Monday, February 20, 2023

The Inspirations of Gamma World

Based on the comments to the second part of my recent post on My Top 10 Non-D&D RPGs, my opinion that Gamma World should be viewed more as an example of the "dying earth" fantasy genre than as an example of straight-up post-apocalyptic science fiction was well received. This got me to thinking a bit more about Gamma World and its inspirations. While I suspect I'll dig more deeply into this in future posts, for the moment I wanted to present what editors Tom Wham and Timothy Jones had to say on this matter.

In their May 21, 1978 foreword to the first edition of the game, they write:

Drawing inspiration from such works as The Long Afternoon of Earth by Brian Aldiss, Starman's Son by Andre Norton, Hiero's Journey by Sterling Lanier, and Ralph Bakshi's animated feature film Wizards, the referee of a GAMMA WORLD campaign fleshes out the game, adding any details he or she deems necessary, and thereby creating a unique world in which day-to-day survival is in doubt. The rules are flexible enough to allow for a variety of approaches to the game – anything from strictly "hard" science-fiction attention to physical probabilities to a free-flowing Bakshian combination of science-fiction and fantasy.

What's apparent from this section of the foreword is that, as written, Gamma World was intended to be a fairly open-ended set of rules without a specific feel beyond whatever the referee introduced into his own campaign. In this respect, it's not unlike Dungeons & Dragons (and indeed most other early RPGs). The explicit inspirations mentioned above are eclectic, though none of them strike me as particularly "hard science fiction." The fact that every edition of the game that I ever owned (1st through 3rd) called itself a science fantasy game is telling.

Still, I think this is a topic worthy of further discussion. I believe there is more going here than is popularly imagined. If nothing else, it'll be yet more grist for my delving into the literary origins of roleplaying games.

17 comments:

  1. In the other post I commented that it surprised me to see Gamma World beat Star Trek, but I actually like GW better.
    I think you are on to something, especially considering how the
    Erol Otus art for the GM screen had a fairly "mutant wizards, punk fairies and magical robots meet the Wizard of Oz" feel to it.
    2e still retains much of that atmosphere, I think, but Rite of Passage very much sets a very precise tone, steering prospective GM in a definite direction regarding how GW should be run "properly".
    The same goes for all the editions afterwards, more or less.

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  2. I think that Hiero's Journey and Starman's Son (which I read under a different title) really influenced my Gamma World experiences. I never read Long Afternoon of Earth - or rather I think that I have read a portion of it as a separate story. As for Bakshi's wizards - ugh.

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  3. In the 1970s, Prior to Star Wars, dystopian or post-apocalyptic fiction was incredibly popular both in books and movies. So there's no lack of source material.

    As a random thought, I remember there being GM advice to mark areas of the map with various radiation intensities, and to consult the appropriate radiation vs. constitution chart as needed. And we played this game for fun!

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  4. Just as Brian Aldiss's Starship (aka Nonstop) was the prime influence of Metamorphosis Alpha, so too was his Hothouse (aka The Long Afternoon of Earth) a prime influence of Gamma World.

    From the former comes the Pure Strain Human's gang of humanoid mutant followers. From the latter comes the hilarity of PC's trying to uncover the significance of baffling and often silly artifacts.

    I highly recommend Aldiss. He was at the forefront of the new wave and is unfairly and unreasonably obscure today. I can't blame James Ward for being utterly smitten by him.

    (Shameless plug: Pilum Press's Penultimate Men contains my essays on Aldiss and rpgs along with some first class postapocalyptic stores at least one of which was directly inspired by Gamma World gaming.)

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  5. What a fantastic, evocative illustration by Dave Trampier!

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  6. That introduction does allow fitting in the Dying Earth into it. Science Fantasy as a genre seems to have all but disappeared. Perhaps the closest thing I can think of is Guardians of the Galaxy.

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  7. I am not sure if "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky Bothers influenced the authors of Gamma World at all, but it certainly influenced my own campaign. The notion of dimensionally altered landscapes full of incomprehensible artifacts is deeply compelling to me. I think the idea that the future Earth of Gamma World was already far beyond our current tech level when it succumbed to its weird holocaust was lost on many readers of the game. No doubt aided by illustrations of 1980s era stop signs and telephones strew about the wasteland environment. In my mind such things would have already been lost to history before the Gamma World timeline even began.

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    1. I fully agree. Much as I love the art from the various Gamma World modules, it played a role in giving the wrong impression about the nature of the setting and the apocalypse that preceded it.

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    2. I guess it depends on how long GW was in development and what languages Ward & company read. Roadside Picnic was published in 1972, but only came out in English in 1977, a year before GW came out. That might have been a big enough window for it to have influenced the design.

      Guarantee Picnic was on someone's Appendix N for the WotC edition of the game, though. That was much closer to the vibe of the book, with a reality that literally broken to the point of instability.

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  8. For those of us that discovered Gamma World after 1980, the Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon was the primary Inspiration for our games. My inspiration for Gamma World and mostly Sci-fi games came from TV and movies, while most of my fantasy/D&D inspiration came from books.

    The timing is what makes this topic so interesting. There are tons of post-apocalyptic movies and books that were created after Gamma World was first published, but I've never thought about what inspired the original game. Certainly there was post-apocalyptic fiction before 1980, but it certainly isn't as widely popular as the what came later.

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  9. Talking of the game's influence, when I think of Monte Cook's Numenera, I think of it as sharing more DNA with Gamma World than D&D.
    I think it's no coincidence (or a very peculiar one, I really can't say) that Cook's friend Bruce Cordell went on to work for MCG soon after he co-designed Gamma World 7th edition.

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  10. I think a lot of Gamma World games fell back on a sort of near-future Mad Max post-apocalyptic setting (probably encouraged by some of the later modules and artwork, as mentioned above), but as originally written it was pretty clear that the apocalypse was already far in the future. When Jim Wampler wrote Mutant Crawl Classics (which is to Gamma World as Dungeon Crawl Classics is to D&D), he was even more clear about the setting being post-apocalyptic from an explicitly "Vancian" incomprehensibly advanced civilization whose relics linger on.

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  11. my grandmother, dep, took us to see wizards in the short time it was in theaters. she did not speak english well and thought it just a cartoon, we were in for quite a ride! we loved it, and it shaped our perceptions of an 'after man, after apocalypse' and subsequently our 2nd edition gw experience. by the time 3rd ed gw was released we had discovered twilight 2000, and thus abandoned gammaworld for the grittier twilight 2000.

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  12. I ran it as weird dnd with a hint of walking dead. There was also some big brother thrown in there with a town being controlled by ai. "Mother" who wanted all tech. I watched some of Wizards but couldn't finish it. The game also had some he-man and thundarr in it

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  13. Thinking of how I have run Gamma World (I've briefly run 2nd, 4th and 7th edition), I have to say that the past and the ancients play a surprisingly small part.
    Not that they are absent, but that I've always naturally put the accent on the mish-mash of fantastic elements and social/political elements.
    Probably, due to my interest in Marvel comics, the result could be described more as "superhero fantasy" than "Science fantasy".

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  14. Roadside Picnic is a great book, as is Definitely Maybe by the Strugatskies. Perhaps not Gamma World stuff but wonderful science fiction.

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  15. Yep, I noted the influence of Hiero's Journey on GW - but also O/AD&D encounters and psionics - a while ago. One chapter in particular seems a direct inspiration to the artifact flowchart procedure.

    https://rolesrules.blogspot.com/2013/11/hiero-and-d.html

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