Gamma World, to my mind, is a great game that got taken down by its own sense of history. Orginally written by TSR waaaaay back in the 1970’s, Gamma World was meant to directly evoke a particular genre of bad 1970’s fiction – specifically, the postnuclear descendents who had realized the folly of their ways and who were slowly rebuilding their societies in accordance with the Protocols of Filthy Hippie. Think of The Omega Man, the Planet of the Apes series, Zardoz, Silent Running, and innumerable novels that attempted to inform us just how bad things would be after a nuclear war, some good (Canticle for Leibowitz), some bad (don’t get me started).

A lot of them also derived from a particular short story about a tribal youth whom we realize is living in the postnuclear suburbs of Washington, D.C, trying to make sense of the strange, ruined temples in which he lives. It’s difficult to summarize them without going into a two-page rant – not that it hasn’t stopped me before – but basically, they reflected the SF of the time very closely.

Now, the revision of Gamma World has been split down the middle. The initial Player’s Guide felt very, very much like the classic CRPG Fallout – even the weapons list seemed like a direct copy of the weapons that you could lay hands on in the computer game. It felt simple, and straightforward; the kind of game where you could just create a simple world and run your players through it, like the Road Warrior, or, again, Fallout. Sure, you had some weird shit, but it was background noise and flavor, not really the central focus of the game.

The GM’s guide had some of the best GM advice ever committed to the pages of a supplement, but began to show more and more influence from the original game. As I’m to understand it, the original game had a lot of this – weird mutants, secret societies, mutant powers, and ultra-strange monsters. One of the suggested adventures has a number of political factions fighting, but instead of normal humans, there’s mutant dogs, a nanomachine that can cure any wound, and all manner of strange shit that makes the game less about humanity and more about “Holy shit, that’s weird.” There was also the tendency to introduce more tropes from 1970’s fiction, like a computer that runs a perfect society, or humans slowly descending into a ruined state after a nuclear war. I will, I think, go into this later, if I ever get around to reviewing the original core books, but that’s a basic precis for the moment.

Remember how I said that the sample adventure in the GM’s guide would make you say “Holy shit, that’s weird?” Mutants and Machines will make you wonder if you’re on Candid Camera. It is that weird. These are creatures deliberately created to be as weird as they can get.

For example: You’ve got a bear that’s been bio-engineered to spit fire-retardant foam.

Or a fish that breeds extraordinarily fast, and whose metabolism runs so hot that it explodes if you take it out of water.

Or sadistic, tool-using penguins – chenguins – who spend all of their time planning vengeance on humans.

Or fish that can swim through flesh as easily as they can through water, thanks to nanotechnology. (Read: magic.)

And it was after I read about the flame-retardant-spitting bear that I just gave up. I mean, there’s no way that I can critique something like that. There may be a pressing need in somebody’s campaign for a bear that can spit fire retardant, and you know, there’s no better resource for that kind of thing than this. Just none.

I think that something snapped inside of my head.

I guess one thing that sort of bothers me about this is how sudden the changeover was. For example, there’s a little bit of weirdness in the original two books, but it’s kept under control. This is just batshit lunacy, the kind that was really fun back in the original Gamma World, but which seems utterly out of place when you look at the two corebooks for the d20 version.

Mutants and Machines also falls into the same trap that D&D used to – that the steady production of new monsters, weapons, spells, treasures, magic items, blah blah blah is what makes a book useful to the GM. There’s nothing so annhilatory, to my mind, as opening up a book and realizing that TSR just paid eight guys to come up with new monsters, each weirder and more marginal than the last. (“Uh…okay…it’s a slime that has a sonic attack…and it lives in the desert. And it interacts with the ecology like a squirrel!”) (Thank you, Justin Achilli.)

I can’t sleep at night for envisioning them squatting in a room somewhere, exuding reams of papers from their mouths, tiny mandibles working back and forth, making this horrible chewing noise that’s only annoying at first but gets worse and worse the more you hear it as they exude monster after monster, spell after spell…

And this is that book – except written in the era of Nobilis and Godlike and Unknown Armies and Vampire. It’s just a bunch of weird ideas slapped together at random, a tragic throwback to the days when TSR would shit this stuff out. Yikes.

