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Gamma World was role-playing game company TSR's attempt at a post-apocalyptic role-playing system. TSR hit the big time with the mega-successful Dungeons and Dragons franchise, but the company's history is littered with non-starters. Still, when it came out, Gamma World felt like a winner - edgy post-apocalypse adventuring humans, robots and mutated bunnies contend in the ruins of a future Earth. The rules themselves are more or less D&D lite - character stats, melee rounds, and randomized combat mechanics. You can play as a Pure Strain Human, of untainted genome, but the fun is in mutated humans, and even mutated animals with human intelligence - if you want to be a panda toting a Mark VII Blaster Rifle, you've got it.
This takes us onto the Physical and Mental Mutation tables, full of exotic adaptations to the new brave new world ("Quills/Spines", "Pyrokinesis" "Multiple Body Parts"), and the occasional dark side of genetic damage ("Hemophilia," say, or "Epilepsy").
When it arrived in stores in the early 1980s, Gamma World was announced like this:
The first world is lost in the mythical past, the second was destroyed by apocalyptic energies, and now a whole new world awaits you - GAMMA WORLD!Unlike, say, the neo-Ptolemaic D&D supplement Spelljammer, GW had what seemed like a tang of edgy plausibility. In those days, we were made to understand that there was every likelihood that most of us would perish in a nuclear conflict...
...or would we!? Because maybe we'd still be around, and everything would be messed up in a cool way. When I was playing Gamma World in junior high, it seemed vaguely plausible that in a few years we'd have tattoos, and cool rubble to climb around on. There would be tribes!
Gamma World's principal architects were Gary Jaquet and James M. Ward - the latter of whom must be touched by some visionary quality, since his name is on Metamorphosis Alpha and Deities and Demigods. It's patterned more after science fantasy than science fiction proper - the creators cite The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's marvelous Wizards, a post-apocalypse subgenre boiled down and codified into 56 pages of narratively generative charts'n'tables.
Players set out into an America remade as a country of mutants, rural communities, and the mystery-shrouded ruins of a prior civilization. Robot farms, nomadic tribes, ancient spaceports, mutated forests and radioactive desert dot the landscape as well as the Cryptic Alliances, crackpot factions contesting for the fragments of what used to be.
As a context for storytelling Gamma World gets full marks. Gamma World's crazy mix of high-tech and ruined-garden aesthetics is still my preferred vision of the post-Reaganite era. In Mad Max, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the post-nuclear world is a humorless burned-out husk, but Gamma World is lush and green, a hothouse full of unwholesome life - like dropping the bombs just kicks everything up a notch.
It combines that neo-tribal waste-land adventure with a Riddley Walker, Motel of the Mysteries vibe - familiar artifacts become strange to us, the present day world we walk around in becomes a strange and distant past, a lost technological climax instant for the human race. Poignant and thrilling at the same time.
But Gamma World never caught on in a big way. Some X-factor was missing - maybe it lacked D&D's potent fantasy urtexts. Or maybe it was in the game design? GW's character creation lacks the hard-wired archetypal structure of D&D's class system - sure, mutations are fun, but it doesn't bring the ready-made type-casting of fighter vs magic user vs thief.
And the reward schedule isn't there. You don't go up levels - in Gamma World your base stats go up, and you can find artifacts, and there's a thin chance of further mutation (here I consult the Radiation Matrix), but you don't find that steady treadmill of advancement that keeps D&D and WoW players grinding onward and opening up new areas in the game mechanics.
And of course the nail in the coffin is the post-Reagan New World Order itself, which let the air out of our collective investment in a grim post-nuclear endgame.
But Gamma World keeps being remade, even unto the Sixth Edition. Cormac McCarthy, along with Jericho, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and even Al Gore, show that the devastated future Earth still has a place in the contemporary imagination. I like to think McCarthy would appreciate the final pages of the 1981 manual, a 100-item treasure table full of poignant relics as "57. Jungle gym - fair condition, used," or "1859 Swiss Infantry Sabre - excellent condition, well polished blade." Gamma World is a future with a past that includes the world we see around us, which ought to mean as much as a bunch of halflings.
