Enemies & Equipment

Metamorphosis Alpha: Creatures & Gadgets is a supplement designed for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship. The first Science Fiction roleplaying game and the first post-apocalypse roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard the Starship Warden, a generation spaceship which has suffered an unknown catastrophic event which killed the crew and most of the million or so colonists and left the ship irradiated and many of the survivors and the flora and fauna aboard mutated. Some three centuries later, as Humans, Mutated Humans, Mutated Animals, and Mutated Plants, the Player Characters, knowing nothing of their captive universe, would leave their village to explore strange realm around them, wielding fantastic mutant powers and discovering how to wield fantastic devices of the gods and the ancients that is technology, ultimately learn of their enclosed world. Originally published in 1976, it would go on to influence a whole genre of roleplaying games, starting with Gamma World, right down to Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic from Goodman Games. And it would be Goodman Games which brought the roleplaying game back with the stunning Metamorphosis Alpha Collector’s Edition in 2016, and support the forty-year old roleplaying game with a number of supplements, many which would be collected in the ‘Metamorphosis Alpha Treasure Chest’.

Metamorphosis Alpha: Creatures & Gadgets is written by James M. Ward, the designer of Metamorphosis Alpha and contains twelve new ‘monsters’ for the Judge to throw at her players and surprise them, and some forty or so new gadgets and pieces of equipment which their Player Characters can find, experiment with and determine their usage, and hopefully make use of as they explore the various levels of the Starship Warden. To get the very fullest of the twelve creatures in the supplement, the Judge will need access to Metamorphosis Alpha: The Mutation Manual, as they do have mutations listed there. The dozen includes five mutated plants, most of which feed on the dead and decaying flesh of their victims, three insectoid things, a fish and a shark, and more. All include full stats, plus a list of defects, mutations, appearance, normal reactions, the terrain where it is usually found, how it attacks, and how it procreates. The entries for all of these, for all twelve monsters, are nicely detailed, and together with their respective illustrations, every monster is given about three quarters of a page of detail.

The selection opens with the Blob Fish, an ugly giant thing with a powerful sense of smell which lives in mud caves at the bottom of the river and moves by undulating both on land and in the water. It is a powerful leaper and likes to leap out of the water to land on and smash boats in search of prey. The Corpse Flower, is the first of several plants which feed on carrion., this one swamp dwelling and smothering its prey with its giant leaves which snake out to fifty yards and distracting them whilst using its Mental Blast attack to kill them. The Dragon Pod sits atop sand dunes from where it launches the hallucination of a dragon to distract its prey before stabbing them with its javelin-like fronds. The fun thing is that certain mutant tribes cultivate these plants for their hallucination effects giving rise to sightings of dragons flying around certain mountaintops! Similarly, the Dragon Tree is found in sets of four and uses Density Control Self to increase the density of its seed-cones to almost one hundred pounds and drop them on anyone foolish enough to wander under their eaves! Meanwhile, its wooden tree humanoid servant drags the victims to be absorbed...

The Frilled Shark is another amphibious animal, lurking at the water’s edge, ready to dash out at surprising speed. The Horned Viper uses its chameleon power to blend into the background and bites its victims twice, before retreating to let its venom do its work. The Invisio Fly is not so much a fly as a giant butterfly which is all but invisible when in flight, before making a diving attack with its deadly proboscis and then feeding for as long as it can! One of the stated aims of the dozen or so creatures to be found in Metamorphosis Alpha: Creatures & Gadgets is to surprise the players and their characters with something new and unfamiliar. Whilst this a decently described collection of creatures, they do not all together do that by themselves. There is just a little too much similarity between some of them—the plants in particular with covering of large areas and feeding on carrion—for them to wholly surprise the Player Characters. That said, once they have encountered one type of plant like this, they are likely to be more than circumspect in approaching another as they will not know what its powers are yet.

The selection of gadgets in Metamorphosis Alpha: Creatures & Gadgets starts with a tables for randomly generating them across three categories—hand held devices, large devices, and vehicles before diving into the individual descriptions. Each one includes its power source, if any, description, functionality, and a very good illustration. They include Animal Dressing Kits, Canteens, Emergency Containers (for storing hazardous material—what fun a Judge can have with those!), First Aid Kit (not a kit as such, but a mini-robot cube capable of repairing most injuries), a Force Hammock (a hammock made from a forcefield web), Light Cube, Pepper Spray Grenade, and Stealth Day Pack (which creates a digital effect that blends with the surroundings, behind which a character could hide). The Large Devices include a Force Field Hunting Blind, a Generic Bot, Healing Tube (an autodoc which can heal Humans and will probably heal Mutants into Humans), and a Tiger Decoy. The Vehicles include an All-Terrain Vehicle, a Bubble Car, a Canoe, and even a One-Man Sub. All together this is a big collection of very useful gear, a lot of it, actually camping, hunting, and survival gear, as the players, but not their characters, will realise. Metamorphosis Alpha is very much a roleplaying game about the gear and weapons that the Player Characters can scavenge and learn how to use, so it is always useful to have more with which to confound them. The fun with them being that whilst the players may realise what an item might be, their characters will not, and so they will have to roleplay that ignorance and the subsequent act of finding out—which can have dangerous consequences!

Physically, Metamorphosis Alpha: Creatures & Gadgets is cleanly presented. The illustrations are excellent and the supplement is well written and easy to read. This is a supplement which will be of use to a lot of other Post-Apocalyptic settings or roleplaying games, such as Mutant Crawl Classics or Gamma World. The gadgets in the collection are likely to be more useful than the creatures, but this does not mean that the creatures will not have a use in a campaign. Overall, Metamorphosis Alpha: Creatures & Gadgets is a serviceable supplement for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship or the PostApocalyptic setting or roleplaying game of your choice.