Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook

I am sitting here reflecting on the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook and trying to think of the details that stand out to me, without the need to directly consult my notes. The main thing I remember is that there were five "F/X" systems - Biotech, Mutations, Nanotech, Cybernetics, and Psionics - and they all had their own dedicated mechanics. And I guess this is one of the eternal game-design debates. You want to give characters cool abilities, but do you need to group them by their effects and allow their fictional differences to be merely cosmetic (i.e. your lightning bolt and firebolt both use a generic "energy blast" rules template, just with different tags) or do you give each and every thing with a distinct fictional presentation its own unique rules (i.e your "lightning bolt" power works differently than your "firebolt" power because you are trying to capture the difference between lightning and fire)?

I'm going to be a bit of a coward on the issue and say that each approach has its place and both can work really well in a system and setting that plays to its strengths. And then I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "separate mechanics for each power source" approach doesn't work particularly well for this book because, out of the five different power system, only the nanotech rules are actually fun.

I really wish I was more familiar with Gamma World as a franchise, because the GM chapter said the d20 version was the seventh version of the game and I'm not sure if the clunkiness in the rules comes from six editions of legacy baggage or from the d20 conversion being an inelegant means of adapting a perfectly functional system that had already been refined through a half-dozen iterations. All I can really say about the F/X chapter is that it felt like more work than I was willing to do to play in the Gamma World universe.

Which brings me to the other thing that sticks out clearly to me, absent my notes - this book has some uniquely bold ideas, but they are presented in such a way that I can't be sure they're meant to rise to the level of a setting premise. Or, to put it another way, the one thing the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook most unforgiveably neglects to do is sell me on Gamma World. Yes, I'm willing to play some post-apocalyptic adventures, but is that what this book is? A genre guidebook?

Now, I don't want to sell the game short. I felt something special here, lurking at the edge of my awareness. Even when the setting chapter opened with nine pages of completely generic descriptions of terrain (yes, please, post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, explain to me what a mountain range is and why it might act as a barrier to communication and trade), I got the feeling it was going for something different than d20 Apocalypse. But, you know how sometimes you'll read an rpg and it will have a completely unearned sense of its own importance and you'll occasionally have to roll your eyes at the way the text swans around, as if in awe at its own (unwittingly anodyne) audacity? Well, this book was kind of the opposite of that.

There are a couple of Big Ideas here that, if they were more deeply explored, would lead to a unique post-apocalyptic setting. The first is that of the "multaclypse." There wasn't just one apocalypse, there were dozens or hundreds that happened more or less simultaneously. Nuclear exchanges, bioengineered plagues with 0.00% survivability, orbital kinetic strikes, grey goo nanoswarms, rogue AIs wrecking the infosphere, genetically engineered super soldiers, domestic robots rising up against their owners. All of these things happened at once, each crisis making the others worse. 

And the multaclypse has a great explanation in the backstory - technology had gotten so advanced that the expense to ramp up to world-destroying superweapons was within the reach of small to mid-sized political clubs (or even to well-off individuals). That's a fucking sci-fi premise. Knee-cap your neighbor before they transcend. You don't even have to particularly hate them. If they're annoying as a human, that's not going to change when they're an immortal god machine.

It's such an interesting idea, but I can't help feeling like it's used here merely as an excuse for the world to be a blank slate, and for there to be weird creatures in the wilderness. There's a giant bat/lion hybrid that flies around and eats clothes. Just clothes. It can subsist on bolts of cloth, but finds plant fibers, yarn, thread, rope, etc completely inedible. Probably because it incorporates symbiotic, intelligent nanotech into its digestive system. Presumably, before the Final War, it had some specific purpose. But now it's just a wacky encounter. 

Now, far be it for me to condemn something for being "wacky" or even "wacky for the sake of wacky." But this is a book that spent a page and a half telling me what "grassland" is. Not "mutant grassland." Not "strangely organic yet unmistakably metallic robot grassland." But rather "dry grassland" and "tropical grassland." And I guess the intended vibe was "hexcrawl through a land where nature is healing" which is a fine post-apocalyptic vibe, to be sure . . . but one which had absolutely nothing to do with the unique and meritorious qualities of the book's introduction.

It's the same story with the book's other bold idea - soultech, semi-organic AI that was so cheap and easy to make that the ancients literally put it in everything. And I do mean literally. "No one wondered what the toaster and the refrigerator talked about, in epic debates carried on as nanosecond timing errors in monitored communications. No one noticed bank accounts being started by elevators who plated the stock market with literally inhuman skill, trading on the knowledge they heard discussed within them . . ."

