Thor's Day Trope - Post Apocalyptic

After the End

The End Of The World

Of course, with out development of the Gamma Crawl Classics idea, I'll be talking about post-apocalyptic tropes.

Post-Apoc has had lots of great games, Gamma World being the most well-known, followed by Deadlands Hell on Earth, and the amazing yet less well known Atomic Highway. Car Wars is post-apocalyptic as well, based upon Mad Max of course. WarLands is a great miniature game set in a Post-Apocalyptic world. My personal favorite is Rifts for setting.

Post Apoc is my favorite type of game, it not only has wide open variety of encounters from mutations, but it can be an effort just to find enough to eat, and keep yourself well-armed. Exploration of high-tech sites is always fun as well. Rifts takes it a step further and brings supernatural elements into the game, from magic to demons, to the rise of Atlantis. Rifts has EVERYTHING, except a system which is fun to run. (Ran it once, when I figured out that I had to track 700 MDC on a Robotech mecha that I used to bring the characters into the game, I realized I didn't like that so much...Also 1 MDC destroying a 10,000 SDC building...)

I'm a huge fan of the Fallout line of video games, and now I'm playing Borderlands (first one).

Anyway, back to writing....Enjoy checking out the tropes!! Lots of fun stuff on those links.

Gamma Crawl Classics on G+

Over on G+ we've been talking about creating a DCCRPG based Gamma Crawl....Now that would be pretty fun. Gamma World was ALWAYS one of my favorite games. I remember when I was in A-School for the Navy, that a buddy and I would sit there and roll up characters for arena combat using the 5th? edition rules. The book version.

I've actually been thinking of resurrecting my Epicmonsters.blogspot site and creating weekly DCCRPG monsters instead of Pathfinder monsters. While the PF monsters were fun, the amount of work that went into those stat blocks was STUPID. It's the reason I stopped that site, it just became too much work to continue after I got a job again. But creating DCC monsters, man that's pretty easy.

Now new classes, that's a bit harder to do.

So for a Gamma Crawl Classic game there wouldn't be so many races

Pure Strain
Altered Human
Mutant Animal
Mutant Plant

Anyway, there's now a GCC G+ community. Want to Help out?

Come on By!

Retro Review - Gamma World 1992 (4th edition)

Gamma World (TSR 1992)

To me this is one of the best versions of Gamma World, before the OGL, before the edition wars. 4th edition of Gamma World, not to be confused with D&D4E - Gamma World (which is seventh edition). Produced by TSR in 1992, in a single 192 page perfect bound book. Here's the Wiki Link. Now, I never got any of the adventures printed for earlier versions, Famine in Far-go being my favorite, so I missed the 4th edition ones. GW4e was unfortunately discontinued in 1994, and had no Dragon Magazine Support really (1 article).

In this version you could be a Pure Strain Human, Mutant Human, Mutant Animal (many base varieties), or even a Mutant Plant! This version had basic classes (Examiner, Scout, Esper and Enforcer); each class has access to class specific skills, and gave different advances. Mutations were still random, divided between physical, mental and plant mutations, d6 physical, d6-5 mental powers though on a 6 you'd have 5 mental/0 physical. The mutant animals had base PS/DX/CN scores that had 2d4 rolled to add to them. The mutations are the best thing about the game, with so many mutations, and the defects cut back and limited, you could roll many many variations of characters.

This was produced during the era of 2nd edition AD&D and thus gets rid of THAC0, and replaces it with a basic THAC [To Hit Armor Class] and MHAC [Mentally Hit Armor Class], the equivalent to BAB from 3.x edition. Stats are PS (physical strength), DX (dexterity), CN (constitution), MS (Mental Strength), IN (Intelligence), CH (Charisma) and Finally SN (Senses). So the attributes are quite close to the AD&D attributes in effect, PS= Strength, MS=Wisdom. Senses is new, but really straight forward. The game uses hit points but the saves are all based on health or mental defense. A Simple system, which in my opinion was superior to AD&D 2e (which I quit because my house rules were massive.)

Every creature in the monster section is illustrated and has a half page write-up. The experience system for the creatures is pretty well covered to award XP based upon the  power level of the creatures, better than AD&D2E even, due to the page 141 table covering everything from 30 AC to having a usable artifact.

This is the last of the revisions to the original Gamma World, (I owned 2e and 3e as well). After this came Alternity based rules, then d20 rules, and finally D&D4E ruleset...which is by far the worst of the lot, with the constantly changing Alpha mutations, dumbed down weapon system, and lack of the original character options; it was just too generic and random...I'll Grognard this one thanks.

All in all this is one of my favorite old school games, where even character creation is a blast! (On Par with BL23C).  We've been making characters for fun over the weekend, Ian made a Mutant Wolf that happens to have a poor Dual brain, which he thinks is hilarious. Sean rolled a Mutant Fungus, which has 3 legs, heh...kinda funny.

Old School Gamma World

OoOoO  I was reading through some new (to me) RPG Blogs and came across http://kellri.blogspot.com/

Unfortunately, Kellri appears to be gone on the blog (last post in 2009). But he left some fun stuff on the blog for some Old School Gamma World, and other games (though some of the links have died...) Here's a list of his downloads, though I'm not going to hotlink his links, visit his site.  So if you see soemthing cool, grab it before it's gone.

CDD#1 Statblock Reference.pdf

CDD#2 - Spells Reference.pdf

CDD#3 - Dungeon Geomorphs.pdf

CDD#4 - Encounters Reference.pdf

Old School Gamer's Puzzles.pdf

Old School Reading List 2008.pdf

GW_Scavenger's Field Guide.pdf

GW Wild in the Streets.pdf

GW Mutant Manual II.pdf

GW Underwater Gear

GW 100 Events

GW Cryptic Alliance Form

GW_Settlement Record Sheet

GW Random Settlement Generation

GW Equipment Spreadsheet

Weird Science.pdf

Scifi City Blocks.pdf

Fasa Trek Timeline v1.pdf

Fasa Trek Worlds.pdf

Fasa Trek WhosWho.pdf

WFRP Cathay.pdf