LeBrun's Animal People c. 1806

Speaking of mutated humanoid animals, you might enjoy these 1806 engravings representing the work of Charles Le Bruns (1619-1690).

L.-J.-M. Morel d'Arleux

Dissertation sur un Traité de Charles Lebrun concernant le Rapport de la Physionomie Humaine avec Celle des Animaux 

Paris, Chalcographie du Musée Napoléon, 1806

Digest Sized Character Sheets for Gamma World

In case anyone might be interested, here is a pdf for some no-frills digest-sized Gamma World character sheets I cooked up. These should work for both first and second edition. There are two character sheets per page. Here's what they look like:

Also, if you're bothering to read this post you might be interested that TOR.COM just posted two separate retrospectives regarding original edition Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, respectively. I think it's pretty amazing these obsolete games would get mainstream attention like this.

Have a lovely and colorful weekend - hopefully I'll see a couple of you at Gamex on Sunday!

Van Vogtian and Poulandersonian Talking Animals

Gamma World’s reputation as a totally zany game comes partly from its rampant anthropomorphism – namely, animals walking on two feet and speaking English. The official storyline given in the early editions of Gamma World – nuclear holocaust – doesn’t do a great job of explaining how radioactive fallout can result in badgers becoming bipedal, donning medieval armor, and acting like gnolls. While leaving the causation a mystery is fine, it’s certainly fun to think more deeply about specific scientifiction scenarios that might result in hop-scotching, jive talking rabbit people.

Two classic paperbacks I read recently provide some appropriately cyclopeatronic explanations for rapid language acquisition amongst our dear animal friends…

BRAIN WAVE – Poul Anderson

I was living at a tropical field station in Panama for a little while last year and luxuriated in some extra time to read a pile of paperbacks. In the pile was a great little read by Poul Anderson called Brain Wave. This story, one of Anderson’s earliest, was originally serialized in Space Science Fiction in 1953. The basic premise is that all life on earth had evolved while earth was being bathed in a strange type of space radiation that retarded neuronal activity. As the book opens, earth abruptly moves out of the radiation field and the intelligence of all living creatures increases by orders of magnitude. The results of this is that many animals gain a human-level of intelligence (resulting in an awesome scene where African Gorillas go bananas and rebel against the humans!), mentally deficient humans gain “normal” intelligence, and all normal humans become hyper-geniuses. Without going into too much detail, the end product of this could very well be an alternate Gamma World. The cover art for this Ballantine edition is beautiful and eerie; it's by someone named Phil Kirkland, whom I know very little about.

THE BATTLE OF FOREVER – A.E. Van Vogt

I love Van Vogt and I don’t know why he doesn’t get more attention these days. World of Null-A is one of my favorite 1940s sci-fi classics, and spectacularly presages everything Philip K. Dick became a superstar for. The Battle of Forever, from 1971, is one of Van Vogt’s more far out novels. It is set in the far future after the 1000 remaining humans separated themselves from the rest of the planet and evolved into large floating heads with small limp bodies. These 1000 individuals lived for 3500 years in an isolated hyper-intellectual society and had almost completely forgotten about the earth and the physical lives humans used to lead. The book opens with one of these future-humans emerging to explore the earth, finding a plant populated by talking humanoid animals whose ancestors were genetically engineered by the pre-isolation humans. Ahhhh, I love this kind of stuff! Please admire the wondrous Ace paperback cover art by master illustrator John Schoenherr.

Classic Gamma World Ads and Posters

This material should already be familiar to many of you, but here it is in one place. I especially love the white hot picture of Elise Gygax in the White Dwarf magazine ad! Yeow!

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Gamma World: Floating Castle of the Wasp Women

Friday night I ran a group of six friends through a draft of my Gamma World scenario Floating Castle of the Wasp Women in preparation for the Gamex con next weekend. (UPDATE: Read about the con session here!)

The game was pretty much insane… Because I don’t want to reveal too much about the scenario yet, I thought I’d simply describe a few Kodak Moments from the session:

A 15-foot tall humanoid deer was standing on the battlement of a floating castle when he grabbed two 8-foot long human-faced wasps by their necks and fried their brains with electrical shocks emitting from his fingers.

A flying go-kart was careening through space, crashing through a swarm of angry wasp women, while the driver – a gigantic stink beetle – was desperately trying to spray his hymenopteran aggressors with paralyzing flatulence.

A winged woman with radiation-seeking antennae broke down a door to find herself being fired on by a seven-year old boy with a laser blaster. Luckily a flying hedgehog girl was able to wrestle the laser blaster away with her telekinetic powers.

An "average guy" named Bob strolled into a giant wasp brood chamber to find hundreds of tiny maggots with baby faces. Being the average guy that he was, Bob began to mentally leech the life force out of the squirming babies while worker wasps were frantically dog-piling him.

A giant sticky (and delicious smelling) slug with a pulsating Mole of Confusion on his forehead fell from the air and began frantically spitting mucous spit bombs as he was stung to death by the wasp women.

