Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Empire of the East

Having enjoyed revisiting Hiero's Journey in last week’s installment of Pulp (Science) Fantasy Library, I thought I would continue along a similar path this week with 1979's Empire of the East. Before turning to the book itself, however, a bit of context is helpful.

Empire of the East is not a wholly new novel but an omnibus edition that gathers together three earlier works by Fred Saberhagen, The Broken Lands, The Black Mountains, and Changeling Earth. In preparing the omnibus edition, Saberhagen revised portions of the original texts so that they would read more smoothly as a single, unified narrative rather than three loosely connected installments. The result is a work that functions much more clearly as an epic novel than the original publications did.

Of these three component books, only Changeling Earth appears in Gary Gygax's Appendix N. The absence of the earlier volumes is somewhat curious, since they are integral parts of the same story. One possible explanation is that Gygax regarded Changeling Earth as representative of the trilogy as a whole, but this is only speculation. Regardless, the series as a whole exemplifies the kind of exuberant science fantasy that almost certainly helped inspire many early role-playing campaigns and adventures.

One of the central conceits of Empire of the East is that sufficiently advanced technology might appear indistinguishable from magic. By the 1950s and 1960s, the concept (immortalized as Clarke's Third Law) had already appeared in numerous science fiction stories. Saberhagen, however, approached the notion from a different direction. Rather than presenting magic as misunderstood technology, he imagined a catastrophe in which technology itself had literally been transformed into magic. It is an intriguing inversion of a familiar idea and one that gives the setting much of its distinctive flavor.

In Saberhagen’s imagined past, mankind fought a devastating war using immensely powerful computers capable of manipulating the laws of physics to achieve specific military ends. At the height of that conflict, these systems inadvertently triggered a phenomenon known as the Change. The Change permanently altered the behavior of the physical universe, rendering advanced technology unreliable or entirely inoperable. In its place arose a new set of forces that later generations would understand as magic. Over time, as knowledge of the pre-Change world faded, people came to regard magic not as a transformation of technology but simply as the natural order of things.

Within this transformed world stands the titular Empire of the East, a tyranny that dominates vast territories through a combination of sorcery and alliances with demonic powers. (The Change, it turns out, did more than reshape machines: it also gave rise to supernatural beings, including a powerful demon named Orcus, a name that will sound familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons.) Against this empire stands a loose resistance movement known as the Free Folk.

The story begins with Rolf, a young man whose life is shattered when imperial forces destroy his village and carry off his family. Escaping captivity, he joins the Free Folk and soon begins receiving mysterious visions from an unseen entity called Ardneh. These visions guide him on a path that gradually reveals the deeper mysteries of his world. During his adventures, Rolf discovers an “Elephant,” an ancient armored vehicle from before the Change. To the people of his era, it appears to be a kind of legendary mechanical beast, but in truth it is a relic of the lost technological age. In a world where such artifacts are almost unknown, the Elephant becomes both a symbol of hope and a tangible advantage against the Empire.

As Rolf’s role within the resistance grows, the truth about Ardneh gradually comes to light. Ardneh is not a spirit or a wizard but a surviving artificial intelligence created before the Change. Long ago, it intervened to prevent global nuclear destruction. In doing so, however, it inadvertently helped trigger the very transformation that reshaped the world into its current magical form. The Empire, aided by the demon Orcus, seeks to destroy Ardneh and thereby secure its domination forever.

The narrative ultimately builds toward a large-scale confrontation between the Free Folk, guided by Ardneh, and the armies and supernatural forces of the Empire. It should surprise no one that the forces of resistance prevail in the end, though the victory comes only after the underlying truth about the world is revealed and some of the consequences of the Change are reversed.

I confess that I do not have a clear sense of how influential Empire of the East was when it first appeared, whether in its original installments or in its omnibus form. Apart from Gygax’s reference to Changeling Earth in Appendix N, I rarely encountered discussion of it during the years when I was first exploring fantasy literature. More often, the trilogy seems to arise in conversation as background to Saberhagen’s later The First Book of Swords and its sequels. Those novels appear to have achieved greater visibility, perhaps simply because they formed a longer and more widely published series.

Nevertheless, I think Empire of the East stands as an appealing example of a once-common strain of science fantasy featuring a magical world that is, in fact, the distant future of our own Earth. During my youth, such settings were remarkably popular, blending the wonder of fantasy with the speculative imagination of science fiction. Saberhagen’s trilogy embraces that hybrid approach wholeheartedly. By transforming the relics of advanced technology into the foundations of a magical world, he created a setting that feels at once ancient and futuristic, which, being a fan of "secret sci-fi," continues to hold great appeal for me.

Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Hiero's Journey

Today, I'm being doubly cheeky. First and most obviously, I've decided to dub today's post an entry in the previously non-existent Pulp Science Fantasy Library series. In the past, I've occasionally run posts under the Pulp Science Fiction Library title, so this isn't wholly without precedent. In the case of Hiero's Journey, though, I think it's a reasonable modification, since it's definitely not a fantasy book in the usual Tolkien/Howard sense most people understand the term, but neither is it a "proper" science fiction tale of the sort that could have appeared in Gernsback's Amazing Stories.

Second, this is another book I have discussed before, albeit briefly. Like last week's post, this too was part of the Pulp Fantasy Gallery series, an early series that I more or less abandoned after a while (though I have revived a version of it from time to time, many to discuss the different pieces of artwork that have graced the covers of famous fantasy books). In any case, I like Hiero's Journey enough that I thought it would be productive to do a full post on it and its relationship to the history of RPGs.

Though first published in 1973, I didn't read Sterling Lanier's post-apocalyptic tale until almost a decade later, when I chanced upon it in a bookstore at the local mall. Though Gary Gygax listed the book in Appendix N, I am almost certain the first time I ever saw a reference to it was in the foreword to Gamma World, which is why I picked it up. I instantly fell in love with it. If I had to pick a single book that captures my own sense of what Gamma World was meant to be, I'd probably choose Hiero's Journey. Certainly, it's the book that, even now, I still find myself subconsciously influenced by whenever I try to imagine what the game is and should be.

Lanier himself is an interesting fellow. As a writer, he produced only a small number of works, of which Hiero’s Journey is probably the best known (and that's being kind). For a time, he worked as an editor at Chilton Books, where he was involved in bringing Frank Herbert's Dune to publication after having read it in serialized form in Analog magazine. Herbert had had great difficulty in selling his novel elsewhere, but Lanier believed it would sell well. When it didn't, he lost his job at Chilton, which led to his taking up writing more seriously.

Hiero’s Journey is set in North America thousands of years after a catastrophic nuclear war referred to simply as “the Death.” The devastation of that ancient conflict reduced the technological civilization of the past to scattered ruins and reshaped the natural world in unexpected ways. Mutated animals roam the wilderness, some hostile, others capable of domestication, while human societies have reorganized themselves into small states and tribal cultures amid the remnants of the old world.

The novel’s protagonist, Per Hiero Desteen, is a priest-scholar belonging to a monastic order known simply as the Abbey, located within the Republic of Metz, a polity occupying part of what was once Canada. The Abbey preserves fragments of ancient learning and trains individuals with psychic abilities, including telepathy, which have become an important if poorly understood feature of the post-Death world.

At the outset of the novel, Hiero is dispatched on a secret mission by the leaders of the Abbey. Rumors suggest that somewhere to the south lies a cache of ancient knowledge about relics called "computers" that might aid the Republic of Metz in its ongoing struggle against a shadowy group known as the Dark Brotherhood. These enemies, whose influence extends across large portions of the former United States, employ both advanced relic technology of their own and psychic powers in pursuit of domination over the scattered civilizations that survived the Death.

