StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Posted: **2006-05-20 12:48am**

Tomorrow I'm GMing a Paranoia one-shot session for some friends, and I'd like your input on the notes I've put together for this game. I created all the characters myself, and with the exception of one, they'll be handed out randomly to avoid favoritism.

They are:
Former IntSec goon who's a member of Anti-Mutants
Former R&D who's Pro-Tech
Former CPU who's FCCCP
Former Power Services who's a mutant with regeneration and a member of Psion
Former Tech Services who's a mutant with adrenaline control and a member of Psion.

I'm leaving it up to the two mutant players to choose whether or not to register their mutations before the game begins. I've also written up about 1/2-3/4 of a page for each player on their characters backstory of how they became a troubleshooter and basic personality.

For the plot itself, I was inspired by a classic adventure where the Troubleshooter team is sent to destroy Christmas. I figured it could be nicely disturbing and hilarious.

INTRO

The daycycle starts like any other normal day cycle. You wake up in your dormitories, take your caffeine pills, grudingly go through mandatory morning exercises, and finally finish your morning routine with a nice refreshing bowl of gruel and some Soylent RED wafers in a RED clearance cafeteria. As finish your meals, the loudspeaker blares. "Citizens *names go here*, report immediately to Briefing Room C-17, Dispatch Building 12, Sector JFK."

A door on the far side of the cafeteria leads to a TransTube station, which can take them to Sector JFK. (1) The INFRARED clearance car is dimly lit, slightly rusted, and the seats are all metal. It also vibrates intensely at high speeds. After a short but uncomfortable ride, it deposits them onto a run down station in JFK sector. DB 12 is four blocks away, but unfortunately the shortest path there is blocked by an ORANGE hallway.

Possible ways around:
reprogramming a maintenance bot to repaint the hallway RED
running through it and hoping they dont get caught
attempting to find an alternate route

If the players go with the third choice, they find one, but it makes them 10 minutes late for their briefing.

BRIEFING

(If they arrive in time)

The briefing room is adequately lit, but the air conditioners make it slightly chilly. There are enough desks, but the chairs are uncomfortable. The door opens and a YELLOW clearance officer walks in. He places a briefcase on a side table, pulling out a few sheets of paper and taking a seat.

"Recently, Internal Security has been tracking down reports of a subversive activity known as "Christmas". However, they have failed in all attempts at infiltrating and destroying this treasonous activity, and the Computer, in all its wisdom, has removed them from the search and handed it over to Troubleshooting. The information you are about to receive has been edited in accordance with your clearance level and is not to be shared with anyone outside of this room. Do I make myself understood?"

"Good."

"Now, this...Christmas is a secretive and mysterious activity with a currently unknown purpose, and is of course, highly treasonous. Surveillance has revealed numerous traitors mentioning that it takes place sometime next week, and that hundreds, if not thousands, of traitors are preparing for it. We don't know what "it" will be, but we do know that the potential security and well-being of Alpha Complex depends on stopping it, and that duty is yours!"

"Now, we don't know much about this activity, but apparently all the strings are being pulled by some traitor known only by the code name of Santa Clause. Root this traitor out from whatever dark burrow he hides in and terminate him, along with all traitors who work for him. Supply warehouse 210 in sector YFX has recently had many freight shipments disappear, we believe it might be connected to Christmas. I suggest you start your search there. You are dismissed."

With that, he picks up his briefcase and walks out, not giving time for any questions.

(they should stop by a PLC commissary and pick up their equipment, as well as R&D for experimental devices that need testing)

WAREHOUSE 210

The warehouse entrances are INFRARED during working hours, allowing easy access. Players asking around will find that freight shipments were not stolen, but actually transferred out. (2) To where is above their clearance level, but the YELLOW warehouse manager's office keeps the transfer records locked up in his office. PCs attempting to break in during the night cycle will find the entrances have been recoded YELLOW, although they can break in through a window. Two doberbots patrol the warehouse, and the PCs will have to fight them. The manager's office is on the second floor above the break room, with the files locked in a filing cabinet. If they get ahold of the files, they find that each one went to a different location. The next one is to be delivered tomorrow to a freight hub in Sector QWE Subsector RTY.

