Mutant Future Pdf

[Charise Zelnick]

Mutant Future is the second offering published by Goblinoid Games under the Open Gaming License (OGL), providing non-game publishers the ability to develop derivative content with few restrictions.[1] While the game is not a true retro-clone, it nevertheless emulates gameplay of role-playing games from the "classic" (late 1970s and early 1980s) era.

The in-game setting of Mutant Future is one of post-apocalyptic science fiction tropes, including global post-nuclear radiation, genetic mutation, dystopian societies, and advanced technology. Players choose from a variety of mutant animals, humans or plants; robots; and un-mutated "pure" human characters to portray.

Reviews of Mutant Future have been favorable, with prominent old-school renaissance RPG bloggers, including James Maliszewski, who gave the game "5 out of 5 Pole Arms" and wrote positively about the game, saying, "All in all, Mutant Future is a very impressive game. I find it very inspiring and Daniel Proctor and Ryan Denison have given the old school community a huge gift with this product. Firstly, they have preserved not merely a genre that's not seen much play in recent years but also a style. Mutant Future is exuberantly gonzo."[2]

Even at the risk of being overshadowed by Alien Rope Burn's take on Pathfinder (an endeavor which I fully support) I'm going to bite the bullet and continue my look at Mutant Future, so that I might be able to move on to something more novel at some point.



Mutant Future, Revised Edition. Part 4, Adventuring Rules or: Needlessly Complicated Rules for Technological Artifacts

You know, this section is by far the most tedious to go through. The adventuring rules have been lifted pretty much wholesale from Labyrinth Lord, which again took them straight from Basic D&D, and what with Evil Mastermind's take on Rules Cyclopedia and ZeeToo's look at Adventurer Conqueror King everyone should already have a pretty firm grasp of what sorts of things the rules entail: we have rules for adventuring in ruins (Mutant Future's version of dungeons), wilderness adventures (including rolls for foraging and hunting with the potential for death from eating anything found in the wilderness being left up to the Mutant Lord discretion), hiring retainers and mercenaries and awarding experience. As such, I won't be focusing on those things. Instead, I'll be looking at where it's at: technology rolls.


The result of a failed technology roll.

Unlike Basic D&D and its many clones, Mutant Future doesn't have magical items. Instead, it has technological artifacts, which are found randomly scattered throughout the wasteland, mostly in ruins but occasionally in the lairs of mutated beasties. Upon finding a technological artifact (which the Mutant Lord obviously generated by using the appropriate hoard class for the creature in question and rolled for randomly on a chart because GYGAXIAN NATURALISM!!!) the first thing to do is for the Mutant Lord to roll what condition the artifact is in. This is done by rolling on a d100 chart which gives the condition grade of said artifact. At worst, the artifact the PCs found is already in such terrible condition as to be nonfunctional.

But wait, there's more! After finding out what condition the artifact is in by rolling, you have to roll again against a probability determined by the artifact's condition to see whether it's actually functioning or not. The artifact's condition is only checked once, when it's found, so it's not like you have to check whether the artifact is working again every time you use it. So you have two rolls just to determine whether an artifact is working or not when you could just have one roll for no reason whatsoever.

Okay, I understand that aping these old legacy mechanics is part and parcel of the OSR, but in this case separating what is basically a Yes/No question into two separate rolls is completely unnecessary. If I could be bothered I'd put this through AnyDice to find out the actual probabilities of an artifact working just to reduce this needless rolling.

After you've found out whether the artifact you've found is even functional or not, you get to make your technology roll. All technological artifacts are divided into three complexity classes, with the least complex being stuff like energy weapons, pistols and the simplest of explosives, powered weapons and robots in between, and the most complex being stuff like medical equipment and computers. Each class not only has a base technology roll chance (modified by your character's Intelligence) as well as a base time to make one technology roll. These times are in hours, and as hanging out for too long in ruins is generally a bad idea, figuring out technology isn't something that you do during an excursion to a local ruin, it's something you do back in your home base.

