Star Wars As Lovecraftian Horror-Fantasy

I mentioned in my review of Edge of the Empire that I know of Star Wars, but am not really a fan of it. Gamma World came out some three years ago, and I have on occassion thought of running a campaign by taking the Star Wars universe, and cramming everything onto one planet.

In this setting alien species would either be mutants or actual aliens from other worlds or dimensions, while planets would be represented either as geological regions or locations; Tatooine would be a desert, Hoth a frozen wasteland, Dagobah a swamp, Naboo an island chain, Coruscant a bit city, etc.

While playing The Old Republic another thought occurred to me while I watched my jedi smack humanoid-sharks with a sci-fi bokken (that apparently everyone has): why bother with the sci-fi elements at all? Also, what if the world was the battleground for numerous aberrant stars vying for control (making the name Star Wars a literal thing)?

The high concept is a…relatively nightmarish world where mortal races get caught up in the conflict between the denizens of various otherwordly entities, giving rise to many bizarre creatures that you would expect to see from Star Wars, like those aforementioned shark-people or gungans.

Just kidding, even Cthulhu has limits.

If you want to use some 4th Edition flavor, the Feywild could be a major player (though it could have also been destroyed).

In this setting the Jedi would be an order designed to instruct people on the proper usage of psionics (aka, the Force), which in most cases can cause insanity to those “gifted” with it that go untrained, the Sith would be those that have been corrupted by elder gods, lightsabers could be psi-blades, spaceships become airships, and various types of warforged take the place of droids.

Hyperspace would be a method of travel by which travelers exploit distortions in space and time due to the Far Realm encroaching on the world. The Death Star could be a kind of gate intended to allow an elder god to enter the world, or a weapon to destroy the prison of one. Maybe the world is a prison, and it is designed to destroy it? Maybe it will only annihilate all life to pave the way for a new race of an elder god’s design?

Red Sails in the Fallout Review

My judgement might be skewed in light of having just come away from Under the Crimson Sun, but I found this heartwarming tale of two anthropomorphic female animals literally playing grab-ass across the desert–along with a swarm of insects, racist human, and carnivorous plant–to be pretty a entertaining read that plays out very much like an adventure arc might.

The characters were enjoyable (especially Shaani), the pop culture references were not too tiresome (except perhaps for Wigwig’s lolcat speak, but your mileage might vary), and the pacing flowed well up until the end, after which it felt kind of rushed; you never found out what happened to Watering Hole, but presumably they made out alright, how the Plodder’s dealt with having their wombats exploded, and for better or worse Xoota and Shaani never got past the, “playful-spanking” phase.

I found it to be a good deal better than Sooner Dead, so if you liked that I would give this a read, too. 

Sooner Dead Review

Another very late review, this one for Sooner Dead, Gamma World’s novel debut. In short, it was pretty good, though I did find the serious tone out of place when compared to the general feel and play style of the game. This isn’t a bad thing mind you, just unexpected. I don’t want to spoil the book if I can help it, so don’t expect a detail synopsis.

The story revolves around two scouts, Hella and Stampede, as they guide a caravan of scientists and heavily armed and armored soldiers across Oklahoma as they search for something (what that is, both you and the characters aren’t privy to until much later). Hella is a human whose body contains nano-machines, allowing her to shape her hands into guns, and later perform other feats (which I won’t spoil). Stampede on the other hand is a bisonoid seismic (ie, can create earthquakes by stomping on the ground).

Overall I enjoyed the pacing, with action scenes, exploration, and character interaction mixed together quite well to give you a solid impression of what the world of Gamma Terra can be like. I say can be, because while there are certainly mutant “people”, there’s a lack of fluctuating mutations and high-tech weaponry. Likewise, aside from the spider-coyote mutant things at the start, there really aren’t any mutant monsters, so don’t expect yexils, centisteeds, or land sharks.

In terms of character depth, the author did a good job on both characters. I like that Hella isn’t a stone-cold survivalist or incapably weak, but instead treads the middle ground. Yeah, she grew up in an apocalyptic world, but she’s still a person with emotions, strengths, and weaknesses. Stampede isn’t as fleshed out, but still a likable father figure archetype. On a similar note, Hella benefits the most from character growth, which is understandable since she’s basically the main character, but I would liked to have seen more.

