[Let's Look At] Mutants & Machine-Guns: A Gonzo Post-Apocalyptic RPG, Part 1: Overview

Several weeks ago, I was delighted to find a couple friends of mine in my hometown have been up to something exciting, and I thought what better way than to launch a new series of posts to revive this long-dead blog. [Let's Look At] is where I try to read through and dissect every chapter and corner of a new RPG that I have yet to play, and explore it with all of my musings about its design, some notes, and experimental plays to better understand it. I don't really intend these examinations to be a review of the game, but rants and raves may seep through the seams at times.    

Mutants & Machine-Guns A Gonzo Post-Apocalyptic RPG by Robertson Sondoh Jr. & Daniel Marcus of Experimental Playgrounds

Mutants & Machine-Guns: A Gonzo Post-Apocalyptic RPG is a post-apocalypse roleplaying game made by Robertson Sondoh Jr. and Daniel Marcus, who form the duo of Experimental Playgrounds. If you haven't heard of Experimental Playgrounds, these guys are from my far-away homestate of Sabah in Malaysia and they have been up making simple and free print-and-play boardgames/minigmaes that have gained some small notoriety on BoardGameGeek (check out their games that are available on BoardGameGeek) until now. 

Mutants & Machine Guns is the first RPG from Experimental Playgrounds and I'm excited to see a local RPG made by local talents. While it is still very much still in-development, the Experimental Playground folks were kind enough to send me a free copy of their latest version, which you can acquire at their website.

Disclaimer: While I do know both of the creators on a personal level, I do intend to view this RPG as objectively as any roleplayer would, giving my views that would hopefully be taken as constructive criticism to improve this game further.

Overview:

Sticking true to their love for simple to play games, Mutants & Machine-Guns is designed in the pocketmod format, which means that it is printable on an A4 paper and folded in 8 pages (10, if you include the character sheet and battlegrid). This makes it quite literally a very light RPG with all the rules (and then some) that can be fitted into a piece of paper to read through and learned almost at a glance.

Describing itself as a Gonzo Post-Apocalyptic RPG, the introduction to Mutants & Machine-Guns says that it takes its inspirations from classical post-apocalypse materials (movies and games) such as Thundarr the Barbarian, Gamma World, Mutant Future, Mad Max and Fall Out.

All you need to play this RPG, other than the necessary stationery and players, are just the easy to find D6s, which makes it friendlier for most gamers because polyhedral dices aren't a common thing you will see from where I come from.

Given it's format, I would generally breakdown the 'chapters' of this game down to the following, though they do not appear in that order:

1. Character Creation - the four main stats, combat-related stats, and task resolution 
2. Mutations - possible mutations that you can have as a character
3. Combat - combat rules, actions and healing
4. Wasteland Economy - equipment
5. GM rules - radiation and critters. 

So that's how I will be delving into each 'chapter' of the game. Look for more Mutants & Machine-Guns in my next post!

{Quest Log} Restarting the Quest

Gosh, it's been more than a year since my last update. This post certainly wasn't what I had intended to follow-up my last post, but it just goes to show how gaming has been so detached in my life in the past year. From resigning my job, getting relocated to a new town, finding my feet in a new job, new place and a new life, gaming has certainly been put on the back burner once again. So far back that the RPG Herald has become defunct.

Now, with a new boring job that seems to show a semblance of more peace and more controllable disposable free time, gaming has once again resurfaced into the agenda and so not wanting to digress to bore you with the details about how my non-gaming life has affected my gaming, I'm back.

Aptly enough with the start of this new year, the RPG Blog Carnival has set up its tent for New Beginnings, so I took it as a wonderful opportunity to restart my blogging as a questing gamer. I don't know what are my future plans for this blog will be, so I think I will be going with the flow this time around as I go through some of my older posts to pick up on any old ideas that I wanted to write about, or restart my presence in the RPG Bloggers Network and the RPG Bloggers Alliance. I have no gaming resolutions for this year (after not meeting any single one of it for 2011), so I'll just be slowly getting my swing back for gaming.

