Introducing... the Ancients?

I'm not sure whether the Ancients ever played a direct role in any Gamma campaign but to me it always seemed pretty obvious that there should be some place in Gaia Gamma, where enclaves of Ancients still survive. Probably even in a pretty unaltered form, sheltered by ancient fortresses from the havoc they caused. Maybe working on rebuilding the world, maybe trying to alter it even more and maybe following some ultimately extremely sinister scheme far beyond the grasp of Gaia Gammas new inhabitants.

Starting to work on altered animals

After a week-long hiatus from Gaia Gamma I am slowly recovering from my conference week. While all the evenings of this week again already have been taken by various business appointments I nonetheless slowly will restart my work on Gaia Gamma. At the weekend I procured quite a number of beautiful new images for my RPGs in progress and among them were a decent amount of pictures that depict altered animals. The image to the right is done by Bradley K. McDevitt and it is one of several beautiful pictures I am going to use in Gaia Gamma.

Naming the genotypes (part II)

While doing various minor things I am still wrestling with the best names for the planned genotypes. After some pondering I am currently stuck with the following setup:

Metamorphosis Alpha: To the stars and beyond

Metamorphosis Alpha for a long time has been a distant dream for me. I totally loved the idea behind the RPG since I first ever read about it. But that was a long time ago and there was no Internet, no eBay and I was in Germany. Far away from TSR and its games.

Cryptic Alliances: The Harbingers of Doom

Sometimes images are bad, sometimes images are decent, sometimes images are good and sometimes images are... images. That blow you away. That spark your creativity and that blow your nerve fibres into a state of total exhilaration. For me this happened a couple of days with the picture depicted below.

Archetyping with boons

My most recent ideas concerning character classes were running along the lines of strengthening archetypical concepts with skill area specializations (then called talents). I have renamed talents to boons (mostly for abbreviation purposes - a talent level (TL) would have conflicted with a tech level). Now we will have boon levels (BL) which are calculated by an easy formula and specify the detailed effects of boons chosen.

Naming the genotypes

While working on the character background options for Gaia Gamma I noticed that I'm not yet happy with the names of the genotypes available to the player. Some sound very similar and I would like to have more distinct names.

Going even more old school...

Just as a quick mention I have created yet another blog. While thinking about the Gaia Gamma rules I really noticed my growing interest in finally understanding the feel and the philosophy of the first RPG rules ever published, especially to better understand the improvements brought to the world by both Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World 1st edition. The result is The Fantasy Game, a blog researching the OD&D rules. Enjoy!

(And no: The Gaia Gamma blogging speed should not deteriorate - this still is priority one and as the goal is finite I hope to continue with at least one post per day).

Lores as skills or additional talents?

In one of my initial posts on skills, skill areas and character classes roguewombat proposed to use a system of wises inspired by the Mouse Guard RPG. Wises modify the use of other more active skills by providing bonusses in appropriate situations. I have given this some more thought and now have a stance concerning using the approach for Gaia Gamma.

Elaborating PC backgrounds in Gaia Gamma

On Grognardia James raised a very interesting point concerning the cover of Gamma World 1st edition: The cover shows a situation that is not possible given the rules provided in the book - a group of pure strain humans with high tech equipment is preparing to explore a ruined city. Such a setup is not possible with the given rules, which IMHO is a shame.

Gamma May: The glowing near-future

May seems to be becoming a very good month for Gamma Game afficionados. Besides me trying to keep up with the post rate of "at least one per day" for May, too, James over at Grognardia announced to dedicate the month of May towards a Gamma World retrospective.

Abbreviations for primary and secondary attributes

Today's post probably will be one of the stranger ones in this blog. But I'm feeling like having a zen moment of game design right now. While paging through release 6 of Gaia Gamma and fiddling with stuff for release 7 I noticed a minor detail that I subconsciously had been following in order to make the design even smoother.