Paranoia: The Toothpaste Disaster

This is the home page of a Lexicon game in Alpha Complex, the setting of the classic PARANOIA paper-and-dice roleplaying game. In this satirical science-fiction game, a cross between Aldous Huxley and the Marx Brothers, Alpha Complex is an underground city of the future ruled by an insane Computer. Originally published by West End Games in 1984, PARANOIA returned to print in August 2004 from Mongoose Publishing (Swindon, UK). The new edition was written mainly by longtime paranoiac Allen Varney, with considerable help from Famous Game Designer Aaron Allston and many others, under the supervision of PARANOIA co-designer Greg Costikyan.

Designed by Neel Krishnaswami, a Lexicon game is a set of glossary entries written collaboratively by all players in a WikiWikiWeb, a collection of editable Web pages. Each turn covers a specified letter(s) of the glossary; players write entries beginning with that letter. Starting in early April, 2004, this game covered two letters per turn, running turns twice a week, and concluded on May 13.

In the standard PARANOIA RPG, players become lowly Troubleshooters in service to The Computer. In this Lexicon game the players were nothing less than illustrious High Programmers who administered entire sectors of Alpha Complex. Last year the Toothpaste Disaster hit these Programmers' sectors. Fascinated high-clearance citizens across Alpha Complex sought to know more about this notorious event. The Computer created a fact-finding panel to investigate the origins, determine the causes, and implicate the traitors involved in this chaotic, mysterious, and wide-ranging disaster.

Together these High Programmers prepared an alphabetical encyclopedia and glossary, Clearance ULTRAVIOLET, which the head of Internal Security respectfully and blindly forwarded to The Computer. Sounds like routine administration? No, this is PARANOIA -- there were many fatalities, widespread acts of treason, and a few sectors apparently got engulfed in miniature black holes. Clearly lexicography in Alpha Complex is dangerous work.

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• HighProgrammerBiographies and RealWorldPlayers

• LexiconSchedule

• List of entries

• Speculative_Ongoing_Subjective_Timeline_of_Events

• Final_Reports of the High Programmers - well, some of them, at any rate.

• LexiconDiscussionPage to talk about the game

• A discussion of a possible NextVersion of this game

• The OriginalPitch made to recruit players

• Lexicon rules

• A completed Lexicon game written for a NOBILIS roleplaying campaign

• Paranoia blog

• Paranoia-Live.net, a fine introduction to PARANOIA with an active forum of longtime fans

• Home page of Allen Varney, the game's host

• Questions or comments? Contact me at allenvarney (at) gmail (dot) com.

Here is an entry chosen at random:

This is a Wiki

A WikiWikiWeb is a collaborative hypertext environment that emphasizes easy access to and modification of information.

Thanks to Andy "Jazzer" Fitzpatrick for the CSS.

Interesting starting points:

• HelpForBeginners: to help you get started editing a Wiki page

• WikiSandBox: feel free to change this page and experiment with editing

• WikiCourse/BasicIntroduction

• FindPage: search or browse the database in various ways

• SyntaxReference

For an overview of this site and what it contains, see the SiteNavigation page.

To learn more about what a WikiWikiWeb is, read about WhyWikiWorks and the WikiNature. Also, consult the WikiWikiWebFaq.

MoinMoin is a Python WikiClone, based on PikiPiki. The name is a common German slang expression explained on the MoinMoin page. Contributed code is on the MacroMarket, ActionMarket and ParserMarket pages. For details and more topics, see the MoinMoin page.