As far as movements in the RPG hobby go, the OSR has been great for weird. It makes sense: If you want to put stuff in your game that’s atypical, hard to explain, or just plain out there, games which give the GM the latitude to treat them appropriately without forcing you to use giant stat blocks or the square-cube law are going to be a very good fit. We’ve seen some very good weird come out of old-school spaces: Dungeon Crawl Classics is great at making D&D weird, and both Chris McDowall and Luka Rejec have made some memorably weird spaces to plumb through. We’ve got some new weird coming through, though, and it’s bombed out and full of mutants.

Plasmodics is a love letter to Gamma World by way of Into the Odd with the spark tables to prove it. It’s the newest game by Will Jobst, and it’s on Kickstarter right now, campaigning until September 6th. The game has spare but extremely intentional mechanics, and does a pretty great job of casting you as mutants with freaky powers. Will gave me a chance to take a look through the Preview Edition of the game, and it does a great job of taking the ideas in the original Gamma World and going some very untoward places with them. If you want a Mad Max game except only for Beyond Thunderdome, and also want the possibility to literally blow up the world in play, you’ll want to read on.

Plasmodics are the characters in Plasmodics, mutants with a range of strange powers. Defining your character is fairly simple: You have mutations, you have nuances, and there may be some gear. Mutations are just that, broken down into physical, mental, plant, and meta. Physical mutations may be gills or spikes, while mental mutations may be pyrokinesis or precognition. Plant and meta are a bit more interesting; plant is just what it sounds like, you get powers from nature and, well, plants. Plant mutations can be things like harboring berries or being photosynthetic…or it could just be goo, in general. Meta mutations get weird…weirder, I should say. You can always have a secondary location (John Mulaney must love that one) or control gravity, or control…density? The actual mechanics of mutations are left fairly broad, which is good because even with only a dozen mutations per category there’s an essentially limitless font of bad ideas that can come out of all of them. Nuances are skill-like, but as written they act more like ‘cliches’ from Risus, specific weird abilities and sets of abilities that are unique but don’t violate enough laws of physics to be mutations.

Like any good Into the Odd-alike, you get your main abilities through random rolls. You do, however, start by picking one of five backgrounds. The Gamma World influences are pretty obvious here: Human-ish, Animal-ish, Robot, and Alien. Then there’s my personal favorite, the Fluke. The Fluke has no mutant powers but gets a bunch of Fluke-specific nuances which, when taken together, scream “protagonist”. For everyone else, mutations and nuances are rolled randomly (the Fluke does get a few random nuances too). The last bit of character creation are cryptic alliances. You roll two organizations, one of which you’re an insider of and the other you’re an outsider. The game comes with a pre-written setting, King Tide, which we’ll discuss in a bit, but the cryptic alliances are the only part of character creation that directly interfaces with this specific setting material. Each cryptic alliance gets you a unique nuance and some gear.

Actually playing Plasmodics is relatively simple, but there’s a whole lot of chaos that gets added into each roll. For using mutations and nuances out in the world, you roll a d6. If the roll is a 4 or better, it’s a success. If it’s a three or less, you have a choice. You can either fail, or succeed with a complication and add one to the Trouble track. So let’s talk about the Trouble track. The Trouble track goes from 0 to 10, with the track incrementing up based on those successes with complications we discussed as well as for a potential consequence of fallout, which we’ll discuss in a moment when talking about combat. Once the Trouble track hits ten, the Trouble die hits the table. The Trouble die either starts at 1 and counts up towards 6, or starts at 6 and counts down towards 1. While it’s out, the Trouble die adds its value to every dice roll in the game. After each scene or round of combat while the Trouble die is out, it increments, and after the scene or round where it’s showing its final number, it’s removed from play and the Trouble track resets to 0.

Where the Trouble die really means trouble is in combat. Like in Into the Odd, there are no to-hit rolls here, just damage. Every character and NPC has 10 hit points, though some enemies have abilities which effectively extend this. Still, combat and tracking is fairly simple. Each round, you roll your damage die to attack with a weapon or a mutant power. There’s a catch, though. Each attack does damage, but also fallout. When you roll the first die, you choose whether it’s the value for fallout or the value for damage, and then you roll the second die. The bigger the weapon the bigger the fallout, and while a small fallout value may actually help you, bigger values could break items, add to the Trouble track, incapacitate you, or literally end the world. Yes, end the world. Now, weapons typically go up to d12, and a fallout value of 16 is necessary to end the world, so you’re fairly safe…but if that Trouble die is on the table during a combat, it can really mess with things.

One other cool element of combat is the game’s sole advancement mechanic, the ‘salty runback’. If your character reaches 0 hit points, you have a choice. You can either become incapacitated, which is exactly what it sounds like, or you can throw down a salty runback, in which you and whatever enemy dealt the attack which reduced you to zero hit points are both refreshed to 10 hit points and locked in a duel to the death, one on one. If you win, you level up. If you lose, you die. No risk no reward is deeply embedded in this idea, and I love it.

For running and moving the game forward, there are a few protocols which help drive the setting as a sandbox. The baked in setting here, King Tide, is a sunken city which you’ll generate during the first session by identifying and keying locations on a real map of a real city in Google Maps. You’re sinking your hometown beneath the sea, in a manner of speaking. There are five key locations which are each built out with small tables of places, tones, and events to help the GM bring them to life a little. The protocols help with this too; one of the two protocols employed every session is ‘blips’, where each location gets an interesting event assigned to it to kick off whatever happens when the characters arrive. The other key protocol pertains to those cryptic alliances every character has; each character rolls a d6 for their cryptic alliances, and the higher they roll, the more intensely the cryptic alliance gets involved.

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While there are a few more interesting nuggets, Plasmodics is meant to be simple and extensible. While King Tide, the setting, has a lot of great flavor to it, it also lays out a template for how to write characters, locations, and cryptic alliances for your version of the world and have everything run just as smoothly. Just as is true with Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, the power in Plasmodics is in the combination of simple but impactful rules and bigger structures which are easy to understand just by reading.

Plasmodics is on Kickstarter until next Friday, September 6th. The game has already funded, but further support not only gets you a copy of the game but also helps Will keep running Good Luck Press and putting out more weird and wonderful games like Black Mass, This Discord Has Ghosts In It, and of course, this one. There’s also an additional zine available, Vermiculture, which has an additional Plasmodics setting. Plasmodics takes all the simplicity of Into the Odd and other new-school/old-school games, and it lets you make and play weird mutants. If you know, you know.

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