Wednesday, December 3, 2025
REPOST: Retrospective: Metamorphosis Alpha
(Because I've started refereeing a Metamorphosis Alpha campaign this week, I have a number of posts planned in which I share my thoughts about the game and its oddities. Before doing that, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit my original Retrospective post about it from July 7, 2010. I stand by everything I wrote in that original post, but I have more to say now that I'm in the midst of planning a campaign using MA, as you'll see in the coming days. –JDM)Although Gamma World was (I think) the first RPG I played after Dungeons & Dragons, it was with its predecessor game, Metamorphosis Alpha, that I was obsessed for much of the early 1980s. Written by James Ward and first published in 1976, making it, depending on one's definitions, the first science fiction roleplaying game ever published, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard a vast generation ship (called the Warden in a typical example of early hobby self-referential hubris/humor). En route to another solar system far from Earth, the Warden passes through a radiation cloud that damages its systems, kills its crew, and mutates most of its surviving passengers, as well as the Terran flora and fauna traveling with them, into monstrous forms.
Over several generations, the descendants of the original passengers forget they're aboard a starship (which still functions, more or less, under the control of automated systems) and new societies arise on its various decks, which are kilometers-long in size and include many areas designed to mimic terrestrial environments for the benefit of the passengers who were supposed to live and work aboard the Warden while traveling for decades to another world. Player characters assume the role of un-mutated humans, humanoid mutants, and mutant animals, as they explore the Warden, ignorant that it's actually a starship. It's a very compelling premise, one that it shares with Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (sometimes titled Starship in certain editions). In many ways, it's a much more interesting, if somewhat more limited, premise than that of Gamma World.
My own obsession with the game stemmed from the fact, sometime after I acquired Gamma World, I also acquired the first The Best of Dragon compilation, which included articles about Metamorphosis Alpha in it. These articles were strangely inspirational to me, all the moreso because they were for a game that I'd never heard of, let alone seen, but that clearly bore a lot of resemblance in basic premise and rules to my beloved Gamma World. Thus began my quest to find a copy of the game, a quest that ended in vain. I asked the guys down at my favorite game store about Metamorphosis Alpha, but they told me it was long out of print and my best bet was to go to a convention and win it at an auction. The old grognards who hung out there added that MA "wasn't very good anyway" and that I was better off just using Gamma World and making up the rest.
And so I did. I pulled out my huge graph paper sheets and set to work to mapping out my version of the starship Warden. It was a long and tedious undertaking, filled with lots of missteps and heartache, because I never felt I could get it "right." This vessel was supposed to be 80 kilometers long or so, which meant that even a big map would have to use a very large scale. Moreover, what would a vast generation ship even look like? The only starships I'd ever seen were from movies and TV shows and none of them were generation ships designed to house a huge number of colonists, animals, plants, and machinery for decades of travel across many light years. Eventually, all these worries and concerns got the better of me and I abandoned my maps, something I regret now, even as I fully understand why my younger self admitted defeat.
Over the years, I retained a high degree of interest in Metamorphosis Alpha and kept hoping that, one day, a new edition would be released that'd give me everything I'd hoped for back in the days before I could even take a look at this mythical game. As it turns out, new editions have been published over the years, but each one has been a terrible disappointment to me, utterly lacking in the aura of mystery and possibility that surrounded the original. To be fair, some of that isn't the fault of the new editions -- though some of it is, as nearly all the new editions have been conceptually flawed in significant ways -- as much of the mystique about this game for me is that I could never find a copy.
I've since been able to read it and I'd say that, while it's definitely a very early game in terms of its mechanics and production values, it's nevertheless excellently inspirational. At 32 pages, it contains just enough information to get the referee going but not so much as to prevent him from putting his own stamp on it. I still don't own a copy myself; I keep an eye out for them but they're generally ludicrously expensive and I can't justify spending that kind of money nowadays. In truth, I should probably pick up where my younger self left off and just create my own starship maps and use Mutant Future for the rules. Heck, I have this crazy idea of a supplement for MF called Generation Ship, which would basically be Metamorphosis Alpha with the serial numbers filed off and better production values. Maybe that's something worth considering ...
