Vault 49ers: Gamma World 1e Campaign Prep - The Basic Start

Running a Gamma World Campaign has been an idea I've been rolling around in my head for a while now, but with me getting a copy of the POD version of Gamma World I have really dug into prepping a full campaign. I want to talk a little about the premise of the game. 

Below is the basic Overview that the Players will see before the game will start. 

Basic Overview

Welcome to 2320, roughly 300 years since the world went nuclear and was blanketed in nuclear waste and ash. You are one of the newest students from the Pre-War days to be let out of the Freezer-chests, the world isn’t a whole lot like the one you remember. 

The world is a blasted wasteland now that is crawling with monsters, mutants and anything that wants to either eat your soft hide for breakfast, or turn you into their latest “Volunteer” to work their land. 

The whole reason why you’ve been let out is because your freezer timer is up and you need to be pulled out less you turn into a real meat-popsicle. Best make the most of your time here on this… brown earth now. Vault 49 had kept you alive long enough, time for you to do the rest.

In essence (and in my Fallout inspired beginning with the players waking up in the Vault), I hope this provides a summary of what Gamma World is like from my understanding that is presented within the original rulebook. I wrote this in the tone that basically the PCs are the players themselves (or at least a character similar to the player)  and they are having to be given a fast and dirty update on the world and is pushed out into it.  

Below is a look behind the curtain on my end of being the DM.  

Initial Start of Campaign

The campaign will kick off with the PCs waking up in Vault 49; a massive underground bunker built under UNCC Campus where much of the Student population and those living in the area around it were housed and placed into cryo-sleep. 

PCs will be greeted to a blasted out world filled with Monsters, Mutated Humanoids, and Mutated Animals crawling through the ruins of the Old World… Our world for those that decided to do a Self-Insert of themselves.

After being evaluated by Doctors and Medical Bots, the PCs will be asked if they seek to work within the confines of the old University Area or go out into the wider world to find Tech and fight monsters. The NPC they are talking to will stress that they have plenty of staff currently in the central compound and Adventurers (or Prospectors) are needed.

To dissect my thoughts, the central DNA of the game is ripped right out of Fallout 4 (and the Fallout Series in general) in that the PCs are start out inside of a Bunker and leave the safety of Cryo-sleep for the wider, stranger and much more dangerous world that our world has morphed into. The "Vault" that they PCs come out of is located under the grounds of the College me and my players go to. 

The choice to allow the PCs to be self-inserts (or at least mirrored version of the Players) is to allow the use of their basic knowledge of the local area which we all have traversed in real life. The choice will hopefully make things enjoyable since the players can call upon their own knowledge to work around given situations. 

In addition, the choice to set the game localized around UNCC (and thus the greater Charlotte Area) is also kind of fun since I get to turn everything in the area onto it's ear with Gamma World logic. 

In the next couple of posts I'm likely gonna try to get into the actual world and what is going on in the local area. 

    

 

Gamma World 1E Initial Thoughts

Published in 1978 by TSR and written by James M. Ward and Gray Jaquet, Gamma World is a Science Fantasy Roleplaying Game centered around PC surviving in a nuclear wasteland as they scrounge for technology from the ancients, use their mutant powers to fend off monsters, and try to keep the local Secret Organization off their backs. 

Before getting into my initial thoughts on Gamma World 1e, I would like to disclose that I purchased a Print-on-Demand copy of the rulebook and have not had the chance to run the system. I do not have system mastery and will likely overlook certain details that likely would meet certain issues or concerns I might have.

The first thing that greets you upon getting the book is a nice color cover featuring a team of soldiers in Astronaut gear wielding laser rifles and gizmos as they head into an overgrown and ruined city. Opening the 54 page book, the Gamma World rules greets you with the iconic, black and white image of the Mutant Monkey holding a pistol at the monster.  

The pages after the Introduction covers everything you need to know to build the world, make a character, run the game with examples of the game in action to help get started. Though, these 54 pages are fairly dense with blocks of small text only broken up by headers, a couple of piece of art, the matrixes used for combat and the tables of used for Artifacts, treasures and monsters depending on the terrain the PCs are currently in. In the back of the book are all the tables and matrixes that would be needed to be referenced during play.

Reading over through the rulebook, it's a fairly dense read, but once you've read a small paragraph a couple of time and been able to mull over the text for a little bit; the rules make enough sense that you can run a game with them. Though, like any rulebook from TSR, reading the rules over a couple times is always a good habit to make sure your own sanity is in-line with the sanity found in the rulebook. 

In these readings, the only thing I think I saw missing was a table for Modifiers from Ability Scores, but I might be missing something myself or it might be present in one of the two modules (Famine in Far-Go and Legion of Gold) as a late addition. Though, this isn't knock against the rulebook since (if memory serves), the AD&D DMG held rules for converting characters to and from games like Boothill and Gamma World; which means the Ability Score Modifier table could be ported from AD&D easily without breaking a whole lot. 

I hope to run Gamma World for my home group. Its a system that's been on my radar for a little while now and now it's likely going to chew at me until I get a chance to run it. 

For a more comprehensive overview of the rules, go take a look at the review made by capcorajus here.