Gamma Gazette: Famines, Heroes, and Firepower

Famine in Far-Go

I picked up Famine in Far-Go, the first expansion for Gamma World, shortly after getting back home from visiting family for the holidays. It includes 20 new origins, rules and cards for organizations known as cryptic alliances, a bunch of new monsters, and an adventure to take a group of mutants from 3rd to 6th level.

The new origins are a bit more far-fetched than those in the core game. For example, the mythic origin allows a character to be a god’s offspring and the reanimated origin makes your character a zombie. These ideas might not fit everyone’s idea of what should be included in Gamma Terra, but its pretty easy to adjust the random tables to fit whatever flavor you want in a game.

The cryptic alliances offer a nice amount of fluff and I could see them being a core element of a longer campaign. The cards contain 5 alliances that are considered player-friendly and can be used to randomly assign allegiances to the player characters. The cards can then be revealed during play to have an effect such as making Omega Tech harder to recharge in exchange for a bonus to various rolls until the end of the session. I don’t think I’d use the random alliance cards in a campaign, but I could see them being a fun twist for a one-off game. In addition to the friendly alliances, the rule book details a handful of villainous organizations as well.

The monsters chapter contains a great selection of new terrors to throw at players. The monsters range from the mutant chickens known as gallus galluses to the massive froghemoth. Fitting with this being the middle adventure, the monsters span from level 2 to level 8 leaving both extremes of the level range empty of any new threats.

The adventure material details the town of Far-Go in East Dah-Koh-Tah with enough detail to use it as the basis of an entire campaign and then also provides an adventure that pits the players’ mutants against vegepygmies, gallus galluses, klickies, and visitors from outer space.  I haven’t run the adventure yet, but overall it seems like it would be a lot of fun and offer more roleplaying opportunities than the rather straightforward dungeon crawl included in the core game box.

Gamma Heroes

Since its release, I’ve seen several mentions of using Gamma World as the basis for a super hero game.  If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I’ve written a super hero focused specialized origin table to use for a super hero themed game.  A player should roll once on each table and pick which of the two origins rolled is the primary and which is the secondary.  The first roll is intended to model the hero’s origin story while the second is the type of super powers that they have.

Firepower

I’ve seen a couple good posts on adding more options for weaponry to Gamma World. Dixon Trimline shared some basic rules for adding weapon properties (reach, high crit, and brutal) to the game. Dixon used accuracy as the trade-off for adding weapon properties which seems like a pretty good system.

Archetype Origins

I’m working on the next two archetype origins, the Protector and the Ravager, and should have them posted here within a week or two.  The Protector is going to be based around a marking mechanic, while the Ravager currently has a trait similar to sneak attack called Dirty Fighter. After those two are posted, I only have three more planned: the Scientist, the Road Warrior, and the Wanderer.  The Road Warrior will likely be tied into some vehicle rules for the game so it could be a while before I have it finished.