FREIGHT HUB

Several boxes of goods are delivered to the hub, where they are handed over to a group consisting of 1 GREEN supervisor, an ORANGE driver, and ten RED guards. The goods are loaded into a truck, which the group will then leave in.

Providing the PCs manage to find a way to track it, it will lead them to the...

MALL

Deep in the underbelly of Alpha Complex, the Mall is an abandoned munitions factory that has been taken over as a base of operations by Free Enterprise. The outside is mundane enough, the only suspicious things are the armed guards and blacked out windows. Admittance is easy, a simple 5 CR entrance fee for each member and a strict warning that anyone causing trouble will be removed immediately and permanently.

The inside is a hotbed of sedition and treason. Gaudy decorations line the walls and strange music quietly flows from ceiling speakers. Strings of colored lights are everywhere, and the production floor has been turned into a bazaar. The centerpiece of all this treasonous activity is a hideous mutant creature! It easily stands twenty feet tall, a mass of green needly things portruding from its conical bulk, and servants are busy bedecking it with strands of colored cloth and shiny spheres, perhaps to appease and gain its favor.

A deep and throaty HO HO HO bellows out from one of the walkways. HO HO HO, MERRY CHRISTMAS! It comes from an obese man in a strange outfit, treasonously combining both RED and ULTRAVIOLET colors into a hideous fashion statement. He wears a fuzzy cap that flops about as he turns his head, and a bell jingles merrily. Three black suited but YELLOW tied men stand to each side, staring down at the crowd in a sternly protective manner. The fat man opens up a large burlap bag, withdrawing handfuls of shiny circle shaped objects (mints) and tossing them to the crowd below with a "SANTA CLAUSE WISHES ALL OF YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS!"

With that, he disappears back through a doorway behind him. In the meantime, the PCs can make contact with secret society officers and do some shopping.

COMMIES!

Before the heroes can leave the production floor, a new person appears on the catwalk above. He wears a black beret and while he's wearing RED, it's obviously not a standard issue jumpsuit. "DEATH TO THE OPPRESSORS, GLORY TO THE PROLETERIAT!" he screams, chucks two grenades into the crowd, grabs one of the light strings, and swings down into the mutant creature. He's engulfed in it, but the force of the impact topples it over into the crowd, ripping down more light strings. His battlecry is taken up by at least ten others in the crowd, who pull out RED lasers and begin shooting randomly to cause as much panic and chaos as possible.

POST-FIGHT

As the heroes go through the door that Santa went through, they burst through a receiving room and then into an office. The office is dark and a man sits behind a desk.

"The figure stands up from behind his desk, flipping on a light as he does so. He's tall and thin, with aristocratic facial features and a smug grin. More importantly, he's wearing a fashionable BLUE suit with a silver badge shaped like a shield on his suit's left breast. It bears the letters ISIB: Internal Security Intelligence Bureau."

He'll attempt to convince them that the entire Christmas operation was really an IntSec sting operation to lure traitors out into the open, and that the troubleshooters were sent after it to give it the appearance of legitimacy. He'll congratulate them on a job well done and promise to put in a commendation for them for their hard work, and then suggest that they report back to Dispatch for debriefing. They'll be punished for abandoning their mission.

If they don't believe him, he'll set off a claymore and smoke grenade hidden in his desk, and attempt to escape through a transtube. The tube leads to a vehicle garage, where he takes an autocar full of goons and flees. Theres a garbage truck sitting there. It's full of volatiles, has no doors, and has a damaged AI, and can only hold three people comfortably in the cab.

Whether they follow or fight, the officer's car is on autopilot, allowing him and his goons to fight while the car drives to the Free Enterprise sector HQ. If the car wrecks, the PCs can find the destination still locked into the car's AI.

It's to Sector VDR, specifically a PLC office complex run by the service firm, which is actually controlled by Free Enterprise.
Somehow the PCs have to get in and fight there way through dozens of guards (both human and bot), and kill the entire board. If they do, mission success. (Although they'll still have to explain everything to the Computer and their debriefing officer...)

Subnotes:
1. Make them decipher which route to take from a complex map.
2. The manager is a Free Enterprise operative who has been forging the transfer documents and sending the shipments to rendezvous points where they are dropped off.
3. The InSec officer is a rank 7 Sector Chief for FE.