Hiero’s titular journey takes him across a landscape that is at once recognizably North American and yet profoundly altered by millennia of mutation, ecological change, and cultural transformation. Along the way he encounters both allies and enemies, from human societies struggling to survive in the wilderness to intelligent animals capable of communication and monstrous creatures born from the lingering consequences of ancient radiation and experimentation.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the novel in my opinion is the way it blends several types of science fiction. On the one hand, the novel clearly belongs to the lineage of post-nuclear adventure stories that became common during the Cold War, exploring the long shadow cast by nuclear catastrophe. On the other hand, Lanier freely incorporates elements, such as psychic powers, telepathic animals, and quasi-medieval social structures, that give the setting a distinctly fantasy character. The resulting world feels less like a conventional science fiction future and more like a kind of Lost World romance set amid the ruins of modern civilization. That's probably why I so enjoyed the novel when I first read it.

It's also probably why Gary Gygax saw fit to include it in Appendix N to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Though set in post-apocalyptic North America, so much of the story's elements feel as if they could be part of an eccentric Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with psychic powers substituting for spells and ancient technology standing in for magic items. Of course, these qualities are also why the novel almost perfectly encapsulates what Gamma World is about, at least for me. The first time I read this book, I felt as if I finally understood Gamma World in a way I hadn't before. It might be an exaggeration to say this is the "key" to the game, but there's no question in my mind that it's helpful in getting into the mood for playing or refereeing it.

Lanier did write a sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, which came out in 1983, shortly after I read the original. As follow-ups go, it's fine but nowhere near as good as its predecessor. Lanier was working on a third novel in the series but it was never released during his lifetime. Supposedly, it was finished by another author and published in 2024, but I've never read it and have doubts that it's any good. I had bad experiences with the sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz being released under similar circumstances, so I'm quite wary of these posthumous collaborations. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear about it.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Mutant Manual"

Since this blog could hardly be accused of intellectual rigor, I trust no one will object to my choosing the "Mutant Manual" as the "article" I wish to highlight from issue #98 (June 1985) of Dragon. Written by Randy Johns, Douglas A. Lent, John M. Maxstadt, William Tracy, and James M. Ward, the "Mutant Manual" was a 12-page insert that detailed 17 new mutants for use with Gamma World.

To say that I adored the "Mutant Manual" is a bit of an understatement. Along with only a handful of other articles, it became a permanent addition to my "referee's binder" in which I kept maps, notes, and photocopies of useful articles from Dragon, White Dwarf, and elsewhere. In the case of the "Mutant Manual," though, it wasn't a photocopy, but the original itself, which I carefully removed from the center of my copy of issue #98. Since I generally preferred to keep my copies of Dragon "pristine" – a shock, I know – the fact that I removed the "Mutant Manual" was a high tribute.

I'm not sure I can really convey why I liked it so much. Were I to describe any of its constituent mutants, like the flying squids, armor-plated rhinos, or post-apocalyptic sasquatches, I doubt most readers would find them particularly interesting and perhaps rightly so. Back in '85, though, I appreciated having a source of new mutants to throw at my players when we played Gamma World. Creating good monsters takes time and imagination, as many entries in the Monster Manual prove. You need more than a name and some game statistics to create a worthy monster – an indescribable something that makes it more than the sum of its parts.

In my opinion, this is particularly the case with regards to Gamma World, where it's all too easy to take some normal animal, roll a few times on the mutations tables, and think you're done. More often than not, this led to some utterly ridiculous creatures that I could barely take seriously myself, let alone my players. So, having some ready-made mutants that weren't immediately laughable was invaluable to me. Whether others might deem the "Mutant Manual" a success in this regard is a matter of opinion, of course, but I loved it and still strongly associate it with my fondest memories of Gamma World.

REPOST: Retrospective: Metamorphosis Alpha

(Because I've started refereeing a Metamorphosis Alpha campaign this week, I have a number of posts planned in which I share my thoughts about the game and its oddities. Before doing that, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit my original Retrospective post about it from July 7, 2010. I stand by everything I wrote in that original post, but I have more to say now that I'm in the midst of planning a campaign using MA, as you'll see in the coming days. –JDM)

Although Gamma World was (I think) the first RPG I played after Dungeons & Dragons, it was with its predecessor game, Metamorphosis Alpha, that I was obsessed for much of the early 1980s. Written by James Ward and first published in 1976, making it, depending on one's definitions, the first science fiction roleplaying game ever published, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard a vast generation ship (called the Warden in a typical example of early hobby self-referential hubris/humor). En route to another solar system far from Earth, the Warden passes through a radiation cloud that damages its systems, kills its crew, and mutates most of its surviving passengers, as well as the Terran flora and fauna traveling with them, into monstrous forms.

Over several generations, the descendants of the original passengers forget they're aboard a starship (which still functions, more or less, under the control of automated systems) and new societies arise on its various decks, which are kilometers-long in size and include many areas designed to mimic terrestrial environments for the benefit of the passengers who were supposed to live and work aboard the Warden while traveling for decades to another world. Player characters assume the role of un-mutated humans, humanoid mutants, and mutant animals, as they explore the Warden, ignorant that it's actually a starship. It's a very compelling premise, one that it shares with Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (sometimes titled Starship in certain editions). In many ways, it's a much more interesting, if somewhat more limited, premise than that of Gamma World.

My own obsession with the game stemmed from the fact, sometime after I acquired Gamma World, I also acquired the first The Best of Dragon compilation, which included articles about Metamorphosis Alpha in it. These articles were strangely inspirational to me, all the moreso because they were for a game that I'd never heard of, let alone seen, but that clearly bore a lot of resemblance in basic premise and rules to my beloved Gamma World. Thus began my quest to find a copy of the game, a quest that ended in vain. I asked the guys down at my favorite game store about Metamorphosis Alpha, but they told me it was long out of print and my best bet was to go to a convention and win it at an auction. The old grognards who hung out there added that MA "wasn't very good anyway" and that I was better off just using Gamma World and making up the rest.

And so I did. I pulled out my huge graph paper sheets and set to work to mapping out my version of the starship Warden. It was a long and tedious undertaking, filled with lots of missteps and heartache, because I never felt I could get it "right." This vessel was supposed to be 80 kilometers long or so, which meant that even a big map would have to use a very large scale. Moreover, what would a vast generation ship even look like? The only starships I'd ever seen were from movies and TV shows and none of them were generation ships designed to house a huge number of colonists, animals, plants, and machinery for decades of travel across many light years. Eventually, all these worries and concerns got the better of me and I abandoned my maps, something I regret now, even as I fully understand why my younger self admitted defeat.

Over the years, I retained a high degree of interest in Metamorphosis Alpha and kept hoping that, one day, a new edition would be released that'd give me everything I'd hoped for back in the days before I could even take a look at this mythical game. As it turns out, new editions have been published over the years, but each one has been a terrible disappointment to me, utterly lacking in the aura of mystery and possibility that surrounded the original. To be fair, some of that isn't the fault of the new editions -- though some of it is, as nearly all the new editions have been conceptually flawed in significant ways -- as much of the mystique about this game for me is that I could never find a copy.

I've since been able to read it and I'd say that, while it's definitely a very early game in terms of its mechanics and production values, it's nevertheless excellently inspirational. At 32 pages, it contains just enough information to get the referee going but not so much as to prevent him from putting his own stamp on it. I still don't own a copy myself; I keep an eye out for them but they're generally ludicrously expensive and I can't justify spending that kind of money nowadays. In truth, I should probably pick up where my younger self left off and just create my own starship maps and use Mutant Future for the rules. Heck, I have this crazy idea of a supplement for MF called Generation Ship, which would basically be Metamorphosis Alpha with the serial numbers filed off and better production values. Maybe that's something worth considering ...