And, seriously, as futures go, would you rather the boring old Singularity, or Gamma World? Do you really want to float around in space chatting with Farsc4pe_Guy_21 or do you want to explore a secret bunker shattered by nuclear fire, to learn the truth of our elder civilization? Leporinoid art by David Trampier.
Comments
Man, I remember Gamma World. I also remember the Light On Quest Mountain choose your own adventure based in Gamma World, which at my young age, had the coolest cover art.
Gamma World had this surreal look at post-apocalypse. One that had so much going on in a world where the table was supposed to be wiped clean. RIFTS picked that up as well. Very rich worlds that I could just read the sourcebooks and imagine, even without getting to play. I kinda wish they had gotten the good fiction treatment, the way Warhammer40k got.
I also remember looking forward to mutation in Gamma World. While there was always supposed to be drawbacks for mutation, they never quite came through when some of the mutations were so damn cool.
I also miss the Wizards movie, including seeing it on an old betamax copy a friend had in college, but that's a whole other set of memories.
Am I the only one who expecting the Hulk to pop up somewhere in this game..?
Yeah. I thought so.
Takes me back, too. I've still got the edition with that killer bunniez drawing on a shelf somewhere.
I remember Gamma World too. Started out with D&D/AD&D but somehow I wasn't quite nerdy enough to truly enjoy it. Gamma World and Car Wars though, now there were two games I could sink my head into.
One more game I played, not really related at all, that I can't remember the name of was a 007 type of role playing game. I'll feel like a complete fool if it actually was a James Bond branded game but I don't think it was. I remember always creating female Israeli spys...for some odd reason.
But yeah, Gamma World made for many fun afternoons and evenings.
I'm a huge post-apocalyptic fiction fan, and Gamma World had a big part in nurturing that interest. Man, nothing like fighting against the Knights of Genetic Purity with your trusty mutated raccoon and oak companions!
@ pleitch: the TSR game you are thinking of is "Top Secret/S.I."
@pleitch: possible, also, you were thinking of the James Bond RPG, which I can (sadly) confirm exists, both via the web *and* via my closet.
[web.archive.org]
@sensenet: All true, but I did also segue from Gamma to Paranoia with remarkable speed. That and Teenagers from Outer Space, which got me back in the mutated racoon business.
Still, I've got to say that Paranoia was one of the all-time best RPG concepts ever forged.
Makes me want to play a Fallout tabletop RPG. Surely someone somewhere has created such a thing.
@zerofritz: I was actually thinking about the James Bond RPG recently. I was remembering their interesting mechanic about attractiveness. If you had high attractiveness, you had the down side of being very recognizable.
But that's any type of game that wants to balance: any positive choice you make differently than the person next to you has to have some flaw or constraint associated with it.
@pleitch:
Victory Games made the James Bond 007 Role playing game. I know as it is sitting on my bookshelf.
Re: Gamma World. It was fun, but I played with a GM who was a total asshole and over did the mutation thing. One character had the powers of Akira (from Akira) and it got so boring that I decided that it was more fun to play Top Secret.
Spiral,
Wizards and Fire & Ice are out on DVD. The Fire and Ice one had an awesome Frazetta doc on the 2nd disc, well worth picking up. Also, Bakshi is selling orginal cels from Wizards, Fire & Ice, his LOTR (got myself some nice Nazgul), Cool World and some hand drawings too on eBay, check it out!
As to Gamma World, our D&D group went the Travller route instead, so never played. Sounds fun tho...
I played some Gamma World back in the day, I've never looked at the new D20 version to deeply, but the production values look top notch. Gamma World came out in a swarm of post apocalypse games including 'Aftermath' and 'The Morrow Project'. That fatalistic end of the world thing was big back in the 80's dontchaknow.
I remeber really liking Gamma World, but also getting pretty seriously bogged down in character creation. Then the TMNT game from Paladium came out and my group never looked back.
Man, you want post-apocolyptic, mutations, craziness, I reccommend HOL (Human Occupied Landfill). Of course, no one ever gets past character creation, but it's hilarious.