Unfortunately, there are some grammar and spelling errors, along with some cluttered sentences that could have benefited greatly from some cleanup and mixing up the adjectives now and then, but not nearly as bad as Seal of Karga Kul. Despite these shortcomings, it was still a pretty good read, and I’d recommend it to Gamma World fans with a 7 out of 10.

Legion of Gold Review

The third and perhaps final Gamma World expansion, Legion of Gold offers what every Gamma World product has so far: new origins, monsters (with token sheets), some maps, a card booster pack, and an adventure at the end. Between all three books, you could easily get a party from 1st to 10th level just by running out of the book. Since the only really new thing is the content out of the book, that’s all I’ll be talking about, as the maps and tokens are what you’d expect.

Chapter 1: New Character Options
Unlike Gamma World and Famine at Far-Go, there’s only eight new origins. Since it brings up the total count to forty-eight, I guess I can’t complain too much. There’s a d12 table in there if you want to try and build a character using every potential option, along with others for restricting diversity (or just sticking to Legion of Gold). New origins include antimatter, demon, octopoid, and more. My favorite is the reanimator, which is Wisdom (psi), gets a Conspiracy and Fortitude bonus, and resist 10 necrotic. The critical deals bonus damage, and you get to prone any one enemy next to a summoned minion (if you have one out at the time). As an added bonus, here’s the power list:

• Graveyard Summons (novice): You summon an animated corpse that lasts for a turn, and can make its own basic attack, or use weapons that you give it/it picks up. At one hit point it’s pretty frail, and since you need a Standard action to summon it, it looks like you can’t actually attack until your next turn, so it might get taken out before then. If nothing else, at least it provides a distraction.
• Meat Shield (utility): An immediate interrupt that gives you a hefty defense bonus against an attack.
• Forest of Hands (expert): An area burst that deals a decent amount of damage, with a Miss effect. Oh, if an enemy moves it also takes automatic damage as an Effect.

Vocations are Gamma World‘s answer to feats. The way it works is that at level 4 you can pick a vocation, gaining the first feat associated with it. There are thirteen vocations to choose from, such as Animal Hunter, Diplomat, and Spice Trader. There’s no cost for doing this, so there’s no reason not to pick one. One interesting vocation is Beast Rider. It deals with mounted combat, and there’s an entire page devoted to explaining how it works on the following page.

Chapter 2: Monsters
Unlike the first two Gamma World products, most of the stuff in this book is level seven and up. Yeah, there are a few level 4-6 goodies (such as a pair of new grens), but the majority consist of super-powered robots, dinosaurs, demons, undead, and other bizarre shit like star slime. I’m not too surprised, since the lower levels had plenty of coverage in the first two products. Also, it’s very easy to level stuff up and down to where you need it. I particularly like the saurians, which are simply regenerating, spear-wielding dinosaurs. The descriptive text mentions that fusion rifles or nukes wouldn’t be much more of a stretch, which is awesome.

Chapter 3: Moon Zone 9
The moon is apparently somewhat terraformed, giving it a thin atmosphere that doesn’t really make it habitable at all (you can last like, ten rounds total). Aside from the lack of an atmosphere, there’s other features danger features such as nanofiber streams (ongoing acid damage, as well as acid vulnerability) and superconductor sands (automatic electricity damage when you flux). If you’ve got a suit and the sense to avoid all this crazy shit? Space eels.

The chapter also provides you with a map of a small portion of the moon that features numerous sites of interest, including a ruined station where Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, mysterious, radioactive wreckage, and the domed city of Tranquility. Tranquility gets a few pages of exposition, detailing over twenty locations along with some personalities and quest ideas. Oddly, the pair of NPCs with stat blocks are both above level 10, though given the level range of lunar monsters I guess it’s not too surprising.

The rules for Skill Challenges have been reprinted again, with examples like replacing a breather tank on your suit, extricating a stuck vehicle, and setting up a habitat to bunk in. There’s also 20 new items to be found on the moon, including the obvious moon suit, inflatable dome, and the coveted space pen. Characters on the moon automatically get a space suit and 2 -5 items off the Moon Zone 9 gear table, presumably by off-camera trade ins or other “acquisitions”. These also get brief descriptions on the following page, explaining that a water re-former changes 50 pounds of rock into a pint of water in an 8-hour span. Good to know.