I believe much have happened in the gaming world during my absence for the whole year, so there's plenty of catching up to do. In the meantime, I'll be revisiting old friends in the bloggersphere, but let me just say that it's good to write for this blog again.   

{Quest Log} There comes an age....the Dragon Age

Hey all! It's been months since I last updated and real life has been tumultuous along the way. Since my last entry, I was employed into a new job and work basically took over my life again. In the meantime, my group had stopped roleplaying but continued playing boardgames. However that soon also fell through as they seem to lose the enthusiasm for it and got busy with other commitments. After long periods without any gaming activity, I thought that it was about time that I started the urge again to roleplay as characters and roll some dice.

It was coincidentally that I was about to launch into new plans of gaming when Free RPG Day went by and some of the print offerings (which I missed because there's no store that participates in Free RPG Day here) had been put up as free PDFs by their respective publishers. So I thought that it was a good time to check for any quick-start rules of new games that we could try.

So it was there I decided to pick up Green Ronin's Dragon Age quick start rules and have browsed through it several times over the past weeks or so. What I really liked about the AGE system is because it uses an abundance of d6s, which means that it's open to new players who don't have their own set of polyhedrals.

Now I'm eager to try running it with the sample adventure attached at the back and I plan to do my prep notes and thoughts on the quickstart rules and the adventure here. Just so that readers here will have something new to read again at the Questing GM.

On the other side of things, the RPG Herald is almost 3 months old now and I barely noticed how time flies as I try to keep posting on the latest news in the RPG industry. There's been some times when it was hard to keep up, but at this point in time, I'm glad to say that I'm happy with how diversified my news items are and how much it has expanded my knowledge about the RPG industry along the way.

Although the hits are still very low, but I would encourage any gamer to check it out if they want to know on the latest news and products that are available on the market. It's definitely the news site to watch if you are into multiple RPGs rather than just being a loyal fanboy to one system.

I'd also appreciate it if you would spread the word around about the RPG Herald because it needs the hits that it can get.

In the meantime, I've already had some ideas of new features to be added in this blog for months but haven't been able to really implement them yet. Just thought that I should mentioned it so that I can remind myself to give this blog a new revival of content.

Keep reading the Questing GM on my prep for the Dragon Age Quickstart Rules

Announcing the RPG Herald

Things may seem to be going quiet on this blog but my blogging has been taking up a notch lately.

I believed that I have mentioned before that aside from maintaining this blog, as a personal journal about my gaming activities in where I live, I'm also a contributor to the Purple Pawn, which is a general gaming news site which covers boardgames, miniatures, RPGs and card games.

Since I've been mainly contributing RPG news that I come across to the site, I've been blogging more and more about RPG-related news and have got my blogging pace back again. However that meant that I have less time invested on this site, since I've been trying to keep track of RPG news (and believe me, sometimes there's so many things that can happen in the RPG world in one day).

So I've been tinkering with the idea about posting more RPG news on this blog but feeling that RPG news did not really mesh well with what I have intended to do with this blog, I thought that I should start another site, dedicated just for RPG news.

After some giving it some thought, I finally decided to create a new blog, the RPG Herald, which aims to be a one-spot supplier of RPG-related news for RPG gamers.

The site would be mainly focused on RPG news, previews of upcoming products and hopefully score some interviews with designers, developers and industry players to discuss about RPG-related issues.

At the moment, I don't know what would the launch of RPG Herald mean to this blog, but it is clear that RPG Herald would be more inclined towards informing readers while this blog would remain as a personal space to talk about my personal gaming life.

Although I don't intend to post up reviews of RPG products on the RPG Herald, to maintain some integrity on the reporting, but I am open to review those products on this blog since I would be more comfortable in expressing my biased opinions here.

To any game publishers, bloggers, podcasters etc who are reading this, I welcome you to send any press releases or information that you have about game products, contests, conventions or game news that you need a free shout-out for to me at my email.

My email address is questinggm@gmail.com.

For gamers and readers of this blog, I encourage you to check out RPG Herald. I try to cover all sorts of news regardless of system and genre, so you might read something new about what is going on in the gaming scene (perhaps near you) and would thank you for your support.

