Gamma Oz

Its friday where I am anyway...
Beastmen and sewers in hell almost done...

So my beaver island stuff was lots of fun and usable but Ive got the apocalypse itch again. Gamma Oz has been on the boiler for a few years since my friend Christine and I would rap about wasps and come up names for Aussie dungeon stuff. The setting will be totally gonzo aussie mutant action. Also inspired by desire to subvert our tradition of cutsie anthropomorphic animals from kids books since Norman Lindsay (look him up he is a awesome artist who influenced fantasy and did some interesting smut too).

So characters will be outback animals, mutants, plants and probably robots in a quiet outback wasteland town prospecting for artifacts and possibly visiting the urban ruined mega sprawls full of insane mutants and zombies. Ruined domes dot the wasteland and underground towns like Coober Pedy today are everywhere.

The north of western Australia is dominated by defence robots who keep the area sentient and civilization free and possibly keep the two northern empires at bay. Indonesia Is under the control of Orangutans who are waging war with the advanced mecha using humans from the Empire of the Sun and the Cassawarriors who control norther tropical Oz and Papua New Guinea. Queensland is dominated by Canetoad men who are rapidly expanding wherever there is tropical conditions and water. They enjoy slavery and vice and like to be crime bosses (see the movie Hell Comes To Frogtown). They expand into other rural areas often running stores and pubs and trade and some of them are not too horrible just greedy and sleazy. Antarctica is crawling with bases and might be worth a trip by atomic subs.

Somehow I will fit the Magic Pudding in here too. Possibly it is a self regenerating mutagenic food source that outback towns live off but he doesn't really like being delicious or eaten. My favorite version of Blinky Bill (a naughty koala character for aussie kids) was a puppet one on the 80s but there are lots of talking Australian animals. A bit of Tank Girl good too for the other end of the 20th century.

Stuff in Gamma Oz (psychon/gammaworld)
koala and Wombat Waggons - merchants with giant koalas and wombats pulling waggons
Dingo dungeon - a big fat Aussie dungeon full of cobber
Possumclaw tower where possum wizards are in trouble
Glory falls, behind waterfall is a hidden kingdom under the mountain
Emus and Eloi -eloi tribes ride emus in Sth and cassowaries in Nth
Bunyip Burrows - a flooded ruin with bunyips
Gumboot gallows - a sunblasted town town that that runs a prison for the region
Magic puddings source bunker
Giant Blowflies - farkin pain in the arse, litteraly want to lay maggots in yer bum
Punk girls driving advanced combat tanks, subs and planes

Gammaworld and talking mutant genre stuff is kinda a bit silly and gonzo. This campaign will be a bit sillier than my last one or more tongue in cheek than beaver Island where I would keep a straight face despite meeting the mormon king of beavers waging wars against swamp mutant freemason hicks. There will be a bit of extra 30s Australian larrikinism in Gamma Oz and while it might get tense or scary it is not horror. Gammaworld everyone is like 10th level dnd and accumulated wealth and status are the goals and means to get more powerful. Not too deadly. Gamma Oz could be a slightly quirky occasionally cute animation or comic.

Planet Psychon is also weirder and stranger and often incomprehensible and psychedelic. The gods of psychon are capricious and insane and anything can happen. It has a different vibe to Gammaworld which is crazy but more consistent or at least justifies things with more limits. It is mor Jack Vance meets Moorcocks dancers at the end of time with HG Wells and Bryan Aldiss. It has whimsy and strangeness but is played straight even when silly. Psychon uses DnD and you start weak but get better growing into heroes. Psychon despite its weirdness and magic is probably more realistic but stylized and fabulously colourful. It is inspired by patrick Woodroof, Roger Dean and Rodney Mathews art.

My murder highway setting is quite different. It is straight faced and grittier and cruel. It is more like cyberpunk with laws of reality breaking down and dark old gods returning with cults and mutants and unrelenting awfulness. It can be weird but not gamma world or Psycho gonzo. I run it straight faced. It has humour more like Robocop, Running Man, Judge Dredd (comic not films), Demolition Man and not Quite as silly as Roger Corman's Deathrace movies but I do Like the Vibe. Kim Newman/Jack Yeovil's dark future sets the tone Perfectly. Over the top cyberpunk aesthetic with BRP mechanics with over the top detail and dismemberment. It is probably more gritty and graffiti covered like 2000AD comics or the first Mad Max (on the edge of apocalypse not actually post apocalypse).

Anyway I wanted to talk about my apocalyptic genre games differences a bit and Introduce Gamma Oz. I might do a starting area map as I have some evocative names.