Retrospective: Rifts

As I edge into my elder years, I’m struck by how persistent one theme has been across the more than half-century of my life: The End of It All. Popular culture has long carried the conviction that, for all our technological advances and sophistication, civilization was always teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Ice ages, global warming, acid rain, killer bees, the Jupiter Effect (remember that?), alien invasions, nuclear war –again and again we were told humanity is on a one-way trip to ruin. This apocalyptic sensibility seeped into everything: books, movies, television, even roleplaying games.

Deeper considerations aside, it's easy to understand why: apocalypses offer unique opportunities for adventure. The breakdown of the old order creates lots of space for heroes and villains who make their own rules, just as ruined cities are the perfect places for such people to loot and explore. The post-apocalyptic world might not be a great place to live, but it often sounds like a great place to play an RPG, filled as it is with danger, mystery, and the promise of carving out something new amidst the wreckage of the old.

Over the years, there have been many post-apocalyptic RPGs, some of which I’ve greatly enjoyed. As readers know, I’m currently refereeing Barrett’s Raiders, my ongoing Twilight: 2000 campaign, so it’s a genre that has long appealed to me. That’s why, when Palladium Books released its own entry into the field, Rifts, in 1990, I took notice. Written by Kevin Siembieda, like most of Palladium’s output, the game now feels like the perfect encapsulation of its era’s RPG culture: exuberant, excessive, self-confident, and utterly unconcerned with its own contradictions. Even more than three decades later, Rifts remains both instantly recognizable and difficult to pin down. To call it merely a “post-apocalyptic” RPG misses the mark, because Rifts was (intentionally) never just one thing. It was a collision of genres and ideas – science fiction, fantasy, horror, superheroes – whose very incoherence was what made it so compelling.

At the time of its initial release, I was already familiar with Palladium through a few of the company's earlier releases, thanks in large part to my college roommate, who was a fan. Consequently, I wasn't surprised when I saw a big rulebook filled with evocative, comic-style artwork and Siembieda’s signature blend of dense rules and poor organization. What I wasn’t prepared for was the scope of its setting. Here was Earth, centuries after a magical cataclysm tore open rifts in space and time, unleashing every kind of horror, wonder, and menace imaginable. Dragons and demons rubbed shoulders with cyborg mercenaries, mutant animals, and alien warlords. The North American continent was a patchwork of techno-dystopias, barbarian kingdoms, and wildernesses haunted by supernatural predators. Almost anything was possible in Rift by design, since one of its purposes was to provide a setting where elements from other Palladium games could be dropped in easily.

The original rulebook – the only one I ever saw – had a clear appeal. Its black-and-white illustrations (by artists like Kevin Long and Siembieda himself) were part of its appeal. Likewise, its cover painting by Keith Parkinson immediately communicated the tone of Rifts: over-the-top, bombastic, and larger than life. Rifts didn’t just allow for power fantasies; it practically demanded them. Whereas Dungeons & Dragons offered a gradual "zero to hero" style of advancement, Rifts lets you begin the game as a cyber-knight, a near-invulnerable walking tank, or a ley line–powered sorcerer who can bend reality. 

That excess was both the game’s great strength and its great weakness. The rules were built on the already creaky Palladium system, with its notorious combination of percentile skills, mega-damage mechanics, and endless lists of powers, spells, and combat options, not to mention character classes. "Balance" of any kind is effectively nonexistent. A city rat with a pistol could be in the same party as a dragon hatchling with spellcasting and mega-damage claws, but the game's overall approach was, more or less, that Game Master can make it all work somehow. Honestly, that's not necessarily terrible advice, though I'm sure it wouldn't satisfy many gamers, especially nowadays. 

Looking back, Rifts is a fascinating snapshot of where the hobby was at the time. By 1990, D&D had already begun its transformation into an ever more baroque monstrosity with a plethora of options and settings, while White Wolf was just about to launch its World of Darkness storytelling games, forever changing the face of the hobby. Rifts, by contrast, reveled in excess, giving players the keys to the toy store and daring them to see what happened. The result was chaotic, but, based on what longtime fans tell me, immensely fun. In the years that followed, the flood of supplements, world books, and sourcebooks only expanded the game’s already immense scope, making it simultaneously baffling to outsiders but also exactly what its fans wanted.

Rifts will never win any awards for being elegant or balanced, but, speaking largely as a disinterested party, I think it largely succeeds on its own terms. It offers a vision of roleplaying that is anarchic, imaginative, and gloriously insane. For many in 1990, Rifts was a passport to a multiverse where every idea anyone ever had from comics, cartoons, or science fiction could live side by side. That’s no small achievement, even if it's not for everyone, myself included.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Before the Dark Years"

[Historical Note: The original version of this, from April 23, 2011, was not part of The Articles of Dragon series but a stand-alone post. However, since the article it discusses did appear in Dragon, it seemed appropriate to fold this report into my revival of the series.]

While the way that TSR looted the corpse of SPI was shameful (and likely had a deleterious effect on the wider hobby), it had one positive effect from the perspective of my youth: the advent of the "Ares Section" of Dragon. I've always been more of a sci-fi fan than a fantasy one, so knowing that every issue of Dragon would devote two or three articles to the genre each month was a good thing in my view. (This also probably explains why the issues of Dragon I was most fond of ran from 80s to the early 100s – corresponding very closely to the lifespan of the Ares Section).

Gamma World was well represented in the Ares Section, frequently presenting articles penned by creator James Ward, which I appreciated, given my obsession with official-dom. One of my favorite articles from Ward was published in issue 88 (August 1984), called "Before the Dark Years." It presents a historical timeline of the Gamma World setting, beginning (as all post-apocalyptic timelines do) in 1945 with the first use of nuclear weapons and ending in 2450, which was the approximate start of the 2nd edition of the game (1st edition began later, in 2471 – why the change, I wonder?).

It's true that the article appealed to me back then because it scratched a completist urge to know it all, an urge I have long since – and happily – abandoned. But back then it was simply awesome to know, for example, that the starship Warden was launched in 2290. Re-reading the article, I still love it, but for rather different reasons. I like it for entries like this one:

2322 – Processed-iced asteroid (guidance circuits damaged by terrorists) strikes Mars; eight-year duststorm and climatic disruption result. All colonies on planet isolated; Federation charter suspended for the duration.

Or this one:

2331 – Trans-Plutonian Shipyards assume control of their own programs and generate robotic "life."

The reason I love entries like these is that they hit home that Gamma World's apocalypse doesn't happen in the here and now but in a science fictional future. That ought to be obvious, given the presence Mark VII blasters and black ray guns and so forth, but, somehow, it's easy to forget, perhaps because, in the 70s and 80s, worrying about the End of All Things focused on the present, not the future. Indeed, lots of people didn't think there would be a future, thanks to the Damoclean threat of Armageddon.

Gamma World didn't take that approach. Instead, it's set in the future and the weapons that usher in the Dark Years include not just nuclear missiles but also "dimension-warp" devices and other weaponry undreamed of in our age. I think that set Gamma World apart from other post-apocalyptic games, imbuing it with a more "wondrous" quality and also, if I may wax sociological for a moment, making it a little less frightening to kids like me. The Morrow Project, to cite one example, postulates that the End would come in 1989 as a consequence of Cold War foolishness and, however absurd its specifics, that was a scenario many people genuinely believed might occur in their lifetimes. But a 24th century terrorist group called the Apocalypse? Using dimension-warp weapons and striking at not just Earth but space colonies as far away as the Oort Cloud? That's clearly fantasy and a lot less terrifying.

