I went to the Happening and ran two sessions of Gamma World 7th Edition, which is the version that uses the D&D 4th Edition rules. This gave me an opportunity to apocalyptically destroy bits of Norrköping again (see the old Gamma World actual play for more of this). I had supposed I could reuse some of my old prep from that game, but in the end I really only used the vague layout of a location.
For the first session we had made some characters and then Ron said “lets play”, so I was scrabbling around to set up something. Creating characters went okay as the Gamma World mostly random character generation system is a lot quicker and involves only a few decision points compared to DnD 4e, although trying to do it as a group with a single book was a bit cumbersome. When I got home I found in the bottom of my GW7 box that the previous owner had found and printed a load of cards to speed up character creation which would have been useful if I had found them sooner and reduced the amount of me reading stuff out of the book for people to write down. Character creation did seem to produce a range of weird mutant characters that peole were keen to play, including if I recall correctly, a super fast cat person, a creepy cryonic plague bearer and a mass of flaming rats!
After some scrabbling I found a few 1st Level Creatures from the rule book to populate a destroyed, post apocalyptic version of the Work museum which sits on an island in the middle of the river flowing through Norrköping. I picked some robot drones plus their Sleeth owners – Sleeth being bipedal blue lizards with mind powers who are cultured and knowledgeable but Xenophobically hate anybody who isn’t a Sleeth. This illustrates an issue I’ve had in the past with the Gamma World monster write ups which is they all describe some weird mutant creature / person / thing and then just end with “and here’s why it wants to kill you” and I’d really like things with even just a bit more of a motivation (Honorable mention here to the Yexil which also wants to kill you but might just trade for your pants instead. So it can eat them!) In the past my solution to this has tended to be to take a monster out of the D&D monster manuals, rework it a bit, give it something to do and use those as well or instead of the ones in Gamma World, but thinking about it that’s no easier than just fleshing out the Gamma World Monsters themselves, so its really just my mental block here.
Anyway, after a bit of mindless violence the PCs managed via a Skill Challenge to reach an agreement with the Sleeth, who’s Xenophobia had shifted slightly in play to a general fear of germs, contagion and the other, probably justified given the player characters. In return for leaving, especially the plague bearer, the Sleeth would provide directions to the lost oasis which the PCs were searching for. (A sketchy quest that the group / somebody made up to get us moving at the start of playing, although I now know exactly where said oasis is in the apocalyptic wastes and what’s to be found there so maybe another time…). Layering the skill challenge over the combat worked pretty well and gave the players some interesting tactical things to think about, and yell at each other about.
For the second session, which was the one actually scheduled in advance I spent a lot of time prior trying to come up with a suitable situation to throw the player characters into. I was aiming to have a situation which gave the plyers decisions to make, maybe choices about who to ally with against whom and where something was already happening which the players could react to and might react in turn to them. I genrally find trying to do this for a oneshot game frustrating and unsuccessful and I think this was the case here. Anyway, I eventually decided it had to have aliens, lots of aliens, as I had discovered that Norrkoping (real, not apocalypic Norrkoping) has a big archive of alien encounters and alien stuff and a hotline for reporting sightings. So I had Grey Aliens and Nordic Aliens, which I spent ages creating / adapting monsters from the books to represent, but not enough time as I didn’t get around to levelling down the 4th level monster I used for my Nordic aliens and they proved to be frustratingly tough. I also brought back the Sleeth, but with a twist, as I thought some continuity with the first session would be fun and I achieved this by the deeply cheesy decision to have the characters from the first session sail away from the Sleeth’s freshly cleaned island, hit a dimensional portal and find themselves sailing back towards the same island but different – most notably having a UFO hovering above it projecting energy columns, and with some new shipmates, as some new players joined with new characters created for this go around.
The situation I had set up this time included the blonde, blue eyed, tanned aliens who had taken over the Sleeth’s tower, brought in some nice flatpack furniture and were recruiting some sort of cult via offering Coffee and Fika to the local mutant population. Having investigated this the player characters were reluctant to join the cult even though attractive orange robes were inlcuded, which was probably just as well as it turned out they were then incoroprating their cultists into a psycho-physical gestalt creature as some sort of mental energy source. The Sleeth had appraently been early vitims of this and when the gestalt escaped and ran amok its writhing, phasing mass heavily deatured blue lizard limbs and face. The third faction present was a number of Grey Aliens, held captive by the Cult for experimentation and autopsy. They had caused a power surge which unleashed the gestalt creature while trying to escape. There was an ongoing chance during play for the Greys to break free and players venturing upstairs into the area they were held could have interacted with them, but neither of these turned out to happen in our play. The players did battle both the Nordic Aliens and the Gestalt, which the Nordic aliens were trying deperately to re-imprision, not helped by player characetrs getting in the way, and when the players eventually killed the Gestalt creature, having established through rolls how much the Cult Aliens didn’t want that to happen, the psychic feedback took the Nordic alens with it.
Several of the player characters took on their own quests as part of this encounter, including memorably the quest “not to move off this comfy sofa until this is all over” which they succeeded at, and which seemed to be quite engaging. One character, who had been in both sessions even gained enough XP this way to level up!
