Earth AD -- Alpha Edition 1!

OK, it's here. I finally said "To hell with it." and just did what every good publisher does -- burn what's on the hard disk and call it a release. Assuming I do this right, there should be a PDF file you can click from here. Download it, read it, enjoy it, then post to this article to tell me how great it is what needs to be changed. Please remember this is a very early alpha draft of a system still being heavily designed.

Click the glowing radiation symbol!

Gamma World was one of the earliest RPGs I played... perhaps the fourth? Fifth? I think it went AD&D, Traveller, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World. Anyway, Gamma World, or GW, may have gone through more editions than any other game. It's always had a devoted hard-core fan base, but it has had trouble sustaining an edition over time. This is because it can be played as anything from wild-and-wacky-goofy fun to grim-and-gritty struggle for survival, and early editions were very unclear about how it was "meant" to be played. The rules were often vague and usually horribly unbalanced, but, like so many things, somehow, bad design became twisted by memory into a feature, and people, including myself, have nothing but fond memories of the insanely impossible characters we rolled up, who often ended up dying in ways as random as their creation.

I was one of the people who worked on the D20 edition of Gamma World, which had a very clear design goal and ethos and "how it was meant to be played", which, unfortunately, didn't jibe with how people remembered the game or how it was thought of. In my opinion, it was only a near miss, not a failure -- what was needed was more variety in character creation and longer lists of mutations and options. But that's past.

I have been tooling around with ideas for a 4e-based "Mutants and Mayhem" style game, doing what I like to do, which is take old-school ideas and attitude and blend them with modern, well-designed rules systems. This mostly remained a mental exercise where I pondered issues of game balance and how to handle various aspects, all while keeping it as compatible as possible with 'baseline' D&D, opening up the world to easy import of monsters with minor reflavoring as needed. Then WOTC announced they were doing their own Gamma World, so I figured there was little need for my project. Then I learned more about WOTCs Gamma World, and stopped thinking, and started writing, because there is a need. WOTC is basically doing Gamma World as a goofy comedy beer-and-pretzels, play-it-when-your-D&D-game-is-cancelled thing. I think it can and should be more than that.

So I've spent my copious free time over the past two weeks hacking together some core rules. I'm still hacking, but it's starting to take shape. I'm trying to decide if I want to post them to this blog as I write them, develop a full document and ask for playtesters, or what. We'll see.

(This is also why posting here has been even more sparse than usual.)

FWIW, here are my official Design Goals: