Tabletop is like a band: you don’t play unless everyone’s there.
My usual tabletop gaming group just did something unique: we finished a campaign. Coordinating six adults so that we’re consistently able to play for three or four hours every other week is hard! Most campaigns have a rotating cast as people drop out due to real-world commitments, games go on hiatus never to be resumed, life just gets in the way. So as weird as it sounds to a non-gamer, I feel a sense of accomplishment.
We were playing Gamma World, which is basically a simplified Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 in a post-apocalyptic setting. It’s a cool concept: several worlds merged together and the result is a lawless frontier with alien technology and magic. The best part is the tone, tongue-in-cheek silliness played straight. It has a vintage sci-fi/golden age adventure comic sort of flavor, and you can take it as seriously or as lightly as you like and it will still be entertaining. The setting has a history that’s older than I am, but the most recent version is easy to pick up and doesn’t need all that perspective.
In Gamma World, you don’t pick a character concept, it’s determined by luck. You roll dice to figure out your primary and secondary origins. In this case, “origin” is sort of a catch-all for power set and species. In this game I ended up with electrokinetic/pyrokinetic, which meant I was a human who could throw lightning and fire and had a burning aura. Others ended up with things like pyrokinetic/cockroach, empathic/yeti, felinoid/speedster. You’re given a set of cards with different superpowers on them. Not all these powers are useful all the time, but they change with each combat or with unlucky rolls. You also have the opportunity to scavenge technology from different universes, most of which consists of weapons. So your combat strategy can change dramatically between encounters based on luck of the draw.
So many maps!
Some spoilers ahead. Our GM used the campaigns from the book and expansions, with some additions and subtractions. I’ve avoided details, but you might want to be careful anyway.
Our GM ran us from level 1 through 10, which is where Gamma World is capped. We began as humble adventurers hired to sort out some fuckery with robots. We kicked the crap out of the gang who was trying to take over the nearby robot factory. It turned out that the gang were henchpeople of some guy named Alpha, who was trying to “bring some order to Gamma World.”
This is where we started to give the GM headaches. This Alpha guy might have a point, we agreed after some deliberation. After all, Gamma World is a shitty place to live. There’s no rule of law, you live by your fists and laser guns and mandibles. We made the henchmen put us in touch, and forcibly joined the organization. The GM used this as the plot hook for future adventures. Alpha needs us to pacify an area or restore the food supply so the people will be more receptive, pretty straightforward.
That’s when we became travelling corn salesmen.
There was one town, basically the town from Footloose, where we crossed the line from Chaotic Neutral to Neutral Evil. We didn’t like the locals: they were rude and banned fun. We happened to procure a spaceship that wasn’t spaceworthy and couldn’t be made so, but could be piloted a little ways. It had a convenient destruct button. We set it to go off in the middle of Assholetown’s square, where it would destroy the local government but not the majority of its people. We then radioed Alpha’s people to come in with medics and supplies so that they’d be hailed as heroes and the town would go over to Team Lawful Evil without a fuss.
That was around the time we coined our team name, Collateral Damage.
More things happen. People disappear, robots appear, we kill stuff, we kill more things, we fight Reaganomics. It’s all fun. We spend a good portion of a gaming session roleplaying our characters asking a computer about astronomy, as it’s unlikely that anyone on the wrecked Gamma Terra even understands what a planet is. We go to the moon, the source of one of our problems.
Bolivian army ending: When your heroes are surrounded by insurmountable odds and will probably die. Fade to black.
A few sessions back, our GM asks us if we would be okay if he killed off our characters. The general response was “Only if it’s awesome.” My expectation was a Bolivian army ending.
We have a final bossfight, which turns anticlimactic when one player combines weapons in a way that doubles their damage, then rolls two crits in a row that instantly turn the boss into a puddle of goo. This was still awesome, don’t get me wrong, just in a different way than expected.
So our characters are treated as heroes and kind of dig it, but it’s time to go back home. We’re going to be met by Alpha himself as thanks for all the cool shit we’ve done in his name! In an out of character way, yeah, it’s a trap, but metagaming is shitty and you should trust your GM. (So long as your GM is a good storyteller and not just intent on torturing you.) And our characters were riding high on their easy victory and had their guard down.
blah blah blah 35 minutes ago.
We teleport back to base and are greeted by fifty soldiers aiming their weapons at us. One soldier is bigger and more badass than the others. It’s Alpha, and he’s got a fucking monologue for us…naturally. He appreciates our service in expanding his empire, but we’ve grown too popular and too powerful. As he monologues, we find that there’s a forcefield around the teleportation pad. Our powers can’t get through it, overload it, or destroy the pad itself. Dude’s had time to prepare for us.
Alpha thanks us for our service, but it’s time for us to go. We dematerialize with a flurry of curses and rude gestures. I’m actually mad: I didn’t think I’d get attached to a character in a lighthearted campaign like this, but it’s been a long ride. We weren’t even planning to overthrow Alpha! Our motivations were pure-ish! And then, very unexpectedly, we re-materialize.
We’re in a dank cave. There’s an acrid smell and sounds of combat nearby. Our radiation-powered dude notices that the local ambient radiation is less than he’s used to, which is a tipoff that we might not even be on Gamma Terra. That, and there’s a dragon murdering a couple guys. “Welcome to Grayhawk,” says the GM.
The best way to end anything, really.
As a group we decide to sneak away and live. Between our powers, the mountain of Omega tech we’ve accumulated, and even our useful mundane gear, we have a better than fighting chance. If the prospect of building an empire from scratch in order to gather mages from all over in order to figure out how to get home and murder the everloving shit out of somebody doesn’t give you pants-feelings, we can’t be friends.
