Paranoia Service, Service.pdf

PARAN O IA ™

Service , Service!

BY THE TRAITOR RECYCLING STUDIO (www.traitorrecycling.com)

CONTENTS

Introduction

PAUL BALDOWSKI

JEFF GROVES

GREG INGBER

DAN CURTIS JOHNSON

HUMZA KAZMI

KARL LOW

ERIC MINTON

BILL O’DEA

ALLEN VARNEY

ERIC ZAWADZKI

Design/R&D

BETH FISCHI

ALLEN VARNEY

Editing, layout/CPU

JIM HOLLOWAY

Cover and interior illustrations/HPD&MC

BETH FISCHI

ANDY ‘JAZZER’ FITZPATRICK

Graphics/Also HPD&MC

ERIC MINTON

Proofreading/Technical Services

1. Life in a service ﬁ rm

DAN GELBER

GREG COSTIKYAN

ERIC GOLDBERG

Original game design & development

2. Mandates

Service groups

Armed Forces 11

Central Processing Unit 25

HPD & Mind Control 40

Internal Security 54

Prod Logistics & Commissary 68

Power Services 81

Research & Design 95

Technical Services 109

Appendix 1: AlphaNet 123

Appendix 2: Service ﬁ rm tables 126

Service ﬁ rm index

IAN BELCHER

Mongoose Publishing roleplaying

manager/Internal Security

ALEXANDER FENNELL

Mongoose Publishing production director/

Armed Forces

THE COMPUTER

At your service, citizen!

128

Security Clearance ULTRAVIOLET

WARNING :

Knowledge or possession of this information by any citizen

of Security Clearance VIOLET or lower is treason. If you’re caught,

just wait for your next service ﬁ rm worker evaluation, bub.

previous editions of PARANOIA .

ILLUMINATI is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games, and is used by permission.

The reproduction of material from this book for personal or corporate proﬁ t, by photographic, electronic, or other means of storage and retrieval, is prohibited. You may

copy character sheets, record sheets, checklists and tables for personal use.

E-mail questions and comments to Mongoose Publishing at sales@mongoosepublishing.com , or write to PO Box 1018, Swindon, Wiltshire SN3 1DG, UNITED KINGDOM .

On the World Wide Web: www.mongoosepublishing.com .

Published by Mongoose Publishing, Ltd. Publication MGP 6639. Published October 2005. First printing October 2005.

S ERVICE , S ERVICE ! C LEARANCE ULTRAVIOLET

Hey! How about a little service?

Q. The PARANOIA line hasn’t done

much with the eight service groups

of Alpha Complex—Armed Forces,

CPU, Internal Security and that lot.

A character’s service group doesn’t

matter as much as his secret society

or mutant power. Why not?

Bonus Duties, but narrower and more ﬂ eeting.

Mandates make a PC’s service group more

important, without all the baggage mentioned

above.

Most of the book presents eight complete

missions, one for each service group. These

are written for Troubleshooters of Security

Clearance RED, but if you have the Extreme

PARANOIA supplement (with rules for

characters of all clearances from ORANGE

through VIOLET), several of these missions

work better for higher clearances.

drift. Fast-moving, hyper-competitive service

ﬁ rms often create new positions on the ﬂ y,

minus appropriately deﬁ ned domains. Such

an unregulated, unauthorized position is

colloquially called a ‘loose domain’, and the

service group bureaucracies regard it with

universal and unmitigated loathing. A PC has

no way of knowing whether he occupies such

a domain, but ignorance of arcane regulations

has never been a defense in Alpha Complex.

A. PARANOIA intentionally depicts the service

groups in vague, incidental terms. Unlike other

(non-fun) roleplaying games, PARANOIA

is not about well-understood duties nor

professionally executed procedures, and

certanly not about organizations that foster

solidarity and high purpose. PARANOIA is

about creating reasons for the players to

mistrust and betray each other.

A player character’s (PC’s) group isn’t

supposed to deﬁ ne his whole life purpose, nor

really even his role on a mission team. Just

because a PC works in Technical Services,

that doesn’t reliably make him a savant of all

things mechanical. No, he’s a generic PC,

with the same general competence as his

fellow PCs (and thus little reason to depend on

them). It works best to treat him as a vehicle

for the player’s own experience of fear and

ignorance.

