Playing Metamorphosis Alpha (1976)

I. Dear Reader

This week, we officially kick off a year’s worth of intermittent posting about games from 1975 to 1985. We start off with Metamorphosis Alpha, a game by James Ward, published by TSR in 1976.

The pitch of Metamorphosis Alpha is wild. You play people aboard a giant starship that on its journey through space was irradiated and turned into a wacky wonderland. The ship is huge – 50 miles long and 17 levels. It’s a megadungeon with whole biomes in it. The people aboard the ship have essentially had their society break down with mutated folk and non-mutated folk separating and fracturing into a thousand different communities. A lot of knowledge of the ship has been lost and now, life is mostly about survival.

Mutation is at the heart of this game. It’s both a worldbuilding principle (anything is possible! just say it’s a mutation!) and an invitation to make off-the-wall weirdest bunch of freaky little guys you could hope for. Character creation is easily the most fun part of the game. You can play a normal human (boo!), a mutant person, a mutant animal, or, wait for it, a mutant plant! Yes, my green friends, you can absolutely play a plant. In my game, which we dubbed the Preposterous Adventures of Peacock and Plant, the two players were, you guessed it, a peacock and a plant. Or rather, a peacock-person and a plant-person. Or to be even more precise, a peacock with six hands and a levitating ficus.

While stats are randomly rolled (3d6 down the line), you get to pick your mutations. For physical mutations, you could pick having wings or gills. For mental mutations (usually limited to one), you could pick precognition or telekinesis or telepathy or… death field generation? It’s a gonzo buffet.

I don’t particularly like the term “lonely fun”. I think “lonely” stopped being a synonym for “alone” a while ago and now it’s mostly used to mean “sadness about being alone”. There’s nothing sad about sitting by yourself and playing a game. For both the GM and players, Metamorphosis Alpha’s big gift is solo fun. The GM is invited to make this big starship, piece by piece, stocking it with whatever nonsense they can imagine. The players are given this toy box with pretty clear rules so they can spend all the time they want making the choicest weirdo.

How does it play? Good question, disembodied voice! Well, it doesn’t really. The actual rules of the game felt like little islands that you could visit but if you didn’t, you were wandering adrift. There are six stats. Radiation Resistance, only used when exposed to radiation. Mental Resistance, used for psychic attacks and defending from them. Leadership Potential, which is used to see if someone will follow you and join your party. And then Strength, Dexterity and Constitution which are for combat.

So outside of being irradiated, trying to recruit a follower, or fighting, the game doesn’t really have any rules to invoke. There is no core mechanic as you’re probably used to. People who have played OD&D will recognize this but for others, I have to explain how weird that feels. You don’t just roll the dice when making a jump or when trying to persuade a person or examining a door or literally anything outside the situations mentioned above. There is no ability check or saving throw. It was honestly like playing a PbtA game with four very specific moves and nothing else.

I didn’t want to just ignore this in play so I didn’t houserule it away. We stuck to the text and anytime the characters wanted to do something dangerous or tricky, we just talked through it. This wasn’t great. Not just because we missed rolling dice. For me, this was tough because there was the stark tonal shift from character creation to play. When we made characters, it seemed like a saturday morning cartoon. But when we played, the primary method for progress was getting the GM to agree that your action should succeed. You can’t just roll for success, you have to convince the GM. But on what basis is the GM supposed to decide? If I was being an impartial referee, thinking about physics and realism and so on, my job is to say “no” to wacky ideas that would be home in a saturday morning cartoon. In the end, I didn’t want to spend my time saying no and chose to embrace my players’ wacky ideas. We had a fun game and since the players wanted to avoid all the combat, we basically never touched the dice.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Is this one of those “objective successfully failed” situations? I’m really interested in hearing from folks who played this game or its successor, Gamma World. Which way did you fall? Survival dungeoncrawl or saturday morning cartoon? Both? Neither?

Regardless, this isn’t the last you’ve heard about this.

Yours mutatingly,

Thomas

PS: This is how stats like Radiation Resistance are used. When the situation arises, you look down at a look-up table! Radiation level on the x-axis and your stat on the y-axis. The result is the amount of dice you take as damage, I think. If you get a D, that’s instant death. But every turn when you’re exposed, your stat temporarily goes down by one. So you have to keep rechecking the table every turn.

---

II. Media of the Week

• Nothing this week! Sorry!

---

• Please consider joining 100+ other patrons and support the newsletter on patreon to help keep me going.
• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

---

III. Links of the Week

• Open Hearth had a nice Forged in the Dark discussion. It’s not an introduction, more a discussion among experienced players about what they liked and disliked about games that build on Blades in the Dark. There’s a video also.
• On Age of Ravens, another great round-up of cool game mechanics. This includes fatebinding, faction management, campaign playbooks, and more.
• I found this lovely post on the Dice Exploder site which features a list of resources for new designers – leaning towards the PbtA side of the hobby. Some of my posts are there which are very flattering. Overall, a very nice reading list of posts.
• Also, for design brains, Monte Cook has a post with three abilities and why they wouldn’t fit in the same game.
• On the Fail Forward blog, a nice dive into what it takes to make the American Wild West an interesting setting.

---

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• The Abbot Trilogy: A system-agnostic OSR zine triple feature: Abbotsmoore, Bitterpeak, and Steelhollow. Trudge through the swamp. Shiver through the tundra. Sweat through the desert. Coming to ZineQuest.
• “The Thief” is a critically acclaimed, immersive, low-fantasy mystery actual play about a City Watchman’s disappearance, starring an undermarket draw-latch named Symphony. Listen to the season in just 3 hours.
• The Hauntings of Hyde Park is an unofficial supplement for The Between by Jason Cordova. Explore London’s Hyde Park and the creatures that occupy it in this ZiMo 2024 project!
• Venture into a colourful solar system with light rules and hard sci. Check out Void Above, on Kickstarter here for Zine Quest!
• Against the Monster/Gegen das Monster is a story game about a monster hunt, the good of the monster, and the monstrosity of the hunters. Crowdfunding until March 1st!
• The Tower – A System Agnostic Puzzle Dungeoncrawl: Home to a puzzling recluse – were you invited, or did you just wake up here? Either way, now you have to escape… Kickstarting now.

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

• Two bundles of Hero system: First bundle contains all the non-Superhero stuff like Justice Inc, Fantasy Hero etc and then the second bundle is all about Champions from the first three editions including adventures
• Also, a bundle of thirty years of magazines which focused on Champions

---

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!