Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Review and Commentary On Wisdom From The Wastelands Issue #35 From Skirmisher Publishing For The Mutant Future Rpg System or Any Old School Post Apocalyptic Campaigns



Grab It Right Over 

Issue Number 35 of Wisdom From The Wastelands marks one of my favorite mutant species in Gamma World 1st edition and the Mutant Future retroclone. Mutant plants are one of the most alien and under utilized post apocalyptic monsters in the wastelands. Yet, this is part III of a series of articles that seeks to correct that oversight. I've played a ton of the style of post apocalyptic gaming that wisdom covers. Mutant plants can and do evolve in the wastes to fulfill a very nasty role. Namely to hasten the demise of adventurers. For the ruins and dungeons of the wastelands mutant plants can be found throughout the wastes and we get a variety of mutant monsters and plants that exist within the wasteland ecology together. From the Demon's Walking Stick a weird horror if there was one to dizzy weed that can end adventurers lives in a hallucination induced death.
The problem is that that mutant plant PC are often some of the hardest creatures to play and yet some of the most rewarding for these are truly an alien species with which we share the planet and yet don't know enough about. Its not surprising that this issue has new plant diseases to make life even more difficult on players of such characters. Not a bad issue with more monsters, a few artifacts, and more poking through the pages.
This issue can add a bit more mayhem to your games by allowing the DM to throw a bit more high weirdness in with some mutant plant monsters into their Mutant Future campaigns. With a bit of work some of these could be adapted and added into Mutant Epoch if the DM needed a bit of extra punch to their ME games but it would take a bit of work. This material could definitely add a bit of mutant plant spice to your Gamma World first edition games with little issue.
Many of my thoughts turned to Metamorphosis Alpha while reading this issue and how this material could be turned loose on a level of the Warden with little fuss. Many of the mutant species would feel quite at home among the cramped and weird corridors of that particular ship. There are echoes of the mutant plant species throughout this issue at least in spirit.
The bottom line is that this issue is part of a chain of mutant plant information and seems incomplete even if it is self contained but that's hardly surprising seeing that this is the third part of a series. My advice is to grab all of them and then go over the material on mutant plants. Its well worth it and some of the advice can be very useful even for older games.
 The new mutations and equipment are really the icing on this post apocalytic cake and add just the right amount of old school science fantasy mutant plant mayhem. All in all not a bad issue but you'll want the others in this series. 

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