I mean, if you need a huge snake man with arms who goes into a killing frenzy whenever it sees a bird, or a gigantic floating eyeball that fires radioactive beams, then hey, here’s your book. You’re welcome.

The worst part is that there’s some decent ideas in here, if they could have been developed in a more sedate fashion. I like the teakettlers, who are living chemical factories, and the doc shadow template features nanotechnology which turns you into a shadowy protector of whatever city you’re in. (Kind of like deputizing somebody, except with nanotech – and it’s a cool idea to imagine a superhero’s power object that makes him be a superhero, instead of him choosing to be one.) However, the teakettlers wind up saddled with the need to eat metal in order to keep themselves going, and the doc shadow template has the “smite evildoer” ability included in it, both of which kinda made my love go away.

The robots aren’t quite as bad. One of my favorite sequences in Grendel: War Child involves Grendel Prime and his charge bypassing through the ruins of New York. While the entire sequence has some amazing images – like the scarified, tattooed soldiers who guard the entrance, who demand a display of pain just to get in – one sequence that stood out is where Prime is fired upon by a war robot, who is in turn torched by a second war robot. The entire sequence is amazingly grim, but the idea of small armies of robots still fighting out their lonely, empty war in the ruins of a city just struck me as really evocative.

Anyways, that’s exactly what the robots of Gamma World are like: They’re machines that had a purpose at one point, but lost it now that their masters are dead. For instance, the Apothecary robot used to be a soft-drink machine, but it’s overrode its own programming and now dispenses a variety of chemical cocktails in exchange for repairs and energy. The Architect covers entire deserts with useless roads, or with the shells of houses, unaware that it’s working without a larger plan. They’re lonely robots, carrying out tasks for masters long since dead – very much like Bradbury’s story “There Will Come Soft Rains”. There are a lot of neat ideas in here, ranging from enormous, skywhale robots whose job is to clean the air of contaminants to rogue appliances whose masters – out of a misguided sense of devotion – gave them their autonomy in the final days of the war. As a matter of fact, robots like that give me ideas for new game types – like “The Brave Little Toaster Meets Lord Humungus and his friend Wes”.

Not every idea is a winner. The Braintaker is basically a walking Illithid brain pool; Free Cars are interesting, but players are immediately going to quote that “Killer Cars!” Monty Pyton sketch as soon as they find out what’s hunting them.

But still. The Oasis Robot functions like a GECK device, from Fallout 2 – if you can find a blank one, you can set it to terraforming the land into a paradise. Newflesh is an STD that grows an artificial intelligence in your mind, which eventually replaces you. Stepfords are humans who have been translated into robots, and driven utterly insane in the process. Shrikes use nanotechnology to turn any animal into a calculating killer. The monster itself suggests a basic plot, which is what makes them so great. (There’s also an excellent drawing for the Deranged AI template – a ice-cream truck robot, its lower half a floating freezer, carrying a metal sword that would look at home either on Cloud or on a Fatima.)

And there’s Death Machines. I remember an article from – I think it was Dragon #152 or #153, but it described how a guy had a bunch of his friends pick a deity from Deities and Demigods and throw them against a single Death Machine. (The result was a total party kill for the gods, and the Death Machine got a dented nosecone from Mjolnir.)

But here’s the real kick in the nuts: NO DEATH MACHINES!

Baw!

Following that is natural life – not engineered animals, but natural life that’s evolved to fit Gamma World. It’s also the first time you’ll see a microbe statted up for the d20 system, so mark that in your calendars. A lot of this stuff is basically “Here’s how the normal organism works, and – EXTREEEEEEM! – now it’s been Gammafied, and it sucks blood and lays billions of eggs in your ass and they eat you from the inside out.”

