HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
I was already familiar with Gamma World when I bought my first Gamma World RPG in 1986 (see my prior entry about Gamma World 1 and 2). This was the new Gamma World third edition, a game that stepped pretty far from the roots of first and second edition. This edition dared to fully re-write the system the game used, added a new parasitic plant character race, and had to be published with an errata booklet because the game had so many cut and paste errors, and outright missing rules. It is also the Gamma World I love the most.
The big change was something that TSR had been doing a lot in that era – switching to a system using a d100 and an action resolution table with coloured results based on the difficulty of the roll and the number rolled. The system was originally hatched for Marvel Supers, and made it over to Star Frontiers via Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space. However it was implemented at its best, IMO, with Gamma World third edition. What made it work so well here is that the designers included a DM screen with a lot of results charts – rolling a system shock roll? Black result is death, white is invalid, blue is knocked out, green is delirium, yellow is exhaustion, orange is trauma and red is stunned. Trying to impress someone? There’s a results table for that too, and each result is paired to a game rules effect. While I was unhappy with the way they introduced these charts to Star Frontiers, and was ambivalent about them in Marvel, this game was definitely an expert implementation of the system… if only the rest of the game followed suit.
The errata booklet is the big give-away – it begins by describing that several sections were cut from the main books because they needed the space, but they forget to get rid of the references to these sections. So, because people wanted them, they decided to bring them back in the errata booklet. It only contains minor things like descriptions of the various types of weapons and their game effects, price lists for everything in the game, the rules for skills and talents, and the cryptic alliances, the semi-secret societies of Gamma Terra.
This edition was the one I found most exciting as it added mutant animals that were not humanoid and mutant plants (symbiotic and free-living) to the game. It also partially got rid of the level system, replacing it with a ranking system and the ability to buy up your stats and mutation levels, as well as skills and talents. The game retained the ability to be played as a wild-and-wahoo game (like Omega World), a serious game or something in between. In fact, in my experience, it seemed to work best somewhere in between the two extremes. Combined with the article in Dragon Magazine “Up and Running in the Land of Mutants”, the game ran great.
I got my copy of GW3e from Glenn, a member of my high school gaming group. He had bought it, we rolled up a few characters, and I fell in love with it and bought it from him. It was also the first edition of Gamma World that I actually owned. My first character was a ‘wizard of the wastelands’, a human mutant with no visible mutations but with great wisdom and the ability to produce blasts of energy from his hands (the same mutation, rolled three times, allowed me to create blasts of ice or fire 3 times per hour instead of the normal limit of once per hour – it made for a cool schtick).
We played several short campaigns in my senior year of high school, once everyone had burned out on our years Call of Cthulhu campaigns. Half the game was exploring and discovery, but the other half of the game was the players trying to figure out where they were in reality, as I used maps of actual buildings and places in the Ottawa – Montreal region for our games – we adventured on my farm, in our small town, under the interprovincial bridge nearby, at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, and in the shopping mall in Hawkesbury. The characters were, as with any edition of Gamma World, three-quarters of the fun in the game. We had Emile (a meal), the humanoid mutant shark with extra rows of teeth; Fungaloid – a poisonous toadstool who wore a cow skull as armour (he wasn’t very big) and who lashed out at all around him with mental blasts; a thorn-apple tree that constantly made various horticultural puns but who was a devastating grappler; a mutant hawk with mini-missiles strapped to his wings who wore various old football jerseys; and a collection of other misfits and mutants as well as a few pure strain humans who tried to make up for their cool mutations with their uber-stats. But we all knew that they were really just second class citizens of Gamma Terra – left-overs of those who came before the social wars.
Whenever I toy with Gamma World, in any edition, I pine for third edition. Even when we played a great Omega World game (coming in my next Gamma World article, about Gamma World 4e and Omega World), I kept thinking back to third edition and my love affair with the system. Whenever I consider making rules for social interactions in RPGs, I think to the results tables from this edition and remember that there are several possible results from a social interaction roll – from grudging agreement to fanatic loyalty to violent rejection.
