Monday, April 5, 2021

The Many Returns of Gamma World

I started this post planning to examine my growing interest in the roleplaying game Gamma World, after having only been casually appreciative of it previously. However, I kept getting side-tracked making comparisons between the uncommonly multitudinous versions of the game. Eventually I realized that the long tenacious publishing history of GW is part of it’s charm, so I’m going to fully indulge this tangent before getting back to the main subject later.

"Edition zero” for Gamma World was Metamorphosis Alpha, written by James M. Ward and published by TSR in 1976. Inspired by science fiction novels such as Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop and Robert Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky, MA was about primitive humans, many of them bizarrely mutated, exploring a strange and hostile enclosed world littered with inexplicable devices. Eventually the characters realize they are in a vast multi-generation space vessel (the starship “Warden,” 13 miles long, 7 miles wide, and 17 levels tall) lost adrift after a cataclysm decimated it’s population centuries before. By modern standards, MA is a very skimpy game system, just 34 pages (in an admittedly cramped and tiny font) with a handful of rules for a few specific situations, a lot of description of the Warden, and everything else left for the referee to fill in.

In 1978 Ward and Gary Jaquet took the general concepts of Metamorphsis Alpha and filled them out with a few ideas from D&D (mostly the Basic version) to produce the first edition of Gamma World proper (expanded to 56 pages and boxed with a spiffy continental map). While keeping the core concept of low-tech often-mutated humanoids poking around a twisted landscape hoping to unearth high-tech loot, the game swapped out the starship setting for post-apocalyptic planet Earth, retaining the ray-guns and robots of MA by saying the world had reached a scientifically sophisticated age before being blasted by a nuclear fire. 

In getting away from the restraints inherent to MA’s premise (can't really repeat the "you're actually on a spaceship" big reveal to your players after the first time) this change of setting carved out a unique new post-apocalyptic subgenre, where the world-before was just as strange to the players as it’s mutated present-day. It also created the unique opportunity for a referee to build campaigns by "Gammafying" their hometown, taking their local mundane roadmap and twisting once familiar landmarks and names first through a lens of techno-wonder and then another of irradiated-savagery. 

First Edition boxed set cover.

Though it didn't enjoy the same runaway success as D&D, there was consistent interest in the game, and a fondness for it among the staff at TSR. So in 1983 Gamma World got a 2nd edition, also credited to Ward and Jaquet with an additional credit for James Ritchie, though it was largely just a cosmetic upgrade with more colorful art and a handful of rules expansions. Mostly it was mechanically the same as 1st edition, albeit with more elaborate accouterments in it's boxed set.

The first big change came in 1985 with the 3rd edition, which massively rewrote the rules around a color-coded universal resolution chart which had been a feature of the hit Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game the previous year. Unfortunately the change was poorly implemented, and the game text was rife with typos and outright omissions. This edition was still mainly credited to Ward and Jaquet, but I get the impression there were some interfering mandates from higher up in the company.

The 3rd edition debacle ushered in an odd tradition for Gamma World, where whoever was publishing D&D at the time would use the GW brand to promote an entirely new rules system, or as a pitching ground for concepts being considered for the next iteration of D&D. I suppose it makes sense from a marketing perspective; there's enough name recognition to pull in an audience, but without risking the flagship brand to test the waters. As a result, counting up from Metamorphosis Alpha, there have been at least 10 distinct versions of the game so far, many of them with very different rules from each other.

They can be broadly divided into "Original Rules" (MA up through 2nd edition) and "New and Different Every Time." Most of the "New and Different" versions have their good and bad points, but some have been utter boondoggles. 

As mentioned 1985’s "universal chart" 3rd edition stumbled out the gate, and 2003’s 6th edition was a poorly received sprawling “grim & gritty” re-imagining (licensed out to White Wolf through their D20-focussed imprint Sword & Sorcery Studios) . But if you didn’t like the last edition of Gamma World, you only had to wait a few years; there was bound to be another before long.

So ... starting chronologically from the left: 2nd edition (1983), 3rd edition (1985), 4th edition (1992), "Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega" for the Amazing Engine rules (1994), Gamma World Alternity/5th edition (2000), Omega World (2002), Gamma World D20/6th edition (2003), and last so far 7th edition (2010).
 

Personally my interest has mainly been peaked by the "original rules" era, particularly 1st edition GW, with some clarifications lifted from 2nd edition (it’s only some eye-straining formatting and a lack of a print-on-demand option disinclining me from settling onto the 2nd edition text entirely). As an old-schooler it's no surprise I like the earlier more succinct versions, but I also have a fondness for 1992’s 4th edition (credited to Ward and Bruce Nesmith) since it was the first version of the game I ever owned and played, and I still have my original copy (it’s got some nice expanded systems for character-creation without getting too complicated, but its resources for the referee are lacking).

2002’s Omega World, the first version by TSR's successor Wizards of the Coast was published as an article in Polyhedron #153, designed by Jonathan Tweet himself. It's a well-regarded fast-and-dirty conversion of the core concepts to the D20 system . 

There are also many fans of 2010’s 7th edition, a wild and woolly and very random take built from the rules of D&D 4th edition (leading some to refer to it erroneously as “4th edition Gamma World”). All editions are currently available online through various venues, most of them legitimate, so you can easily compare and choose for yourself.

Admirably, the tone has been consistent across all these versions (with the exception of 2003's 6th edition), presenting a wild and wahoo world of science fantasy where characters imbued with strange powers are as short-lived as they are unique.

Two addendums worth mentioning:

  • James M. Ward eventually got back the exclusive rights to Metamorphosis Alpha and re-published the game first on his own, and them in 2014 joined up with Goodman Games to create a line of professionally designed supplements for it, more than were made for any single version of GW.
  • In 2008 Goblinoid Games published Mutant Future, an OGL retro-clone of GW itself derived from Labyrinth Lord, their retro-clone of Basic/Expert D&D. So arguably that makes 11 total versions so far.

3 comments:

  1. I always thought the 7th Edition looked like the best version of DnD 4.0. Say, do you still have that d66 version of the "universal chart"? I saw it on Scribd, but don't have an account. Plus, would you be interested in explaining it's use for ZeFRS/FASERIP? All the old links are down and I'd love to see a simplified core mechanic in that game.

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  2. BJ Johnson's (AKA Big Fella's) Mutant Bastards might be of interest. It looks like a rationalization of GW2e with a Spaghetti Western theme:

    https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/214078/Mutant-Bastards--Adventures-in-the-New-West

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  3. Sadly, BJ died, early in 2020 (touching obituary at Delta's DnD Hotspot: https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2020/01/in-memoriam-bj-bigfella-johnson.html).

    His original, brilliant, fan site survives in the Wayback Machine: https://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2020/01/in-memoriam-bj-bigfella-johnson.html

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