Over several generations, the descendants of the original passengers forget they're aboard a starship (which still functions, more or less, under the control of automated systems) and new societies arise on its various decks, which are kilometers-long in size and include many areas designed to mimic terrestrial environments for the benefit of the passengers who were supposed to live and work aboard the Warden while traveling for decades to another world. Player characters assume the role of un-mutated humans, humanoid mutants, and mutant animals, as they explore the Warden, ignorant that it's actually a starship. It's a very compelling premise, one that it shares with Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (sometimes titled Starship in certain editions). In many ways, it's a much more interesting, if somewhat more limited, premise than that of Gamma World.
My own obsession with the game stemmed from the fact, sometime after I acquired Gamma World, I also acquired the first The Best of Dragon compilation, which included articles about Metamorphosis Alpha in it. These articles were strangely inspirational to me, all the moreso because they were for a game that I'd never heard of, let alone seen, but that clearly bore a lot of resemblance in basic premise and rules to my beloved Gamma World. Thus began my quest to find a copy of the game, a quest that ended in vain. I asked the guys down at my favorite game store about Metamorphosis Alpha, but they told me it was long out of print and my best bet was to go to a convention and win it at an auction. The old grognards who hung out there added that MA "wasn't very good anyway" and that I was better off just using Gamma World and making up the rest.
And so I did. I pulled out my huge graph paper sheets and set to work to mapping out my version of the starship Warden. It was a long and tedious undertaking, filled with lots of missteps and heartache, because I never felt I could get it "right." This vessel was supposed to be 80 kilometers long or so, which meant that even a big map would have to use a very large scale. Moreover, what would a vast generation ship even look like? The only starships I'd ever seen were from movies and TV shows and none of them were generation ships designed to house a huge number of colonists, animals, plants, and machinery for decades of travel across many light years. Eventually, all these worries and concerns got the better of me and I abandoned my maps, something I regret now, even as I fully understand why my younger self admitted defeat.
Over the years, I retained a high degree of interest in Metamorphosis Alpha and kept hoping that, one day, a new edition would be released that'd give me everything I'd hoped for back in the days before I could even take a look at this mythical game. As it turns out, new editions have been published over the years, but each one has been a terrible disappointment to me, utterly lacking in the aura of mystery and possibility that surrounded the original. To be fair, some of that isn't the fault of the new editions -- though some of it is, as nearly all the new editions have been conceptually flawed in significant ways -- as much of the mystique about this game for me is that I could never find a copy.
I've since been able to read it and I'd say that, while it's definitely a very early game in terms of its mechanics and production values, it's nevertheless excellently inspirational. At 32 pages, it contains just enough information to get the referee going but not so much as to prevent him from putting his own stamp on it. I still don't own a copy myself; I keep an eye out for them but they're generally ludicrously expensive and I can't justify spending that kind of money nowadays. In truth, I should probably pick up where my younger self left off and just create my own starship maps and use Mutant Future for the rules. Heck, I have this crazy idea of a supplement for MF called Generation Ship, which would basically be Metamorphosis Alpha with the serial numbers filed off and better production values. Maybe that's something worth considering ...
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
The Articles of Dragon: "Ay pronunseeAYshun gyd"
When I was in school, I enjoyed diagramming sentences and making proper use of the subjunctive mood. Spelling was one of my favorite subjects and I used to proudly tell anyone who would listen that I only ever spelled one word wrong on a spelling test during my entire elementary school career (Tuesday, if you can believe it). I was (am?) that annoying kid who corrected other people's grammar – and pronunciation.