I, and I think most of the players, enjoyed the GW7 / DND 4e combat and encounter system which seemed to give them a reasonable amount of options and choices to make, although I think Gamma World doesn’t showcase the cross character / out of turn order actions that Ron is always talking about as much pure 4e does. As I noted above the amount of HP bloat from not adjusting some of the creatures used down to 1st / 2nd level was a mistake, as I think it made the encounter drag unnecessarily without adding anything to the encounter, so I would definitely recommend not doing that if you are inspired to try the game.
6 responses to “Gamma World at the Happening”
I was surprised and charmed by my cold + plague character, although it took a few minutes for me to figure out that he made most sense as pure, pure anime, given the high Charisma and cold-dead stare. Rolled results kept me at “background guy” status in the action, but I loved the Sleeth and arrived the Skill Challenge to gross-out and terrify them with my cooties. Apparently that also helped with your observation, which I think is accurate, that it’s hard for a 4E Gamma World GM to come up with anything for a creature to do except attack.
I didn’t play in the second session, but I did lean over the table for a few minutes to see what was happening, and it was all energy blasts and bloodied characters and crazy movement, so, normal, “… when the gestalt escaped and ran amok …” as you do.
It seems like maybe there is a line to be drawn between the presentation of Monsters without much motivation and the discussion about the lost concept of defeat that’s been discussed in relation to the No, not Blackleaf workshop – https://adeptplay.com/2024/11/04/workshop-no-not-blackleaf/
I assume this isn’t unique to 4e / Gamma World but I’m not familar with earlier editions. I am thinking about what I might find more useful in this space, and maybe some structure for filling that gap myself.
I think you’re onto something, Ross, regarding especially Gamma World and 4e in the context of the Blackleaf workshop. Both of those games are high on my list to really put through their paces (I envision doing Gamma World first as a kind of “easier” way to get into 4e, but whether that’s sound or not who knows), and the workshop made me think 4e really needs something other than death as a failure option. And now I see that for Gamma World, as well.
Thankfully, given the rest of their focused design and its belief in player agency, I don’t think some table-side design toward this end would be too hard to do (see “We Crossed Off Death” for a good approach: https://adeptplay.com/2024/10/11/we-crossed-off-death/).
Anyway! I also played in the game discussed above, for any other readers, but only in the second session. It was wacky fun and about as dynamic as this sort of setup can be, given varying levels of familiarity with the rules and the relatively high handling time of said rules. I’ve been in plenty of two-hour combats that were boring as hell, but our group of characters really wanted to *do* things as individuals, and we had the tools to at least try. And the imagery was fantastic!
That matches my experience in play, although I’m not sure why it’s so. Going by text, I’d think the cross-character effects would be similar, but play is what matters. Maybe the procedures of flipping new cards and thereby rebuilding one’s character focuses attention on internal combos or the next individually clever thing to do. Or maybe it’s player-side, in that I (for example) am not attending to something which could be a feature.
I have some theories about this. Partly I think the way characters are created in Gamma World – randomly rolling and combining two Origins, then adding randomly drawn mutations and tech cards, means all these individual bits need to work well by themselves and probably are a bit simpler. So, you don’t tend to see mechanics like Mark, or to really have the specialisation of 4e Roles. Looking through the Origins there are relatively few powers that are reactions or interrupts, although you see more of these in the mutations and tech, so there’s scope to get more out of turn activity going there, especially with decks customised to a character.
Where focus in play could potentially bring more cross character interactions to the fore would be groups strategising around turn order, using delaying and held actions, to benefit from powers applying conditions and forced movement to opponents. There’s probably a learning curve to using this effectively so its likely going to be less emphasied in short term play, as at the Happening, although some players were working hard to get flanking bonuses going in those games for instance.
I just got my physical copy, and as usual, I’m able to process play-instructions much better by reading it rather than on screen. (I often print my PDFs for this reason, but haven’t done so for this game.)
Specifically, I finally understand the card decks. If the group is using the “full” options, then I build my own Mutations deck strictly from the booster cards I may have accumulated. The GM has their own Mutations deck from the core set. When I draw from which deck is a rules procedure.
All of these apply similarly to the Tech decks, with slight differences in when you discard and draw again.
Now I get it! I think doing this, i.e., all the players, might lead to more cross-character powers play, especially regarding the procedures you’ve listed.
Since we in this hypothetical group do not subscribe to the money-grubbing “buy more boosters” tactic, I suggest a table rule. Players build their decks using any common cards from the booster list (not the core base cards), with maximum number of two per card for commons and one per card of any other type (to reflect rarity).
Unable to resist, I rolled the dice to discover a Felinoid Cockroach, rolling the Stealth skill so that’s at +8; proud possessor of an adventurer’s kit, a horse, a truck, a flashlight, a laptop, and duct tape, as well as shears-type scissors (two-handed light weapon). To the point of this discussion, he-she-it (no one wants to look) has a Mutations deck including 2 each of Hyperbalance, Adrenal Rage, Proboscis, Mandibles, and Accelerated Claws; plus 1 each of Multiattack and Hyperactive. [I need to get the PDF of the master list for Omega Mutations to make the other deck from the boosters in there; or maybe, I’d just use the GM deck for all draws since this character is so biological and doesn’t need a dedicated tech deck]