Announcing: Gamma World Guide, Grand Unified Junk Table, and the Junkulator
As part of our continuing Gamma World coverage, we bring to you today our Gamma World Guide, collecting a number of useful links throughout the web for your games.
However, we haven’t just brought you a new guide like our Skill Challenges guide… we’ve created a new tool for use in your Gamma World games.
It started with Jared von Hindman of Head Injury Theater, who recently did a lot of research on Gamma World, discussing random junk tables. I got in contact with him, and from our combined files, I typed up all the entries from older editions of Gamma World (and a few supplements.) I did some editing and trimming and dropped all 800-some items into a massive spreadsheet, along with a few surprises. We called this mega-list the Grand Unified Junk Table.
From there, Vanir put the whole thing into a database, and started coding a random generator to pull out pieces of junk and display them. The three of us tossed ideas back and forth (adding to the coding workload, as these things go), Jared contributed some more art. And so the three of us present…
The Junkulator, the result of our efforts. The Junkulator pulls a random piece of junk from the Grand Unified Junk Table, assigns it a random condition (also culled from various GW editions), gives it an image from Google Image search, and displays the result. You can get a single piece of junk, or 1d4+1 pieces of junk for your starting set. You can also display the Grand Unified Junk Table in its entirety and print it out if you want an offline chart to roll on. The result doesn’t always make sense, but hey, that seems appropriate enough.
We hope you enjoy the GW Guide and the Junkulator, and thanks both to Jared and Vanir for making it happen. Speaking of which, Jared contributed an article about the history of the junk tables in Gamma World, so be sure to check it out for some extra context and commentary.
And while you’re at it, check out the rest of Critical Hits Presents: Drinking Dungeons & Dragons and our events at DDXP 2011. Of course, there’s more on the way…
Gamma World: You Can’t Handle All This Junk
“What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside your trunk?”
-Black Eyed Peas, “My Humps”
Hi there, Gamma Boys, Girls, Androgynous Robots, Plants, and indiscernible Others. What we’re going to talk about today is the Junk. Junk that’s survived the test of time. But first, Trivia! How did we get here?
For me, it involved doing way too much research for my D&D Alumni Drop-Out article on the long history of Gamma World. I tore through book after book, edition after edition, trying to wrap my head around what the essence of the Gamma World experience was all about. Thing was, I overlooked a major component, mostly because I think I have an allergy to what was cool about old-school gaming: Charts.
It wasn’t until I saw the Ancient Junk table on pg 81 that something started popping back into my mind, like that Gummi Bear song or that one time at Summer Camp you’re supposed to have forgotten about. Fast Forward a bit to me torturing my players by forcing them to roll random to get terrible treasure crafted by the infamous James Ward or Gygax themselves, a Twitter joke about having these charts lying around, and huzzah: The Critical Hits crew steps up and makes Gygax’s Junk available to all. That….sounds wrong some how, but such is the fun of talking about Gamma World and a word that’s versatile enough to refer to Twinkies, Chinese merchant vessels, broken alarm clocks, and genitalia. So don’t judge me.
On topic: The Grand Unified Junk table has terrible things from all editions….that had Junk tables. Sure, they might have been called Loot or Treasure, but anyone who played knew they mostly contained something that you’d be embarrassed to have…or ashamed to be excited to have. The White Wolf & Alternity editions, being serious expeditions into Gamma Terra, had nothing to stuff inside my trunk. The others? Oh my. Here’s a brief rundown, followed by some of my personal favorites that just might convince you that the Grand Unified Junk Table needs to be let into your heart (or hearts, if you have more than one). [Read the rest of this article]
Dancing Tentacles
I might not look it, but I’m pretty good at Dance Dance Revolution. I know this might seem unlikely, especially for those of you who have seen me. I’m 6’3”, 280 pounds, and as gangly and uncoordinated as they come. I very much think my parents rolled a 4 or 5 for my DEX score. My life is a game of pinball, where I am the ball. When I was 6, my mom was walking me to school, and I somehow managed to fall off a curb and embed my teeth (and several ounces of gravel) into my lower lip while holding her hand. I was not built for physical activity.
