubleshooters or Internal Security, probably due to the existence of new content.
WARNING: It's clear that Gareth intended for the UV rules to be used towards a PARANOIA campaign. There are rules for character creation, and not in the standard (for PARANOIA) "Roll dice sixty billion times", but actually having the player carefully craft his character's strength and weaknesses (furthering the "keenly balanced tactical economics"). The struggles for informal power also suggest that said "informal power" needs to be tracked. That being said, there are pre-generated characters in the rulebook, so a one-shot game may be possible, though unwise.
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