You can really just do this on your own – just take any natural organism and make it about ten times bigger and THIRSTY FOR HUMAN BLOOD and you’ve got a Gamma World cliché. Even dust mites don’t escape this fate. (“Dust mites eat dead human flesh? What if they ate LIVE flesh instead?) Oak trees don’t even escape this fate – they’re given poison sap. It’s easy to make something lethal to humans, harder to make something interesting to a human reading the book. All of the really awful diseases that everybody frets about but nobody every gets – hantavirus, necrotizing fasciitis – are included as well.

I’m not really set on fire by this chapter. How do you introduce a microbial invasion that can’t distinguish between a gasoline spill and the gasoline in your tank without having the players feel like they’re being screwed? (There’s literally no way to fight it, since it just turns poison into pure water.) Do we need a full page on the effects of a disease as utterly rare as necrotizing fasciitis, when pinkeye could kill just as easily?

There are some interesting ideas, though. The econet is a sentient fungus which balances the local ecology through a combination of bacteria and viruses which control the mind, so you could have going nuts and sending every creature in a twenty-mile radius at the characters.

And all is forgiven when I see the Octofus. Sentient octopuses. Who can use a mechanical walker in order to move around on land.

Look, any game that lets you play an octopus with a mechanical walker, complete with those cold little eyes staring out from behind the laser sights of a submachinegun, deserves your support. If it were up to me, I’d make octofuses the only available race. I love them that much.

There’s also templates available for different climate types, so if you want sentient octopuses from the tundra, there’s guidelines on how to alter the creature accordingly.

The book rounds itself out with feats that mutated characters can take to alter their powers – making them last longer, do more damage, affect a larger area, like the metamagic feats from D&D. There’s some new character classes, too.

The Agent is basically a spy who specializes in alien species, so if you need to find out why the local ocotfuses are gathering at the border to wave their tentacles at your town in a series of menacing gestures gestures, he’s the man that you want to go to.

The Hybrid Diplomat literally alters his genetic structure to better bring himself in line with what the aliens are actually thinking – a neat idea, but almost better suited to Traveller or Trinity than Gamma World, since those worlds are much more sedate, and less.

The Messenger strikes me as kinda useless – all of your skills are based around delivering the mail, to the point where you’re allowed to roll an extra 1d6 and take the best result if you’re directly engaged in delivering a message. It’s a little Unknown-Armies-esque – very much like the Herald’s final channel.

The Robot’s Bane lets you take robots as your favored enemy – again, ennnh.

The Scrutinizer is a field zoologist class, with the final level granting the ability to figure out what’s exact gesture is required to calm an animal or robot down. It’s kind of a neat idea – sort of the Jane Goodall of the flame-retardant-vomiting bear set.

The Trapper is kind of a modified wilderness man – you get bonuses to making traps, you can track your favored prey better, ending with the ability to make an extra attack in exchange for an attack and defense penalty. Ennh.

The artwork is uniformly excellent – Timothy Truman, who just started drawing the stellar Grimjack again, does a lot of artwork here, and it’s got the mixture of weird technology and strange creatures to fit Truman’s skills exactly. (All that you need is the Grateful Dead somewhere in there, and you’ve got everything that Timothy Truman likes to draw.)

It should be noted that I’m a Tim Truman fanboy - I mean, shit, look at this and tell me that's not the coolest goddamn thing you've ever seen - but there are no clinkers in the lot. The illustration for the clochwhirl has an almost Geoff Darrow level of detail, for instance, and the Deranged illustration summarizes the concept in a nutshell while suggesting a really awesome scenario in the bargain. A book in which there’s no bad art is a book with excellent artists, and those involved with this book’s illustration should pat themselves on the back.

Anyways: Ultimately, I can’t find myself able to recommend this book. It’s got some immensely interesting stuff in it, especially in the robot section; it’s also got some massively silly stuff, like – well, the bear. The book just needs more direction – to decide what the Gamma World is and to work with it, instead of ping-ponging from silly to straightfaced with every other monster. There’s also a lot of material that just didn’t need to be in there, like the bulk of the natural life chapter, and most of the character classes. It’s worth paging through, or buying if you like silly monsters, but I don’t think that it’s worth buying for its full price.

-Darren MacLennan