Chapter 4: Legion of Gold
This is the actual adventure, and similar to Famine at Far-go, it takes up a considerable chunk of the book (about half). Mysterious raiders in golden armor are attacking the towns in the Horn barony, and its up to the heroes to put a stop to them. The adventure is divided into four parts, which involves tracking them down, investigate a machine-staffed facility, get teleported to the moon, and destroy a malfunctioning AI. While not quite a cool as beating up Dracula in his moon-castle and surfing his robotic double back to Earth, it’s still pretty epic.

Conclusion
If you’re up for sending your group to the moon in order to stop a mad scientist from zapping Gamma Terra with a laser cannon, deal with robotic aliens that cobble bodies out of humanoid corpses, or just make a quick buck whaling, this is a great buy. If moon-walking isn’t your style, it’s still alright for the new origins and monsters.

Interactive Gamma World Character Sheet

Though Gamma World lacks its own Character Builder, you can make a character online via this interactive character sheet–with no subscription required. You can randomly generate everything about the character that you’d expect, though there are drop-down menus if you want to choose your options manually. The only glitch I noticed was that the first time messing with it, the origin fields went blank, though they still showed up in the Traits section.

Famine in Far-Go Review

I’ve never played Gamma World before Wizards got their hands on it, an experience that I enjoyed but unable to indulge in nearly as frequently as I do Dungeons & Dragons. I’d heard from some source or other that Famine in Far-Go is also an adventure from a much older Gamma World edition, and chickens are implemented in some capacity. The cover certainly tries to make them look menacing, though even bulging with muscles and dual-wielding bloody cleavers isn’t going to cut it. The expansion box is half as thick, containing a rulebook that roughly the same size as the Gamma World book, a small collection of cryptic allegiance cards, three sheets of monster tokens, and two foldout maps likely used in the adventure.

Chapter 1 adds twenty new origins, as well as instructions on how to use origins from Gamma World if you want to mix and match them. I like the exploding origin. Initially, you can damage very creature within 2 squares of you as an at-will, and while you can eventually explode once per encounter as an immediate reaction, the best one is the expert power: you literally explode, doing a burst 4 attack that removes you from play until your next turn, after which you reform yourself. Other origins let you control magnetic fields, be Stretch Armstrong, play a monkey, and more. There’s also additional tables for ancient junk and starting gear (again, with instructions to determine which table to use if you want to include the ones from Gamma World).

Chapter 2 details five cryptic alliances that have more or less (loosely) good intentions, at least compared to the rest. Some want to make the world a better place through psychic coercion, while others want to use technology to destroy other technology. These are intended for players to pick from in order to add additional agendas to their characters, which might cause them to butt heads with other characters depending on if and how their agendas conflict. Yes, these come on cards. No, they aren’t randomized. You get all five player-intended allegiances, with two cards each (doubles). Like D&D backgrounds they aren’t mandatory, but provide a small benefit that might inconvenience the rest of the party (especially the one that imposes a penalty to Omega charge checks in order to gain a bonus that lasts for the rest of the game session).

Additionally, there are seven major and twelve minor alliances intended for game masters to give some background flavor to villains. These range from packs of goth kids to heavy-metal biker gangs to shotgun-toting nuns.

Chapter 3 adds over 50 new monsters (if you count variants to the theme), expanding the menagerie to include bizarre creatures like life-draining bipedal dogs, horse-shaped ambulatory cacti, and rage zombies (along with other kinds, too). The level range is alright, eschewing levels 1, 9, and 10, and they included a level 8 elite space dragon as an almost end game threat, unfortunately called a poong. One of my favorites is the hopper (aka, jackalope), which is a very easily scared, Large-sized critter that camouflages itself so long as it doesn’t move too far.

For those curious about the froghemoth, its a level 8 elite soldier with a stat block that eats up the entire page, capable of making four tentacle attacks per round, which has an auto-damaging “mark” kicker effect, and can make a tentacle attack as a free action anytime someone hits it in melee. Its bite does a hefty amount of damage, and immobilizes you. The worse part is that if it bites you, it can try to swallow you as a minor action, meaning that you take automatic damage and are stunned until you make a save.