Despite this, I have somehow managed to survive 20 years of karate training. I have no illusions that I have somehow become more coordinated as a result of this; to wit, my sparring partners facing me described as “an angry jungle made of arms and legs” or (as my BFF/dojo-mate Dante from Stupid Ranger puts it so eloquently) “like fighting a giant bag that contains kittens, hundreds of elbows, and also some musk”. I’ve also been told I am very fast for someone my size. This is great, at best. The other 99% of the time it just means I have hurled myself and my tentacles at my opponent at terrifying speed and nobody knows what is about to happen.
My first exposure to dance-genre gaming was a PSX title called Bust A Groove. Well, I thought it was, anyway. Bust A Groove was played with a controller just like everything else. Dance Dance Revolution is not – it is usually played on a dance pad, where you step on arrows in time to the music. When I first played DDR, I just thought it was some variant of Bust A Groove, so I tried it with a controller (the arrows are mapped to the D-pad) and I was astounded at how quickly I became overwhelmed as soon as I ventured beyond easy. I became far more overwhelmed once somebody brought over a dance pad. Everyone who tried it was reduced to giggles as they proceeded to make a fool of themselves and we all would quit after awhile after getting frustrated.
I really don’t know why my roommate Ryan and I kept playing as long as we did. At first, we’d go to our friend’s dorm room who had the dance pads to play every day. It wasn’t too long before we were at the arcade a couple times a week, dropping $10 on the arcade machine and its FAR superior dance surface (the plastic dance mats are not even remotely capable of handling someone of my mass – I have destroyed a good half-dozen of them). It became a ritual, and we kept at it for months. Soon, we started playing progressively more difficult songs, eventually working ourselves up to 8 or 9 foot (very hard) songs. I’ll never forget the day we finished a song and noticed we had drawn a crowd of 12 year old girls who then clapped and cheered. I almost wept. With joy.
It’s important to note at this point that when I play DDR, just like everything else I do, a flailing mass of arms and legs somehow makes it happen. It is not a pretty sight. Additionally, a peculiar thing happens to me when I start getting too tired playing DDR – my core muscles loosen and my top and bottom half become independent of each other. Then, two things happen. First, my arms retract until I am holding them as a T-Rex might. Second, my dancing begins to resemble that of a drunken pirate. The “Pirate Dance”, as it became known, is basically my DDR equivalent to Ultraman’s chest-light beginning to flash. I only had a few more songs left before my superpowers fade (and I risk crashing headfirst through the screen).
With the amount of money I was dropping at the arcade every week, I decided it made financial sense to pick up a Cobalt Flux pad. Made of metal and fiberglass and not quite as sturdy as an arcade machine, but about $4,000 cheaper, these could withstand my might. Still, they weren’t cheap at about $300. As it happened, I found a friend willing to sell me one for a bit less, and for a few days it was DDR paradise at my apartment. Then a funny thing happened.
We stopped playing DDR. Almost entirely.
To this day, I have no idea why we stopped. Several years, a marriage, and a house later, my wife and I decided it might be fun to work out to DDR together, so I bought another Cobalt Flux pad. I still have both of them. After another week of DDR paradise, they’ve been used exactly once, at a party I threw when (after what I believe may have been some sort of intoxicating beverage) I showed everyone that yes, I can in fact play Double Mode. I have no clue what to do with them. (Best plan so far: pressing leaves and flowers beneath them. You know, for all my crafts.) I’m sure many of you out there have made similar purchases, fitness-related or otherwise, and had your spouse huff and ask if you are buying “another thing that’s just going to take up space”. Sadly, my wife is right to huff and ask this, as the DDR pads were not the last such paperweights to grace my home. Two years ago, it was Wii Fit. I used it for about a month. It got boring, and then it got shelved.