As I noted recently, my preferred way to play Gamma World is to treat the post-apocalyptic world as largely a blank slate, one utterly unfamiliar to the characters, who not only grew up generations removed form the Fall, but are played by people for whom even the pre-Fall world is alien. That pre-Fall world included settlements on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, is supported by robots, cyborgs, and A.I.s, and is launching extra-solar colonization efforts. That creates a lot of scope for terrific adventures and campaigns; I might even go so far as to say that, as developed in this and other articles, Gamma World provides a canvas every bit as large as that offered by Dungeons & Dragons. Sadly, the game has largely been treated as a joke by its custodians over the years, its full potential never quite realized and that's too bad.

Retrospective: Gamma World (Third Edition)

A couple of years ago, I broke with tradition and penned a Retrospective post on the second edition of Gamma World, despite having already written one on the original. I justified the decision by pointing to just how different second edition was, both in tone and presentation, from its predecessor. It stood as a vivid example of how Gamma World – and roleplaying games more broadly – were evolving in the early 1980s. By that same logic, the third edition of Gamma World, released in 1986, surely warrants a post of its own, as the differences it introduced were even more pronounced.

Since its debut in 1978, Gamma World has always seemed uncertain whether it wanted to be a madcap romp through a world of radioactive mutants or a more serious science fantasy game exploring its post-apocalyptic setting. That tension runs through every edition, but third edition feels like the first time it was intentional. I remember seeing ads for it in Dragon magazine at the time, and the cover, featuring Keith Parkinson’s vivid illustration, made a strong impression. It hinted at a bold new direction for the game, though I was struck less by its novelty than by its familiarity, having already seen the same image on a TSR calendar the year before.

If the first and second editions of Gamma World were clumsy but endearing offshoots of early D&D design – random, deadly, but bursting with imaginative potential – then the third edition marks a dramatic, and often jarring, departure. Released during a period when TSR was busy retooling many of its games in the wake of Marvel Super Heroes' success, third edition followed the lead of Star Frontiers and embraced the concept of a universal resolution system and its color-coded Action Table (ACT), column shifts, and result factors. While elegant in their original context, the ACT always felt awkward and ill-suited when retrofitted onto existing games. In Gamma World, it comes across less as a refinement and more as a mismatch – neat in theory, but clumsy in practice.

Third edition attempted to marry this new mechanical chassis to the conflicted sensibilities of earlier editions, but, in my view, the result was less than satisfactory. Combat resolution and mutation use now hinged on interpreting results from a chart – an abstraction that sapped much of the immediacy from play. Firing a Mark V Blaster was no longer a simple matter of “roll to hit, roll damage.” Instead, it became a multi-step procedure: find the appropriate ACT column, look at the result, then consult a separate chart to determine the weapon’s actual effect. One might argue this wasn’t dramatically more complex than previous systems, but for those of us who’d long ago internalized the old mechanics, it was anything but intuitive. At best, it felt like change for its own sake; at worst, a solution in search of a problem.

What also stood out – and not in a flattering way – was the presentation. The rulebook was stark and utilitarian in its layout, almost entirely bereft of artwork. What little art it did contain was mostly recycled from earlier editions, along with some lifted from Star Frontiers. A few original illustrations were scattered throughout, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Even the foldout map of Pitz Burke, a centerpiece of second edition, was repurposed here with minimal alteration. Worse still, key rules were split between the main rulebook and a separate “rules supplement” tucked into the box, fragmenting the material and giving the whole package a slapdash feel. It lacked the cohesion one expects from a fully realized edition, and instead felt cobbled together, more like a rushed repackaging than a thoughtfully constructed evolution.

Just as its mechanics felt awkwardly imposed, third edition’s treatment of the Gamma World setting also seemed diminished. Much of the evocative, if sketchy, setting material found in earlier editions was either stripped away or given only the most cursory attention. Take the cryptic alliances, for example: while they’re mentioned, their role in the world feels vague and perfunctory. Gone is the sense, so evident in second edition, that these shadowy factions were vital to understanding the post-apocalyptic landscape. The same could be said for many other aspects of Gamma World’s implied setting. It’s not that these elements are entirely absent, but that their inclusion feels scattershot and half-hearted. There’s a perfunctory, almost apathetic quality to the world-building in third edition, as if the designers were merely checking boxes rather than engaging with the material in a meaningful way. The result is a game that lacks the weird, half-glimpsed coherence that gave earlier editions their charm. It feels like a product made to fill a slot in the release schedule, not one born of creative enthusiasm.

Amidst its uneven mechanics and uninspired presentation, third edition nevertheless hinted at something more ambitious. Scattered throughout the rulebook – and more clearly in the adventure modules that followed – were the outlines of a broader campaign arc, one that seemed intended to link Gamma World to its spiritual progenitor, Metamorphosis Alpha. These modules presented ancient installations, buried technologies, and the tantalizing possibility of uncovering the true origins of the post-apocalyptic world. There were even whispers of the derelict starship Warden, as well as references to other planets and moons of the solar system, suggesting a much larger canvas than previous editions had dared to paint. That, more than anything else, remains the lasting appeal of third edition for me, the first edition to really toy with the fact that Gamma World's apocalypse belongs to the 24th century, not the 20th, and hinted at a setting far more expansive than mutant rabbits and ancient ruins.

Unfortunately, this promising thread was never fully developed. The planned module series was left incomplete and, with the arrival of Gamma World’s fourth edition in 1992, the game was rebooted once more. Any connections to Metamorphosis Alpha were quietly abandoned. Whatever larger vision might have existed was lost, leaving third edition as a curious dead end in the game’s evolution.

In the end, Gamma World Third Edition is a strange, transitional fossil, neither wholly broken nor particularly successful. It represents an attempt to modernize a legacy title by grafting onto it the mechanics of Marvel Super Heroes, but it does so without the conceptual clarity or setting depth needed to make that modernization feel purposeful. What was left is a game that is both overcomplicated and underdeveloped: a patchwork of ideas, some intriguing, others ill-suited, held together by a presentation that feels rushed and indifferent. Yet, for all its flaws, there remains a flicker of something more, an unrealized potential that somehow still has the power to capture my imagination, even if only in fragments.

Hope Among the Ruins

Owing to scheduling conflicts, my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign didn't meet this week. While we've striven to meet every week over the course of the three years and three months we've been playing, such hiccups aren't uncommon. Still, I can't deny I was a little bit disappointed, because this week would have been the first session in the campaign to take place on American shores. After three years of war on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the characters are finally home. 

The reason I was disappointed is that playing Twilight: 2000 in post-war America is something I've wanted to do since the late 1980s. In a very real sense, bringing Barrett's Raiders to this point is the culmination of a nearly forty(!) year-old dream of mine. Back when I originally played T2K, I only owned the first four adventure modules – The Free City of Krakow, Pirates of the Vistula, The Ruins of Warsaw, and The Black Madonna. These are all set in Poland, so my campaigns stayed in Eastern Europe rather than venturing elsewhere. 

Clearly, though, GDW had a great interest in seeing Twilight: 2000 characters return to the USA. After 1986's Going Home, the company produced nine modules set in America. With the exception of the first, Red Star, Lone Star, which dealt with a Soviet-backed Mexican invasion of Texas – think Red Dawn but a little more grounded – the modules were all notable for their focus on rebuilding the country after the nuclear strikes of 1997 and the chaos that followed. 

