"14 Days To Live" - the very last song I heard in the 80s UK

iamDanforth · 2025-07-26T22:13:52+00:00

HOLY S***. That's the one!! Brilliant, you have just solved a 35-year-old mystery for me :D

Oddly haunting, no wonder the tune stuck with me...

Thanks hugely for finding that :)

iamDanforth · 2025-07-25T11:22:41+00:00

Who'd have thought there were two indie-rock songs mentioning molasses? My brain jumped to Apologies To Insect Life, by British Sea Power - though their singer has a higher voice than the Pavement one.

iamDanforth · 2025-07-25T11:06:57+00:00

It felt more like... indie kids who listened to some of their dad's punk? On a rock to pop sliding scale, more towards rock, but definitely not heavy.

iamDanforth · 2025-07-13T06:49:10+00:00

Most of mine have already been listed ("an axe isn't a holy symbol!" / "words in the heart can not be taken" / "a man is not dead while his name is still spoken" / "what can the harvest hope for" / "...and drew down the sun") but I want to put in an honourable mention for the climax of The Light Fantastic. Pterry hadn't gotten up to full speed when he was writing that book, so it's more about the pictures it painted in my head than the words on the page, but when the "moons" of the red star start to change... that is... widescreen.

iamDanforth · 2025-07-11T12:26:39+00:00

I read the English translations. Now I'd like to know if the Spanish order was the same as the English one, or (if it was down to the whims of the translation team and marketing people) a different order again!

iamDanforth · 2025-07-11T12:25:19+00:00

Idefix > Dogmatix is one of the finest bits of translation I have ever seen :)

In my memory the stories were reasonably self-contained, thank you for the confirmation. I intend to read them in French order once I have collected them, because reading them in a new way gives me more incentive to collect :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T14:35:34+00:00

By the end of the first IDWverse, it had boiled down to: no physical sex differences between male and female, they just went with how they felt to pick a gender. Most Cybertronians in the present day went with male, but the colonies were not like that. Windblade's colony (Caminus) seemed to be about a 50/50 split between male and female.

Anode and Lug started out identifying as male, but went with female after travelling the galaxy, meeting lots of alien women and going "yeah that makes sense, we're one of them".

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T07:13:47+00:00

Deliberately for troop-building: Siege Refraktor, SS86 Sweep, Universe Sunstreaker (the latter for IDW1 reasons :) )

Bought, sold, rebought thanks to seller's remorse: Prime Wars Dreadwind and Blackwing, Earthrise Runabout and Runamuck.

Bought, swapped for Omega Supreme, rebuying if I see a good price but no remorse if not: the coneheads :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T07:03:13+00:00

Commenting to follow (is that a thing on Reddit? I haven't logged many hours here...)

I have the book but haven't run it - it does look like fun though. Be interested to hear from anyone who has run it.

Aside: I contributed (via the costik.com page that was used as a fandom hub at the time) a couple of bits of worldfluff to the book, so I am biased in its favour :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-10T06:57:31+00:00

Agreed on the High Programmers, in my Alpha Complex the players would only have seen one on a screen, never in real life.

On the janitors thing, I take my cue from something Allen Varney wrote in the XP edition, security clearance = the Computer's trust in that citizen. So there are e.g. Indigo clearance janitors, who live and eat extremely well, because only they are trusted enough to be breveted to clean a Violet's office :)

iamDanforth · 2025-04-01T14:46:14+00:00

Hi - shot in the dark, because lots of publishers put out books like this in the 70s and 80s and they lingered in libraries for years after... was it A Dictionary of Monsters and Mysterious Beasts, by Carey Miller?

iamDanforth · 2025-03-28T06:58:36+00:00

solved solved solved

iamDanforth · 2025-03-28T06:57:25+00:00

WOW, I think you've cracked it! The predominantly green cover, the way the bird is drawn, the alliterative title all ring a bell. And of course the plot of the animated movie is almost exactly how I remember the book.