Now, I pin my hopes on a new device: Microsoft’s Kinect. I have to admit, it was a little weird to have my first thought upon hearing about the Kinect be “wow, fitness games without a controller”. (I do feel slightly redeemed though, as my second thought was “LIGHTSABER GAME PLZ KTHX”). I just got a Kinect yesterday, and for the moment I have resisted the urge to buy a fitness game (per se). What I did get was a game called Dance Central. I wasn’t expecting this game to be like DDR, but I was not even remotely prepared for how different a dance game is when you’re required to do more than make sure your feet are in the right place at the right time. DDR could make me work up a sweat. Dance Central, at least right now, is making stuff hurt that I wasn’t aware of. As I am currently trying to get back into shape, I find this to be a very good thing. It has a “workout mode” where it estimates how many calories you’ve burned, but I find it a little depressing when a song puts me through the wringer and I am informed that I have burned 30 calories and I can now eat an entire grape guilt-free. Right now, the game has piqued my interest in much the same way as Guitar Hero/Rock Band did a couple years ago, and that meant a solid year of obsession and practice. If that happens here, I stand to experience far more cardiovascular exercise than the treadmill/coatrack we bought last year will ever yield.
And yes, I look like a complete doofus playing Dance Central, too. If I wind up starting a dance crew as a result of all this, I’m going to call it “8-bit Tentaclez”.
Interview with Rich Marflak, Winner of the First RPGA Open Tournament in 1981
I joined the RPGA in the mid-1980s, while I was in high school. I joined in order to get access to Polyhedron magazine, and I never was able to attend any conventions or play any of the RPGA adventures back then. My first experience with an RPGA convention came in the fall of 2001, when some friends and I decided to give the RPGA’s Living Greyhawk campaign a try. We had never been to an RPGA convention or played in a Living campaign before, so we weren’t quite sure what to expect.
In a nutshell, we were blown away. The convention was well run, the DMs were so much fun, the games were interesting, and even the other players were great. Of course, since then I have come to learn that conventions are only as good as the people running them. That convention, and so many awesome conventions since then, was run by Rich Marflak. You couldn’t ask for a better and more dedicated organizer, DM, player, and adventure writer. In the years since that convention, I have come to know Rich very well. We have worked on countless projects and conventions together.
On a trip to some convention or another—not sure it if was GenCon, Origins, DDXP, Winter Fantasy, or some other smaller convention—Rich told a story about one of the first RPGA-sponsored events that he played in. I had always dreamed as a kid of being able to go to GenCon or other large convention and play in one of those RPGA tournaments, where the best roleplayer at the table advanced to the next round. I wasn’t so much focused on the competition as much as just wanting to take part in a shared experience of gaming with a bunch of players as passionate about the game as I was. So I was entranced to hear Rich talk about the experience of not just playing in, but winning, one of the first RPGA Open tournaments!
Shawn Merwin: Rich, thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. First of all, tell me a little about your introduction to roleplaying games.
Rich Marflak: From childhood I found games that demanded strategy and tactics the most enjoyable. Whenever I could find someone to sit and play Monopoly, Risk, Stratego, Broadside, Blitzkrieg or in particular Chess, my day was made! Second to playing these types of games for entertainment, I loved books and movies about or based upon mythology and heroic fantasy. Music became a very important part of my life in seventh grade, as it does for many of us at that age. But the music I became fascinated with was a little out of sync with most. It was the wonderful heroic images the works of composers like Beethoven and Wagner that was capturing my imagination. Special movie effects, being what they were at the time, came nowhere near my imaginings of monstrous beasts and the performance of heroic deeds while reading books, and plugging in my own heroes, villains and plots while listening to late classical and romantic period music was the ultimate creative experience—far surpassing watching movies or reading books. However, having this total control over all of the elements of my imagined stories lacked a key component – the element of surprise. [Read the rest of this article]
What I Learned Running a 1 to 30 D&D Campaign
As I write this I sit less than 12 hours away from the last adventure of a level 1 to 30 D&D 4e campaign and I’m feeling strangely emotional about it. I’m extremely lucky to have players willing and able to play nearly every week for two and a half years. I’ve had to come up with an interesting adventure for over 100 sessions that tied together a story spanning the entire level range of 4e D&D.