I will be planning to apply the RPG Herald into the RPG Bloggers Network in the future since the application requirement says that the blog has to be active for at least 3 months.

In the meantime, you can keep up to date with the latest postings of the RPG Herald through my Twitter account if you haven't already followed me.

Once you've checked out the site, feel free to drop any comments or feedback on how you would to like to see the site improve here, and I'll see what I can do.

I like to thank you all for your support throughout these years of my blogging journey and hope that you would continue to do so for my new endeavor.

{Quest Log} Gamma World is Crazy Whacky Fun!

Last Friday, I had my first taste of Gamma World when a group mate of mine, Bryan, who bought the boxed set, decided to let us have a go at it. So me, and four others of various levels of experience with 4E would be playing as characters while the group mate who bought the game took the honours of being the ever dutiful GM (I guess you call them the Gamma-Master?).

When I arrived, the group were already in the early process of character generation but I managed to pick it up quickly due to the similarities it had with 4E. It was interesting to see that some of the other players who had only relied on the Character Builder when they started playing 4E, was having a hard time understanding the process.

I rolled an Empath Felinoid (which I named Mind Catrol) on the origins and had below average stats except for Wisdom and my origins ability scores. It was pretty nostalgic to roll random stats with 3d6 again. The whole process took us about an hour and a half, as we went through the 'eehh' and 'ahh' moments when trying to figure out how the process works.


Our gaming group for the session. That's me at the far right, in white. Bryan, our GM for the night, is the one in orange on the left.

After that an Empath Felinoid, a Seismic Giant, a Speedster Yeti, an Electrokinetic Telekinetic and an Android Cockroach were on their way to investigate the source of some robots rumbling down a hill to fire missiles at our homes before self-destructing for good measure.

It was here that me and everyone on the table knew that this game was not to be taken seriously even by chance. So we just had our fill of making quirky quotes, roleplaying our characters in the funniest way we think it would be appropriate and just went along with the weird whacky fun.

Combat encounters started easily enough outside the tower where the robots were coming from but once we got in, it showed that we weren't the toughest party except for the Giant who was taking most of the hits unscathed thanks to her Resist 5 to physical damage.



It was probably the first time that I saw the players didn't plan their strategies and tactics in-combat than while playing 4E, so we were just going with the flow of what we wanted to do and combat moved pretty fast. The game was so random, especially with the Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech cards, that we just wanted to try out what we had instead of planning to best ways to attack the enemies.

Unfortunately for our Speedster Yeti, he suffered a terrible irony where the only thing he was fastest at was dying (he also rolled the lowest initiative for all combat). But he was able to quickly generate a new character while we were still in combat and wade in a few rounds after that.

Our Speedster Yeti died the fastest in the group. At least he has fast at *something*

The session ended after the group managed to destroy a machine at an underground level underneath the tower and killed a group of crossbow wielding badgers with a couple of them having psychic fear inducing abilities which managed to knock most of us bloodied with one hit. My character, the Seismic Giant and the Speedster Yeti were dead after that encounter but we had our fill of crazy whacky fun during the game.

Overall, I like the randomness of the game as it feels like a different pace of the 4E rules. The random Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech at every encounter is the cause for all kinds of laughter we had that night and it just pushed us to go for that whacky idea in combat. In my mind, those cards alone were good motivations to roleplay in combat than I could ever achieve with D&D 4E.


This one just opened a whole can of laughs when one of us drew this.

However, I don't know if I can see myself running this in the long term, or if it was meant to be used for a long term campaign. It's a good break after all the sometimes stressful math crunching and combat tactics of the 4E system and it's definitely seems to be meant as a more humorous and lighter tone of 4E.

I will admit that I'm still pretty unclear about some of the rules after the session, other than the ones from 4E but with my character dead, I'm not sure if I really want a second dose of this. Still, it was a fun game nonetheless and some of the other players are eager to continue on with the adventure. I would recommend this if you want to have a some crazy whacky fun game night.