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Paranoia XP

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Rauthorim:
Jea cool!!

Das wird ein teures Jahr.. Chroniken der Engel Zeug, Degenesis, WoD2.. Paranoia XP... ;)

Sethai:
Also ich werds kaufen *freu*

Selganor [n/a]:
Bis zum GenCon kommt's wohl raus...

PARANOIA XP GOES GOLD
Internet Technologies Revolutionize Roleplaying Game Development

New York/Austin/Swindon -- Aug 5, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mongoose Publishing Ltd. and the creators of Paranoia XP announced today that the new version of the classic tabletop roleplaying game had "gone gold," and would be released in time for GenCon 2004.

To a large degree, the game was developed online, in public. Fans of the game contributed enthusiastically via blog, wiki, and online forum. They wrote text, debated rules, proofread, ran statistical analyses, and even wrote a computer simulator to test the game's paper-and-pencil rules.

"Online collaboration made this edition of Paranoia the best yet," said Allen Varney (www.allenvarney.com), the game's designer. "We borrowed the tools and methods of open-source software development for a paper game, and it worked brilliantly. I plan to create future games the same way, and other designers should consider it too."


THE COMPUTER IS YOUR FRIEND

Paranoia is a roleplaying game set in a darkly humorous future. A well-meaning but deranged Computer desperately protects the citizens of Alpha Complex, a vast underground city, from all sorts of real and imagined enemies. Players take the role of Troubleshooters, The Computer's elite agents, their job to search out and destroy the enemies of The Computer. Each player character is, however, secretly a traitor... In short, Paranoia is a light-hearted game of terror, death, bureaucracy, mad scientists, mutants, dangerous weapons, insane robots, and technological satire that encourages players to lie, cheat, and backstab each other at every turn.

The original version of Paranoia, designed by Dan Gelber, Greg Costikyan, and Eric Goldberg, pioneered in 1983, and was an instant hit, going on to sell more than 150,000 copies worldwide.

PARANOIA XP

The popularity of the original game was in part due to society's fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and uneasiness about the new desktop computers that were starting to revolutionize working life.

Happily, today those fears are obsolete. Instead, we have terrorism, spam, viruses, trojans, malware, distributed denial of service attacks, the RIAA, cyberwarfare, identify theft, the Patriot Act, terrifying new diseases, the threat of environmental catastrophe, the grey goo scenario, and weapons of mass destruction.

In other words, Paranoia is more relevant than ever before, and Paranoia XP updates the world of Alpha Complex for all these terrors and more.

DESIGNING IN PUBLIC

In order to involve Paranoia's community of fans, the designers decided from the start to discuss the new version's development via a blog (www.costik.com/paranoia), and to invite comments, suggestions, and contributions from anyone who wished to participate. Naturally, there was a potential legal issue; there was no easy way to compensate people for their contributions, and nobody wanted to deal with the potential bookkeeping involved. The solution: a virtual inversion of the Creative Commons license. Posters were warned that anything they contributed might be used in the game, without any compensation whatsoever, and that although the creators would try to credit people whose material was used, it might slip their minds in the hurly burly of meeting deadlines. As the legal "boilerplate" (if you can call it that) said, "All Your Rights Are Belong to Us."

The fan community soon found it wanted to debate, discuss, and contribute in a more free-ranging format--and luckily, a pre-existing fan site, Paranoia Live (www.paranoia-live.net) agreed to host a forum for public comment and discussion. Varney soon discovered the utility and importance of posting and participating in the forum. "There were so many good ideas worth stealing... and the enthusiasm and support of the community really kept me going in meeting a pretty brutal deadline," said Varney.

To publicize the game, Varney started a wiki at http://paranoia.allenvarney.com. Framed as a "Lexicon" game -- in which players contribute one entry per turn to an alphabetic research report on a fictitious topic -- the wiki traced the history of "the Toothpaste Disaster," a wide-ranging Alpha Complex calamity. Varney recruited almost two dozen players, in hopes of finding writers for upcoming Paranoia support products.

"The project succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. The Lexicon game produced the largest stable of talented writers Paranoia has ever enjoyed." Varney has informally organized the best Lexicon writers as the "Traitor Recycling Studio," to collaborate on the next few Paranoia supplements using -- yes -- a wiki.

"We stumbled into this," said Greg Costikyan, one of the original game's designers. "I wanted to incorporate a blog from the start, but the community's response, and Allen's embrace of them, was both startling and exciting. I think Allen is onto something here--at least for artforms that are collaborative in nature, such as games and possibly film, there's a lot to be said for tapping the collective talents of the fan base, as filtered by a professional."

MONGOOSE AND GENCON

Mongoose Publishing Ltd. (www.mongoosepublishing.com) of Swindon, Wilts., is one of a new breed of hobby game publishers, producing roleplaying and miniatures games for the adventure gaming market. Among its fine roleplaying products are Conan, Judge Dredd, Babylon 5, and Macho Women With Guns.

"We had... no clue what we were getting into," said an exhausted-sounding Alexand Fennell, director of Mongoose. "But the bloody thing is finally at the printers... ahh, I mean, ahh, only a traitor could fail to find this new edition of Paranoia hilarious, spiffy, and well worth your money. Paranoia is fun. Other games are not fun. Buy Paranoia."

Paranoia XP will premiere on August 19th at GenCon (www.gencon.com), the world's largest convention for game players and enthusiasts, held annually in Indianapolis with more than 20,000 attendees.

HAPPINESS IS MANDATORY!

Failure to be happy is treason. Treason is punishable by summary execution. Have a nice day!

For more information and/or disinformation, interviews, drivel, or just for the hell of it, feel free to contact:

Greg Costikyan {my email address}
{my phone number}

URLS:

Paranoia Blog: http://www.costik.com/weblog
"Toothpaste Disaster" Wiki: http://paranoia.allenvarney.com
Paranoia Forum: http://www.paranoia-live.net
Mongoose Publishing: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com
To Order: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/rpg/detail.php?qsID=530&qsSeries=Paranoia%20XP
Allen Varney: http://www.allenvarney.com
Greg Costikyan: http://www.costik.com

Selganor [n/a]:
Und schon wieder was neues (das Buch kommt ja hoffentlich demnaechst hier raus):

Der neue Charakterbogen

Ich hab' zwar vor LANGER Zeit das letzte Mal Paranoia geleitet (war noch zu 1st Edition Zeiten, also ehe es die Box oder eine deutsche Version gab) aber bei dem Bogen (gerade auf der Rueckseite) kommen mir einige Dinge neu vor...

Rauthorim:
Kann sein, aber der Computerbildschirm wirkt noch vertraut... ;)

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