PARANOIA: Red Clearance Edition plays fast and loose with NPCs, bots, monsters (READ: animals and mutated animals) from the Outdoors, and anything else the Game Master controls. Which is how it should be. But as the edition has progressed during the pass off form the Red Clearance Edition starter set all the way through to the Acute PARANOIA boxed set, NPC stat blocks have undergone a few changes. Mostly, this is just to give GMs some pointers and benchmarks, but there are those GMs — likely traitors or mutants themselves — that enjoy using a more fleshed-out stat block, so for them, I’m showing off some of the templates I use.

NPC Template

Here’s the template I use, making it easy to copy/paste into Google Docs or your word processing program of choice, and write up an NPC in no time. I setup the Health Boxes as a table, making it easy to right click and add or delete columns as necessary, since mobs of minor goons or giant warbots all have more or less Health Boxes than standard characters.

Name-Clearance-Sector-Clone#

Service Group and job | Secret Society

  • Roleplaying note1
  • Roleplaying note2

/// SKILLS

Skill +XXX

Skill +XXX

Skill +XXX

Skill +XXX

Skill +XXX

Skill +XXX

/// HEALTH BOXES

[ ]  [ ]  [ ]  [ ]  [ ]

/// EQUIPMENT

  • Item1
  • Item2
  • Item3

/// NOTES

  • Notes and stuff

Source: Insert Name of Mission (Title of Book)

Example

Here’s an example from PARANOIA: Red Clearance Edition’s Mission Book. This is the initial version of Roz-R (who appears in the first mission in Mission Book) that I ran. There are some slight changes and expansions from what is actually written up for her (which isn’t much), so this is hardly spoilery material.

Roz-R-HYT-2

PLC form acquisitions clerk, Troubleshooter | No Secret Society membership at this time

  • Constantly annoyed

/// SKILLS

Bluff +3

Bureaucracy +2

Charm +1

Defense +1 (reflec armor)

Guns -1

Throw -2

/// HEALTH BOXES

[ ]  [ ]  [ ]  [ ]  [ ]

/// EQUIPMENT

  • Armor: RED Clearance reflec armor
  • Weapon: RED Clearance laser pistol
  • Weapon: Grenades x3 (Level 2)
  • Cans of Bouncy Bubble Beverage – NEWtral Flavor x3

/// NOTES

  • Clone Replacements. Roz will be replaced by a fresh clone upon death.

Source: [YOUR SECURITY CLEARANCE IS NOT HIGH ENOUGH FOR THE TITLE OF THIS ADVENTURE] (Paranoia Ultraviolet Edition Starter Set: Mission Book)

Okay…

Yeah, there’s some stuff on there that might be weird. Remember that this is PARANOIA: ignore whatever you don’t like or don’t wanna use. With that out of the way…

  • Defense “Skill”: I put in a modifier here for armor, and I personally use the “roll Defense, any successes subtract from the damage taken” rule.
  • Other Skills: I just throw random stuff in the list of skills, generally sticking to what’s on a standard character sheet and maybe adding one or two other funnily-worded skills that might apply to a particular character. Yeah, there are ratings (+ or -), and I use them as a way of throwing an amount of damage or modifying player’s successes (or failures) on a roll against them, rather than rolling my own dice pools. As you can see for Roz, she actually is pretty bad at fighting, so a player has to roll at least 2 failures before they start seeing damage. But she’s convincing; they gotta roll 3 or more successes to read her intentions.
  • Armor and Weapons: I note these in the Equipment section with a bold header. Other gear wouldn’t get that; I’d just list the gear. I do it this way so I can very quickly scan an NPC stat block and pick out what combat-related gear is in play.
  • Notes: I could probably ignore the Clone Replacements text because it’s pretty obvious in Alpha Complex, but I have noticed that having it there helps with one thing in particular: making an NPC become a recurring character. In Roz-R’s case, she ended up getting executed at the end of the mission because my players threw her under the bus (metaphorically speaking, in this instance). But now she’s gonna show up as Roz-R-HYT-3 in the next mission I run. And boy is she gonna have a grudge against them!

What Do You Do?

Do you even bother with stat blocks in PARANOIA: Red Clearance Edition? If so, was any of this helpful? Sound off in the comments!

Reminder

I’ve got a couple articles with useful tools and ideas for PARANOIA: Red Clearance Edition. Check ’em out here!

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Happy gaming to ya!