Over this time I probably spent an average of 10 to 20 hours a week working on my campaign. I built out the battle maps, outlined the story, generated the encounters, came up with props, and organized the events. While I followed the H1 through E3 published adventures, I ended up tweaking, converting, or discarding a lot of that material for my own.
I lived in that world for a long time. I put myself to sleep at night thinking through the eyes of my NPCs. It was a lot of work and I regret none of it, but I spent so much time on it that I don’t know exactly how I feel now that it’s over. I’m happy to have completed the longest single-story campaign I’ve ever run in my life. I’m also sad to see it end. Reading the body language of the players as I read the final paragraphs of flavor text, I think they felt much the same.
So what did I learn? How do I feel about 4th Edition now that I’m completely through it? What would I do differently if I could start over? All questions I will try to answer now. [Read the rest of this article]
Savage West, Session 1: The Riverboat Poker Heist, Of Marks and Busts
This is a play report of my first Savage Worlds game in which I played a character. Yan was our GM. See part 1 here. I write them from my perspective, so expect the story to be a told mostly from my player/PC’s point of view.
Dramatis Personae Redux
Judge Gloom: Scary as hell roaming judge running from disbarment , played by PM
Dynamite Chang: Chinese miner-turned-demolition-expert. Prefers to mine safes now, played by Alex
Jayne: Ex hitman/enforcer of a bounty hunting outfit. Not as gifted in the brains department as he thinks, played by Maze
Jimmie Joe: Con Man with a knack for chemistry, fast talking and easy marks. Played by yours truly.
Scene 1: Ready, Set, Mark!
Our first order of business was to locate a poker player who was good enough to have already registered for the tournament, but obscure enough that we could take his place once we “borrowed” his entry fee. So we made our way to the town where the players would board the Riverboat for the tournament.
Yan had us roll Streetwise checks to find a likely skilled player who had the money but wasn’t too known to cause alarm should he fail to show up. Savage Worlds doesn’t seem to have a “helping out” mechanic so all trained PCs played their skills, with success. We tracked one such player staying in a nearby Saloon, trying to finish building up his 1000$ buy-in.
Game design aside: I realized in that scene that I now more or less expect games to have “helping out” mechanics. D&D has had one since 3e and Burning Wheel more or less runs on that. Now I know that Savage Worlds has a relatively low success target, meaning that helping is not that needed, but it still lends itself to the oft-played “lets all throw dice and one of us will succeed” approach to skill rolls. I might have missed something about adding margins of successes but I’m not sure.
We then explained to Yan that we wanted to discredit the player before we made the “Two-Stage Winston Job” on him.
Yan: WTF is that?
Phil: Trust me, it’s flawless…
First we tried to spread the rumour that the our Mark was a cheater. Yan made us roll persuasion rolls at a penalty (I have an Edge called Charisma that cancelled it). We succeeded. Once we established that our mark was in his room, Judge Gloom entered the Saloon where he was staying.
PM: I walk up to the bar, order a double Whiskey and say real loud “I hearsay that this house of sin hides a lowly cheat and thief that’s been trying to evade justice! (Slowly pans the whole room) Well justice has finally arrived.”
Phil: I run upstairs real fast and start banging on our Mark’s door.
Yan: Whaaaaat?
Phil: Yeah, and I whisper through the door: “Quick man, Judge Gloom is here for you, you gotta run!”
Mark: “Who the hell are you!”
Jimmie Joe: I’m your biggest fan man! I know you’ll win this tournament! In fact, I bet my whole house on it! You’ll make me rich… but you need to get the hell out, follow me I can help you!
(General laughter)
I aced with a good margin of success. In hindsight, I think that I should have gotten a Bennie (action point) for it (Edit: See Yan’s comment below).
The sucker followed me, hid in my wagon under a tarp and got beaten senseless by my more physical acolytes. Bang, we were 900$ richer!
Good start!
Scene 2: Busted!
With some scratch from the other party members (cuz, you know, I was tapped out), we made the full thousand. We then went to register to the tournament a few days later. Our plan was dead simple. Dynamite Chang, through some bribing of a distant nephews, arranged to get on the ship as a replacement coal shoveller, ready to start a diversion on command.
