News — Gamma World

Today I'd like to take a look at a single piece of artwork that was done by artist Jim Holloway for TSR's Gamma World 2nd Edition in roughly 1983.  Now Holloway only spent two years at TSR, and to his recollection those weren't 'great times' considering how the company was changing from 1982 to 1984.  It was transitional, with Gary in L.A. and the company beginning to sag under its own weight of production, mismanagement, and the cooling of the fad that D&D had become circa 1979.  Still, in that period, under the art direction of Jim Roslof, the art...

Today I’m going to give a little ‘love’ to Gamma World 2nd Edition. Although you’d be hard pressed to find a player out there to calls 2nd Edition their favorite iteration of the game, it still has some cool work done for it so I’ll take a look at the art of The Cleansing War of Garik Blackhand [which BTW wins the TSR award for longest title of a product]This is a strange little bit of work as there are two credited artists in it, Jim Holloway and David ‘Deisel’ LaForce. As the first printing was in 1983, this seems...

I was at my yearly game retreat last March and one of my friends had a copy of the third printing, of the initial release, of Gamma World by TSR in 1981. Since the game had been designed in 1978 by James M. Ward and Gary Jaquet, it had a certain old school feel, but it wasn’t until I actually picked up a physical copy and held it in my hand that I realized all the artwork for it was done by Dave Trampier.That simple fact alone makes this version of the game highly important to the hobby in...

Rolling D20s for Gamma World might sound odd, considering how the system has evolved over the years, but because of the D20 boom of the early 2000s, there is a rather substantial Gamma World edition based around the mechanic. Today, to continue my Gamma World series, I’m going to look at the art of the Sword & Sorcery’s release of Gamma World D20. Based on the D20 Modern core rules by Wizards of the Coast, this edition is a nice collection of rules that feel a bit forced and not as lovely as I’d like considering the source material.The artwork,...

I have a love of Gamma World that can be traced back to my Cold War infatuation with nuclear oblivion, so make no mistake that I take a good deal of pride in my collection of post-apocalyptic RPGs, as well as my own creations Future Warrior and my After the Apocalypse card game.That said, I’d have to admit that my favorite edition of Gamma World would be the 3rd Edition, and today I’m going to talk a bit about Kim Eastland’s Alpha Factor.Written in 1986, this module is 38 pages of introductory procedure that sets new characters in the Gamma...