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   This isn't exactly a review. I don't own a copy, and I only spent 2 hours reading the game. However, I feel that's sufficient for my purposes here.

   Some background: I've been playing GW since 1978, and I still think 1st is the best edition, though there were some very useful improvements in 2nd; I mostly played with 1st Ed. plus the modifications in the GW1 Legion of Gold and GW2 Famine in Far-Go modules. If 3rd had been edited and had the "supplement" integrated into it, it would have been the best, but as it was, it was almost unusable. 3rd did have some of the best modules, and the mix of alien and native high-tech was nifty. 4th was perfectly typical garbage for TSR of the time. I didn't even waste my time doing more than flipping through the Alternity version. Nobody liked Alternity, least of all me.

   So now Sword & Sorcery have released a new version of Gamma World, in hardcover, because GW is the game that will not die, though with the last few it's more like each new generation of game company execs have to dig its corpse up and bugger it. Still, I was willing to give this a good hard look-through, and if it was at all decent, buy it immediately. I dislike D20 very much, but I've bought a few D20/OGL products that didn't suck: Babylon 5, The End, and Everquest, for instance. So it is possible to put in enough good material to make me ignore the system's flaws, and S&S has done so before.

   This time, I was massively disappointed, for five main reasons:

1. It sets the apocalypse in the 21st century, and is basically caused by an AI email virus... Which is too specific to current events to even be funny, and takes out the mystery of the setting. In the original, with the apocalypse in the late 23rd century and the game set in the early 25th, the over-the-top weird science and technology of the Ancients seemed reasonable, and the players would have as little knowledge of the world of the Ancients as the characters do. With the S&S edition, it's not that unfamiliar. I think that's a major, tone-destroying mistake.
2. Radiation is uncommon, and isn't responsible for the mutations. So why the hell is it even *GAMMA* World?
3. Many of the time-honored mutants and monsters are not included, apparently preferring to waste a lot of space on garbage D+Dish beasties (green slime, etc.), and there are no illustrations for a great number of creatures.
4. The mutation, equipment, and artifact sections are sub-par at best, cut-and-paste more likely. I don't know what they were thinking on this. "Weird stuff I have" is the heart and soul of Gamma World, and it sucks.
5. The writing is dull as dishwater, but much dryer. There's no sense of mystery or adventure. It's not even presented as a fun monster bash. It's *tedious*. How the hell you make *GAMMA WORLD* tedious, I don't know, but Bruce managed to do it. I have rarely been so completely turned off by the writing of a product in my life.

   IMO, it's not worth the paper it was printed on, and certainly not worth $34.95.

   Some of this isn't even mere incompetence. It was maliciously, intentionally flawed, so you'll have to purchase supplements to "correct" it. They've already announced the GM Guide for $29.99, and Mutants and Machines (monster manual) for $34.95, for a grand total of $99.89. Does the word "extortionate" sound familiar? GW 1st Ed. cost $20, IIRC. Boxed, complete, and with a nice map of the US. It took quite a few allowances to buy it, but I was glad I did. I'm pretty sure today's dollar is not worth 5x as much as 1978's, and this product sure isn't 5x better.

   If you want a good D20 version of GW, rather than just playing more of the real versions of it, go pick up Dungeon #92/Polyhedron #153, which has Omega World by Jonathan Tweet. In just 42 pages, it does everything right that S&S's soi-disant "Gamma World" game does wrong. The races are Pure-Strain Human, Mutated Human, Clicky Mutant (bugs), Hairy Mutant (mammals), and Scaly Mutant (reptiles). It has all the mutations, defects, and artifacts we know and love, and some new stuff. It doesn't have a complete or completely illustrated monster section, either (though it does have illos of Badders and Hoops, unlike S&S's book), but I have lower expectations from 42 pages in a magazine than I do from a 256-page hardcover. It also has random encounter design tables, and a modern story-based XP system. It's almost everything you'd ever want.

   I don't normally care much about art or layout past "illustrates the text" and "doesn't have grey text in thin fonts on busy grey backgrounds like White Wolf usually does", but Omega World is full-color, with really spectacular art, and makes amusing use of retro bitmap fonts for headers. S&S's book is black-and-white, with a very few good pieces of art, a minimal amount of other art (uniformly terrible), and a standard White Wolf "grey text in thin fonts on busy grey background" layout.

   Omega World is a better product in basically every way possible, for $7.99 instead of $99.89, available now (if your FLGS can get a reorder, anyway) instead of whenever S&S finish pumping out the other books.

Last modified: 2003Nov01
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