Sadly the slug character was turned into a puddle of mucous during the game. However, Bob The Average ended up with almost 200HP after walking into the middle of the wasp nest and Life Leeching them all. At the last moment, the flatulent beetle character saved the day with one very well placed fart.

A beautiful experience - I can’t wait to again relive the joy and wonder that is Gamma World...!

A few technical comments:

At cons it’s sensible and standard to have pre-generated characters. However, I think one of the most pleasing aspects of Gamma World is the weird and unpredictable mutation combos you get popping up in PCs. In order to keep this fun and unpredictable element in a one-shot game I’m using mutation cards where the players have their mutant abilities printed on little cards in front of them. I achieved this during playtest by photocopying the mutation tables from the first edition rulebook, and having the players excise the bits describing their mutations. This worked great – it sped things up, and no one had to look in the rulebook during play. Before the con next Sunday I hope to make an actual Mutagenesis Deck that players can simply draw cards from. Also, for the session I had players draw lots for their starting weapons and I made up super-simple digest-sized Gamma World character sheets. I’ll post the character sheets for download here in a few days in case anyone’s interested.

A word from James Ward:

Interestingly, after the game the dude who played the mutant slug asked James Ward (the original Gamma World designer) if he thought the Life Leech mutation was too powerful. If you'll recall, Bob the Average's Life Leech played a huge role in the players' victory over the wasps. Here's what Mr. Ward said:

Lifeleech, one of my best inventions.

Over the versions editors (those nasty organizers) have tried to calm down the effects of this mutation. I must admit the ability to keep sucking life points away is powerful. Of course the editors rarely consider that life leechers are the ultimate target of every enemy. Leechers can't take robot hit points. There are really lots of balancing effects to be used on such mutants. I can remember in the games I ran for Gary Gygax and his friends that Gary would kill leechers on sight and not allow them in the village of vigalists. In one group I gamed with they invented anti-life leech paint made from special nanos.

I'm glad you had fun with the game.

James M. Ward

Although right after the game I was having mixed feelings about how powerful Life Leech was, in retrospect the game was hyper-fun and I wouldn't change a thing. Gamma World is not about playing a highly balanced strategy game, after all, it's about mutant insanity! I agree with Mr. Ward - the trend to weaken mutations in later editions was a wimp out...

Naughty Erol Otus - Banned Illustrations

1982 saw the release of a high school-themed RPG called Alma Mater. Many game stores banned this product for its sex, drugs, and violence. Although I've often heard about this game, I've never personally seen a copy of it.

From what I understand, the game is a pretty straight-up old school RPG. The character classes are Loser, Average Kid, Brain, Jock, Cheerleader, Criminal, and Tough. The game takes place over four years, and players score points in categories like Social Success or Academic Success, with the goal of meeting class-specific victory conditions. There is a skill system that includes stuff like Drinking, Cheating, and Studying. There are also simple rules for dealing with various challenges like acne, pregnancy, and dope addiction.

Probably the most remarkable aspect of this game are the zinger illustrations by Erol Otus. Enjoy:

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I thank Kellri for posting these scans to The RPG Site a few years back.

Erol Otus' Gamma World

I’m immersing myself in Gamma World in preparation for the con session I’m running during Memorial Day weekend. I played this game back in the early/mid-80s using the second edition set in the burgundy box. I have fond memories of grid crawling through a trashed post-apocalyptic world, munching on Cheez-Its, listening to Iron Maiden cassettes late into the night. Playing Gamma World was pretty weird and cool - mutated humanoids digging through piles of rubbish to find goodies, cults of talking animals hiding in the hills, and secret bunkers hosting fundamentalist pure strain humans.

In reading about other folks’ Gamma World (and Mutant Future) games on blogs and forums these days it’s interesting to note the divergent aesthetic approaches to the game. The aesthetic represented in the official published material is pretty dark, gritty, and Mad Max-like. This approach seemed to become stronger over time through the various editions (at least the ones I have seen, I lost track around edition 4 or 5). More evident in the earlier editions, and in the current retro gaming world, is gonzo zaniness reminiscent of Thundaar the Barbarian and Dave Trampier’s first edition illustrations. I love Thundaar, so of course I'm biased towards this latter vision.

My personal favorite approach to Gamma World, however, is best illustrated by Erol Otus’ illustrations in the first edition supplements. Beautiful technicolor weirdness more along the lines of early Heavy Metal and Epic Illustrated magazines than Saturday Morning cartoons.

In particular, look closely at Otus’ colorful ref screen illustration. The sky is clear and blue – not a dark and gritty scene at all. Green tress, mountains, dragons, mushrooms. I like the punked out warrior babe with the Dead Kennedys amulet and the crazy techno-wand - I want to be her friend. The mutants are really weird and fantastic. Soooooooo awesome! I’ll take Otustown over Bartertown any day!

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