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!

It’s our second birthday!  This year has seen a lot of changes here at StupidRanger.com… SR and I moved out to Colorado, we got ourselves some wicked awesome PHB2 pre-release action, met ourselves the Geek’s Dream Girl, and had the good fortune to hang with a ton of great RPG Bloggers via our Twitter accounts.  Vanir got himself an artist for the revival of the Evensbrook cartoon, coming When It’s Ready ™.

The past year has been good for our friends.  DungeonMastering won an ENnie, there’s no reason Critical Hits shouldn’t this year.  Our good pals over at Gnome Stew just keep doing that magic stuff that they do.  There are countless other friends that have joined us in the RPG Blogosphere since we last presented the birthday cake, hopefully the coming year will see scores more.

So what’s in store for us as Year 3 dawns?  Honestly, I have no clue.  That’s the fun part.

Here’s to another year gone and a new one to come!  Thanks to all of our readers, fans, and friends that have helped us make it to the esteemed two year mark!

One of my fellow campers joked that we were probably one of the only camping groups to come to this site with a battle mat and D&D books in tow.  We all had a laugh and lamented that it was too windy and dark to play properly so we left our campaigning aside, but it got me wondering about all of the interesting places that our readers come from.

So I ask you this, gentle reader: What’s the most exotic locale that you’ve played a roleplaying game in?  Did the environment get in the way?  Did bears eat your dice?  Birds swoop in and snatch your mini off of the battle board?  Tell us about it!

Thanks to everybody who comes to read us every day. Thanks to all of you who linked to us and helped us start to grow. Extra special thanks to every website owner that got an email from us and still read it even though they thought it was spam. You know who you are.

I wholeheartedly encourage everybody to click on those links on the right side of our front page. None of us would be here without a good community, and I think there’s a lot of good D&D sites run by some really great people. Please go visit them, and keep a good thing going.

There’s been a few outstanding individuals (with outstanding websites) without whom we would almost certainly not have gotten this far this fast:

• Martin from Treasure Tables
• Yax from DungeonMastering
• Jonathan Drain from Jonathan Drain’s d20 Source
• Phil from Musings of the Chatty DM

Thanks, guys. We really appreciate the help and support you’ve given us over the last month.

Once again, to everyone, thanks for coming. We’re enjoying the hell out of this website, and I hope all of you are as well.