Saturday, May 31, 2014

Mutant Future Expanded Wilderness Rules

I've taken a break from the mapping and DCC adventure locales because I started running a Mutant Future campaign.  I got inspired to run this after playing in +Jim Wampler 's very cool playtest of Mutant Crawl Classics at GaryCon.  Since those rules aren't out yet I looked for alternative.  I was about to just run old Gamma World Second Edition but one of the players in my regular Labyrinth Lord game turned me on to Mutant Future.

The rules are great as written.  Very old school feel with lots of room for the GM, or Mutant Lord, as it is called in MF, to tinker.  The campaign idea I had in mind was going to be very heavy on the hex crawl and wilderness exploration themes so the first area I decided to tinker in was with the Wilderness Exploration rules and random encounter charts.

The fun of a hex crawl for me as a GM comes in creating an environment where I am just as surprised by what happens as the players are.  I created the following Wilderness Travel Sequence to help keep us all on our toes.
Of course I made some custom random encounter tables as well.  I haven't tweaked these to exactly where I want them yet, but I did add some bell curve to the types of critters commonly encountered, mostly segmented by power level for now, and the chance for special encounters as well as two or more groups encountered at the same time.



The roll twice are the best!  I love it when they come up.  It forces me to think on my feet and almost always lead to cool roleplaying or push the characters into an unexpected direction.  I rolled Pigmen and Spidergoats!  What exactly is going on here.  Of course they could be fighting each other, that's easy.  The Spidergoats could be tamed by the Pigmen, that would toughen up the encounter a bit.  Better yet, the Pigmen, having previously found the Spidergoat lair are laying in ambush for the Spidergoats to weaken or capture the party and then attack.  Or, since this is Mutant Future, the bizarre; The Spidergoats have a mental mutation that allows them to dominate creatures and the Pigmen are their servants.  Or the really bizarre; one or both groups have a physical mutation that allows them to inter-breed and the party really encounters a fledgling Pig-SpiderGoat army bent on world domination!

Then I created a subtable of 'Special' Encounters.  These are drop-in locales I have created, weird non-combat type encounters, or stuff I have ripped from other sources like +Tim Snider 's awesome One Year in the Savage Afterworld.

You can follow the results of my science project at our campaign website; Mutant Future - Big Sky

All of the charts are here in .doc format for you to enjoy!

Mutant Future Wilderness Travel Sequence

Mutant Future Wandering Encounter Tables

Big Sky Special Encounters

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