Dreaming of Mutants

About two weeks back, I got some old friends together on the net and asked them to get back to some RPG-ing (the dice and paper variety). While I'm glad most responded positively, the last week saw a truckful of work cascading down on me and leaving me with another weekend and week of deadline beating, paper pushing, cruchtime dodging work. Ah well, I aint complainin' as too much work beats too little work anyday.

I hope I can make it up to my players who I can see believe in their referee to give everyone another afternoon of fun and whacky dice rolling in Neverwhere.

For the past few days I'd been immersed in Omegaworld, a take off from the old 70s RPG Gammaworld. Omegaworld came out in TSR's polyhedron magazine and is the solution to a referee with too much on his hands in terms of work and real life commitments and too little in terms of gaming and prep time. It looks rules light and pretty straightforward for a d20 game. Plus, more importantly, it looks like FUN!

Alas, my projected epic of an intrepid band of explorers in the post-nuclear wasteland of the future will have to wait till I live through the epic of a struggling lawyer and his deadlines in the urban wasteland that is Manila of the present.

At the back of my mind, I'm dreaming of a four armed mutant with bandoleers of scavenged powercells, grenades and bullets criss-crossing his smooth scaled torso sitting on a pile of ancient rocks. He doesn't know it but that pile of rocks he's sitting on used to be part of the Pentagon. Somehow I think that in between trying to find stuff to eat and staying out of the way of giant mutant spiders which shoot black deathrays at their prey he muses on how it must be fun to have been born in the time of the ancients. If his granpa's tales were true, he'd have been sitting before a magic box with a glass window which comes to life at the touch of a crypitc button. Different images appear on the glass window depending on how you pound the crytic buttons in front of you. I guess he'd think that sure beats having to scrounge around the desert for edible roots while dodging giant mutant spiders and their ilk.

Then again there'd be no way for me, an ancient one from the time Before the Bomb to tell him it isn't really all fun and games living in this time. After all, we all know there are worse monstrosities than giant mutant spiders which shoot deathrays at their prey in 21st Century Manila.

Yes my mutant friend, here, our monstrosities are called Politicians.

Best to stay in your own time even if it is in the world After the Bomb. It still pays to count your blessings.

Argh, I still wanna run a game...