Granted, the modules still offered plenty of opportunities for violent mayhem, but it was generally directed toward opportunistic warlords and authoritarian New America cells, forces that need to be swept away before any kind of rebuilding might be possible. And while MilGov and CivGov are most definitely at odds with one another, neither side is demonized or reduced to a caricature. It's a messy situation that creates lots of scope for interesting situations and scenarios.

And that's what most excites me about Barrett's Raiders finally making the transition to the Not-So-United States of America. As American soldiers brought home from Europe by the US Military Emergency Administration, the characters are put in a difficult situation: continue to obey the Joint Chiefs despite their extra-constitutional assumption of authority or put themselves at odds with their former comrades in arms. It's a situation made all the more complicated by the equally dodgy authority of President Broward and the reconstituted Congress – to say nothing of the threat of New America and others taking advantage of the breakdown in civil society.

Twilight: 2000 got a reputation in some circles as an immoral power fantasy RPG that made light of the deaths of millions in nuclear war. I think only the most superficial reading of either the game or (especially) its adventure modules could support such a false conclusion. This is most definitely not a game about reveling in the collapse of civilization but rather one where the characters can actively participate in helping to reconstruct that civilization. As campaign frames go, that's a truly worthy one in my opinion, one I've wanted to explore with some friends for decades. Now that I'm finally getting the chance to do so, my enthusiasm is high. Expect increased posting about Twilight: 2000 and the events of the Barrett's Raiders campaign. 

The Articles of Dragon: "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures"

 

Quite often, the articles from Dragon magazine that I most remember are not those I ever made use of in my own games, but those that I didn't. There are probably many reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that, even in my youth, when I led a life relatively free of responsibility, I still had limited time. There were only so many games I could play at any given time and, inevitably, there'd be lots of ideas I'd have loved to make use of but didn't simply because I lacked the time to do so. To be fair, that's still a problem for me, even today. Consequently, these articles occupy by the same space as "the one that got away" does in the minds of fishermen – a might have been that continues to play on the imagination even years later.

That's certainly how I feel about "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures," which appeared in issue #68 (December 1982). Written by Arthur Collins, whom I consider one of the great unsung contributors to Dragon during the early to mid-1980s, this lengthy article offers ideas and rules modifications for playing AD&D during the Pleistocene era. Collins explains that he was inspired by Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, but, for me, the touchstone for Ice Age tales will always be Manly Wade Wellman's Hok the Mighty, which I first encountered in old copies of Fantastic my local library kept alongside issues of other SF and fantasy magazines.

For years, I'm not certain I could have explained exactly why I found the idea of Ice Age adventuring so compelling. Rereading the article in preparation for writing this post, though, I now think I understand it. For lack of a better word, the Ice Age is post-apocalyptic setting – not in the sense as it's usually meant, of course, but it's nevertheless a setting in which humanity (and other intelligent races) must struggle to survive in a very hostile world. Perhaps because I've never really lacked for anything in my life, I have a powerful fascination for settings in which characters have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or how they'll shelter themselves against merciless Mother Nature.

Collins spends a lot of time discussing the challenges of living during the Pleistocene, particularly when it comes to food. For example, he offers calculations on just how much game and grains a small tribe of Ice Age would need to gather during the course of a single year to stave off malnutrition. He even goes so far as to translate the meat into hit dice in order to quantify it in a way that makes sense within the context of AD&D. I have no idea how well his calculations would hold up to rigorous scrutiny, but they serve a very useful, practical purpose for referees and players alike, which is honestly what I want in an article like this. 

Collins also includes information on braving the weather of this period of history, though he doesn't go into quite as much detail as did David Axler in his "Weather in the World of Greyhawk." He devotes far more space to imagining what the standard AD&D races and monsters would be like in the Pleistocene world, which makes sense, I think. The key to articles like this is in providing enough new and variant rules to make the setting/time period feel distinct but not so many that employing them in play seems daunting. I feel Collins struck the right balance overall, though I do wish he'd take the opportunity to write a bit more about just what Ice Age adventures and campaigns might be like rather than just how they differ from more conventional AD&D play.

I'll conclude by saying that another aspect of this article that likely appealed to me as a young man was that it dared to stray even a little from the default faux medieval setting of Dungeons & Dragons (and indeed of fantasy more generally). While I was and remain a fan of using the Middle Ages as inspiration, I do find myself wishing gamers would occasionally try something else occasionally, whether based on a real world historical period or something completely imaginary. Fantasy need not be so cramped in its vision.

Retrospective: Dark Sun

Having devoted last week's Retrospective post to The Complete Psionics Handbook, my thoughts inevitably turned to 1991's Dark Sun campaign setting – a setting specifically created to provide a place for Second Edition AD&D fans to make full use of the game's new psionics rules without having to worry about the potentially adverse effects these psychic powers might have on, say, the Forgotten Realms or the World of Greyhawk. 

Designed by Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning, Dark Sun was presented as "a world ravaged by sorcery" and "the most challenging AD&D game world yet." This new setting took inspiration from both the post-apocalyptic and Dying Earth sub-genres, with a dash of Burroughsian sword-and-planet for good measure. Dark Sun was thus a significant departure from the vanilla fantasy of traditional D&D and AD&D. This departure wasn't just in terms of its content, but also its presentation, making ample use of the dark, edgy art of Gerald Brom and Thomas Baxa, two relative newcomers to TSR's stable of artists, who, together, created an esthetic for Dark Sun that clearly differentiated it from everything the company had previously done. 

Like all of TSR's settings for Second Edition, Dark Sun was released in a large, boxed set, filled to the brim with gaming materials. The two main components of the set were 96-page softcover books. The first of these, entitled simply "Rules Booklet," presented new and altered AD&D rules for use with the setting. The second, "The Wanderer's Journal," was an in-character presentation of the "arid and bleak" world of Athas, which is "beset by political strife and monstrous abominations, where life is grim and short." Also included was a 16-page booklet, "A Little Knowledge," which consists mostly of a short story but also includes details of an adventure. The adventure proper is presented in two small 24-page, spiralbound flip books, one of which has illustrations to show players, like those in Tomb of Horrors or Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Also included are poster maps of the city-state of Tyr and the region in which it's situated, known as the Tablelands.

Before getting on to the actual content of the boxed set, I'd like to say a little more about its presentation. Dark Sun is an impressive package. I remember when I got copy of it, being quite taken aback not only by how much was included in the set, but also by the unique format it took. This was particularly true in the case of the flipbooks, something I'd never seen previously in an AD&D product (or indeed any RPG product that I can recall). I suspect that they were intended as something of an experiment by TSR, one that carried over into most of the adventures subsequently published for the setting. I never really warmed to this format, which was in my experience quite unwieldy, which is one of the reasons I didn't buy any of those adventures. I'll get to the other reason shortly.

Athas itself is a very imaginative and engaging setting – sort of a cross between Barsoom and Zothique. As presented in "The Wanderer's Journal," the world's history is fragmentary at best. All that is certain is that present-day Athas is a shadow of its former self, its land ravaged by sorcery run amok and littered with the ruins of happier, more sophisticated times. Now, Athasian civilization is centered around scattered city-states, each ruled by an immortal sorcerer-king, who protects his subjects from the dangers of the wasteland in return for utter obedience. The sorcerer-kings also war amongst themselves, each attempting to expand his control of the Tablelands at the expense of his rivals, while various factions within and without attempt to take advantage of the situation. 

Though intended for use with AD&D 2e, Dark Sun makes many changes to the standard rules and assumptions of the game. Though all of the usual AD&D races are available, many are changed significantly, like the halflings, who are wild, feral beings reputed to engage in cannibalism. Joining them are new races, like muls (half-human/half-dwarf hybrids bred for their hardiness), half-giants, and thri-kreen. Character classes are similarly affected, with all being changed (or outright disallowed, like the paladin) in some way. Wizards, for example, must decide whether to increase their power by employing defiling magic that destroys the environment – the reason Athas is now barren – while clerics serve not gods, which don't exist in this setting, but the elemental forces of nature. 

