![]() The pregens in the best prewritten Paranoia adventures were often the highlights, and a long pre-game character generation session isn’t really in the spirit of Paranoia, but using this process as a creative tool to make pregens would be really fun. I can see the rationale there (it’s useful in such small games to give PCs additional enemies because it’s otherwise too easy for them to guess which PC is backstabbing them), but I actually think it’s even more useful for a different purpose – namely, coming up with pregenerated PCs for your home adventures to give out to your players. The book suggests that its main use is for small games with only two to three players, so as to give the player characters a more developed set of personal issues and disputes and allies and enemies beyond the other party members. (In a jocular dig at Traveller, the supplement notes that whilst in some games you can die in character creation, Criminal Histories allows you to die multiple times in character creation.) Lashed together by Bill O’Dea, this is an extensively expanded character generation system whose main draw is its extensive set of lifepath tables. Here, I’d like to take a quick look at a cross-section of them. (Writers ceasing to work for Mongoose is a long-term trend, as is Gareth Hanrahan eventually taking on the bulk of the writing work for a line.) Before that, Mongoose actually produced some of the best non-adventure resources for Paranoia ever seen. ![]() But that was late in the game line, when the bottom of the barrel was being scraped and a lot of the writers who had been producing Paranoia stuff had, for whatever reason, stopped and left Gareth Hanrahan to write everything. ![]() Paranoia XP‘s supplement line wasn’t perfect, and there were some releases (like a supplement for playing Armed Forces troopers, or one about bots) which felt like a misguided attempt to rekindle bad ideas whose shortcomings had already been exposed in the late 2nd edition days. As far as later editions go, the 25th anniversary version just had a few adventures released for it, whilst supplements for the latest version seem to take the form of additional card backs (doubling down on what I think is a fundamentally misguided design approach). Acute Paranoia for 1st Edition was basically an adventure collection with some bonus essays here and there of mixed quality in 2nd Edition The DOA Sector Travelogue was interesting as far as an overview of a sector goes, but a bit bland, and was hampered by the intention to tie it into the start of the Secret Society Wars metaplot later supplements like the Crash Course Manual or Paranoia Sourcebook were misguided attempts to make the game suitable for long-term campaign play and pander to a metaplot nobody wanted. Supplements (as opposed to prewritten adventures) for Paranoia are, as a concept, something the game used to struggle with a lot.
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