I've had a bit of an epiphany.  Scrolling through the "why is D&D famous", and the recent genuine retrospective stuff that's been cropping up, and thinking about the cultural zeitgeist of that time, I started thinking about the stuff that got me fired up as a kid that I never found the game for.

When I was younger, I grew up with a dad who probably would've been a roadie for Led Zeppelin or something if he'd never met my mother and made bastard me.  I was always a bit behind the curve musically and culturally.  

But one thing that sticks out in my mind, is the art from those days.  My best friend growing up had this great book of art from one of the artists who did a lot of the Elric book covers.  And it was chock full of album art from 70s and 80s rock and metal bands, totally unrestricted, probably drug-induced visions of sci-fi and fantasy mashed together into vividly colored vistas of just pure fucking weird.

I wanted to play that.  I wanted to explore the worlds that these covers depicted.  I didn't want another shirtless Frazetta barbarian, or another fucking unicorn, I wanted mushroom forests and triple suns and lanky guys with laser guns flying robotic salamanders and all that shit.  

And the thing is, for years, I never found that game.  I saw hints of it in Jorune, but never managed to track down a copy, and it always seemed to take itself just a bit too seriously.

Then, by chance, and the stern advice of our own RPGPundit, I found Gamma World 4e (the TSR one, not Wizards' version which is technically 7e).  And this, this was fucking it.  This shit was fucking crazy.  Power armored warriors on robotic cat monsters, dog people shooting at flying eyeballs while a crumbling futuristic city rises in the background.  Pure fucking awesome, right out of those album covers I loved so much.

The fact that it was loaded with crazy random tables that could spin up such wonders as a one-eyed telepathic shark with laserbeam eye, or a six-armed sniper with webbed feet riding a motorcycle, just completes it all.

Gamma World was the game I always wanted when I was a kid and never managed to find.  It's a shame it took me so long to find it, and a shame on TSR that it never seemed to get the treatment it richly deserved. Maybe if they'd grabbed onto that metal madness with both hands they could've kept riding the wave a while longer instead of descending into SCA-inspired boredom with 2e.  Dark Sun was the closest D&D ever got to that level of Heavy Metal Magazine awesome, and I think that's a low down dirty shame.

GW 1e was the first game I ever bought. I squandered countless summer days pretending to be a 6' tall telepathic black bunny. FWIW, GW is one the major influences on the Metal Earth, equaled only by Heiro's Jouney, Den, Kamandi and Krogarth of Barbaria.

Gamma World 4th edition (by that I mean the 1992 TSR edition) was for a long time my favorite game. I've always loved bad, comic book science and there is just something about playing in the ashes of our world that is just so powerful and poignant. It's like that final scene from the original Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty.

Plus anything you add the adjective "atomic" to instantly becomes 1000 time cooler.

I've never even seen a copy of GW 4e. Can someone give me an idea of the differences between it and say 1e?

Quote from: Aos;509878I've never even seen a copy of GW 4e. Can someone give me an idea of the differences between it and say 1e?

I don't really know 1e so I can't make comparison.  4e uses a sort of proto D20-ish system, ditching the AD&D reverse AC for a combat system more resembling the current version.  The skill system on the other hand, essentially does the whole reverse thing again, where for some reason you add the DC to your roll and try and roll under skill.

The latter is sort of weird but you can house rule it back to normal die+adds just by upping the DCs by 5-10 points.

It appears that there are some used copies out there. I think I'll pick one up soon.

I'll always be fond of GW1st because a) it was a fucking cool game for its time and b) my dad actually played a session with me GMing for him when I was about 12 just so he could see what all these games I played were all about. Think I still have the character sheet somewhere - at least I hope I do.

Quote from: Aos;509878I've never even seen a copy of GW 4e. Can someone give me an idea of the differences between it and say 1e?

Here's the thing: I can describe the differences between GW1e and GW4e and apart from replacing the Weapon Class base combat tables with D20 style attack rolls pretty much everyone will sound like a step in the wrong direction. And yet it still somehow worked really well.

