The Post-Apocalyptic Prometheus

or I finally got a chance to play D&D Gamma World! 

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Ohhh wow, I forgot all about this entry. It has been sitting on my blogger queue for more than a year. 

I wrote it a couple of days after I finally had a chance to play D&D Gamma World.  Mike, a buddy of mine from the Atlanta Gamers Guild Meetup, volunteered to run "Steading of the Iron King" at Manuels Tavern. 

I rolled up a reanimated hawkoid man-creature called Howard Phillips. I figured that Howard once belonged to Herbert West, a mad scientist with a penchant for trying to challenge the dominance of death over life. West scooped up Howard off the street (the hawk had been run over by a car) and used it as a test subject. West's reanimating liquid worked a bit too well, for the roadkill came back as a man sized Hawk thing with an attitude. After destroying his creator, Howard Phillips wandered out into the post apocalyptic world of Gamma World in search for meaning. That and fat l00t. 

Some spoilers will follow...

Steading of the Iron King 

In Steading of the Iron King, the adventurers are hired by the people of some nameless town to look into the roving robots that are driving into town to blow up. Our adventuring party captured one of the little robots before it selfdestructed and re-wired it to return to base. We followed it to a castle of sorts were we met by mutant pigs and rodents.  The group fought their way inside until we got to a basement level were we were overpowered by the defenders. Two of the adventurers managed to escape. Howard Phillips and Steve, the Altered Woman were knocked unconscious during the firefight. Their fate is probably too terrible for me to want to imagine!

My Take on D&D Gamma World

I loved D&D Gamma World!

It's a fun game from beginning to end. Character creation is lightning fast and creative. Baker and Cordell did an amazing job simplifying the 4e system in order to make it work within a highly lethal and chaotic post-apocalyptic world of Gamma World. Powers and tech are constantly changing for the characters, so it's hard to get tired of your character.  

I have two minor gripes with the game. They are both related to Hit Points and are both totally subjective:

Death & Dying: In GW a character dies when his negative hit points equal his bloodied value or after failing three saving throws. I've never been a big fan of the negative hit points. I think that a character should perish once he gets to 0 hit points. This is a totally subjective thing, I'm sure a lot of people out there dig the system as is. 

Hit Point Refresh: Characters have the opportunity to get back all their hit points after each encounter. I don't know, doesn't this kind of go against the whole "highly lethal" thing? (Then again, 2 of the characters died in our session, so maybe I'm just being blood thirsty here.) 

These two minor quibbles are nothing that simple house ruling can't fix.  

I really want to play more D&D Gamma World. Not only that, I also want to keep my three boxes ( the core book and expansions) around in order to run it as a pick up game from time to time.