For those of you that wanted more story content in Gamma World (myself included), chapter 4 is a good place to get you started. Its kind of a lite-Nentir Vale treatment that provides you with twelves pages of history and information on a region of east Dah-Koh-Tah. Some of it is intended for the adventure, but a good deal can be used as a foundation for further adventures and encounter ideas. About half the pages are devoted to the city of Far-Go, including a stat block for the city, a map, and key NPCs and locations.

Crashed aliens. Fungus people. Mutant chickens. The adventure in chapter 5 eats up about a third of the book, and with good reason: the characters have a lot on their plate to deal with. See, aliens have crashed on Gamma Terra and are trying to fix their ship, but have unknowingly released russet mold into the area, which has caused local flora to grow to a very large size. The farmers use it to fertilize their crops, not knowing that the mutated plants become sentient and attack. This doesn’t stop a band of mutant chickens from a factory south-west of the town to steal the crops and continue using the fungus to speed up plant growth, creating more violent fungus people. Finally, those aliens? The ones that just want to go home? They keep suffering setbacks due to mutating cockroaches stealing parts from their ship.

This adventure looks a lot better than Steading of the Iron King. Its got a sandbox feel to it, allowing characters some flexibility as to where they go (and what they’ll face). There’s some depth supplied for NPCs and the town, instead of just having you save a nondescript town from random, missile-launching robots. It also (re)introduces skill challenge rules on the off chance that you only play Gamma World and not D&D.

If you’re a fan of Gamma World, this is a must-have. If you’re on the fence, I’d flip through it, as the added content will probably sway your vote. If you hate Gamma World, then don’t bother: its just more wacky wasteland hijinks.

Previews for December and Beyond

The previews open up with a reskin of the dehydrated man that you might have gotten from Gamma World Game Day–which I did not. It does basically the same thing, but gives bonuses to other skills.

Next month there’s Caverns of Icewind Dale, a winter-themed Dungeon Tile set. I’ve already got a lot of tiles, but I like the boxes that they’re coming in: easier to sort through them all for something I need.

Also next month, Dragon will feature a Channel Divinity article for Vecna. I’m glad to see that they are doing evil deities, as I’d like some more support with my tiefling paladin of Asmodeus. The feat Command Undead is previewed, which grants you a +1 to all knowledge skill checks and replaces turn undead with command undead. The feat power targets all undead in a Close burst 2 and targets Will. On a hit, you slide the targets, immobilize them, and cause them to deal necrotic damage to enemies adjacent to them. On a miss it instead dazes the undead. So, something either way.

Both the new Dungeon Master’s Screen and Legion of Gold debut in February. Here’s a shot of the screen:

Legion of Gold will–of course–add new origins, including demon, vampiric, and octopoid. Shit yes. During my dark times of playing Rifts, I really dug Splynn Dimensional Market, which had an octoman race that looked badass. If nothing else, there ya go for those wondering how to make the octopus-chick on the Gamma World box. There’s also options for vocations, such as soldier of fortune, mad scientist, and bounty hunter.

For monsters, we’re going to get more cyborgs, haunts, robots, saurians, and the lornak (a giant land squid). Never played any of the older Gamma World editions, so I don’t know if they are throwbacks from an older age.

As for the adventure…well, you start on Gamma Terra, but at some point its bang, zoom, right to the moon. It’s both habited and hospitable, assuming you don’t count all the monsters that dwell within crystalline ruins, wrecked habitation domes, and “forests of weird plants”. Characters start at levels 6 or 7, and should end up at 9 or 10, so combined with previous adventures it would be a simple task of getting from 1 to 10.

The preview for Heroes of Shadow, which comes out in March, gets quite a bit of coverage. The bit on Shadow Magic assures us that, despite all the villainous cliches that typically wield it, its not evil, just easier to get ahold of. Of course, they then preview some flavor text for the new paladin build: the blackguard.

In 3rd Edition, blackguards were a prestige class designed to emulate a fallen paladin. Sith Blackguards are no different, described as shadow warriors that focus divine power through a dark vice or dark emotion, cultivating dominance and fury to fuel their might. “Heroic” blackguards, on the other hand, stem from paladins who tried to exemplify a virtue, but were unable to control their anger (or some other emotion).

