I haven’t had time lately to work on the Straight Paranoia writeup I’m putting together, but I wanted to give a couple samples from the character backgrounds I wrote.

I don’t tend to actually create characters the normal way.  I usually go into this cool Paranoia Character Generator I found online and generate a stack of characters.  Then I sort through them all until I get 6-8 characters that I find interesting in some sense.

In this case, I was looking for interesting skill combinations, a decent distribution of skills across the party, and a reasonably unique distribution of Mutant Powers and Secret Society links.  Once I had the candidate characters, I created backgrounds for them.

As is my wont, I bent the Paranoia universe to my own will.  In this particular case, I made fundamental changes to the nature of the character’s Secret Society (PURGE).  But more than anything, I wanted to try and establish backgrounds that showed how an ordinary citizen gets caught up in treasonous activity, while having only the best intentions.

And so we meet Aly:

Aly-R-LDL

10 Word Description : Nerdy Glasses. Louis From Ghostbusters.  Terror Has A New Accountant.

You have been working as an Accounts Administrator in Psyche Ward 33 of Housing, Preservation & Development and Mind Control (HPD&MC).  Ward 33 holds 12 beds, enough for two whole Troubleshooter teams.  It is very small by comparison, and would be considered of little consequence to most.  But you’re pretty proud of the work you’ve done there.

Your duties have largely involved managing the books of Ward 33.  Budgetary constraints, a rising influx of patients and occasional breakdowns in the supply chain have made your job increasingly difficult.  You have had to get creative to keep the books in balance, and you repeatedly have to turn to the auction site C-Bay to purchase discounted supplies for Ward 33.

It’s difficult to hold the purse strings for long without realizing how much waste there is in the System.  Given how little you are compensated for your efforts, compared to how much there was to be made by acting as the middleman, you set up a shadow-company called Rally DL.  You’ve used Rally DL to purchase supplies from C-Bay and other sources (legitimate and illegitimate), selling them back to Ward 33 at a small profit.  You’re still saving the ward money, and the books are still balanced.  But sometimes patients might be eating food supplements that are recently expired or of questionable origin.  While there’s nothing technically illegal about your activities, you’ve kept it very much to yourself.  It’s always bothered you that you had to do this, and that you were able to do this.  The Computer, you thought, should be doing a better job of managing its supply chain.  it’s failure to do so is, in your eyes, criminal and treasonous.

Eventually someone caught on to what you were doing.  His name was Henry-B-TUE-3, and he approached you with a proposition.  He wanted you to smuggle propaganda into the ward for distribution by agents within the ward itself.  You don’t know who the agents were, but you know some posed as patients, others as technicians.  In exchange for smuggling in this propaganda, you would be compensated financially and offered a ranking position their organization.  If you refused, a lengthy investigation was threatened, one which you were certain would result in the cancellation of your clone series.  You were not eager to participate in such a scheme, but the propaganda made a great deal of sense to you.  You accepted the position.

When you went to your first organizational meeting, you were shocked to discover that the entire organization consisted almost exclusively of like-minded accountants, all of them angry with The Computer over its wasteful spending, mismanagement and lack of internal consistency.  They proposed that The Computer must be brought down before any meaningful process could be implemented.  The propaganda that you help smuggle into the ward follows many different themes and topics, but all of it has one unifying purpose : to encourage fellow citizens to rise up and overthrow The Computer.  Some of the propaganda is especially violent in nature, but you’ve come to accept that some citizens may have to die in order to bring about reasonable logistic and accounting practices in the Alpha Complex.

That’s not Aly’s whole background, but it should give a sense for the flavor I was trying to get across in the scenario.