First Impressions: Gamma World…

It’s been a bit sparse here at StupidRanger lately, but for very good reason: we’ve been gaming A LOT. Between our Wednesday night DM Revolution games, the periodic Deadlands adventure, and our normal D&D campaign we’ve been doing a lot of roleplaying and I am happy to report that Saturday marks my first excursion into Gamma World.

This recent revival of the Gamma World game has been a very exciting happening here in Colorado, several of my cohorts ran out and bought the box set immediately but we haven’t had the collective time to actually sit down and play it.  I am a bit of a latecomer to the party, having only picked up the box set when it became apparent that the duties of actually running the game were going to fall to me.  I visited Black & Read (one of my friendly local gaming stores), grabbed the box, ripped into it and am excited that tomorrow is the big day to finally get to experience the joy, wonder, and hilarious mutations that makes Gamma World so unique.

First Impressions

The box itself is really great, with a comic styled nuclear waste motif.  The rulebook is very concise, interesting, and lighthearted bringing a lot of the irreverent  flavor of Gamma World through.  At first look, character generation appears to be a BLAST.  In fact, it is one of the things I am looking forward to most tomorrow.  The possibilities, coupled with the urging that all character generation take place by randomly rolling on a chart is a great mechanic to me.  It seems as if it will keep the players from the urge to min/max their characters, and seems to be a very creative process.

The game takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth where several realities have collapsed into one.  This causes terrible, interesting, or hilarious mutations to occur on a regular basis and has caused the rise of both high technology and strange creatures (human-sized insane rabbits, anyone?).  The provided Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards provide the mutagenic variety to the play experience, and have the possibility of expansion by purchasing booster packs with new mutations and tech (this seems to be completely unnecessary, but could be fun).  Basically, it seems like this game was borne directly from the brain of our good buddy Vanir.

Gameplay is based strongly on D&D 4e and presented in a format similar to the D&D Essentials line.  The stat blocks are simplified, the box comes with both maps and tokens to represent both players and bad guys, and the whole thing just looks like a lot of fun.

Tomorrow we are going to descend on our game shop, roll up some mutants, and have at the game.  Check back soon for further impressions and stories from the front!