Mutants After the Bomb

I was thinking about I've been posting a bit about Mutants in the Now and trying to understand why it doesn't always click for me. A big part of it was it was a detailed building minigame before the tactical game. A legacy of trying to streamline and make workk Palldium's scattershot approach to D&D-derived game design. Not that Eric Wujick couldn't design games, he was probally the best at Palladium.

While both games are crunchy and I appreciate MitN splitting off the tedium of statting each foe as if they were a player character. MitN just lacks that sort of old school spontaneity, of randomly rolling a weird character and choosing three or four animal and human traits becuase your options were limited and on the sheet. Of a distingive image oppossum with a machinegun .Imagining that weird thing spraying bullets and rolling a fistfull of dice as damage. MitN is very methodical and probally a game less likely to just snap in half or end up a dead end.

Unless one plays a giant cockroach with the Pursuit Predator style, that was busted.

Eastman and Laird's drawing of a mutant opposeum they made for the game.

There just doesn't seem to be much distinctiveness between foes. A few animal traits, a martial arts style and some cinematic powers are just attached to a featureless block when players characters are heavily defined by their choice of species and origin through the "discounts" that come from that. In the form of natural and favourable abilities, skills and styles.

The text in it's replica printing press font can make it a bit hard to read dense text too. It blurs sometimes, which isn't good when finding one rule among many.

But it's still pretty good as a basis. Which let me tinker around with trying to reinvent the classic TMNT&OS setting, After the Bomb. Later the sole setting when the license for TMNT lapsed.

Game idea

(map from Gamm World 2E, 44km scale hexes)

It's been 20 years After the Bomb. The ruins and surrounds of Vegaz are home to about 5000 people, 4500 of them mutants. While they are theoretically divided into 4 great tribes, in practice they are split into gangs of 3 to 12. These gangs are called upon for various tasks, particularly in scouting, trading with distant cities/societies or fending off various semi-mutant wildlife and Cryptic Alliances which wish to twist the wastes in their own image.

Why are there mutants?

GOO-P can change and regenerate tissue to an enormous extent, it was the medicine of last resort used in burn and anti-radiation treatments. It's believed that it was also in the weapons used in the Bomb as Poison-Storms swept the lands, mutating creatures. Children of Zandig are zoo and farm animals, sprayed down with GOO-P as a safety precaution during the Bomb or picked up on the trek east. The Wild Bunch are native species of the Mojave Desert and Kalifornya. The New Scum were those feral animals and urban pests already living in Vegaz and the Dammed are those human and nearly human engineers who keep the Hoover Dam running.

In my idea, the GOO-P was tested in sterile conditions and so there was no different species DNA to mix together, so it either caused massive health collapse or regenerated all damaged tissue.

That and Proteus lied about their accidental mutations of lab animals.

What's the problems?

Inter-gang squabbles are constant in the ruins, the human engineers who live at Hoover Dam need new parts and hostile wildlife/semi-feral mutants are always a concern. As mutants age, the question of children and their forms take prominence. And with all the gasoline having run out, expeditions go by muscle and hard to gather ethanol. The world of the Vegaz people has shrunk down to the valley and they are isolated.

Random Wild Mutant Concept, Monsters and NPCs only

1) Animal-Intelligence, No obvious mutations, might not be mutated at all

2) Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase Wild Mutations

3) Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase Psionic Powers

4) Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase SR

5) Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase 1 Wild Mutation, 1 Psionic Powers and the rest on SR

6) Above Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase Human features

7) Above Animal-Intelligence, Purchase no Human features

8) Above Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase equal amounts of Human features and Psionic Powers

9) Above Animal-Intelligence, Refund Half GOO-P and purchase equal amounts of Human features and Wild Mutations

10) Above Animal-Intelligence, Refund all GOO-P, purchase Human features to maximum and then buy species traits