Necromancy and nethermancy will also be presented as two new magic schools. Necromancy seems to be more about animating physical undead, while nethermancy focuses more on spirits and ghosts. The spell summon shadow servant is featured, allowing you to conjure up a shadow skeleton (Necromancy) or shadow beast (Nethermancy). 

Ghouls For Gamma World

I don’t care for Fallout: New Vegas (or Fallout 3 for that matter). Liz does, however, so I end up getting to experience wandering through radioactive wastelands running errands for strangers by proxy. Via watching and/or listening I realized that there’s a lot of good concepts and monsters that could work very well for Gamma World, so I decided to stat up a few iconic monsters from the game last night.

Starting with ghouls.

I couldn’t get Adventure Tools to change natural to terrestrial, but it doesn’t really matter. I couldn’t make heads or tails if ghouls were humans that got super-radiated, or died from radiation and reanimated, though a Fallout wiki seems to indicate the latter.

Gamma World: The Alleged "Arms Race"

There’s a comment–well, three of them actually–on my Gamma World review that I feel needs addressing. Like minis in D&D, I knew (and so did many others) that people were going to cry foul on the whole card mechanic. I know in D&D that they heavily assume that you’re using minis, and while frankly any representative marker will suffice I suppose it kind of sucks that they didn’t supply you with anything when you bought the game. Sure, you could by boosters of minis, get them off eBay or wherever, but that was more money and time spent. Recently, they released a few Essentials products that had token sheets, and though they aren’t nearly as nice they’re certainly a leg up from using dice, bottle caps, teeth, etc.

So…why the fuss over Gamma World and the cards?

Gamma World already comes with a hefty deck of cards and a free booster pack, meaning that no, you don’t need to shell out any more money. The game is complete as packaged, just like D&D is. If you want to spend more money you can add more flair to it, but again it’s not required. I had the disposable income to buy five booster packs, and going over the cards I found a few that were interesting not because of some sort of relative power level, but because of what they did. At any rate, my entire group used the same deck and had a lot fun with it. Even the mention of building their own seven-card deck didn’t generate much interest for them, but to each their own.

So let’s take a look at the first comment. It mentions a lack of player equality and a combination of empowering players with the most disposable income and an alleged “card arms race”.

I really don’t see how there’s any lack of player equality. Sure, some players might be turned off by the random character generation method, but Gamma World allows you to, by the rules, pick one or both your origins. Even if you roll, understand that the origins aren’t more powerful than the others. There’s no “rare” origin that will allow one player to outclass everyone else, and if there was who the fuck cares since you could just pick it anyway. The only thing that sucks in my mind is rolling the rest of your stats, but since the stats you really need run between 16 and 20, I don’t care too much because your character is always effective.

As for the “arms race”…what? There are several problems with this claim. The first is this isn’t a competitive game. Player’s aren’t vying for dominance against each other, they’re working together. Another thing is that you’d have to determine what the best cards you start with are and compare them with what the “best” ones that you can get from booster packs. If the best cards can only be gotten from boosters, then you would have something of an argument depending on how much better they are. Finally, players can share cards, you know. That’s what happened in my group; I bought the cards, everyone wins.

The second comment asks why the cards instead of random tables. That’s something I mentioned already, but I’ll explain again. When you are constantly doling out random effects and material rewards, it would be a massive pain in the ass to have to roll on a table for each character and have them write it down themselves. Imagine how long it would take doing this for just one player. Now imagine taking the time to do that for 4-6 players after every battle, day, or natural one that’s rolled. Imagine grinding the game to a halt for a nat 1 to tell the player what’s happened to them.

Fuck that.

Gamma World Report

I ran a short session of Gamma World for the first time last night with Josh and Liz. Josh rolled a speedster/seismic that he called Rockslide, while Liz played a felinoid/hypercog that she simply named Jingle. Following some advice from the book, I placed the adventure in my local area seen through the shattered lens of apocalypse-vision. The skeleton adventure I wrote up had them going to a shanty town built atop the nearby Beaverton Transit Center before hitting up the ruins of Fred Meyer’s looking for power cells to help repair a MAX train so that they could quickly (and relatively safely) get to downtown Portland.