Psionics also play a major role in Athas, with psionicists being common throughout the setting's population. Most intelligent beings – and many unintelligent ones, like monsters – are able to wield the powers of the mind. Psionics is, in many ways, more important in Dark Sun than is magic, though both have their place. In fact, magic and psionics can be employed together and it's explained that the sorcerer-kings owe their power and immortality to being able to wield both. "The Wanderer's Journal" suggests in various places that the relationship between magic and psionics played some sort of role in the ancient apocalypse that laid waste to Athas, thereby setting up a mystery that would be explored in later supplements and adventures.

This is where, in my opinion, Dark Sun faltered. The adventures produced for it all centered around major events within the setting, like the slave revolt that overthrows the sorcerer-king of Tyr and establishes it as a free city. Later adventures build upon these events, further changing and altering the setting as Big Things happen in accordance with a plan established by TSR. This isn't an inherently terrible way of developing a setting, though it's not my preference. However, what made it frustrating was that many of the setting's big events, like the aforementioned defeat of the sorcerer-king, are the result of actions by named NPCs, not the player characters. Furthermore, some of these events even happen in the pages of tie-in novels rather than adventures – a testament, I suppose, of just how popular and lucrative AD&D novels were in those days.

It's a pity, because Dark Sun is a genuinely imaginative and unique take on fantasy. Athas is a great setting, one with lots of possibilities for adventure, as well as a style and feel that differs from everything else that TSR was producing at the time. I was blown away by Dark Sun when I first bought it and really wanted to run a campaign with it. That never happened, for many reasons, but a big one was that I worried that TSR would, through its adventures or novels, derail whatever it was I had in mind with their event-driven releases. To be fair, the company did the same to the Forgotten Realms as well, but the Realms had the benefit of being standard fantasy and thus there was little need for any official guidance on how to use it. Athas, being new and different, would have benefited immensely from some better adventure material to aid referees looking to make use of the setting.

This is why Dark Sun will always be, for me, "the one that got away" – a fantasy setting that could have been fantastic and groundbreaking but instead never really achieved its full potential. A shame!

The Setting of Gamma World (Conclusion)

Having now spent far too much time delving into my collection of Gamma World rulebooks and supplements – and not even having even read them all – I think I'm now in a better position to offer some conclusions regarding its setting. In the interests of clarity and concision, I'll present these as number points.

1. It's often overlooked that Gamma World is a sequel of sorts to James M. Ward's first stab at a post-apocalyptic RPG, 1976's Metamorphosis Alpha. Like its descendant, MA is about mutants in a world gone mad after a civilization-ending disaster. The key difference is that the "world" of Metamorphosis Alpha is an interstellar generation ship launched from Earth in the late 23rd century – a setting that is unmistakably in our future.
2. I mention this because I think it's important to understanding the background to Ward's own conception of the setting of Gamma World, namely that of Metamorphosis Alpha writ large, so as to encompass the entire Earth.
3. However, it's clear that, from a fairly early stage in its development, Gamma World was never the sole product of James M. Ward. At the very least, Gary Jaquet had an influence over its development, as likely did Tom Wham, Timothy Jones, and even Gary Gygax. Each injected their own ideas into the game, diluting Ward's original vision of a high-tech apocalypse occurring several centuries into our future.
4. Consequently, the setting of the 1978 Gamma World rulebook is something of a mishmash, consisting of a strongly high-tech science fictional foundation atop of which were added numerous elements that don't quite comport with it.
5. While the non-Ward elements of Gamma World don't wholly undermine the implication that the setting is a futuristic one, they do muddy the waters quite a bit, thereby lending credence to the common belief that the End comes in the relatively near future rather than the 24th century.
6. There was never a strong editorial hand on the Gamma World game line, especially in its early years. Therefore, each release for the game is sui generis, reflecting the tastes and ideas of the authors who created them. The fact that Ward himself never wrote a single stand-alone scenario for the game line during its first and second editions did little to clarify the situation.

Ultimately, there is no single Gamma World setting, however much James M. Ward might have intended otherwise. That said, I personally believe that the game makes the most sense – to the extent that that's even possible – as being set in the aftermath of a future apocalypse. That's certainly the frame I'll use, when I finally get around to starting up a Gamma World campaign. Your mileage may vary.

The Setting of Gamma World (Part V)

Before presenting my final thoughts on this topic, I wanted to take a brief look at one other aspect of Gamma World that sheds a little more light on its setting: cryptic alliances. The 1978 rulebook has this to say on the subject:

As if the monsters and creatures of GAMMA WORLD weren't fearsome enough, many of them have banded together into secret or semi-secret organizations called CRYPTIC ALLIANCES. Some are remnants of organizations that existed in the Shadow Years ... some are of very recent origin. 

Very little else is said about cryptic alliances in general. However, the descriptions of several of them include tidbits of information that offer some insight into their origins in the pre-apocalyptic world. For example, the Brotherhood of Thought was "founded by a biochemist who survived the holocaust," while the Healers were "founded by a medical technician during the Shadow Years." The rulebook of the 1983 second edition of the game is even more spare on such historical details (though, to its credit, it includes much more information on the present activities of the various alliances).

Issue #25 of Dragon (May 1979), however, includes an article by the game's creator, James M. Ward, with the rather banal title of "A Part of Gamma World Revisited." The article looks more closely at the cryptic alliances, with an eye toward their use in an ongoing campaign. In several instances, though, Ward also reveals information that grounds them more strongly in the setting. For instance, the Brotherhood of Thought mentioned above is described as having been 

started by a biochemist from the University of California that was putting the finishing touches on an ecological monitoring station in the mountains near the university. The time of the "great destruction" pulverized the campus while Dr. Dotson and two assistants were at the station ... The years went by and that scientist and his assistants had sons and daughters that carried on their work.

The article mentions a leader within the alliance named Elenor, who is called a "5th generation granddaughter to the first biochemist." There is thus a direct, lineal connection between an important figure in the 25th century Brotherhood of Thought and its pre-apocalyptic antecedent. Meanwhile, the article describes the aforementioned Healers as having its origin in

a group near Duluth, Minnesota [begun] by a number of med-technicians that had been working on sleep therapy and accidentally made a vast break through in artificial telepathy through electrode induction. 

This is another case where setting details reveal the wonders of pre-holocaust high technology.  

Prior to the introduction of the Empire of the Sun, the cryptic alliances were among the most cohesive organizations to exist in the setting of Gamma World. Even so, they're stretched thin across North America. Several, as described by Ward in his Dragon article, have a fortified base somewhere on the continent, but, unless your campaign happens to be set in an area close to one of them, the player characters are most likely to encounter the cryptic alliances in small, often secretive groups, hence the adjective "cryptic" used to describe them.

When I played a lot of Gamma World in my youth, the cryptic alliances fascinated me, in large part because they were the only power groups described in the game. Each had an overriding philosophy or worldview, as well as an agenda. The cryptic alliances were working toward – or against – something and that made them very easy to use in a campaign, whether as allies or antagonists. Still, I was frustrated by how little any of them had achieved. Despite their presence, the setting of Gamma World largely remained a shattered wasteland, even more than a century after the End, which seemed unlikely to me. Unfortunately, published materials, as we have seen in previous entries in this series, provided scant – and often contradictory – answers to this and most other questions.

