...And to Every Overlord, a Mutant.

A couple of years ago I was working on a Gamma World 1e game that involved a marauding army of mutants. The mutants were the Friends of Entropy, lead by Jim Ward's own munchkin Mary Sue, Blern the Stranger. Anyone who has played GW should know what the F.O.E. is. The very obscure Blern, on the other hand, comes from a story written by Ward and of whom I'll write more about in a later post.

From left to right: Strong mutant, Agile mutant, Tough mutant. The guy behind them is obviously a demon, so he doesn't count.

Long story short, I needed some generic mutants to fill out large groups of opponents as you would find in the army of Blackwolf, the villain of Ralph Bakshi's post-nuke epic Wizards. Orcs, basically. Cannon fodder.

These humanoids make up troops for evil mutant overlords. They are all essentially the same save for their respective mutant powers. They should all supplied with the same weapons, usually Tech Level II or III, for ease of implementation. Since these guys are fodder they shouldn't have high hit dice, except for the Toughs. I would recommend adjusting the number appearing rather than AC, HD, etc for more powerful parties. The mutations need not be applied to every single mutant of that type. Maybe just give them to the squad leaders or whatever.

TOUGH MUTANT

No. Appearing: 1-10

Armor Class: 5

Movement: 8

Hit Dice: 18

Mutations: Heightened Constitution

STRONG MUTANT

No. Appearing: 1-10

Armor Class: 6

Movement: 10

Hit Dice: 12

Mutations: Heightened Strength 

Strong mutants add three dice to melee weapon damage

AGILE MUTANT

No. Appearing: 1-10

Armor Class: 7

Movement: 12

Hit Dice: 8

Mutations: Heightened Dexterity

After that, just add visual touches (horns, weird skin colors, etc) and you should be good to go.

Exaltation of the Gargoyle King

I just got done playing the first enjoyable night with my DC Universe Online supervillain, the nefarious Gargoyle King, in a very long time. I'd been focussing on my two main characters, modern-day Pulp avenger Downright and jingoistic Bush-era superpatriot scumbag Rockets Redglare, but have gotten pretty burned out on them of late. It happens.

Luckily, I have 14 other characters on my account to help alleviate my ennui (that's such a douchebaggy word. makes me laff) and so, enter The Gargoyle King. In DCUO fortune favors the bold- sometimes you have to fight through grueling, shitty adventures (which usually involves Batman to a large degree) in order to get the Big Bucks. Problem is, you usually get burdened with at least a couple of crappy players, who will defenestrate at the first sign of real heat, leaving everyone else with their dicks in the dirt, unable to move forward.

This happens entirely too often in the game and can turn a 45 minute raid into two hour-plus marathon of repetitive, agonizingly dull gameplay.

Anyway, that all ended tonight, when Fortune finally started to show some interest in the old boy and things finally started going my way. Nothing too spectacular, but I'll take what I can get. So, I decide on one last mission before logging off and end up in yet another of what seem like an endless series of battles against Brainiac. Thankfully, I drop into an "instance" already in progress (the final boss fight as it turns out,) and wail on that motherfucker like nobody's business, putting the kibosh on him in record time (for me, anyway.)

Long story short, one of the other players tossed a nice bit of praise my way which actually made me happy for a few minutes. Sadly (ha ha), the late hour and fog of war prevent me from quoting said praise accurately. Suffice it to say I got a big thumb's up. This puts me very close to completing a short-term goal I set up (two goddamn weeks!) which should come to a close tomorrow. 

I hope so, anyway. I hate this fuckin' game.