Friday, March 11, 2011

Gamma World Dungeon Master Tools

I have no idea what the legality of this is, but I'll just put this here and if there are problems, maybe it will disappear from here.

A complaint I have about Gamma World relates back to my conjecture that Wizards is strapped for cash right now and is trying to generate revenue however they can. In the case of Gamma World, it's releasing the "complete" rules in a series of three box sets. While I like this in one aspect, which is to keep the cost of each one separate down (like packaging it all together would have probably had a 70 or 80 dollar price tag, which would not get a lot of buyers), it does create the problem of having disjointed rules. For instance, all you REALLY need is the main box, the green box. What the green box gives you is 20 character types, the basic character build rules, 80 alpha mutation and omega tech cards, tokens for most of the monsters in the book, and a level 1 adventure. However, there's more to it. The first extension, Famine in Far-Go is mostly a new adventure that continues where the first one left off, but also has a lot more monsters, as well as 20 MORE character types (40 options is better than 20 options, in my opinion). It also introduces cryptic alliances, which is an optional tool of helping the players betray each other and get benefits from it. It could be fun if you were doing a very merciless campaign. The second extension (probably the last) was Legion of Gold, which introduces only 8 more character types (making a grand total of 49 character options, which is weird... why not 50?), adds 10 more alpha/omega cards, and introduces "vocations," which are Gamma World's version of feats, and are awesome, as well as another adventure, more monsters, etc. For a serious Gamma World GM, it's really worth getting all 3, but it creates the problem of having a lot of information in a lot of different sources, making the GM's job more tedious in utilizing all of the sources.

To that end, I've created a few tools to make the GM's job easier. The first is the master card list. I've included all of the base set cards, all of the booster cards, all of the legion of gold cards, and all of the promo cards, so if a GM wants to create a custom deck for a specific campaign it serves as a handy reference guide. I've left off details on the cards, and so for a lot of them you couldn't just copy and paste and print off your own cards, it's not for that purpose. Just if you already have the cards and you can't remember what each of them do. That can be found here:

Here!

The next, probably more useful tool I put together is a published monster list by level, with its type, experience reward, and page number.  This includes the Gamma World Game Day adventure, Trouble in Freesboro, on top of all of the monsters in the Gamma World base set, A Famine in Far-Go, and The Legion of Gold expansion sets. If there are more releases in the line, the list will be updated, you can find that here:

Sup!

Lastly, I've developed my own character sheet.  I don't like the "official" character sheet, not only because it uses a lot of ink from the printer, but doesn't have room for all that much information, especially not with all the optional features introduced in the addons.  Unless you print it really lightly and in black and white, there's not really even room to fit all the stuff about your character onto the sheet, and there are also not Gamma World power cards that you can use on top of that.  So my goal in creating the sheet was to have it very no-frills, require very little ink, have space to fit a lot of information, and so it can be rattled off quickly in the printer and make lots of copies that you could keep in the box with everything else.

It's in a pdf, and you have to tell your printer to "ignore page margins" or else it'll be printed off too small.  I gave it 1/2" margins on each side, printed landscape, so you can have two character sheets on one standard printer page, and you just cut it in half.  Soon I'll upload a "sample" version so you can sort of see what I was thinking when I made it.  Consider this the "1.0" version, as I'm not above moving things around and redesigning it.  For instance, I still don't have room for vocations on there, since I just got my copy of Legion of Gold a couple days ago.

That can be downloaded here.

Check back for updates.

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