Gamma World Figures

One of my biggest complaints about first edition Gamma World was that its rulebook included very few illustrations of its mutant creatures. Sure, there were verbal descriptions of most of them, but many of those descriptions were vague or equivocal, which made it difficult to describe them in the course of play. That's why I was so keen to see Grenadier's line of GW miniatures: I hoped they'd give me a better sense of what all these weird mutants looked like.

Unfortunately for me, I never saw most of the "over 150 figures plus accessories" promised in the advertisement above. I did find the large "Denizens" boxed set, which I happily purchased, partly because it had such evocative box art, featuring a trio of tribesmen facing off against a Yexil.

I don't know for certain, but I suspect the artist is Ray Rubin, who was one of the cofounders of Grenadier Models. He did a lot of box art for the company's miniatures, including those produced for its official AD&D line. This one looks similar, so it's probably his work.

As I said, I never saw most of the Grenadier Gamma World miniatures in the wild, so to speak. There is, however, a terrific website that includes photographs of most of them. When I first came across the site, I goggled at what I saw, because many of them are exactly the kind of thing I so wanted back in the day. Instead, I had to wait until the release of Gamma World's second edition in 1983 to see at last what all the game's mutant monsters actually looked like (lovingly drawn by Larry Elmore at, in my opinion, his best).