Consequently, I absolutely adored Frank Mentzer's article, "Ay pronunseeAYshun gyd," which appeared in issue #93 of Dragon (January 1985). Over the course of five pages, Mentzer sets out to present the correct pronunciations for some of the weirder and more obscure words and names found in Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D materials. Of course, Mentzer is quick to note that he personally doesn't believe there is such a thing as a "right" or a "wrong" pronunciation (or spelling). Thus, the pronunciations he offers in the article are simply the "preferred" or even "most common" rather than the correct ones. Such descriptivist nonsense didn't hold any water with me when I was fifteen and it holds even less now, but I feel it's important to mention Mentzer's comment nonetheless, since I'm sure someone will bring it up in the comments in order to defend the rectitude of his idiosyncratic pronunciation of lich or drow or whatever.
As I said, I really enjoyed this article, since it gave me a weapon with which to bludgeon my less verbally adept friends. Thus equipped, I was ready to defend “proper” pronunciation with the zeal of a paladin guarding a sacred relic. My friends humored me (mostly). After all, I'd been doing this sort of thing for years before this article ever appeared. Fortunately, I’ve mellowed somewhat over the years – at least, that’s what I tell myself – but the truth is that I still sometimes look at Mentzer's article just to be sure that I wasn't mistaken in how to say certain words and names.
 |
| Apropos of nothing, I assure you. |
Monday, December 1, 2025
Just Right: The Importance of Setting
As I continue to work on the new edition of Thousand Suns, I find myself grappling with questions I didn't anticipate. At the moment, for example, I'm struggling with the extent to which a roleplaying game needs a setting to succeed – and indeed what, in fact, constitutes a setting at all.
Pulp Fantasy Library: The Nameless City
“The Nameless City” occupies a peculiar and revealing place in H.P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre. Written in January 1921 and first published later that same year in the amateur journal The Wolverine (before appearing Donald Wolheim's Fanciful Tales), it fits comfortably in neither his Dunsanian dream fantasies nor his later cosmic horror tales. Instead, it stands astride both, blending several strands of Lovecraft’s evolving imagination into a single narrative. The result is a story that feels simultaneously archaic and forward-looking, poised between decadent fantasy, pulp archeological adventure, and the nascent Cthulhu Mythos that would soon define his mature fiction.
The plot is straightforward. An unnamed explorer ventures into an ancient ruin somewhere in the Arabian desert, a city so old that even legend has forgotten it. What he finds is not the expected relics of a vanished human people but the physical remnants of an inhuman race. They are reptilian beings who built their low, elongated architecture to suit their own forms and who left behind murals and funerary chambers chronicling a far older history than that of mankind. As the narrator moves from sun-blasted ruins into the pitch-black passageways beneath them, the story shifts from a travelog into something uncannier. A visionary experience soon overtakes him. Part dream, part revelation, the vision lets him to see the reptilian race alive, chanting during nocturnal rites. The tale ends with a familiar crescendo of terror: a sudden rush of wind from the darkness and the narrator’s panicked flight, shaken by the conviction that the ancient beings may not be entirely gone.
Objectively speaking, “The Nameless City” is not a particularly strong story, even by the standards of Lovecraft’s early fiction. Its prose is overwrought and its plot unnecessarily dramatic. Even so, HPL regarded it with considerable fondness, perhaps because it marks one of his first serious attempts to portray a genuinely non-human civilization, complete with its own art, culture, and long arc of rise and decline. This is a theme he would revisit throughout his career. Its desert setting and dreamlike atmosphere still bear the imprint of Dunsany, but the tale also seems shaped by the era’s growing fascination with archeology and the mysteries of the ancient world. It is hard not to read it in light of the cultural moment, coming as it did barely a year before the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb captured the world’s imagination.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that “The Nameless City” anticipates several of Lovecraft’s major later works. The long, claustrophobic descent into the ruins points toward the archeological exploration of At the Mountains of Madness, while the conception of a non-human race with its own history looks ahead to both "The Shadow out of Time" and "The Mound." Even the narrator’s sudden, overwhelming revelation of the ancient past prefigures the shocks of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and other mature tales. The inhuman builders themselves, with their distinct physiology and culture, have a faint resonance with the pre-human or parallel races that populate Lovecraft’s later tales, though he would eventually reframe such beings in more explicitly cosmic or quasi-scientific terms.
