Uhrwerk Stadt: A 4e/Gamma World Mashup

Sometimes I get into a situation where I absolutely must run a game.  Like, as soon as humanly, stop everything, gimme an hour or two and I’ll throw a situation together off the top of my head.  Last Friday I did that, with a wrinkle:  I wanted to see how 4e and Gamma World played in the same setting.  Fortunately I had a setting just crazy enough to accommodate such a beast.  I called it Uhrwerk Stadt, or the Clockwork City (love google translate!).  Here’s the super fast write up I did for the players in a google document:

The Timelords, powerful Eladrin and Fomorians, destroyed space and time during their many wars.  All possible universe and epochs are undergoing Collapse.

Uhrwerk Stadt is the last stable piece of reality left.  The timelords send the clockforged out to “rescue” representatives from all time periods and realities.  Those they find and bring (by force if necessary) are kept in the clockwork city in  a large colliseum/prison.  The Timelords send these people through time to find the Blessed Anchors that can be used to restore reality’s stability.

You have been captured by the Timelords. They are sending you on a mission to find the Blessed Anchor, freeing you from your prison just long enough to hurl you through space and time.  Can you survive your mission? Can you help heal reality’s wounds and in doing so free yourself?

To go a little farther, the Timelords pluck people out of “anachronistic realities” (i.e. out of a 4e world) or a “richly unstable reality” (you guessed it — GW).  And now we are free to mix both of these up as we see fit!

And here were the ground rules:

Create either a 2nd level 4e character or a 1st level Gamma World character.

If creating a 4e character, note there are no magic items (using inherent bonuses).

Gamma World characters get alpha mutations but do not  get omega tech.

4e characters recieve Action Points, but get no surges.  Instead, all characters use the healing rules from Gamma World.

4e healing powers heal 2d6 hit points by default instead of the normal value, and no longer require healing surges to be spent.

Here’s what we had for characters:

We didn’t get too much combat in, as we had just a few hours to play, and there was a lot of intro roleplay  going on that I didn’t want to rush.  We roleplayed out interludes of the characters last minute on their home realities before the “Clockforged” –steampowered warforged drained of sentience– came to retrieve them for the Timelords.

In the one combat we did have the characters fought Black starspawn on the portal from Uhrwerk Stadt to their mission zone.  It was interesting to see the difference in characters.  They mostly functioned the same, but a Gamma World character with an overcharged  power can do considerably more than a 4e character with even a daily and an action point could.  That’s what it felt like, but one combat is not what I would call conclusive so I’ll try to run something like this again.

I think that the concept of Uhrwerk Stadt works well to frame the colliding worlds, and with a few changes (my prison world I made on the fly was a too restrictive) could be pretty darn fun mashup that I’ll revisit soon.

Have you tried putting 4e and GW together?  How was it?  Also, would you want to hear more on Uhrwerk Stadt?

Similar Posts:

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•      4e and the Art of the Limit-Break: Arcane Limit Breaks