Legion of Gold

Legion of Gold, the second expansion for Gamma World, was released earlier this week. It is similar to the previous expansion, Famine in Far-Go, in that it includes new origins and monsters, new cards, and an adventure. The box also introduces new mechanics for character vocations.

Only 8 origins are included with Legion of Gold: antimatter blaster, demon, octopoid, photonic, reanimator, regenerator, saurian, and vampiric. Of those, my favorite is easily the demon; it seems like it would be a very fun skirmisher character with a mix of teleportation and blinding attacks. The only real dislike amongst the themes is the regenerator’s utility power to detach its own animate hand. I’m not sure exactly why, but that power just doesn’t sit well with me.

The rest of the character options chapter consists of new mechanics for vocations. These are a new character option that provide feats at levels 4, 7, and 10. Vocations don’t come with any drawback, so my first impression was somewhat negative. They seemed like something that should have been included all along rather than tacked on in an expansion. I’ve since decided that they are a nice addition to the game allowing for a little extra character customization. There are 14 vocations included in the book covering a pretty good range of concepts. As a bonus the section includes rules for mounted combat in order to support the beast rider vocation.

The monsters chapter fully embraces Legion of Gold’s focus on higher levels with most of the new monsters falling in the level 7 to 12 range. One drawback is that a fair number of the monsters don’t have artwork and just use generic tokens. Since the monsters don’t have descriptive text either, a Game Master is stuck without any guidance at all for giving descriptions of them. The most notable missing art is for the demons with only 1 of 6 varieties illustrated.

The rest of the book is a description of Moon Zone 9 and an adventure that takes the characters there in order to fight against a group of golden cyborgs. The adventure starts in the Barony of Horn in what was once North America and provides both means and motive for the player characters to travel to the moon. While the early portions of the adventure are more open-ended, the final few encounters are a dungeon crawl through a moon base. The adventure overall looks well done and seems like it would be a lot of fun to play through.