As for our main Poker player…
Jayne: I’ll go… I got this RISK-PROOF method for playing poker! I had to pay this guy a fortune for him to teach it to me.
(Groan)
Jimmie Joe: Is that right?
Jayne: Yeah! Remember when we played and I told you that 2 identical Kings was the best hand? Well, I’ve tons of foolproof tricks like that! So can I play?
Jimmie Joe: Sure you can! You’ll be the perfect foil while we go for the prize.
Jayne: By that you mean that I’ll win it for you guys right? Cuz I totally can!
Jimmie Joe: Sure Jayne, sure Jayne.
Aside: I must say that Maze played his dumb-as-a-5-day-old-tuna-fish-sandwich guy to perfection. Once we adjusted to his way of playing his PC, we all embraced it and he fit seamlessly in the story we were building.
Jimmie Joe: All right so Jayne will be the player, Gloom and I are going to be his entourage. Chang will be in the boiler room or whatever they’re called on those boats. We locate the Prize money and…
Others: Yes?
Jimmie Joe: We’ll see once we get there…
So a few hours before we boarded, we got to the boat’s pier to register for the tournament. As we were waiting in line…
“He’s that’s the guy that stole my money!”
Yan: You see your mark, along with a sheriff and a few deputies. They want to interrogate you at the Sheriff’s office.
Phil: (Facepalm) Yan, you are a rat bastard.
Yan (Jubilant): Why thank you!
I tried talking my way out of it but the odds were stacked against me and I failed my roll. (I didn’t want to spend my bennies quite yet).
Jimmie Joe (sotto vocce): You guys register without me, then go for plan “Jack’s Inbox” !
Yan: You do know that you have the money on you, right Phil?
Phil: Damn! Can Jimmie Joe pass it along unnoticed to Jayne with a sleigh of hand roll?
Yan: Sure… roll for it. (I made it)
Aside: I may have already said it, but Yan’s the quintessential good GM. While heavy prep is not his forte, he’s very very good with improv and he is the embodiment of “Say Yes or Roll”
Yan: Oh, BTW, the boat leaves in less than 4 hours. Since the Sheriff failed to find the stolen money on you (much to your ex-mark’s chagrin), he decided to let you “rest” in the jail cell while he tried to figure this mess out.
Phil: Sure man, I’m not worried. I trust the combined resources of my fellow players to sort this out.
Jimmie Joe (Muttering nervously): Nope, not worried at all, everything’s fine.
Stay Tuned…
Critical Bits for the week ending 2010-11-28
- RT @baldmangames: D&D Experience 2011 pre-reg goes live (finally – ya I know) http://fb.me/tzVlZm7g #
- From the Archives:: Critical Hits Gift Guide #3 Games http://bit.ly/992L8i #charchive #
- RT @gamefiend: Achievement Unlocked: Build Achievement System in 4e #dnd : http://bit.ly/9yJl6T #
- RT @gregbilsland: Combining Themes & Backgrounds: http://wp.me/pPNTx-68 #
- .@bartoneus reviewed the "Legend of the 5 Rings" RPG, and you could win a copy just by leaving a comment: http://bit.ly/eEbwZb #
- RT @gnomestew: Black Friday deal on Eureka: $24.95 print+PDF, $11.95 PDF. Get the ultimate adventure toolkit 29% off! http://bit.ly/cA3Y1t #
- RT @KatoKatonian: One Inch Square: Gamma World – Omega Tech By Salvage Level http://bit.ly/e1oY9g #dnd #gammaworld #
The Gammarizer: Bringing Your Town to Gamma Terra
The Gammarizer is my attempt at a semi-random adventure generation tool for Gamma World. You start with a location all the players are familiar with (like your hometown) and then change it to fit into the post-apocalyptic setting of Gamma Terra, and in the process, generate an adventure on the fly. This method focuses on using the elements of a setting and altering it to connect to the origins of the PCs to give it that Gamma flavor and a personal connection.
To begin:
- All the players decided on a setting that everyone at least has a passing familiarity with. (For example, Westminster Maryland.)