The most important function of service

groups is to provide ready-made rivalries.

Armed Forces and Internal Security butt

heads all the time. Likewise Power Services

vs. Tech Services and sometimes PLC. CPU

bureaucrats are incredibly annoying. Nobody

trusts HPD&MC, a bunch of marketing types

weak on ideological purity. As for R&D, just

ask experienced players what they expect from

an R&D guy; for recreation, count the seconds

until you ﬁ rst hear the words ‘malfunction’

and/or ‘explode’. That shorthand, that instant

mistrust, is the service groups’ ideal purpose.

But maybe we’re missing a bet. Do you

want the groups better deﬁ ned? If you’d buy a

sprawling full-length supplement that plumbs

the innermost workings of PLC warehouses,

let us know! Hey, if White Wolf can do all those

splatbooks about vampire clans....

Q. What happens if a group bureaucrat

discovers a worker occupying a loose

domain?

Q. Is your importance in a service group

related to your security clearance?

A. He might impose a hefty ﬁ ne, just enough

to put the PC in dire ﬁ nancial straits. He mght

sell his silence for a bribe equal to a month of

the PC’s income, or two months. He might ask

a ‘favor’ for his secret society. Alternately, you

can use the loose-domain excuse to transfer

the PC to a new service ﬁ rm from this book, or

assign him a mandate as punishment for his

unauthorized loose-domain-ing activities.

In other words, this is just one more useful

player coercion device, joining the many others

in PARANOIA . Service groups are becoming

more useful all the time!

A. Not necessarily. Security clearance does

not measure competence or training, but

strictly how much The Computer trusts you.

The Computer assigns those it trusts most not

only to positions of high authority, but also to

less-skilled positions that have little authority

but require enormous discretion.

So, for instance, a janitorial worker in

R&D could be INDIGO Clearance, which

means The Computer trusts him to go into

INDIGO laboratories. He cleans up goo from

experiments lower-clearance folks don’t even

know exist. He collects an INDIGO’s high

salary, and he can lord it over the GREEN and

BLUE technicians in the outer ofﬁ ces. Yet he’s

still a janitor, with a good Hygiene rating but no

scientiﬁ c training to speak of.

The service group sections

Aside from the ﬁ rst two chapters, this book

has eight sections, one for each service group.

Each section offers the following stuff:

Hangouts: Typical locations around Alpha

Complex where you can ﬁ nd members of this

service group.

Rumors: What they talk about at the

hangouts. Take these as examples for creating

your own rumors. As a mission begins, mention

one or two rumors at random to a player whose

Troubleshooter has heard them at his regular

day job.

Service services: As described in Chapter

38 of the PARANOIA rulebook, these are

hazardous little side-jobs The Computer

assigns to Troubleshooter teams in addition

to their regular mission.

Service ﬁ rms: Types of ﬁ rms in this group

where a PC might work, like those in Chapter

38 of the rulebook.

Personnel: NPC professions whose

members can help or torment the PCs.

Mission: A complete Troubleshooter

mission (RED Clearance) involving this service

group.

Q. Then how do service groups sort

out who’s capable of what job?

A. To us Famous Game Designers, this

question is trying to make sense of Alpha

Complex, a quest that leads to frustration and

heartbreak. Alpha Complex makes no sense.

It exists as a molecule-thin backdrop designed

to foster paranoid tension.

Q. Would you please not weasel out of

a perfectly reasonable question?

A. Okay, okay.... Service group bureaucracies

establish ‘duty domains’ for each category of

service ﬁ rm under their aegis. Duty domains

specify a requisite level of competence and

responsibility— without, please note, deﬁ ning

a corresponding authority to actually get the

job done.

Unfortunately, the bureaucratic processes

that define new duty domains proceed at

a pace otherwise seen only in continental

Q. Well then, what’s in this book about

service groups?

A. Service, Service! gives you new service

ﬁ rms for each group, NPC personnel to torment

your players, typical rumors and hangouts, and

a new kind of duty: mandates . Mandates are

special temporary abilities and responsibilities

assigned to one or another PC—like Mandatory

PARANOIA Service , Service!