And I don't really have any idea for where to go from there. Input and ideas are welcome!

EDIT: Bah, this damn thing keeps erasing my previous edits whenever I click on it again. Anyway, I've got the story fleshed out, just looking for input now.

Posted: **2006-05-20 01:56am**

If any of the players agree with you on begrudging morning exercise, frag 'em and bring in a clone. Reds are almost as heavily drugged as IRs and they enjoy that sort of stuff in their drugged out minds. Also, if they complete the mission and are actively working together, they don't get the gist of the game. Give them little side missions from their secret societies/play on personality quirks,.

Remember the motto: Fear and Ignorance, Ignorance and Fear.

Posted: **2006-05-20 02:09am**

Yeah, I don't expect them to work together though (unless its through fear). For example, the two mutants have the same secret society, and should be expected to sort of stick together for mutual protection (provided they know the other is a mutant), but by making them from rival service groups, so they'll have that conflict to deal with, plus the InSec guy who'll be out to get them either way.

Then there's that the setting is pretty appropriate considering the people playing (in every D&D campaign, the majority of PC deaths are due to other PCs, including one incident that pissed off our DM where only 2 out 7 players made it out of a dungeon, the rest all killed each other, including myself)

But anyway, I'm open to secret society mission suggestions.

Oh, I've also decided that the InSec agent will actually be legit, even if the operation isn't, he'll be a plant that's been working his way up to the upper echelons of FE. If he gets a chance, he'll attempt to tell the PCs of this if they're about to kill him. Considering he'd have lied to them before about the operation, chances are they'll kill him anyway, thus committing treason.

Posted: **2006-05-20 02:54am**

Add some sort of R&D gear for this. The more likely to cause chaos and destruction, the better.

Here's one I remember from a website full of the stuff:

Acid Grenades. Get a bit on you and it's like, movie style oops there goes my skin type burning. It eats through metal, wood, small animals, ceramics, etc.

It's almost useful enough to justify the fact that it's inevitably going to cause casualties when R&D accidentally gave them the wrong blast radius descrption and completely neglected to tell them that the timer is settable and is totally not at the highest setting when passed out.

Give two- surely any more and the fun is wasted.

For even more fun, have the second one not detonate. Watch the hilarity as nobody wants to approach it or test. For extra fun, have it really be inert. Oh the fun they'll have being scared in a narrow hallway with that blocking the only passage.

Missions-

Anti-Mutant guy is easy- just have someone be a Mutant and have him needed to be killed. The more awkward the person who has to be taken out, the better.

Pro-Tech- Um, salvage some seditious technology from the Mall Santa or something?

FCCCP- Friend Computer needs a terminal that's blown out activated again. He neglected to tell the FCCCP guy it's a confession booth. A Paranoia confession booth is always fun.

I dunno about the last one.

Posted: **2006-05-20 03:02am**

I like the SS suggestions and added them to my notes. As for experimental equipment, I also added the two acid grenades to it, along with:

Propaganda Grenades x3 (one will be full of Commie propaganda)
Chrono Rifle x1
Gamma Raygun x1
Wheelie boots x1

Posted: **2006-05-20 05:52am**

Don't forget the lovable Plasma Grenade. When thrown and cooked off for five seconds, it showers a target with blood, which either makes them look HIDEOUSLY wounded, or gives someone an emergency blood transfusion on the spot.

Perhaps an experimental R&D Escape Pack, a box that when a button is pressed, it opens to reveal a pair of expensive sneakers.

Edit: For added Irony, make the escape pack shoes a clearance off limits.

Posted: **2006-05-20 11:31am**

This is a character idea, actually.

A Empathic Mutant who is the Happiness Officer.
"You will be happy, Citizen"

Posted: **2006-05-20 10:11pm**

Nothing like them finding a copy of 1984 and bringing it back....

Instruction manual citizen ???What is your security clearance again?

They are issued laser barrels, the only laser barrels in stock....let em find out they are viiolet clearance.

Asign them a bot...and have them told they have to protect it at all costs. Since it is a bot it can enter any security clearance area to get where it needs to go.....oh my is that a green clearance corridor ahead?