Gawd! This is so interesting, and it's buried in the "Robot" entry of the book's bestiary. I think about a post-apocalyptic world where those things make up the bulk of the survivors. Where the toaster mourns its fallen frenemy, the refrigerator. Where the day-trading elevator slowly goes mad, trapped at the bottom of its shaft because the building above it collapsed. Where you can explore an ancient ruin and everything is alive and everything has a voice, but none of them want precisely the same thing.

I'm left asking myself what a world made from this book's boldest ideas would look like. And I'm forced to conclude that it would not look all that much like the world presented in this book. The "campaigning in the Gamma World" section talks about "overall campaign style" and it's a very general discussion about hack-and-slash, community building, or travellogues. The discussion about technology centers entirely around varying the rarity of laser weapons and shit.

And the dread realization finally dawns on me - it's not a kitchen sink, it's a toolkit.

There's nothing wrong with being a toolkit. I've spent the last couple of months praising d20 Modern for being a functional toolkit system (heck, it's even powering Gamma World d20). But, at the end of the day, toolkit systems are meant to disappear into the campaign prep work. They rely on the GM to make something memorable and exciting. I really don't think that's what Gamma World was going for.

The book is not unsalvageable. I think you could build a really cool rpg setting based on its three core ideas:

Anything has the potential to be alive and self aware.
Nothing is too goofy to exist.

Power scaling is whimsical, at best.

I'm imagining a world where the legacy of Earth's original abiogenisis has been swept aside by the apocalypse and humanity's obscene and blasphemous technological creations have moved into the millions of vacated ecological niches. Maybe a slogan - "the freak will inherit the Earth." (And if there are any "pure strain humans" left, why, they'll be the biggest freaks of all). There might be a forest of solar panels, inhabited by robo-fauna who glean energy from the "trees" and chase each other down for predatory data transfer (and if you're a biological interloper who lacks the proper ports, well, at least it's generally less painful than being eaten by a bear). There could be vast prairies of feral GMO food crops, leading to a resurgence of terrestrial megafauna because invasive frankencorn is calorically dense enough to feed massive herds of escaped theme park dinosaurs. And scattered throughought the land are ruins of the old world, still mysteriously active, and constantly spawning new horrors. Because the technology for the hard takeoff singularity still exists, in hardened bunkers powered by stockpiled nuclear materials or deep geothermal generators. With no one at the helm, it just keeps doing random shit, but it's possible these sites may be captured and repurposes, so in a sense the Final War never ended. And maybe your desperate band of survivors will one day be faced with the same dilemma that destroyed the world - do you preemptively frag your neighbor just to stop them from becoming the world's most obnoxious god?

Along the way, you'll see things you never imagined you'd see, talk to things you never imagined could talk, and become something you never imagined you'd become. Maybe you'll grow a couple extra arms, make telepathic contact with an intelligent horse, and team up to stop an ancient elevator from reinventing capitalism. Anything's possible and it doesn't have to make sense because the context that would have explained it has died along with the world.

Or, at least, that's how I'd do it if I wanted to differentiate Gamma World from a generic post-apocalyptic setting. The book occasionally dips its toes in those waters. The bestiary contains cannibalistic rabbit-folk and a pony express powered by a species of horse/centipede hybrid. The "cryptic alliances" section included the Bonapartists, uplifted animals who indulge in Napoleonic-era cosplay and real military conquest. There are "neo-cavemen" living in the ruins of France. It's not all Community Behavior Maps and realistically grim negative mutations. 

And yet, overall I think the Gamma World d20 Player's Handbook commits the cardinal sin of weird fiction - it lacks conviction in its own weirdness. The bulk of the book is written as if it expected you to play grounded characters telling grounded stories in a grounded setting. It treats its weirdness as spice to be sprinked in judiciously instead of the star attraction. And I'm not sure I can entirely forgive it for that.

Ukss Contribution: I do have a lot of good choices for stuff to steal, though. Some of it, like the insider-trading elevator or the scavenger who was enraptured by the rainbow reflections of ancient CDs, would be hard to contextualize in a fantasy setting, but even with that limitation, I still need to work to narrow it down.

I think my absolute favorite thing was the weird dynamic between Hoops (intelligent rabbit-folk) and Hoppers (giant horned rabbits that have animal intelligence but which are large enough to be ridden as mounts).

"Hoops, despite their carnivorous habits, will not eat hoppers. They view it as slightly disgusting, akin to a human eating a gorilla. Hoops also never ride hoppers; indeed they seem to find the existence of the hopper species to be something of an embarrassment."

I really like that they acknowledged it. So, I guess I'm technically picking two things, because they are both necessary for my true pick - the sheer awkwardness of the situation.