Interlude II: The Empire of the Sun

In an earlier post, I drew attention to a Gamma World article that appeared in the pages of the Polyhedron RPGA 'zine. The article described an attack against a major Radioactivist base by a giant fighting machine called an "Aquabot." The nature and origin of the Aquabot are left a mystery, though it is heavily implied that its appearance heralds the introduction of something else into the Gamma World setting.

That something else is revealed in issue #101 of Dragon (September 1985), in two connected articles. The first is entitled "Out of the Sun ..." by James M. Ward and Roger Raupp, whose names are also attached to the earlier Polyhedron article. This article details more "man-machines" like the Aquabot, such as the AATAAV (Airborne All-Terrain Armored Attack Vehicle), along with their game statistics. 

The second article, by Roger E. Moore, is entitled "The Empire of the Sun" and is, in my opinion, the more significant of the two, particularly from the point of view of the setting of Gamma World. This article describes the titular Empire of the Sun as "not so much a cryptic alliance as a true nation, one of the few in existence in the Dark Years." The Empire controls the island of Honshu but has bases across the Pacific Ocean and the coasts of eastern Asia and western North America.

Prior to the appearance of this article, the setting of Gamma World was seemingly devoid of large polities or states. There's the Barony of Horn in Legion of Gold, but it's a very small scale, localized thing. Likewise, there are hints here and there that some of the cryptic alliances (about which I'll talk at greater length in another post) maintain large, city-like strongholds, from which they send out their forces. However, none of these could really be called a state or nation. Thus, the Empire of the Sun is a genuinely new thing within the setting, as is the fact that it appears to be engaging in a campaign of conquest across the post-apocalyptic Earth.

Just as interesting is the fact that the Empire owes its existence to pre-apocalypse military personnel of the Asian Coalition, who "were hustled into suspended animation chambers in a major undersea base off the coast of Honshu, and thus survived the cataclysm." These soldiers "were revived in 2431 and since then have slowly spread across the Pacific Ocean, scouting out the remains of the world." Even more interesting is the goals of the Empire: "to bring order out of the chaos of the world, using the most efficient means possible." 

One can quibble about the wisdom of introducing anime-style mecha into the setting of Gamma World. I must confess that, even at the time this article first appeared, I had some qualms about it. Conversely, the idea of pre-apocalypse humans being reawakened a century later and seeking to restore order to a world gone mad is really quite compelling, but then I've I like the idea behind The Morrow Project, so what do I know? Regardless, "The Empire of the Sun" is, I believe, an important and often overlooked addition to Gamma World, one that strongly suggests its setting is potentially much more dynamic and larger in scope than the popular conception of it. 

The Setting of Gamma World (Part IV)

The second – and last – product TSR published for the first edition of Gamma World is 1982's Famine in Far-Go. Written by Michael Price, the module was written "as an introductory adventure" and "to aid the GM in starting an ongoing GAMMA WORLD™ science fantasy game campaign." From that perspective, I'd say it's a qualified success – qualified, because it both leans heavily into the "primitive barbarians roaming the wasteland" version of Gamma World and because it's littered with lots of details that undermine the idea that the game's setting is centuries into our future.

As a brief aside, I wanted to mention that, when I first got this module, I assumed – mistakenly, as it turns out – that the Far-Go of the title was not the most populous city in North Dakota. Having recently looked at a map of the region, it's now clear that it is. In my vague defense, the module's background section that the settlement of Far-Go is so named "in memory of [the] long and dangerous trek" made by its first inhabitants to reach its present location. This is, however, a just-so story and Far-Go really does seem to be Fargo, North Dakota. Go figure.

Now that I mention it, the location of Famine in Far-Go is relevant to the subject at hand. Here's the players' map included in with the module:

I'm not sure that it's easily visible in the image above, but there are three "old high-speed roadways used by the Ancients," called "the Great Oad," "the 10," and "the 94." These are, respectively, Interstate 29, US Route 10, and Interstate 94. As depicted on the map, these roads all look like typical 20th century asphalt-covered highways with painted median strips. They're also (more or less) in the exact same locations that they occupied in the early 1980s. The Gamma World rulebook does state that, while "most roads ... have been destroyed ... some portions of a vast highway system for air-cushioned vehicles (similar to our interstate highway system) remain due to the incredibly tough duralloy metal from which it was constructed." No mention of this construction is mentioned in Famine in Far-Go, but if one is charitable, one could interpret its silence on the matter as consonant with the rulebook's statement. Still, the near-identity of the 20th century arrangement to that of the 24th seems implausible to me.

A bigger issue with the module is the presence of a large number of 20th century in-jokes and meta-humor among the treasures found in it. For example, the very first detailed encountered includes "an old, thin, damaged plastifax book" whose cover is torn so that "the only word that remains of the title is 'GAMMA.'" Moreover, inside the book is "a small plastic card" that "bears the hologram of a bearded man in pre-holocaust clothing. Below the picture is the inscription, 'Executive Pass, E.G.G., Pres.'" There's a GM Note after all of this that says, in relation to the book that "this item can be an amusing one if you have the desire to make it so." In another early encounter, the characters come across "an experimental counter-intelligence mechanism developed by certain Eastern European countries just before the onset of the great holocaust." The item bears three letters on it, "DDR," which I can only assume are the initials of Deutsche Demokratische Republik, which is to say, Communist East Germany. Once again, we have an out of place 20th century reference that makes little sense in Gamma World's future setting.

Then, there's this:

For those of you unfamiliar with American collegiate sports, that's Buckingham "Bucky" Badger, the mascot of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the Timothy Truman illustration above, he's being adored as a deity by Badders, the mutant badgers of the game setting. I must admit that I chuckled when I saw this, but it seems more like something from Jack Kirby's Kamandi comics than the setting described in Gamma World. Mind you, American universities take their sports very seriously, so maybe they'll retain their mascots unchanged hundreds of years into the future. On the other hand, the Badders' warren also includes the wreck of "1995 model Lincoln Continental Mark IX car," which doesn't seem like something that should still be around after centuries.

The central location of Famine in Far-Go is the La Prix Industries Automated Chicken Processing Factory. For the most part, the description of the factory is much more in keeping with the 25th century setting of Gamma World. The facility is filled with computers and a few robots, in addition to a nuclear power station. Now inhabited by mutant chickens descended from those originally housed here for poultry, the place is a decent example of what the GW rulebook calls a "mech-land" or robot farm. Of course, there are still a couple of in-jokes and 20th century references, like the presence of the book Animal Farm and "a magazine called Best of DRAGON™ Vol. 53."

Famine in Far-Go is thus another mixed bag when it comes to fleshing out the setting of Gamma World. The module mostly sticks to the script laid down in the first edition rulebook, but it still contains an inordinate number of references to things from the 20th century that simply don't make sense. My feeling is that this represents less a failure of imagination on the part of the writer – though that likely does play a role – and more a desire to include elements the players will recognize while their characters will not. I'm not at all opposed to that, nor do I think situational humor is necessarily inappropriate in a post-apocalyptic setting. Rather, I simply wish these elements were more clever, or at least less obvious. However, this is a constant issue with Gamma World products and not at all unique to Famine in Far-Go.

The Setting of Gamma World (Part III)

I've written before about Legion of Gold and my love for it, so I will do my best to avoid gushing about it in this post. Instead, I want to focus on what the module – the first full-length one to be published for Gamma World and by Gary Gygax no less – says about the game's setting and how this information jibes with what is stated or implied elsewhere.

When I talk about Legion of Gold, I sometimes compare it to another Gygax-penned adventure module, The Keep on the Borderlands, even though the comparison is not exact. In both, the player characters have a "home base" – the titular Keep in B2 and the City of Horn in Legion of Gold – from which they can launch their exploration of the surrounding areas. Where they differ is that, while the D&D module is set in a "true" wilderness far from the borders of civilization, its Gamma World equivalent takes place in a region whose relative stability is being disrupted by the incursions of a terrible new enemy.

