Mutants of Metal!

This last Saturday was the Socal “Minicon” game day. I was actually scheduled to play in a morning game and an afternoon session, and also to do a dungeon crawl session of OD&D in the evening.

As it was almost an hour’s drive to Orange County, I eventually decided not to play two sessions then have to run my own game all worn out, so I decided to show up for Cyclopeatron’s afternoon Gamma World game as the one session I would play in.

As any regular reader can probably tell, I don’t do much playing outside of my own group (although these experiences tend to make for some entertaining posts). I have most often found it to be a disagreeable experience at best. I really just prefer to hand pick my players for a regular group, and if I get the rare itch to sit down as a player, I try to get somebody in my group to run something.

But if I was going to run a game at this event, I decided I needed to also play in somebody else’s session. Bob “Cyclopeatron” seemed like a decent enough guy online, and he had a truly interesting idea for a Gamma World one-shot.

I hit the road around 1PM, and if you are from anywhere in LA you know Saturday afternoon traffic to The OC can be a bummer of a bitch. The I-5 was a big part of the trip, and at one point it turns into three lanes and is just a nightmare. So as you can guess I was running a bit late for the 2PM session.

The area was right around Disneyland, and it tripped me out. I haven’t been to Disneyland in over 20 years, and things in the area had really changed. When I was a young man the area around the park was pretty open, but it had really developed since then. Residences and big hotels and shopping areas – Oh my! I was a bit disoriented by that, but found the location of the Minicon pretty easy once I got away from the big traffic.

The event was being held in a large glass community room near the pool, and it was a great and well lit room for gaming in. There were three tables in the room with upwards of 8 people at each, with a fourth table outside with a game going on. For sure a great turnout! I found Cyclopeatron’s table, introduced myself, and after going back out to get better parked the game was on.

OK, here is the basic premise of the scenario. This Gamma World setting was set in a very far future, in a time when all living things had been so mutated and interbred so much that all things contained human, animal, and plant genes. I had seen this premise in some old sci fi of the 70’s, and found it interesting.

Our characters were a band of heavy metal musicians. In this world, this kind of performer was a respected sort of bard, and travelled the lands bringing rock to the huddled and heavily mutated masses. My character, “Child Eyes,” and another player’s charcter were The Tipton Brothers, and we seemed to be the main force behind the band. We came from a famous rock family. Our mother had recently been killed, our home destroyed, and our family heirloom and relic “The Gibson Guitar” had been stolen.

In our travels we found a flyer for another band, “Zygotus,” who featured the Gibson in their photo. We had found our guitar, and we needed to go to the local town of dogmen to await Zygotus’ arrival for a big concert. There was a lot of arguing with the local town guards, because we didn’t want to leave our weapons (swords, axes, exploding ninja stars, flamethrowers, etc.) at the door. They seemed to have the ability to scan us for powers and weapons, so we didn’t have much choice. We spent a lot of time at this, and quite frankly I was worried that we would ever be able to finish up this game in the one sitting we had for it. My boy Child Eyes Tipton wanted to confront the band right there on stage at concert night. That would eventually happen, but there seemed to be a lot of the typical screwing around with minor things and issues that I don’t think have much place in a 4-hour one time session. In the end though, this wasn’t really a big issue.

We got to confront Zygotus on stage, reveal them for cyborgs and robots, win the hearts of the people, and get our Gibson back. We ended the night and the game with our band (which I don’t think we ever named but I was referring to as “Van Tipton”) bringing true flesh and blood rock to the masses.

I know the way I tell the tale might sound lame, but this was actually a really great session. We had a lot of laughs with our weird characters, and all the heavy metal imagery was fun. The only thing missing was actual heavy metal to listen to (I had my boombox in the car, but the room was just kind of crowded with other gaming for tunes to be played). Also, Cyclo is a fairly soft spoken guy, and in a room full of loud gaming it was hard to hear what he was saying sometimes. But he had a strong grip on his scenario, and things moved along pretty well despite a lot of piddling around by our characters.

Cyclopeatron got applause from us at the end of the game, something I cannot really recall from any game I have played in. My own damn regulars certainly don’t throw a clap my way, and I give them my heart and soul.

Anyway, congrats to Cyclopeatron (real name “Bob”) for a great showpiece game. I think he really needs to put together a scenario pack featuring themes and situations from this session (using Mutant Future of course) and make it available (to sell or otherwise) to the old school retro clone community. I think he might have a Carcosa level hit on his hands.

OK, that was my session as a player. For the night shift I ran my OD&D game, and I’ll follow up on that in my next post later this week.