Since Gamma World is purportedly much deadlier than Dungeons & Dragons, I decided to pit the pair against a quartet of porkers perched on an old bridge, which a rampart of cars for added defense. Basically, twice as many monsters as I really should have, with the terrain advantage. Oh, and I gave one of the porkers a shotgun.

Things didn’t go well.

For me.

I learned something from this first encounter, the least of which is that Gamma World characters are really fucking bad ass. As a “future cat”, Liz’s character has an initiative bonus of +13, so she basically always goes first. She’s also insanely fast, and on the first round easily made it up to the bridge and hid behind a car, making her already high Armor Class even higher. Josh, though a bit more cumbersome, also closed most of the distance and also hid. On their turn, the porkers waddled over to the mess of cards and readied actions to hit them with chains, since it was the best I could do.

Well, Jingles leapt over the cars, dodging a chain, and tore the shit out of one porker, bloodying it with one attack. Rockslide just charged the whole mob, shrugging off the blows, and with his stomp attack spattered the wounded one and knocked the others down (except for Mr. Shotgun). I took a gamble with the shotgun, hitting Jingle and another porker with the blast, and had the last porker pathetically–and vainly–flail on Rockslide. Things didn’t last much longer, even with minor action belching and bellybucking, it was pigs to the slaughter. It lasted all of three rounds, and that’s only because they took a bit running up there.

The safely made it to Beaver Town and picked up a quest from Mayor Theo (a beaver mutant) to clean out some more porkers camping out by an Ancient hydroponics facility attached to a ruined store (ie, Fred Meyers), as the townsfolk often made forays there to scavenge food. They had another shindig in the parking lot, but even robot minions didn’t amount to much as Jingle tore both them and the porker controlling them apart with her claws, while Rockslide stabbed the rest the rest with a combination of quills and a makeshift sword. Again, this was a quick fight, 2-3 rounds tops, and they rarely if ever used mutations (mostly because I think they kept forgetting about them).

Things got challenging when they found the hydroponics lab, underneath a massive tree. The place was flooded, with plant life growing rampantly throughout the complex. Inside they fought ambulatory fungi, spine-flinging cacti, and kai lins. Kai lins were a hassle up until Josh used a mutant power that rendered him invulnerable to physical damage, meaning that all I could do was hope he tried to run away from them and trigger their electricity attack. The most dangerous thing they encountered were the horl choos, since they had a nasty acidic spike they could fling that dealt ongoing 10 acid damage. That encounter was frantic because Rockslide actually crumbled under the onslaught of damage, but stabilized before dying.

By this point they’d gathered a healthy inventory of Omega tech, including fusion rifles, photonic spears, and jet packs, allowing them to weed out the rest of the flora without breaking a sweat. Horl choo? BLAM! 4d8 plus etcetera damage, thank you very much. Uh oh, Jingle is almost dead? Overcharge whatever-the-fuck power she had at the time, vanish for a round, and return fully healed. Anyway, the adventure ended once they battled their way to the basement and exterminated a few obbs (in like, two rounds), picked up some power cells from the nuclear-powered machinery–with some mutated fruit that was probably edible–and went back to Beaver Town.

A lot of the time I was able to bring them close to death, especially since most of the mosnters ganged up on Rockslide. His damage resistance helped a lot, while Jingle’s double-claw made short work of everyone. Liz felt like the striker, while Josh was clearly pulling the defender. Alpha mutations helped in some cases, but fucked them over in others. When Josh tried to overcharge his quills, he botched it and took ongoing damage himself. One of Liz’s mutations would have allowed her to blind a target for a longer duraiton, but light herself on fire if she messed up the overcharge, so she opted for the safe route.

We didn’t have as much fun as we could have, considering that I didn’t have a lot of time to sufficiently plan an adventure, there were only two players, and it was a new genre for all of us. The game’s got a lot of promise, and I think that as we play more, I’ll get a better handle on planning adventures suited for post-apocalyptic wasteland-romps. For now, it’s back to the drawing board so I can prepare for a lengthy train tunnel throwdown. I’m thinking giant mutant cockroaches, or perhaps graboids?