The very existence of the City of Horn and of more than a dozen other settlements within the larger Barony of Horn shows – quite reasonably in my opinion – that, 150 years after the End, civilization has been re-established, albeit on a quasi-medieval model, both socially and technologically. This is in contrast to the common assumption among many players that the post-apocalyptic Earth of Gamma World is a wasteland peopled entirely by primitive tribes. I can somewhat understand the origins of this assumption. Many GW adventures, like Famine in Far-Go, which I'll discuss in the next post in this series, start off with the characters being members of such a tribe about to embark on their first foray outside their traditional tribal lands. That's a perfect kick-off to a campaign, but it's not the only possible one. One of the many reasons I like Legion of Gold is that it presents another possibility.

Though the Barony of Horn is modeled on a walled medieval city, it's not entirely devoid of Ancient technology. Indeed, Baron Jemmas has a stockpile of high-tech weapons and vehicles in his possession, some of which he gives to his elite soldiers to employ in defense of Horn. This situation makes eminent sense to me, since there are probably a lot of Ancient devices lying around and possession of them would give one a significant advantage over one's enemies. In any case, Legion of Gold makes it very clear that human civilization is already in the process of rebuilding. The characters should thus not be surprised to encounter law and order of a rough sort in many regions, though obviously nothing as sophisticated as what was found prior to the End.

Throughout the module, there are occasionally references to historical events from the past. These events all take place in our own future, but they're consistent with what's implied elsewhere about the game's setting. Thus, we see mention of "a period of cold war between 2150 and 2193," during which time "the rapid advancement of beam and robotic weaponry was constantly shifting the balance of power," as well as an underwater research facility established in 2284 by order of the "Secretary of Technological Advancement" of the United States of America. Furthermore, free willed androids act as antagonists during one portion of the adventure and the Legion of Gold itself is the work of a rogue "control computer" with the ominous name of REAPER. There is thus no mistaking the fact that, as presented by Legion of Gold, Gamma World takes place in a world several centuries hence.

Nevertheless, some of the problems I commented upon on Part I of this series remain in evidence. Included among the new weapons are things like rifled muskets and shotguns that arguably shouldn't have existed into the 24th century. The module's text seems to recognize this issue and attempts to justify them as having "persisted for purposes of target shooting, hunting, and self-protection." Of more concern (to me anyway) are the additional items offered up as random treasure, like plastic cutlery, can openers, telephone books, and even polyhedral dice. As before, they seem to be simply examples of meta-humor by Gygax and his co-authors rather than anything intended to undermine Gamma World's setting, but I dislike them nonetheless. 

Like "The Albuquerque Starport," Legion of Gold largely comports with the idea that the game is set after the fall of a high-tech society several centuries in advance of our own. More important, I think, is that it's the first time we're offered a glimpse of any kind about the setting's "Big Picture." What are the surviving descendants of that high-tech future doing a century and a half later? How have they organized themselves? What do they know about the past and to what extent do they make use of the devices of the Ancients? These are questions that Gamma World had never answered before. Even if you take issue with the answers Gygax and company offered – though I personally like them – I find it difficult not to be pleased that they made an effort at all. Therefore, what Legion of Gold really provides is a sense of what the setting of Gamma World is like (or may be like) in its present, not just its past. That's not nothing and, I would argue, gives prospective players and referees a helpful model to inspire their own campaigns.

The Setting of Gamma World (Part II)

The first edition of Gamma World was published in 1978, but did not receive any official support from TSR until 1981, when the company released both the Referee's Screen and Legion of Gold. What makes the former worthy of discussion is its inclusion of an 8-page "mini-module," written by Paul Reiche III and developed by Lawrence Schick. Entitled "The Albuquerque Starport," it offers not really an adventure but the description of three different locales, each of which could serve as the basis for one or more scenarios on their own, or in tandem. 

As its title suggests, "The Albuquerque Starport" takes the futuristic setting of Gamma World as a fact. Indeed, the mini-module places it front and center, since the three locales it describes are the starport itself, a passenger space shuttle, and a space station in orbit above the Earth. All of these locales include details and elements that hit home that GW's apocalypse occurred several hundred years in our future. Indeed, I'll go so far as to say that "The Albuquerque Starport" is the most clearly futuristic of all the products released for the first edition of the game.

That said, the starport section is probably the weakest in this regard, since it is clearly modeled on what commercial airports were like at the time it was written. There is, for example, a restaurant (with cash register), a gift shop, and baggage claim area. However, in many cases, Reiche made an effort to "futurize" what he describes. Thus, the restaurant is "totally automated" and served by robots, as is the kitchen that serves it ("filled with all manner of cooking apparatus, including a quark-powered cooker, a selenium stone, and a maxi-boron boiler."). You'll still find references to "paperback novels" in the gift shop, as well as paper, pencils, and keys – why not staged I.D. devices? – that reflect a 20th century reality, alongside the robots, broadcast power receiving stations, and nervium-12 anti-theft gas.

The description of the shuttle is short, but, by necessity, it demonstrates the high-tech nature of the pre-apocalyptic world. Aboard the vessel, there are "tri-vid amusement games," a null-grav jump shaft instead of an elevator, "acceleration couches," and similar wonders of the Ancients. Like so many things in the mini-module, the shuttle is fully automated, which is convenient, since it means the player characters aren't required to figure out its workings in order to be able to make use of it. That's both a dramatic contrivance and precondition for their reaching the third section of the mini-module, the space station.

The space station is where "The Albuquerque Starport" tells us the most about the setting of Gamma World. The docking pods of the station, whose floors are covered by "bright shag rug[s]," – a concession to the 1970s? – have posters that advertise "the splendors of the cloud cities of Jupiter, the intra-ring pleasure ports of Saturn, and many other famous vacation spots around the solar system." With that, Reiche paints a picture of a solar system-spanning human civilization that I've always found very intriguing. 

Shortly thereafter, he describes "matter transmitter pads" that "once transported shuttle passengers to the large outbound starships located farther out in orbit," Star Trek-style. The reference to starships is suggestive, implying that mankind had in fact traveled beyond the aforementioned pleasure ports of Saturn to other star systems. This implication is proven to be correct, when the dreaded Canpous plague is described as "an alien disease brought back to Earth by long-range scoutships in the early 2300's." The star Canopus is more than 300 light years away from our solar system. Even if these long-range scoutships were unmanned, it suggests, at the very least, that, prior to the End, humans were well on their way toward exploring the galaxy. 

Finally, the space station section includes "The Moon Survival Store," where "specialized survival gear for travelers going to the moon" can be found – once again implying regular travel beyond the Earth. There are a variety of high-tech pharmaceuticals to be found, in addition to clothing made from "rayon, nylon, dacron, ultron, and other man-made fabrics." None of these things play a significant role aboard the station and are unlikely to be important to the player characters. Nevertheless, they help to paint a picture of a futuristic world – or at least what someone from the late '70s or early '80s might have imagined such a world to look like.

As a kid, I simply adored "The Albuquerque Starport," though I doubt I could have articulated why beyond, "I like spaceships" or something equally banal. Now, as I look at it more critically, I realize that its appeal lies in the way it brings the futuristic elements of Gamma World's setting to the foreground. In addition, it expands that setting beyond Earth and starts my mind wondering, "What happened to Earth's interplanetary settlements and installations? Did they survive the End intact or did they suffer their own catastrophes?" That it does both these things in the span of only six pages of text makes it all the more remarkable.