@AdamL: Actually there are two. Sort of. One's a fan-made version [fallout-rpg.narod.ru] , and the other one [pnp.fallout.wikia.com] is by J.E. Sawyer.
Alternity flavored Gamma World is, in my opinion, the best post-apoc RPG ever made. It's about as close to perfect as something can be.
I have a copy of Metamorphosis Alpha tucked away.
I never liked Gamma World, though; I hated the whole post-apocalypse genre back in the 80s and it seems kind of quaint now.
I loved Gamma World. The setting was terrific, and the variety of characters you could make was almost unbounded. Androids, robots, mutant humans, sapient plants...
But the reason it never caught on was the game system. The first edition encouraged characters to sit and bask in radiation zones, as they would collect mostly beneficial random mutations and become like unto gods within days. The second edition fixed that, but it had other problems -- a character wearing a leather vest, as I recall, could not be injured by an opponent with a knife. And so on, and so on.
I wish they had made a Gamma World movie. I remember writing a script when I was about seventeen...with luck it's permanently lost, now.
Whoa, time warp to 1981! Now I've gotta break out my Traveller game!
Nerdcore to the max. Thank you for this.
This Pure Strain Human wants you to get the hell off his glow-grass lawn.
The White Wolf D20 version of Gamma World is an amazing game. It is, with the possible exception of GURPS Transhuman Space, some of the best actual Science Fiction in an RPG published this decade.
Some of the sections display the sort of forward thinking that simply are not present in RPGs, that tend to be slavish in repeating the tropes of others. Instead of just repeating some myths critters, they, more or less, ask what would people make to cure the problems of the world, and then how would that go disastrously wrong.
It is also totally not Gamma World.
Contrary to the article, I think that one of GWs sources of success was that edge of wackiness. The totally random mutation tables produced outrageously unique and strange characters. It was weird science at its finest.
So much of what made GW a great game is that sense of the normal being somehow special. Fabulously, I once managed to spend an entire hour of a gaming session as the players attempted to figure out the mysterious artifact that they'd found, which was, in fact, a stereo speaker. I kept assuming the gig was up because I kept looking at the speaker above my head for points of reference, because I'd never expected this to drag on as long as it did.
Gamma World lived and died by the length and strangeness of its mutation table. Too few people understood that.
gamma world and traveller ftw.
Don't make me dig up my Morrow Project rulebook!
It's in the bolthole under my house...
@Spiral: Yeah Spiral, I'm right there with you. I had whole games that I did nothing but imagine the worlds, get the campaigns ready, make a slew of NPC's, but never ACTUALLY played the game. Damnit if those weren't the most fun.
Gamma World was the first role-playing game I ever played. The artwork in those days was so fun. I love these looks back from io9. It keeps this site firmly entrenched in my feedreader.
@Rus McLaughlin: Rus, I couldn't agree more. Paranoia was a great concept. Why aren't more of these games licensed and turned into computer games? Car Wars had those old school Apple II games, but that IP is a natural for a modern computer game. Twilight 2000 had an old DOS game I think. That's a setting that would be perfect for a game. I'm really surprised we don't see more games made from old PNP RPG properties.
Gamma world was Science Fantasy - not Science Fiction. Just D&D with randomly generated creatures.
Own that.
I think the Fallout game series, even the orphaned Fallout Tactics, are really what people were looking for with a lot of RPGs bitd. I really got bored with D&D and a bunch of other tabletops/rpgs/strategy games, but playing them on the computer now is bearable to fun to obssessing. And the level of lead and paint solvents in my bloodstream is way lower.....
Gamma World is #1. Probably the biggest thing holding it back is that the setting is so open ended. D&D gave DM's places to jump in and run stories for, Gamma World had some similarly targetted sourcebooks but for the most part the DM's really had to craft their own world and had very little baseline to work with.
The random mutations chart is the type of thing legends are made from.
Geez this is a trip down old RPG lane...Twilight 2000, Gamma World, RIFTs. But no one mentioned Star Frontiers! Go go Yazirian's!
[en.wikipedia.org]
Give me Aftermath or Morrow Project over Gamma World for 20th century Post-apocalyptic RPGs. (both of which are sitting at home on the self)
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