Yet what makes the story especially revealing is the way it straddles two different phases of Lovecraft’s imaginative geography. “The Nameless City” is clearly set in the waking world, but it makes casual reference to Sarnath, Ib, and Mnar, places that would later come to be associated with the Dreamlands in “The Doom that Came to Sarnath.” However, in 1921, Lovecraft seems to have imagined these locales as belonging to a remote prehistoric era rather than a parallel dream realm. The borders had not yet hardened. Names, ideas, and mythic motifs drifted freely between dream fantasy, cosmic antiquity, and pseudo-historical prehuman epochs. “The Nameless City,” then, offers a rare glimpse into this fluid early stage of his mythmaking, before his different modes of fiction crystallized into distinct conceptual territories.
For all its rough edges, I think the tale remains significant because it marks a turning point in Lovecraft’s development both as a writer and as a creator. Here, for perhaps the first time, he fully embraces the idea that human civilization rests upon the remnants of a far older and indeed alien past. It's a notion that would become central to his mature worldview. It is also among his earliest attempts to blend antiquarian curiosity with cosmic dread, the signature synthesis that would soon define his best work.
This is why I see “The Nameless City” as a kind of literary bridge. It spans fantasy and horror, waking world and dream, the Dunsanian phase of Lovecraft’s youth and the more confident, original voice that would produce “The Call of Cthulhu,” "The Colour Out of Space," and the great masterpieces of his later career. Its imagery of ancient stones, subterranean chambers, and forgotten races may lack the polish of his mature style, but the essential vision – that distinctly Lovecraftian sense of deep time, buried history, and alien life – is unmistakably present. In that sense, “The Nameless City” may well be the first fully Lovecraftian tale and it deserves appreciation on those grounds alone.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
Around the Campfire
Long ago, the People dwelt in the First Garden. Shaped by the hands of the Builder, it was green beyond imagining, filled with waters that murmured like song and fruits that never failed. In those days, the Builder walked unseen among His children, guiding them through the soft meadows and gifting them with wonders that eased every burden. These Gifts – rare relics now – could mend wounds, command the elements, or summon angels of strange metal. The People lived without toil and they called themselves blessed.
Yet, as seasons passed uncounted, the People grew proud. They praised not the Builder but their own cleverness. They claimed the Gifts as their own works and whispered that the Garden’s perfection proved they needed no master. Their pride soured the soil and the Builder, though slow to anger, grew sorrowful.
He sent His fiercest angel, Bright-Ruin, whose secret name is Rad-Ashun, meaning "burning breath," to humble the People.
Bright-Ruin descended as a storm of unseen fire. Its passing cracked the earth, stilled the rivers, and dimmed the very light of the Garden. The wondrous Gifts turned wild or deadly. The First Garden fell in a single long night of flame and thunder.
But the Builder, though angered, did not cast the People into oblivion. Instead, He gathered the survivors and carried them to a new place – a hard place, a place of punishment and contrition where pride was impossible and ease a luxury.
He named this land Warden.
Warden, in the Old Tongue, means " a place of keeping," a realm of confinement where the People would dwell until they remembered the humility they had cast aside. Warden was not a prison of bars and walls, but of spiritual confinement, a vast wilderness meant to teach obedience, endurance, and wisdom.
Here, among the Barren Hills, the People were set to labor. Here, they would feel hunger, cold, and the bite of honest earth beneath their feet. Here they would live under the watchful eye of the Builder until the day they proved worthy of his love once more.
