Why did I make Chronomutants? Well, I did it because I run a lot of tabletop games, and there was a gap, an itch I wanted to scratch, and I poured over tons of games, and I couldn't find what I wanted. But what did I want? The long and short of it is that I wanted Gamma World to play like the key art looks.

I wanted to ride a mecha-badger across desolate cliffs with a sniper rifle and armor that looks like I won it in a poker game from a sentai-predator.

I’m not saying that you can’t recreate the awesome cover art in Gamma World, but it wasn’t the experience I have had playing it or running it, and I don’t think it’s the experience most people have playing it.

Now I’m not going to say anything bad about Gamma World, I love Gamma World. Over the last few years I have dove deep into a smattering of indy systems both big games like Blades in the Dark, little PbtA games, game jam curios, unsung heroes like Electric Bastionland, lots and lots of other modern games. We live in a golden age of tabletop games, and I have played a bunch and read even more. What I wanted was cutting edge modern game design married to the flavor of Gamma World.

So I went on a quest for this game. 1st I went through every edition of Gamma World proper, and it’s kids (Omega World & Mutant Future). Then I went to homebrew conversions (shoutout to Savage Gamma World & The Gene Hack). Then I went to hacking apart and rebuilding Gamma World 7th edition into something meaner and leaner.

The precursor to Chronomutants was a heavily homebrewed Gamma World 7th Edition. I spent a long time creating some pretty substantial adventures for GW7. A puzzle/trap heavy crawl called The Intern Terror of the Chronomancer’s Vestibule, followed by a living ecosystem sandbox dungeon The Claw of Santos, followed by a hexcrawl The Ballad of Jumbo Shrimp. 

The Claw of Santos was much more developed than the other adventures, it took a lot of inspiration from an awful experience I had trying to run The madness at Gardmore Abbey a couple of years before. So I had a lot of ideas about what I thought should go into a sprawling dungeon. I thought it was good, so I workshopped a lot of the stuff in some online groups, and I entertained the idea of putting it out. I know GW7 has a small but very loyal following, and I know there is little to none in the way of content for the system. It’s all done, content complete, but I was really unhappy with my amateur formatting/layouts, and I felt I either had to spend hundreds of hours teaching myself graphic design or dump money into the project to hire help. At that time I was struggling financially, and working a lot of hours. I eventually just let it go. Mostly because I had already done the part that interested me, and don’t have a passion for formatting/graphic design/etc. I still run it every other year for the holidays (it’s about a mall santa).

Last year I wrote a little 1 shot hexcrawl The Ballad of Jumbo Shrimp. Which I wrote specifically to play a game with the terrain and miniatures I have.

In the years between Santos and Jumbo I had begun running Savage Worlds as my default DnD-a-like. I was originally going to do much more system homebrewing to port it over, but ended up doing mostly vanilla GW7 once I saw how much I would really need to do to gut and rebuild GW7 into Savage Worlds. I instead just ended up removing to-hit rolls for players and made all their defenses active saves. I only ran the whole thing once, and it was fun, but what really stuck with me was the fact that I felt like GW7 was getting in the way of the fun I wanted instead of helping create it.

I think part of my dissatisfaction was that I was spoiled by Electric Bastionland. EB’s parent Into the Odd is quite frankly the leanest meanest OSR crawl game there is. It’s versatile, compact, and gives a very solid foundation to do whatever kind of dungeon crawling you want, or you can explore the sprawling psychedelic system of Bastion. Additionally, the GM notes from the EB book and the blog of its creator Chris McDowell are first in class. It’s a treasure trove of powerful ideas for GMs and designers.

So I toyed with hacking Gamma World into ItO. It’s pretty easy to do actually, but the results didn’t feel right. It was an OSR crawler with laser guns and tentacles. I could feel I was on the wrong track.

In the wake of Jumbo Shrimp I was thinking a lot about “finding the fun” in a session. This thing I heard from Ben Milton talking about his adventure The Waking of Willowby Hall being built on “the fourth unspoken pillar of DnD, player shenanigans” had resonated with me, and was rattling around in my brain. It felt true to me that every story I had with a lifetime of tabletop gaming in me was based on this “player shenanigans” I thought a lot about my 1st time playing DnD4e and being told I shouldn’t try a rope swing into an attack because it was likely to fail, and failing meant nothing happened and I had wasted my turn, I thought about how my EB campaign had felt so effortless in play because of the simple mechanics. I thought a lot about GW7 and how a game about angry badger-men, and finding literal garbage, and accidently growing a bunch of eyes, should be the place for shenanigans but none of the versions supported that.

So I set myself down the path of making “player shenanigans” the game. I wanted players to tell me that they rode their mecha-badger across desolate cliffs to find the sniper perch needed to be in place for the plan. I wanted them to mess up and instead of nothing happening, they grew a bunch of eyes and now that was their character. I wanted shit to explode and my friends to laugh, and a game where “it’s so crazy it might work” was the default, not the special case. I had an itch that needed to be scratched. I wanted to stop bolting the fun onto other systems, and make it core to how the game worked.

Good news is that I’ve done it. It works, we play it, and it’s fun. In fact I like it so much I’m going to insist on sharing it. I know it needs a lot of work to be more readable, but I can get there better and faster with feedback. So please read it, try it, or recommend it to someone you think will like it.

Stay safe, have fun, destroy the timeline

-gary