I’ve never finished a campaign before! It’s always been sort of a Fremen thing. “Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now it’s complete because it’s ended here.'” And that’s what’s happened anyway, because we’re not revisiting our intrepid adventurers, but at least we got a full story arc out of it.
Our GM deserves a trophy! We’re not an easy group, with our tendency to jump the track, destroy what we shouldn’t, roleplay or start combats in situations where we shouldn’t. If you name an NPC and hint that they have a personality, I don’t want to kill them. If an NPC is rude to us, we hold ridiculous long-term grudges. We try to collapse economies and foment revolts. We sold a lot of popcorn and beer. We’re ridiculous assholes, and he put up with us for several months, steering us when need be and letting us have fun rather than just beating on us with monsters.
I really like the Gamma World system. It’s playable right out of the box. You need dice, but you already know that. The rules are simple enough to pick up quickly, and we only had to establish a few house rules to fill in the gaps. The campaign that comes with the game is simple, but the point isn’t fancy storytelling, the point is fun. Laser grenades! Swords! Explody teddy bears! Objective achieved. 9/10.
Disney Remix: Beauty and the Beast
Eleven is the age of accountability in the Pokemon world, of course. Because if anything is a model of sanity, it’s Pokemon society.
There’s probably a Cracked article about this somewhere, but was everyone aware that Prince Adam from Beauty and the Beast was 21 when he met Belle? When the object-servants sing about how much it sucks that they haven’t had company in a long time, they mention that it’s been ten years since they were people. That means that Prince Adam was eleven when he turned the witch away and she retaliated by turning him into a beast and everyone he cared about into an object. E-lev-en. That is not anyone’s age of accountability!
I feel like the harm the witch did to all the servants gets overlooked because it interferes with this love story. Not all of these are adults or animals: Mrs. Potts has a bunch of children. Did every single one of these children offend the witch too? (Or more alarmingly, Chip seems pretty young. Was he born to Mrs. Potts post-transformation? If so…how? Mrs. Potts is or was married. Who is/was her husband?Is he the kettle? This raises even more horrifying questions. How does a teapot give birth?) In the “Be Our Guest” number we see hundreds of dancing, singing servant-utensils! Is the witch completely unaware that servants are people in their own right?
Neither of these two is Mrs. Potts’s baby-daddy.
So let’s say Prince Adam grows up surprisingly well-adjusted because his servants are like “Fuck, I’m already a candelabra and nobody knows what’s going to happen to us when that rose loses some the last few petals. Why not be honest with the guy?” The servants start calling out the young prince on his shenanigans.
The Beast learns to be a decent human being. The lines of class and privilege have been blurred because they’ve all been turned into something less than human. The Prince can’t associate with other royalty, and has become something of a recluse. He wants the approval of his friends, this community of people who understand what he’s going through. The castle staff tells the prince that what happened to him wasn’t really his fault. Really, who steals a kid’s childhood because he’s kind of an asshole? All things considered, it could be worse. The castle community lives as they always used to, but the servants get used to speaking their mind and the Prince spends his days in the library or in correspondence with magicians and scholars all over the world, attempting to find a cure for the curse. It’s not just about him: he has hundreds of people in his care.
Unfortunately, before the internet communication took a long time. The prince wakes up one day and all of the servants in the castle are just objects. Angered by the death of his friends, Prince Adam seeks revenge.
Gaston: Han Solo without the charm.
This is my favorite part of a lot of movies, getting the band together. He seeks out the local eccentric inventor with whom he has become acquainted over the years, and asks for help hunting the witch down. In my version of the story, the inventor is Belle’s mother rather than father, and is from the Disney version of the Ottoman Empire. (The story needs more female characters and her difference makes the townsfolks’ wariness over her and her daughter a lot more interesting than “I don’t trust that fancy book-larnin’.) Belle gets involved because you really can’t stop her from getting in on this. She’s the Hermione of the group, bringing information into the story plausibly. They hire on Gaston and Lefou, a mercenary bounty hunter and his retainer, because no one hunts like Gaston.
Horses are spooked by the beast. No problem, though! The inventor has always wanted to try out her airship designs. There’s a montage of the crew cannibalizing the castle in order to create the body and balloon of the airship.
But wait! Gaston betrays them in the third or forth act! It turns out the enchantress is trying to undermine the feudal system by literally turning the rulers into monsters! The two have been communicating via magic mirror or some shit. Gaston is sympathetic to the witch’s cause: as a hunter who sees himself at the top of a food chain, he’s distressed by any system that’s not a meritocracy. Of course, he’s also being paid well. He’s not a good person, you know? Don’t expect Gaston to buy into any ideologies but his own. He disables the airship and rigs it so it’s about to blow with the heroes tied up inside. Then Lefou makes a heel-face-turn and rescues the heroes. He loves Gaston, they’re bros, but he’s mad about this one.
The witch turns into a better dragon than these, hopefully. Otherwise it’s just sad.
The heroes recover! Time is short, now that they’re aware that the witch knows they’re coming to her stronghold. The witch turns into a dragon, undermining her point about monsters but symbolically doing what revolutionaries do, turning into the monsters they hope to overcome. There’s a dragon versus airship dogfight! The airship has a single cannon and they lob bombs pirate-style. Someone more talented than me needs to make this work somehow. The witch dies…but the objects don’t come back to life.
Adam ends up abdicating the throne, having learned that power shouldn’t be concentrated in the hands of a few. His kingdom (principality?) institutes a representational government. It turns out Lefou’s actually useful in local government. All those years kissing Gaston’s ass made him good at managing people. Belle and Adam fall in love in sort of an incidental way, out of mutual respect and shared love of literature. It’s not a happy ending — people are dead. But it’s a start.