1. S ERVICE FIRM LIFE

S ERVICE FIRM IOU S

Then it’s code in the data, give the keyboard a punch,

Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch.

Correlate, tabulate, process and screen—

Program, printout, regress to the mean.

And it’s ho, boys, can’t you code it (hunh!) and program it right.

Nothing ever happens in this life of mine .

I’m hauling out the data on the Xerox line .

— Nigel Russell , ‘The White Collar Holler’ (1979)

1. Life in a service ﬁ rm

■

It’s all ‘understood’. Snitching on a

coworker— for offenses committed in the line

of duty, anyway— is just wrong, almost as

bad as betraying your secret society. (Internal

Security investigations are like grenades; if

you’re close to the target, you don’t want to

set one off.)

So Troubleshooters usually have a hard

time turning worker vs. worker. Compared

to the PCs, service ﬁ rm teams are tight-knit

brotherhoods of mischief.

Understandings

Junior Citizens arriving at their new INFRARED

assignment learn within days— perhaps

hours— the fundamental dilemma of Alpha

Complex life: Every day, you have to bend

the rules.

The management’s goals are unreachable

through legal means; therefore workers must

commit treason to reach them. But if you

report a fellow worker, what’s the best that can

happen? Maybe The Computer will promote

you and make you a Troubleshooter, so you

can die six or eight times in rapid succession.

Or maybe you’ll just get an apple or banana, go

back to work, and all your other coworkers will

take revenge on you, the ﬁ nk. Meanwhile, the

traitor you reported was the only one who knew

how to do the job, so you have to take up the

slack while he’s off getting brainscrubbed.

Workers instinctively cover up coworkers’

illegal actions committed— note this important

condition!— committed in the line of duty.

Distributing Commie propaganda? That’s fair

game for tattling to IntSec. But making up for

missing ofﬁ ce supplies (that PLC just won’t

replenish! no matter how many requisitions you

ﬁ ll out! in septuplicate!) by stealing some from

the ofﬁ ce next door? Pfft! Bribing a technician

to repair the ofﬁ ce vendobot? Well, how else

will anyone get a cup of CoffeeLyke? Filing a

form that presents a mere parking violation as

autocar theft? How else can they expect this

ofﬁ ce to make its unrealistically high quota?

Landing the job

At an early age, Junior Citizens take a

battery of tests. The Computer quantifies

their strengths and weaknesses and adds

them to a giant database with thousands

of other JC exam results. Following long-

standing parameters set by the eight service

groups and taking into account the groups’

Semi-Annual Stafﬁ ng Need Projections, The

Computer assigns each Junior Citizen to a

specialized secondary school. There specially

programmed teachbots, and the occasional

visiting service-group bureaucrat, teach the

kids how to be proper members of their service

group. By the time they graduate at the ripe age

of 14, their skills make them optimal Food Vat

or warehouse workers or whatever.

Do you remember your interests when you

were eight? How many of them were the

same when you turned 18? How many people

determine their life’s work before they hit

puberty? Why should Alpha Complex citizens

be any different?

Service group heads often wonder why all

the bright, talented youngsters they chose a

decade ago always turn into bitter unskilled

rejects once they graduate and join the work

force. The answer is obvious: Rival service

groups subverted the good ones!

■

Service ﬁ rm IOUs

So everybody lives happily together in service-

ﬁ rm land, right? No—this is PARANOIA .

Your coworkers don’t ﬁ nk on you for doing

what it takes to get the job done. They look

the other way... but they make sure you know

they’re looking away. In the unspoken code

of most service firms, you now owe your

coworkers for their silence. You have incurred

an IOU.

Chapters 8 and 40 of the PARANOIA

rulebook describe secret society IOUs—

informal but serious favors a society may owe

you in return for a great service. Service ﬁ rm

IOUs work somewhat the same way, except

they’re considerably less reliable and, relatively

speaking, more secret.

How could a favor in a legal, public service

ﬁ rm be more secret than a secret society IOU?

It’s a matter of context. The secret society

leaders admit you did them a service, and they

ARE YOU INTERNAL SECURITY, OR JUST A SMUG BASTARD NATURALLY?

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