Too many words, too few good monsters. This sourcebook was a big disappointment to me, especially considering the high list price. If you want to check this out, try one of the many used copies being sold now. My copy will soon be listed.
At first glance, I was psyched about this book. It contains nearly 200 creatures and robots of widely varying types, with a generous smattering of templates. In the end, this book has not been too useful to my campaign, and I have ended up making up a lot of my own monsters.
First, let me tell you what is good in this book.
Machines and Mutants (hereinafter "M&M") contains a collection of well-conceived critters. A lot of imagination went into this book. They had five authors, and it shows. I actually like many of the robots included. The robots in M&M can serve many roles in your campaign. Some are deadly adversaries, other comical nuisances. Some enhance PC's, or make useful followers. There are nine robot templates, allowing the GM to easily make up all kinds of crazy contraptions.
Also good are the "environmental templates" for monsters found in different ecosystems and climates. These help a GM create a world of genetic chaos by allowing further small variations on stock mutant creatures.
The main problem is that so many of the monsters in this book are *not* useful in a campaign. The prime example is the full page devoted to poison ivy. I'm not joking: regular old poison ivy, the nemesis of many a boy scout. While poison ivy can have a place in a campaign, it scarcely deserves an entire page in a core rulebook. There are many examples of the same problem: an entire page devoted to dust mites (again, I am not joking); nearly a whole page devoted to a bacterium whose only game-worthy property is providing power to nanobots; a half page devoted to a tree (bastard toadfax) whose only property is its spooky appearance; a whole page to a weed that is useful only for damaging crops; a whole page devoted to that fact that wasps like to live in fig trees; an insectivorous plant that is only useful for controlling insects; one and a half pages to flesh-eating bacteria; one half page devoted to a tree that produces superior wood; three-quarters of a page devoted to qat, the narcotic leaf from the real world; and many more. Quite a few creatures are exhaustively described whose only role in the game is to be eaten. There are some puzzling entries, such as the six-legged racoon that is for all intents and purposes exactly the same as a four-legged racoon.
Many of the monsters from the old TSR version of Gamma World are converted to d20 format, so that may be useful in many nostalgic campaigns (although this version of Gamma World is quite different in spirit from the old... if you liked the old Gamma World, you should be playing Omega World instead).
This book is not so much a good source of monsters as it is a good source of background. Many irrelevent creatures are described in depth. As a result, you pay a lot for a big book with little substance.
So much, yet so lacking For the Gamma World campaign our group start, I went out and bought the necessary books. As I work on the campaign, I try to think of interesting scenarios the players are to encounter. My intent was to use Gamma World only creatures found only in this book, but I quicklky find out that this will not be enough. For as many creatures found in this book, there seems to be a strong lack of proper variety for more-common-but-not-too-common encounter. In other words, many of the badies found in this book are just too powerful OR mundane to use against a group of new to slightly advanced players. For now, I'll have to either use other characters as enemies than the information offered here.
I do, at least, recognize that in Gamma World, just the natural animals tend to be a scourge against the players -- and perhaps that is where this book is the most powerful.
Mutants and Machines? The original and more appropriate title in some ways since this book deals a little more with the organic than the metallic. As an addition to the d20 Gamma World system this book is a must have. It is well set up and presented with only a few minor glitches here and there. (and a whooooole lotta typoes.) The art is again all black and white, with a good range and a fair representation of the creatures in question. Virtually every entry gets an illustration here. There are a few art goofs, in particular the depiction of the snake headed Hisser as human headed, and some other quirks. But for the most part the art is very good and they have some talented folk on hand. Two big problems are that the back of the book declares that inside you will find rules for creating your own mutations and rules for interacting with the technological AI driven items of the Gamma World. These things are nowhere in the book. Another oddity is that in the entire book there is only ONE directly PC useable mutation. Virtually all of the mutations used by creatures are FX and not truely for use by players. Where this gets muddled is when one finds species set up to be used as PC playable... and they are using the creature mutations...
The good stuff about the book though will hopefully outweigh the goofs and omissions. There is a good deal of background into interspersed with each entry and the writing is overall fairly good and well thought out. The book has dozens of new creatures both new to the d20GW setting and a few familliar faces from the older editions such as the previously mentioned Hisser. These creatures range from not just the hazardous, but cover a few neutral and beneficial ones as well. Multi-armed serpent people, illusion generating raccoons, combat modified engineered humans, eels that swim through flesh and bone as if it were not there, dolphins modifies for land dwelling and with an agressive wolf's instincts, and many more. The robotics section introduces a wide array of mechanical and nanite driven entities and gives again a good spread of the banefull and the usefull. Mobile junk-mail robots, feral appliances modified with weaponry, mutant hunting infiltration and elimination units, mobile towers, group cyborgs, Art given sanity blasting form, and more. There is even a new cybernetic race available as PCs. AI automobiels. The third section covers naturally occuring creatures and diseases and gives the GM some new and unusual things to toss at the players. Diseases that render the victem feral, horse shaped plants, environmental cleanup bacteria that work a little TOO well, horse-sized elephants, and other things to perplex and harass the players with. The last section introduces some new Feats that boost aspects of mutations. and finishes with a batch of new Advanced Classes, one being the Hybrid Diplomat, a human who uses an implant to slowly metamorphose themselves into a hybrid of human and one choosen species.
This book should proove usefull to other d20 Modern settings and with a little work, even other d20 D&D settings. And hopefully the missing pieces will show up in the upcomming DMG book.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
