JMW: Sigh, I'm very glad you asked this question. The idea to make Gamma World wackier was not mine. It came from several designers from the TSR staff. On the other hand, I never considered a 9-foot tall humanoid rabbit that could turn all metal into rubber—wacky. This might be an area where I have blinders. I went along with the wacky material because I had lots of other things to do in those days. In hindsight, I should have used some editorial brakes on some of that material.

I could not agree more.

Ward's interesting interview is here. He's got a great perspective on the early days of roleplaying. It's really worth a look.

And I have to admit, it's nice when the game designer vindicates my decision to put the seriousness back into Gamma World.

In a previous entry I sketched out some ideas for my Gamma World backstory. In particular, I am replacing the Big Mistake with something more meaningful and interesting. At the same time, I want to keep the wild mutations that are in Gamma Terra, because I want to preserve as many player options as I can.

Here's what I came up with. 

The Year of the Dragon

While the World That Was had already been in decline for years, the event that tipped the scale and birthed Gamma Terra occurred in 2022. Scientists and astronomers discovered it first: a rogue asteroid hurtling towards the Earth out of the constellation Draco. Over the months that followed, the asteroid – officially christened Draco 12 but known colloquially as the Dragon – was constantly observed amid growing concern

The latest sad news out of Gamma World 2010 is that "Famine in Far-Go," the second book in the GW trilogy, is delayed for about a month. There were rumors to this effect for a few days, then yesterday Wizards officially changed the release date on the product page, took the "Famine" banner out of the D&D webpage rotation, and replaced it with the old banner for the Dungeon Master's Kit. Feh.

I was already waiting to start actually running GW until I had the entire game -- it seems silly to introduce new origins, Cryptic Alliances, and more when the players are already halfway through the campaign -- but I dislike waiting an additional month.

Onwards and upwards: House Rules, Theme Powers, and You.

First, I have updated the House Rules pdf with some art and minor corrections. It's still

First off, a shout out to everyone who has commented and written PMs to me in the last week. It's really encouraging to read your notes, and to know that I'm not alone in my desire for a more serious Gamma World which -- while still fun and filled with player character options -- nevertheless confronts the themes of a post-apocalypse game with some degree of bravery. I think it is perfectly possible to have a Gamma World game which has yexils, arns, and hoops in it, but which also allows players to make characters they want to play, and which also dares to Say Something Important.

Thank you for coming along on the ride.

The rest of the My Gamma World series is here.

Now, on to the latest. I have updated my House Rule document to include various corrections and modifications which you have

Welcome back to My Gamma World. Check out my blog for the rest of the series, where my particular take on this campaign setting can be found. 

As most of those reading this know, I want to make sure players can make recognizable human characters in Gamma World. If you want to be a crazy mutant Seismic Yeti, bully for you. But maybe you just want to be this guy:

If he had a name, I can't remember it, but holy cow was he scary.

Anyway, My GW needs a rule for characters who aren't mutants. And that means they don't have Alpha Mutations. Since Alpha Mutations are encounter powers, the logical solution seems to be Omega Tech, which also acts like an encounter power. My solution tries to keep it as simple as possible.

Pure Strain Humans

 If you wish to play a Pure Strain Human (or PSH), you

This is the latest in my series on Gamma World. The rest can be found on my blog's main page. Thanks to everyone who is contributing their comments and ideas; the end result is better for it!

Today I have three new Origins for you, origins based on the idea that age matters. This is key to many post-apocalypse settings. Gamma Terra is the only world which young people have ever known, but in the kind of game I want to run, there are some who are old enough to have had lives -- sometimes long ones -- before the Crash. 

Generation Origins

These origins are intended for a Gamma World game which is set closer to the Big Mistake. Films like the Road Warrior cycle are good examples of these games, in which middle-aged and elderly heroes remember the world as it was, even as a new generation

This is my sixth post on Gamma World. I really appreciate all readers and comments! You can find the rest of "My GW" on my blog. 

Today I want to talk about the way PCs recover from injury in GW, which can best be described as "instantaneous." There are no healing surges, but that's not what really bothers me about the game. Healing surges work fine in 4E, but they do create a kind of "3-5 encounters then rest" rhythm which vanishes when you remove them. I'm totally down with that. If my players can decide how long to go between rests, that's more freedom for them, and it makes adventures less predictable. I'm talking about the, "We can't fight the dragon today, we're out of surges" problem.

Far more important, and immersion-breaking to me, is the fact that PCs in Gamma World suffer no

Apparently there is a tradition in Gamma World which goes something like this: Every time you put out a new edition of the game, you have to come up with a new way to destroy it. It's a rule that makes sense, because apocalyptic fears vary every generation and they're driven a lot by technology. In the 70s, it seemed pretty obvious that, if the world was going to get destroyed, it would be because of nuclear war. But by the 1990s, with AIDS ravaging the US, Africa, and everywhere else, we all decided that it would have to be a plague that killed us all off. With the millennium, we feared divine wrath. Now, it's an environmental catastrophe or some nanite bomb. 

Or, honestly, all of the above. In the famous words of Joey Tribbiani, "Put your hands together."

For Gamma World 2010, the developers

I ran Gamma World for Game Day today and, when it was over, we got to talking about how we would run the game if we wanted to treat it a bit more seriously and take out some of the random wackiness. Graydon, whose character was Str 10, Con 9, Dex 9 and Int 8, had good reason to ask, "What would you do for ability scores? Would you have some kind of point buy?"

I'm all for random ability scores if everything else is random. When your origin is random, you draw random Alpha Mutations, and random Omega Tech, then everything will balance out in the long run. Sure, Graydon's Mindbreaker Empath had lousy stats, but he also got the Photon Grenade and some pretty useful mutations along the way.

But if, as I have discussed elsewhere, we are going to let the players choose their origins, build an