Posted: **2006-05-21 02:19am**

Alright, I ran it today. It started off pretty nicely.

Character names were

InSec: O-R-LLY (Happiness)
R&D: Kittens-R-DED (Equipment)
CPU: Seemo-R-DIK (Leader)
HPD/MC: Logan-R-LIV (Loyalty)
PS: Feline-R-something (Hygiene)
TS: Lil-R-ITH (Multicorder)

As soon as their Dispatch summons was announced, Kittens ran from the cafeteria to the trans station, and was immediately reported by O for leaving a mess. The rest followed and they took the train to JFK, where they were presented by the problem of an ORANGE gate. Logan, Kittens, and O simply climbed over, although Kittens tore his jumpsuit and was fined for the damage. Feline and Lil walked around until they found a sewer grating, pried it open, and got through that way.

They made it to the briefing, where they were assigned a loyalty officer, Logan (late player). Feline and Lil managed to find an INFRARED restroom and clean up to avoid reprimand. The briefing was given, they all leave, get their equipment and experimental devices, then head back to the trans station. The gate problem is waiting for them. They slid their equipment through without touching the ORANGE, then climbed the wall without incident.

They head to the supply warehouse, where the team leader failed miserably at attempting to intimidate an ORANGE lower level manager into giving him information, and ended up doing some boot licking. They do however find out that the manager would have the transfer papers in his office. O finds the warehouse managers office, finding it empty and locked. The only thing in the hall is a small scrubbot. He takes off his reflec armor and covers the bot's eyes, then blows out the lock on the office door. It's a lot louder than he expected, so he ducked into the break room opposite the office and hid. The rest of the team comes running, and Seemo-R and Lil go to distract the floor manager while Kittens searches for the papers. He finds them, jots down important locations and times in a notebook, and then leaves, just in time to get caught by the returning manager. The guy takes the scrubbot's memory device and plugs it into a terminal, and then watches on video as O comes by, tries the office, then blinds the bot, removes the blind, and hides. O did some really great fast talking (it was actually semi-believable) and managed to only end up with a single treason point being added.

Anyway, they leave, head to the site of the next stolen goods dropoff. There's an office complex nearby, and Lil and Feline decide to break into it while the rest of the group is dispersed. They encounter an industrial scrubbot which finds them dirty and attempts to clean them via industrial strength solvents and such. They manage to run from it with only minor wounds, and it breaks down the main entrance chasing after them. The rest of the group hears the commotion and come running, where it decides to clean them as well.

Short fight later, and they manage to disable it. O promptly reports them all for damaging computer property. More treason points assigned.

The dropoff occurs like the notes said, and then the group leader, Seemo-R directs the team to steal an ORANGE autocar sitting in the parking lot, opens the trunk, and stuffs Lil in because the car itself would be too cramped. O immediately accuses him of being a commie for attempting to steal unauthorized and higher clearance equipment, and opens fire, wounding Seemo-R for 5 damage.

O wins the iniative on the first actual battle round and fires again, hitting Seemo-R once again. Feline opens fire on O, injuring him. Logan tosses a frag grenade, which goes off and lightly wounds everyone. A couple more grenades get tossed by others, Lil blasts her way out of the trunk, and Kittens hits Logan with the Chrono rifle, zapping him out of existence (or so they all thought). Feline activates her adrenaline burst mutant power and hammers O into the ground, reducing him to -1 and unconsciousness. Lil promptly opens fire on her for being an unregistered mutant (Lil was as well). Kittens sets off an acid grenade but manages to duck behind the car before it goes off, and is the only one spared from damage. O is killed by it. Lil manages to shoot Feline again and reduces her to unconscious and dying, then tries to strike a deal with Seemo-R.

Seemo-R replies by firing on her with his Gamma Raygun, but it doesn't do anything (except reduce Lil to 6 PIP points), and she fires back at him and kills him. Logan pops back into existence (he was zapped forward 16 seconds into the future, or three rounds), and is promptly gunned down by Kittens from behind, who then kills Lil when she makes a run for it.

Kittens then sets about arranging evidence to make it look like his version of the story is true, and as replacement clones arrived, we decided to call it a night and continue some other time.

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Paranoia game I'm running

Paranoia game I'm running