Gaia Gamma release 6

I'm happy to announce release 6 of the living Gaia Gamma rules. As usual you can find the download in the navigation to the right. Release 6 represents an important step in the development of Gaia Gamma as it contains a number of widespread improvements.

The most important additions and changes include:

• The various rules discussed in the past two weeks in the blog have been added (adjustments to pure strain humans, revised skill scores, the foundation for artifacts, initial skill descriptions, sizes, etc.).
• Lots of artwork, credits for contributions and the official OSR logo for Gaia Gamma have been added.
• The table of content has been structured in more detail. As a consequence it has grown by about 30%. The layout of the table of content also has been refined.
• An opening chapter about the end of the world (together with vivid imagery of the Final War) has been added to introduce players to the background of Gaia Gamma.
• The dice rules have been expanded by more die notations and explanations about how to handle modifiers.
• The character generation chapter now contains more details and references to the actual content chapters.
• The section about secondary attributes slowly is getting into shape. The images for size comparisons are one of the major additions (together with the size rules).
• I have started writing the skill descriptions. For now this has been stalled as comments to earlier blog posts about skills suggested that it might be a good idea to add a system of "wises", basically knowledge areas (instead of knowledge skills) that add modifiers to active skill rolls. I'm not yet sure about how to proceed with this and will post my thoughts about it in a future blog post pretty soon.
• Work on the combat rules has begun, again with sections about size and another new part about split, swipe and stomp attacks. The ideas behind these rules will be discussed in an upcoming blog post.
• Rules for the changes that happen when advancing a level have been added. Again these will be discussed in another blog post.
• Work on cryptic alliances has started, with the Church of Oppenheimer being the first one to receive some attention.
• Optional rules for distributing mutations have been added.
• A bibliography has been begun, influenced by the recent posts about Gamma Games and Gamma Movies.

In total the rules manual has grown from 24 to 41 pages although many of the pages still are just empty frames with headlines, preparing the manual for the next additions to come. Overall I intend to focus on character generation for now in order to be able to create characters as soon as possible. Pure strain humans will be the first genotype that can be used completely (as I don't need to write up the many mutations for them) with robots and cyborgs probably going last as I still do not feel very inspired about them - maybe they even will have to go as player genotypes. We'll have to see.

So that's it for today. Enjoy the new version of the rules and let me know what you think. Now is the time to shape Gaia Gamma!