When I’m planning for a game in this project I usually have a dilemma about character creation. It’s an integral part of the game, and it lets the players connect to their characters, but it can be a lengthy process and creating pregens in advance leaves more time for playing. So far, I think I only went with pregens for Trinity, which has a rather complex character creation process, but I’ll probably use it for more system-heavy games in the future.
With Gamma World, though, there was no question. Half the fun of Gamma World and its successors are those funky random mutation tables. I still have fond memory of a friend’s tiger character who had rolled to have large gas bags.
No, no, they were used for flying. Like a zeppelin.
Our own party consisted of three mutated animals – a flying squirrel, a fox and a platypus, along with one mutated humanoid. Jack, the humanoid and clearly the leader of these lesser beings, was a man with mighty vocal chords (Physical Mutation, Humanoid 80: Sonic Blast) and a slight defect – an inability to recognize the existence of lizards (Defect, Humanoid 55: Mental Block). Unfortunately we hadn’t met any lizards in the adventure – I should have gone with robots.
Stormy Weather, a small flying squirrel, is nothing much to look at from the outside. But from within, he is teeming with mental mutations, some good, some bad. Aside from his heightened charisma (Mental Mut., Animal 25: Heightened Brain Talent) and physical capabilities (Phys. Mut, Animal 33: Heightened Physical Ability), he also has a phobia of loud noises (Defect, Animal 80: Phobia/Fear) and a slight retardation (Defect, Animal 57: Mental Weakness). The player rolled up three defects (negative mutations) for this one, so I let the last one be a positive mutation. I’m not even sure you’re allowed more than one defect by the rule.
Oxford the Fox was next, Oxford the Invisible (Phys., Animal 53), Dual-Brained (Phys., Animal 15), Exoskeletoned (Phys., Animal 09) Fox. This wonder of Evolution is the pride of the village, capable of infiltration and withstanding great damage.
The many shades of Johnny
And at the back went Johnny, the Platypus. None knew from whence he came. His mental powers (Mental, Animal 39: Mental Blast) were great, and so was his absolute, ninja-like control of his skin texture (Plant Mutation 86: Texture Change). From branch to branch he leaped, sharp eyed and weak bodied.
And so, characters in hand, our intrepid adventurers set out from the village of Haven. The village elder, Gene, had entrusted them with the task of finding out Mindkeep and returning the Flyer’s soul to his origin. He gave them two clues to being their search; the location of a hermit some hours to the south and the location of another village whose leader might know something of the Keep. Gene also gave the group three artifacts: a weather predicting device of sorts; a map of the area and the mysterious Needle of the North.
Reassured by the blue hue of their Weather Rock, the group headed south, along one of the highways of the ancients that passed through Haven. Not long after, they heard a buzzing of a sort. As Oxford invisibly approached, he saw two Arns, two-meter long dragonflies of sorts, who had built a sort of a nest into the road. Returning to the group, they decided to avoid contact and changed their heading.
I was going by the Gamma World adventure model here; I rolled up some critters on the random encounter table (Ancient Roads, 51: Arns), and presented them to the characters. They weren’t so interested; in retrospective, they hadn’t had much of an incentive to interact with them. But the players in the Example of Play in the book just charged ahead when they saw something!
Nep Eps (artist rendition)
The next creature I rolled up (Normal Woods, 74) was a Nep Eps. This is a kind of nefarious tree that shoots electricity at unsuspecting victims, so I had it ambush the characters. The third edition of GW has a unified mechanic called the Action Table (ACT). It’s a colored table where you you cross reference your character’s ability with a percentile roll to get a colored level of success. But the game is still limited by having no skills or measures of character beyond six attributes and the character Rank, i.e. level. So to set up the ambush, I assigned an arbitrary difficulty level (I believe it was “Green”, the second level) and had everyone roll their Mental Strength stat. Only Oxford passed, which meant the tree had taken the others by surprise.
Minding his business and walking down the road, then, it was Jack that caught the trees attention, and was immediately swept up by its roots. The group panicked, and surrounded the tree, trying to extricate their friend.
We rolle initiative – one roll per side, modified by the highest Dexterity on that side and then alternating, thank goodness. Our heroes won the roll, and then lunged forward – and flailed rather ineffectively at the tree.
The basic mechanic for combat is the same as for the rest of game, the ACT. Once again, the attacker must look up his attack value in the chart, roll up a d% and get his level of success. The problem is that the base lookup parameter during combat is the character’s Rank. After adding and substracting the appropriate modifiers it might be a little higher or lower, but beginning, first-Rank, characters end up having to roll 70+ to hit a tree.
Possibly, in some alternate universe (perhaps one called The Eighties) this works well. Nowadays, spending two thirds of our time rolling misses isn’t widely considered fun. I quickly bumped the levels up to Rank 5, making them 10% or so more likely to hit, and getting them closer to 50% with various modifiers.
We also had some confusion with the offensive mutations. Each mutation has its own rank, generally around 10. We weren’t sure whether to use this as the attacking number or the Character Rank again; I went with the latter.
After a few rounds of helplessly hitting the tree with sticks (possibly infuriating it further by this disrespect towards its dead relatives) his three companions managed to untangle Jack and get away from the tree. Lacking motor capabilities, it did not pursue.
Without any further encounters, the group had reached a large plateau where Ermon the Hermit was said to reside. There was some confusion at this point, because half the party was sure they were headed towards the village of Oskar. The blame seemed to lay at the feet of Johnny the Shifty Platypus who had led them there. But as they were already on Hermit Plateau, they decided to pay Ermon a visit.
After a short encounter with some friendly n’thlai, the group located Ermon. This seemingly senile old man who kept asking them for their purpose babbled about Mindkeep, its purpose, its dangers and its inhabitants. The group couldn’t quite get the location of the Keep out of him, though, only that some Bofs had been here to ask about it.
However, Ermon was quite friendly and decided to give the party some of his old loot from Mindkeep (I think i asked for a token Charisma roll to see how much he liked them). Telling them of a stash at the bottom of the hill, he prompted a frantic race to the bottom, where they found under a rock a hidden badge, a gray bracelet of some sort, and what was either a weapon or a phone.
We had fun with another bit of the system here, the Artifact Examination Chart. This lets the characters either figure out what a piece of technology does, destroy it, or shoot themselves in the process. The party had two pieces of technology to handle here, the bracelet and the gun. Jack had a first go at the gun, but after some unsuccessful rolls ended up baffled and distraught.
He gave it to Stormy Weather to try, and the squirrel had a bit more success with it. Unlikely as it was, requiring about five or six half-chance rolls, he managed to reach the point where he could tell this was a gun and where he needed to press to shoot it. I had fun with this, as each successful result gave the character another bit of knowledge (“you’re pretty sure you need to hold it the other way around”) and a failed roll caused something alarming to happen (“red indicator lights have now lit up along the rim of the gun”). Once Stormy Weather was done I offered another roll to determine how many shots were left in the device, but he chose not to stretch his luck.
Encouraged by the success of his fellows, Johnny took a look at the bracelet. His first conclusion, upon rolling a 2, was that the best way to examine it was by splitting it in two with his spear. This did not quite work out.
Done with these artifacts, the party moved on towards Oskar in hopes of learning the location of Mindkeep. I was tired of the random encounters so I decided to go with something else now – a high radiation field. Walking through the prairie, the air around the party soon began to glow.
What wondrous new mutations will they receive? We’ll see on my next post.
