Customer Reviews

Gamma World: Game Masters Guide (Gamma World d20 3.5 Roleplaying)

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This is an excellent companion to the Gamma World players guide. It provides a lot of useful information about how to run a game set in the dangerous future "Gamma World."

More importantly, it gives clear, lucid and useful advise on how to be a good Game Master (GM). The instructions for how to run a Gamma World are the kind of "How To" articles that apply to virtually any gaming experience, and will be useful for aspiring GMs from a variety of gaming disciplines.

Let me start this by saying I was teethed on Dungeons and Dragons, which did their GM's guide *right*. This Gamma World GM's guide, by comparison, is not a game master's guide that is packed with rich information on the game world but is more of an idea book with ways you can run your campaign and ideas you can use in your game world. The old D&D GM guide had pages and pages of incredibly useful tables and lists, covering subjects like magic items (in detail), types and values of gemstones, monster experience point value, magical properties of gemstones, and so on and so forth. There were sketches of various monster encounters--where they belonged and how to run them--and ideas for running your campaign at different experience levels. The Gamma World GM guide is a pale reflection of this dense work. It offers about 10% of what the D&D GM guide offers. To put it bluntly, there is not enough bang for your buck with the Gamma World GM guide to justify buying it.

I was very, very disappointed with this book. The old Gamma World rules made for a highly imaginative, highly dangerous campaign world full of weird monsters and ancient treasures just there for the taking. The storyline of an apocalyptic planet Earth was compelling and frightening, and with a good GM you could run one hell of a fast-paced campaign full of danger, adventure, high risks and rich rewards. You could run a zombie apocalypse, plague apocalypse, nuclear apocalypse, alien invasion apocolypse, or any combination of these. This title, this Gamma World GM's guide, is so vague and unfocused as to be meaningless. It almost stimulates you to think of wild ideas but doesn't quite do so, and it gives you virtually nothing in terms of hard information (lists and descriptions of tek items, for example, or types of diseases circulating in the Gamma World, or types and values of gemstones, or discussions of different forms of government, or a discussion of different types of slavery that might be in use, climate charts and tables for different climate and terrain types, etc.).

In short, don't bother buying this if you're a GM looking for a good game to play. Buy the old 2nd edition rules for Gamma World. They're a bit spare, but they're not vapor and fluff, like this book. You'll get bang for your buck and have a good time with the game.