Where GW1e is clean and spartan, GW4e is plain messy. GW4e has got classes and a skill system but they are both half-backed. It's got a whole bunch of derived stats some of which feel kind of redundant. It's got master list of based animal and plant stocks with distinct bonuses which are not even remotely balanced. Players start with ridiculously large number of hit points - it is actually quite possible for a level 1 character to have 100 hit points - and they keep getting more each level.

And yet, despite all that, GW4e is so very, very playable.

In fairness I had a whole bunch of houserules and I relied heavily on a fan produced character generator to create NPCs (why set up an encounter 5 generic Arks when you can just as quickly roll up 5 entirely unique mutants?), all of which helped.

Hell yeah!

Sadly, most gamers don't enjoy settings outside of BOG vanilla.

I absolutely love GW and I was lucky to be introduced to it very early. I saw the movie Heavy Metal and knew that's what I wanted to play.

I remember when the WarCraft II: Dark Portal came out and Draenor the world of the orcs had mushroom trees and weird vistas and I was really thrilled. So few computer fantasy games appeal to Weird Fantasy.

Its GW that got me focused on OD&D instead of AD&D. I loved using GW stuff in my D&D and vice versa and I just found it easier to use Red Book and Blue Book stuff with my GW 1e.

Here's the Heavy Metal trailer for anyone who's forgotten...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_MzWF8YLhY

I am so sad the Sharkman and the Human Crab game died. I love GW, I love GW4. It is awesome.

For me, I didn't have a background in it until I picked up 2E, and played the cover and pages out of that poor book. I loved the whacky, lethal, mad game that let you be strange beings with unknown science powers and still face death at the hands of mutant hating robots.

Later on, I'd played GW1 under some friends, and eventually picked up each later edition. I think 4E is the most playable and should have been tweaked and have Omega World's writer come in to do so. It have made a fantastic D20 game (stand alone) by WOTC.

Sadly, we didn't get that.


Still, I'm willing to run it at the drop of a hat, and there is a reason my Atomic Highway campaign was called "Gamma Road."

Quote from: Silverlion;509913I think 4E is the most playable and should have been tweaked and have Omega World's writer come in to do so.

That would have been absolutely sensational.

If any of you crazy mixed up kids missed GW, you can always downloand the free Mutant Future PDF and its a solid retroclone with some added cool bits.

http://www.goblinoidgames.com/mutantfuture.html

The "new" GW 4e is a good game. It's sad that WotC had no faith in it and did not develop it more fully into something badass and successful. Perhaps they went too far into the silly, but I found it very enjoyable.

I found Gamma World to be too depressing. I didn't like the thought of the world ending in a fiery apocalypse.

Metamorphosis Alpha, on the other hand, I liked. I suppose that I prefer my cataclysms self-contained.

I should note that my AD&D campaign had some sci fi gonzo to it, too, so it wasn't like I was wallowing in a Shannara clone.

Should my kids ever ask me to play, I'm going to run an MA game using Mutant Future and give the whole thing an Adventure Time! feel.

There is a new version of Metamorphosis Alpha in the works, I have made a pre-order. And the original is now back in print. I still have my original copy that I bought new.

I consider my copy of the original GW one of my most cherished RPG books. But the 1992 edition is still my favorite.

That being said, I *highly* recommend any fan of GW to go check out The Mutant Epoch.

My YouTube review:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1Yn9qub1bU

Quote from: Spinachcat;509928If any of you crazy mixed up kids missed GW, you can always downloand the free Mutant Future PDF and its a solid retroclone with some added cool bits.

http://www.goblinoidgames.com/mutantfuture.html

I second this.

Gamma World 1 was the first game I ever got as a pirated copy. I was in Middle School just starting with RPGs and I bought a poorly mimeographed copy of it from a friend.

Within a couple of weeks we found the AD&D/Gamma World conversion rules in the DMG and the complete gonzo commenced.