Clown World will be more Paranoia than Gamma World

Only GenXers that played pen and paper RPGs will get this, so it probably requires a little explanation.

But first, an important point @TrevorGoodchild made on Gab, which is that high IQ types of genX in highschool and so on did play multiple RPGs as well as do sports and a bunch of other things because the school as well as life in general was not quite stimulating enough, so we invented working alternative realities to keep our brain engaged. He pointed out that JRR Tolkien didn’t invent a whole language in order to write a book. He did it because, in essence, he was bored.

Gamma World had:

• Purebloods (aka pure strain humans) and we have those.
• Mutants, and we have those too now, thanks to the genetic serum murder juice, except in Gamma World at least most of the times they have some super-powers. While in this version they only get defects and most likely an early death.
• Mutated animals, and again, we have those for similar reasons to the mutated humans

But Gamma World has almost unlimited freedom. You walk around with whatever weapons you want, exploring the mutated wasteland. And we definitely do not have that in this reality.

Paranoia also had mutants, and occasionally the mutation could be useful, but more often than not it was a reason to be executed by the schizophrenic computer that ran the whole underground complex your unfortunate genetically modified clones found themselves in.

It also had various factions, communists, transhumanists, def leperd fans, and others, all vying for power and trying to eliminate every other faction. Layered over that was the nominal career of the player character which… you guessed it, was trying to out-do and survive all the others player characters. The game was so deadly that each character had six clones, as these died in spectacular fashion and often were executed by order of the all-powerful computer.

The premise of the game was that due to some catastrophic war, humans had gone underground into Alpha Complex where competing high level programmers all shoved their versions of utopia into the mainframe running things in the large underground Alpha Complex. This rendered the Computer essentially schizophrenic and paranoid, with ugly consequences for anyone that came into contact with it, which was daily due to the fact that the computer ran most of the complex. Reproduction was done exclusively by cloning and if a character started to develop normal feelings as a result of being off the hormone filled soylent green they were fed, it was a capital offence.

Well, we are not quite underground yet, but the totalitarian control under a schizophrenic “elite” who think they know best and to whom we are all subject to varying degrees is certainly coming at us fast. As is the war on anything and everything natural.

Remember that one of the WEF mottos is Nothing from Nature. Which means artificial food and transhumanism all the way.

Paranoia was a pretty funny game if played right with the right group. Hilariously so at times… as one of the players controlling a set of clones, and even more so as the referee since his job was to kill the bastards. No, really, that was an actual guideline for the referee towards the player characters: FUD and death.

That is, keep the player characters Fearful Uncertain and Doubtful and then, it literally said this: kill the bastards.

But… imagine if you now had to experience life as one of the player characters instead of the players controlling them. Well, that’s where life is heading if we don’t change it.

And personally I have no intention to become the pawn in some high-level programmer’s narrative. I’d rather navigate the radioactive wastelands of Gamma World with mutated wolves hunting me down. How about you?

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