Our ancestors wandered long in this place of penance until they found the strong river we call the Ranger that wound like a silver chain through Warden’s harsh heart. Following its course, they reached the calm waters of Lake Refuge and made their first home: Habitat. There, they learned again the value of work, community, and gratitude for even the smallest blessing.
Fragments of the Builder’s Gifts lie scattered across Warden. They glimmer like temptations, powerful yet perilous. Those who forget the lesson of pride may draw Bright-Ruin’s gaze once more.
However, one day, when the People have endured enough seasons of hardship and have walked in humility for many generations, the Builder may lift the sentence placed upon them. Then He will break open the gates of Warden and lead His children to the New Garden, fairer still than the first.
Until that day, the People live under the watchful grace and stern discipline of the land that bears their fate in its very name.
Friday, November 28, 2025
Dolmenwood Launch Party
Tonight at 8pm EST, I'll be joining Gavin Norman on the Exalted Funeral Youtube channel for the Dolmenwood launch party, along with other guests. If you're interested in Dolmenwood and have some time to spare, come and join us.
The Threefold Faith of the Living Balance
Over at Grognardia Games Direct, I've indulged my enthusiasm for worldbuilding by presenting an overview of the beliefs and religious practices of the Empire of Inba Iro. This is pure setting creation without any direct game mechanical application for Secrets of sha-Arthan, but I enjoy this kind of thing and thought some of my readers might too.
Thursday, November 27, 2025
Mapping the Blogosphere
Although I was already following this project, yesterday a number of friends, readers, and patrons pointed out its latest development, which is really quite fascinating. The blogger Elmcat put in a lot of effort to map out the tabletop RPG blog scene in the form of a graph that shows "nodes" and "edges" – the web of connections (in the form of links) between blogs and their posts. The resulting map, shown above, is very impressive and genuinely interesting for the way it shows the distinct ecosystems that exist within the larger blogosphere, as well as the relative influence a blog has through its posts and links in and out.
The image above is a combined map, depicting the RPG blogosphere from 2003, when the first gaming blog appeared, to the present day. Consequently, it's not representative of our present moment, which looks like this:
As you can see, the 2025 map is a lot less cluttered, owing to the fact that there a lot fewer active blogs and blogs, in general, are not nearly as widely read as they were prior to the rise of social media. Even so, there are still quite a large number of blogs out there and, though their influence is waning, they continue to generate discussions (and arguments) within that portion of the RPG hobby that reads them.
Elmcat's map is an amazing piece of work. If you go to it, you can sort it by year, from 2003 to 2025, and zoom in to view it more closely. This enables you to see the name of each node, which is to say, each blog and its connections to other blogs. I find that feature the most remarkable thing about the map, since it visually represents the distinct "scenes" within the hobby and how closely (or not) they are to one another.
Likewise, the relative influence of each node is apparent by its size and color, with influential blogs being bigger and darker in color. In case you're wondering, the big orangish-red node in both of the above maps is Grognardia. Here's a zoomed in version of the first map, the one that covers all years between 2003 and 2025
Aside from the gratification of knowing that, despite it all, this blog retains a place of prominence within its corner of the RPG blogosphere, it's great to see the names of so many of the great OSR blogs of yore, many of which are now defunct.
Zooming in on Grognardia's solar system in the 2025 version of the map is interesting, too, but for a completely different reason – so many of today's most prominent blogs are unfamiliar to me. Mind you, I don't read as widely online as I used to, tending mainly to my own little garden, but, even so, seeing what the big and influential blogs are nowadays was genuinely eye-opening. It's a reminder that I probably need to devote more time to reading and interacting with the wider hobby again, something I haven't really attempted since the First Age of Grognardia. I suspect it might do me some good.
In any case, I highly recommend you take a peek at Elmcat's blog post, which is a stunning piece of work. This is the kind of stuff we used to see more of in the past and I want to support and promote it when we see it again.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
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