If there are two old RPGs I would run in a heartbeat – they are Street Fighter from White Wolf, and Gamma World 3e.
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About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
The big change was something that TSR had been doing a lot in that era – switching to a system using a d100 and an action resolution table with coloured results based on the difficulty of the roll and the number rolled. The system was originally hatched for Marvel Supers, and made it over to Star Frontiers via Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space. However it was implemented at its best, IMO, with Gamma World third edition. What made it work so well here is that the designers included a DM screen with a lot of results charts – rolling a system shock roll? Black result is death, white is invalid, blue is knocked out, green is delirium, yellow is exhaustion, orange is trauma and red is stunned. Trying to impress someone? There’s a results table for that too, and each result is paired to a game rules effect. While I was unhappy with the way they introduced these charts to Star Frontiers, and was ambivalent about them in Marvel, this game was definitely an expert implementation of the system… if only the rest of the game followed suit.
The errata booklet is the big give-away – it begins by describing that several sections were cut from the main books because they needed the space, but they forget to get rid of the references to these sections. So, because people wanted them, they decided to bring them back in the errata booklet. It only contains minor things like descriptions of the various types of weapons and their game effects, price lists for everything in the game, the rules for skills and talents, and the cryptic alliances, the semi-secret societies of Gamma Terra.
This edition was the one I found most exciting as it added mutant animals that were not humanoid and mutant plants (symbiotic and free-living) to the game. It also partially got rid of the level system, replacing it with a ranking system and the ability to buy up your stats and mutation levels, as well as skills and talents. The game retained the ability to be played as a wild-and-wahoo game (like Omega World), a serious game or something in between. In fact, in my experience, it seemed to work best somewhere in between the two extremes. Combined with the article in Dragon Magazine “Up and Running in the Land of Mutants”, the game ran great.
I got my copy of GW3e from Glenn, a member of my high school gaming group. He had bought it, we rolled up a few characters, and I fell in love with it and bought it from him. It was also the first edition of Gamma World that I actually owned. My first character was a ‘wizard of the wastelands’, a human mutant with no visible mutations but with great wisdom and the ability to produce blasts of energy from his hands (the same mutation, rolled three times, allowed me to create blasts of ice or fire 3 times per hour instead of the normal limit of once per hour – it made for a cool schtick).
We played several short campaigns in my senior year of high school, once everyone had burned out on our years Call of Cthulhu campaigns. Half the game was exploring and discovery, but the other half of the game was the players trying to figure out where they were in reality, as I used maps of actual buildings and places in the Ottawa – Montreal region for our games – we adventured on my farm, in our small town, under the interprovincial bridge nearby, at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, and in the shopping mall in Hawkesbury. The characters were, as with any edition of Gamma World, three-quarters of the fun in the game. We had Emile (a meal), the humanoid mutant shark with extra rows of teeth; Fungaloid – a poisonous toadstool who wore a cow skull as armour (he wasn’t very big) and who lashed out at all around him with mental blasts; a thorn-apple tree that constantly made various horticultural puns but who was a devastating grappler; a mutant hawk with mini-missiles strapped to his wings who wore various old football jerseys; and a collection of other misfits and mutants as well as a few pure strain humans who tried to make up for their cool mutations with their uber-stats. But we all knew that they were really just second class citizens of Gamma Terra – left-overs of those who came before the social wars.
Whenever I toy with Gamma World, in any edition, I pine for third edition. Even when we played a great Omega World game (coming in my next Gamma World article, about Gamma World 4e and Omega World), I kept thinking back to third edition and my love affair with the system. Whenever I consider making rules for social interactions in RPGs, I think to the results tables from this edition and remember that there are several possible results from a social interaction roll – from grudging agreement to fanatic loyalty to violent rejection.
If there are two old RPGs I would run in a heartbeat – they are Street Fighter from White Wolf, and Gamma World 3e.
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