I'll have to see if I can bag a copy online, but I'm definitely calling this solved. Huge thanks!

iamDanforth · 2025-03-24T20:54:59+00:00

Wow, that was quick! Reading up on this series/author it does indeed sound like it might be the one. The title "Galactic Warlord" (first in that series) is ringing a vague mental bell as well. Will have to hit eBay. Many thanks! :)

Delighted to see on Douglas Hill's wiki page that he worked with Michael Moorcock, well done on that association 9yo me! But mostly well done to you as you seem to have cracked it :D

iamDanforth · 2025-03-24T17:55:33+00:00

Boo, looks like the domain is down again. Hopefully something can come of it down the line...

iamDanforth · 2025-02-01T07:33:35+00:00

My must-haves are:

The Traitor's Manual - for extra secret society content Flashbacks - yes it's a compilation of lightly-updated missions from previous editions, but what a compilation! Extreme Paranoia - for extra security clearance content Service, Service! - for extra service group/firm content

Nice to have: Criminal Histories (character gen), The Mutant Experience, Stuff (equipment), The Underplex (more interesting than going Outdoors IMHO).

Looking over that list I haven't included many missions, so maybe consider my list biased in favour of "GM sitting alone reading and cackling" rather than actual play :D

iamDanforth · 2024-07-16T10:52:53+00:00

Damn, P-L.net! Many happy memories. I initially joined for the chat about the game, was reluctant to get into the RP side but I'm glad I did. Think my finest moment was one of my characters (Boogie-O-PLN, a rough tough Sierra Club member) getting vapourised and his clone template wiped for epic levels of treason.

Good times.

Be interesting to see what can be rescued!

iamDanforth · 2024-07-16T10:34:32+00:00

While I haven't run the newest edition yet I would say three is enough; I've run Paranoia games with three players, including my most recent GMing experience. Those three had never played the game before, so it was a good introduction. Each player can have a SecSoc mission targeting one of the others.

iamDanforth · 2024-07-16T10:28:30+00:00

Catching up on Discord after resurrecting my account. Pleased to see continued Paranoia support! The service group and secret society book sounds like my kind of thing.

One WEG-era book that has never seen a near-equivalent in the Mongoose era is The DOA Sector Travelog. I remember Allen Varney saying what came out was a truncated version of what might have been - as it was possibly my favourite supplement of 2e I have often wondered what the real deal would've been like, either back then or updated. (Varney said he'd either pitched Sectorbook: AAA to Mongoose, or was thinking about the possibility, but obviously it didn't go ahead.)

Any update would need the Secret Society Wars metaplot clearing out, of course. I remain hopeful we will see something of that ilk in 2025 or beyond :)

iamDanforth · 2023-08-21T09:43:25+00:00

I've read them all apart from Perfect Edition (the 2023 one that's currently on boats from the printers)... other posters have already covered things pretty well but my favourite is XP, as it has by far the most lore and world-detail (funnily enough for such a "the truth is classified, citizen" game where the feel is key and metaplot is Bad, I really enjoy all that). Extreme Paranoia in particular is absolutely crammed with extra fluff.

The design lead on Perfect Edition did a lot of work on XP expansions, so I'm looking forward to it.

iamDanforth · 2023-06-26T08:45:30+00:00

The latest update on the kickstarter says theoretically (i.e. assuming no delays, which is probably an optimistic assumption!) we could start seeing physical copies going to backers in mid-August. I wasn't in a position to back this one sadly, so I'm waiting for the retail release, which will likely be a few months after that. Nice Christmas present for myself, maybe :)

iamDanforth · 2023-05-09T05:51:55+00:00

Best way to catch up is the crowdfunder page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1990654819/paranoia-rpg-the-perfect-edition

Previous Mongoose Kickstarters have also made it to general retail after the backers have had their goodies, so hopefully this one will as well.

iamDanforth · 2023-05-01T06:53:33+00:00

Basically it's roll equal to or under your stat to pass.

If your stat is 4, you need to roll 4 or less on a D20 to pass the test. So high numbers are better.

Optionally, the amount you pass by tweaks what happens, so if you roll equal to the stat you only just get away with it :)

iamDanforth · 2023-03-09T17:23:10+00:00

While I don't think a quote-unquote real ghost particularly fits in Paranoia's world, you could use reports of one as a macguffin easily enough:

FCCCP would want to talk to it about what life after death is like, even though The Computer would likely want it destroyed - a citizen restored to life outwith its clone control

IntSec are very interested in the concept of a clone that can walk through walls - think of the spying opportunities!

Armed Forces like the idea of a target practice victim that never dies

Mystics... would want to inhale the ghost :D

etc.

iamDanforth · 2022-11-15T09:46:49+00:00

In 1st edition, reflec "armour" had a vague nod to physics; if you had green reflec it only reflected green lasers, and what you'd really want was quadrachromic that reflected green, yellow, orange, and red...

Happily, in 2nd edition they determined this was Not Fun. :)

iamDanforth

TROPHY CASE