This is what gets me about them though: the base chance to figure out an artifact of the lowest complexity class is 25% and takes 2 hours. A creature of average intellect may end up spending the better part of the day trying to figure out a fucking revolver. I guess the game's baseline technology level being medieval sort of justifies that, but it is just mystifying to think that nobody in the world of Mutant Future would've passed on the information that you need to pull the trigger on a pistol to get it to work.

A roll of 99 or 100 on the D% roll always means that you either damage the item or yourself in the process of trying to figure out the technological artifact. The image above shows one potential outcome, but there's a lot of further potential for hilarity: shooting yourself in the face while trying to figure out a gun, accidentally injecting yourself with a dose of a powerful anesthetic, activating the robot's "Kill all living things" mode, that sort of thing.

Next we have rules for repairing technology, which is labeled as an optional rule. Remember that nonfunctional slug-thrower you found after killing all those spidergoats who took your friend Timmy the Mutant with them? Well, if your Mutant Lord is feeling generous and your character is previously familiar with said artifact, you may be able to make a technology roll to try and repair it!

The technology rules are one of the places where it shows clearly that Mutant Future is trying to accommodate a number of different post-apocalyptic play-styles under one game: the idea of spending hours trying to figure out how all those cool technological gizmos you've found work doesn't chime well with the gonzo feel that the game puts forward in other places. Were I to run Mutant Future again in the future (and I really want to, because for all of its glaring flaws it's actually a really fun pick-up game for rolling a random bunch of mutants and going out to kill spidegoats with laser-guns) I would simply ignore these rules and just have the PCs have magical epiphanies about the technological artifacts in question. As a player it feels tedious having to roll whether or not I can actually use a goodie I found, and as a GM I don't generally like forcing my players into rolling endless series of binary Yes/No rolls just so we can get on with the fun and adventure.

Next time we'll be looking at the encounter rules, which bizarrely also includes rules for dying of dysentery and radiation.

Not to start with, Mutant Future is not really a Retro-clone, near clone, or anything like that. The closest game it is like is Gamma World. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Gamma World has its roots in the dawn of the RPG age and D&D in particular. Filled with mutant animals, plants, and humans of all sorts.

While Gamma World has its own near-D&D system it is not 100% compatible. Maybe 95%. Mutant Future doesn't have that issue. It is the exact same rules as its sister game Labyrinth Lord. Plus Mutant Future is not trying to emulate Gamma World exactly. Mutant Future then is a new game that feels like an old game that never really existed. Mutant Future does have some differences from Labyrinth Lord. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth much like Gamma World.

This covers the basics. What this game is and what to do with it. A brief overview of dice and common abbreviations is covered. This largely the same as what we see in many games and in Labyrinth Lord in particular. Mind this is not a drawback to this game. There is a strong implication here that anything made or written for Labyrinth Lord is also good for Mutant Future.

Again, there is familiarity here, and that works to Mutant Future's advantage. The ability scores are the same as Labyrinth Lord/D&D and are generated the same way. The various species or types you can play are also here. Characters can be an Android (basic, synthetic, or replicant), mutant animals, mutant plant, mutant human, or the rare pure human, also like Gamma World. Abilities can go as high as 21 and there are a different set of saving throws, but the basic rules are the same as Labyrinth Lord. The types also list what HD each character has and how many mutations you have.

This covers the rules of the game and what characters are likely to do. Again these are replicated (but not cut and pasted) from Labyrinth Lord. Mutant Future sticks with feet and Basic movement as opposed to Gamma World's metric and more AD&D-like movement.

Combat and weapons of all sorts are covered. Also covered are damage from stun, paralysis, diseases, radiation, poisons, and more. This is one of the bigger departures from the Labyrinth Lord core, the saving throws are keyed for Mutant Future damage types. There is also a mental attack matrix here much like Gamma World.

This section covers all the sorts of creatures you can encounter. It is fairly expansive and since the format is the same as Labyrinth Lord creatures can be used in one or the other or both. 40+ pages of monsters is a good amount. There are also plenty of detailed encounter tables.

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