- Gammarize the name. (Questmonster.)
- Each player writes down on an index card one element of that setting to start with. This can be specific or general. (McDaniel College, plentiful corn fields, Main Street, and cows are all possibilities.) These should be kept secret except to the GM, and duplicates are fine.
- The GM shuffles the cards out and gives one to each player. It’s OK if players get their own.
- Each player writes down on the card a way that connects that setting to one of their own origins. (A radioactive ratswarm may say that the corn fields are irradiated or filled with rats.)
- The GM takes the cards and builds the adventure. If something immediately suggests itself based on the cards, great. Otherwise, try taking the cards, and assigning (either randomly or by selecting) one to be a setup/hook, two to be encounters/scenes, one to be a complication, and one to be the climax/finale.
- Make adventure go.
I ran a test of this over the weekend, and I’d say it was a big success. The PCs all provided me with very good seeds to start with, and the nature of Gamma World makes it easier to gloss over any leaps of logic (“of course you can negotiate with the pile of cats” “of course a gravity cannon can turn a park into an army of mutant plants.”) [Read the rest of this article]
Review: “Leverage” RPG
Long time readers will remember the 4th Power Project, my attempt to merge d20 Modern with D&D 4e. While researching powers for PC, I took notes from a number of sources, and one that bubbled to the top was the TV show Leverage. For those who don’t know, Leverage is a show about five highly skilled con-artists and thieves who have decided to help those who have been wronged and have no place left to go. Each episode is one complete heist- like watching Ocean’s Eleven in an hour (and with only five people.)
It turns out I wasn’t the only one watching Leverage for RPG research- the Leverage RPG has just been released from Margaret Weis Productions to bring the same sort of stories to your RPG table. You assemble your crew of a grifter, hacker, hitter, mastermind, and thief and pull off one job in an evening to help the helpless and provide… leverage.
Now, it would have been easy to put together a game where there’s a bunch of useful skills, you roll some dice, add the number to the skill, and go on. Instead, the designers went several layers beyond what was needed to put together a licensed RPG, and instead created an extremely well put together system that not only captures the show perfectly but also gives a ton of tools for players and GMs to create your heists. [Read the rest of this article]
Savage West, Session 1: The Riverboat Poker Heist, The Plan
I bought 3 copies of the pocket-sized Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition at Gen Con last summer. It was a game I was told I might like given the limited time I could spend playing on Friday nights. I asked Yan if he’d like to GM a demo to our once-a-month Sunday geekout crew (PM, Maze, Ubisoft Alex and I) and he agreed.
Savage Hybrid
The best way to describe Savage Worlds I heard was to say that it’s what would happen if D&D and GURPS created an offspring. It’s purported to be fast and furious. This is mostly achieved by a dead simple task resolution mechanic: all attributes (Strength, Agility, Vigor, etc) and skills are ranked in terms of polyhedral dice (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12). When you attempt a task (or try to hit a target), you pick the appropriate polyhedral and you try to roll a 4 or more. All dice are open ended (i.e. you keep rolling maximum results and add them together). As a PC, you also get a bonus D6 wild die for all rolls and you get to choose which of your normal or wild die rolls you keep for the task at hand.
Combat is done on battlemaps (squares or hexes, GM’s choice) and is indeed fast and swingy. There’s no Hit Points to worry about, just combat conditions likes “dazed” and “incapacitated” plus various wound levels that make your character progressively less effective. Mook NPC are even easier to deal with, going down after one solid hit or 2 minor ones.
Action and general character badassery are helped by the expenditure of Bennies. They are Savage Worlds Action Point and allow PCs to do things like re-roll failed checks, soak up damage or cancel a critical failure. Each player gets a few every sessions and can win more through play.
Finally, character generation is simple yet covers a very wide range of possibilities through the existence of setting specific Edges (advantages) and Hindrances (disadvantages). Each character buys attributes, skills and gears. Then, they pick two edges and one major (or two minor) hindrances and they are ready to go.
Thus after a bit of brainstorming, Yan offered to run a Far West game and we made PCs accordingly. [Read the rest of this article]
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