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.
RE: Retroclones: with the exception of my beloved S&W WB I have to admit that I have grown to vastly prefer the TSR originals in almost every case. It's something about the art and presentation I think.
Not that I have anything against the clones, because I do not.
Why do you hate retroclones? Why Aos why???? :)
I'm on the fence about recommending buying MF new vs. GW off eBay to a noob. For me, Mutant Future the third best thing to come out of the OSR (Mazes & Minotaurs is tops, then S&W: WB in second place).
Its interesting that GW 1e has better art than the AD&D core books.
The revised art in MF is pretty good, but I do agree that there is a special flair in the writing of the original whereas the clones tend to be more functional than inspirational.
I am hoping that the DCC RPG bucks this trend.
Hmm...I wonder if Joseph Goodman is a GW fan....
Quote from: J Arcane;509861I'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.
not being rude but if you wamted to play 6 armed robot laserbean\m games why didn't you just write your own system?
I mean that would take like a day tops....
Quote from: jibbajibba;510315not being rude but if you wamted to play 6 armed robot laserbean\m games why didn't you just write your own system?
I mean that would take like a day tops....
Having designed my own game before, and several other partial projects, that shit's harder than it looks, dude.
Quote from: jibbajibba;510315not being rude but if you wamted to play 6 armed robot laserbean\m games why didn't you just write your own system?
I mean that would take like a day tops....
Why waste that time when it's already done for you? Not to mention, if you put a system together to do this in a day, it's going to be crap.
This game sounds amazing... far better than the depressing WotC 4e version (7e) that I've watched. If only I could find a copy... /checking ebay
I love my fantasy in all sorts of flavors: Heavy Metal Weird Fantasy, Frazetta Lush Space Opera, Vamped-out, feathered hair Easley epics. As in the immortal words of Freddy Mercury, "I want it all."
You're welcome.
RPGPundit
I wonder if there is a market for a not-quite Post-Apocalyptic alien fantasy setting.
Talislanta is fantastic, but even it isn't quite that alien. It is some...
Quote from: Silverlion;510605I wonder if there is a market for a not-quite Post-Apocalyptic alien fantasy setting.
Talislanta is fantastic, but even it isn't quite that alien. It is some...
I doubt there would be. It'd be "Too Weird to Live".
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;510808I doubt there would be. It'd be "Too Weird to Live".
RPGPundit
Probably--sadly none of the weird ones I know of have much life to them.
so, thanks to a helpful #rpgnet chatter, I've been directed to Roger Dean: http://www.rogerdean.com/paintings/
OMG, this is soooo what I was on about in the OP.
Quote from: J Arcane;522834so, thanks to a helpful #rpgnet chatter, I've been directed to Roger Dean: http://www.rogerdean.com/paintings/
Roger Dean... along with Patrick Woodrofe and Rodney Mathews... were big favorites of mine as a kid.
When I was playing World of Warcraft and finally got to the Outlands I was stunned to find myself strolling through a Roger Dean painting.
http://ktcmmo.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/one-of-the-saving-graces-of-outland.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/87502441@N00/3316886737/lightbox/
The spectacular visuals and all the weird scifi content of the place kept me playing long past where I'd outleveled the area... but I always wondered how many folks were making the connection. A 2000s era game making callbacks to 70s era art.
I don't know of any pen & paper RPGs that really took on that style even when it was current.
Which RPG would be the closest to an unofficial Heavy Metal game?
That strange blend of Richard Corben and Mobius and Druillet and Enki Bilal and Sergio Macedo was certainly the inspirational fondue pot I dipped in when I ran Gamma World back when.
QuoteRodney Mathews
THAT'S HIM.
That's the guy. The guy whose book I was talking about in the OP. I have been looking for him for like 20 years, ever since I first paged through In Search of Forever, but I could never remember his name.
His stuff was just amazing to me, and a huge influence on me as a kid, on the merits of a boundless imagination.
Thank you so, so much for mentioning him.
And yeah, Outland was totally prog rock album cover, right out of the old masters like Rodney Matthews. Shame the gameplay itself was kind of a let down, but damned if it didn't have some cool vistas. Nagrand is still probably the most beautiful place in the game.
i agree with simlasa--when i'm in a HM mood (and my subscription is active) i head to outland.
as to the OP, i only got to play a little of GW 2e back in high school. years later i picked up a copy of 1e (dunno what happened to that :( ).
now i'm thinking about combining two great gonzos--GW and rifts. . . add the roger dean/HM scenery for flavor :D
QuoteWhich RPG would be the closest to an unofficial Heavy Metal game?
That strange blend of Richard Corben and Mobius and Druillet and Enki Bilal and Sergio Macedo was certainly the inspirational fondue pot I dipped in when I ran Gamma World back when.
Captain Sternn has definitely been a thought in the back of my mind while writing my current project.
EDIT: Holy shit, Rodney Matthews made a cartoon show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw3137pI11Y
and a gerry anderson production, too! neato
It's gorgeous. The writing and animation are kiddy crap, but the design! Oh lord the design. So detailed and so very Matthews. It's beautiful.
Quote from: J Arcane;522848EDIT: Holy shit, Rodney Matthews made a cartoon show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw3137pI11Y
This is pretty cool!
Quote from: J Arcane;522834so, thanks to a helpful #rpgnet chatter, I've been directed to Roger Dean: http://www.rogerdean.com/paintings/
OMG, this is soooo what I was on about in the OP.
You're obviously not a Yes fan.
And there you have it, not only do I still play roleplaying games at my age, I'm also still addicted to prog music. I never really stood a chance.
In my dreams, Rodney Matthews does my game cover.
Quote from: Soylent Green;522855You're obviously not a Yes fan.
And there you have it, not only do I still play roleplaying games at my age, I'm also still addicted to prog music. I never really stood a chance.
true. i was never a prog fan but loved the covers. combine that with some erol otus creatures, and that's a game world i'd get lost in for quite some time :D
It's too bad this didn't have an LP inside, rather than Albuquerque Starport, eh? I wonder if the Dead Kennedys medallion has any special properties?
(http://i.imgur.com/Ucj87.jpg)
excellent choice ^_^
Yup, I've still got that GM screen. It's got a lot of personality.
Over the years I have managed to rationalise my Gamma World collection which at one stage included every rule, source and adventure book up to and including the awful 6th (D20) edition. But I finally manged to break free from my obsessive collector habit. I even managed not to buy the 7th (D&D 4e) version at all though I have played it quite a bit - can't say I care for it.
GW never did anything for me, but the idea of a Mutant Future/Labyrinth Lord crossover game (possibly with shades of Hawkmoon) is enticing.
Quote from: J Arcane;509861But 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.
Sounds like Rodney Matthews (http://www.rodneymatthews.com/gallery.htm).
Quote from: isomage;522960Sounds like Rodney Matthews (http://www.rodneymatthews.com/gallery.htm).
Too slow, bro. (http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=522845&postcount=28) :D
Argh :D
This thread and my recent work reminds me that I really do need to check out Jorune one of these days.
Quote from: J Arcane;522848Holy shit, Rodney Matthews made a cartoon show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw3137pI11Y
'Holy shit' is right! I'm a fan of Matthews and Gerry Anderson and had not a clue that show existed... damn... thanks for pointing that out!
Jorune is certainly worth reading.