The Taste Testers (A Monster for Gamma World)

Oozing along the crumbled alleyways of Gamma Ohio are the pitiful taste testers, half mobile and half intelligent, vaguely humanoid forms made from spewing vomit. They grasp at the air with the silhouettes of hands, dripping with sick, bubbling coughs that occasionally reach their permeable surfaces. They tend to congregate in small pitiful packs, huddling together in sewers and ruins, scraping every surface for food to sate their search for deliciousness that they can rarely find. They reach for interlopers' faces with their stinking puke paws, both to get an idea of what they look like since the taste testers lack eyes and to slurp up any dead skin cells or oils accumulated on a traveller's face. Unfortunately for the taste testers, however, most don't take kindly to having their faces fondled by living vomit.

Taste testers are unfortunately maligned and disgusting creatures born into the worst of circumstances. At their core they are ambulatory living entrails, a simple mouth, esophagus, stomach, and set of intestines to be exact, all perfectly human in genetics. Lacking a brain, the taste tester is instead animated by a neural net that it is able to extrude through its mouth in order to puppet objects, most often its own vomit. These accursed things were made this way by a long forgotten candy and chicken byproduct meal company, in house, in an effort to replace human taste testers for their product. Originally centered on the first production center in what was once Cincinnati, they later expanded in their use, including to companies bought up by the taste testers' parent firm. Thus, they were made as a genetically modified human clone, a hominid worm made up of the human digestive system and with the bare minimum of the rest of human anatomy, with the express intention of mass testing product for human consumption with simple binary outputs of acceptable or unacceptable, communicated through the only method left available: vomiting.

That was all before armageddon, of course. With the supply chains drying up and the factories collapsing in on themselves, the vermiform taste testers found themselves surprisingly resilient, fleeing into the sewers to proliferate. The unfortunate thing is, however, that what might be available to eat in sewers or post apocalyptic ruins is nothing compared to the mind numbingly delicious treats they were genetically engineered to taste test, leaving them constantly vomiting up whatever filth they ate. In time, however, the smarter of the taste testers figured out how to extrude their neural net to puppet around their puke, allowing them to venture further afield and be more discerning with what they put in their mouths. They do still have to eat awful things in order to produce the vomit that makes up their very own bodies, however; it is an awful cycle indeed.

Thus the taste tester of today is born: a squirming worm of guts controlling a puppet of puke vaguely shaped into a humanoid form by faint recollections of what their ancestors were and who they were around in the ancient factories. The product of the profit hungry hubris of ancient humanity clinging to existence as a blind pitiful gourmand of discerning taste and hazy memories.

Sometimes, taste testers are kept as an unusual pet by certain distasteful types, or they are taken in by the more well meaning cults and secret societies. They are unlikely to seriously hurt anyone individually, but some warlords and crime lords keep taste testers as torture devices, putting people in a room with an especially stinky vomitoid or keeping a well fed one as a mockery to prisoners they keep starving.

Taste Tester

Number Encountered: 2d6

Hit Dice: 1

Attacks: 1 vomit swipe (1d6)

Armor: none

Morale: 4

Reticent: Taste testers will never initiate combat, although they may approach the players and even touch them without realizing any problems with that.

Stench: Taste testers smell so bad. Those with sensitive senses of smell must save or puke themselves when close to them.

Oozing Body: Attacks to the main body of a taste tester deal no damage; all you're attacking is congealed vomit! To damage it, the worm like digestive system "true body" must be targeted, giving disadvantage to most attacks. When submerged in water or blasted with water, the vomit body dissipates.

Vomit Swipe: Taste testers can attack with a swipe of a pukey tentacle dripping with stomach acid. This weakens armor; for every 2 hits, -1 AC.

Taste Tester for GW 1e

No. Appearing: 2d6

Armor Class: 10

Movement: 5

Hit Dice: 2

These slimy humanoids are the half sapient pitiful result of corporate genetic engineering, now abandoned. They have worm like "true" body made of a stomach and intestines, and a false body made of vomit. They are constantly in search of good tasting food, and rarely find it. They are timid creatures and will never initiate combat. Their vomit bodies take no damage, but dissipate in water; their "true" body is hard to hit due to its relatively smaller size, giving you disadvantage on attempts to hit it. Their acidic swipe gives -1 to AC for every 2 hits.

Taste Tester for GW 2e

Number: 2d6

Morale: 3

Hit Dice: 2d6

Armor: 10

Speed: 5/300/2

MS: 1d6            IN: 1d4

DX: 1d6            CH: 1d4

CN: 1d10+8      PS: 1d6

Attacks: Vomit swipe

Mutations: N/A

Description: see description above

I also do realize that the above drawing takes a lot of cues from Sickly Stomach from Awful Hospital but I'm pretty sure I drew my original doodle of these guys before AH even started, I've had Gamma World vomit oozes kicking around in my head for a while

Elden Ring's Land Squirts for Old School Roleplaying Games

(I actually started writing this post like a month ago but then I got busy n distracted, so I'm finishing it now and posting it!!! Oh, and I have a personal website now, so check that out!) 

So everyone has been talking about that Elden Ring game huh? It looks fantastic, amazing vibes, great open world, lots of opportunities for adventure, the whole nine yards, but uh, I actually can't play it. Woops! My computer wouldn't be able to run the dang thing, so I've been watching playthroughs of it to get a peek into that lovely little lands between that From Software gave to us. And while most people are talking about the bosses, how there's like a hundred of them, and I will admit Elden Ring's bosses do look fantastic, there is something else that has caught my attention...

THE LAND SQUIRT!!!!!!!

Yeah, maybe they're not the most important enemy encounter in the game, but I really love them. The land squirts are found along the shores of the starting area of the game, Limgrave, as well as in a few other watery areas. They gather in clusters and are basically immobile, their only real defense mechanism being releasing a cloud of poisonous liquid from ports on one side of their body. If they are themselves poisoned then they explode into a cloud of poisonous liquid that can poison the other squirts near them, triggering a chain reaction that can kill them all. And that's basically it; these aren't a very story important enemy, they aren't very active, they're basically just a hazard to deal with when traveling through swamps and coastal regions.

But what is so special about the land squirts is that this is the first time I have ever seen anything in any form of media that referenced the sea squirt, one of the most fascinatingly weird animals, and a group of animals that I love. 

Sea squirts, or more accurately ascidians, are a type of tunicate that live in relatively shallow seawater. Tunicates are super fascinating animals, both for their sessile, filter feeding lifestyle, and because they are actually chordates! Yeah, the lumpy, eyeless, boneless, multicolored creatures you see before you are closer relatives to you and me than an octopus or a beetle, despite the latter two sharing more superficially similar structures with us! Tunicates are the only invertebrate chordates, meaning that despite the presence of a notochord (the structure that forms the spine in vertebrates), they lack a bony spine or any bony skeleton at all. In fact, when they are adults, sea squirts and other tunicates even lack the very notochord that defines the phylum Chordata! They have a distinct nervous notochord in their larval form (seen below), but when they metamorphose into the adult stage of their lives they digest the notochord, leaving them without a central nervous system. Isn't that just so cool?? The closest boneless relatives of humans, frogs, lizards, birds, sharks, and fish DIGESTS its own nervous system to transition to adulthood. I just think that is sick as hell.

A larval sea squirt in all its flagellate glory!

Tunicates do this because they actually don't need a central nervous system as an adult. That's because sea squirts and other tunicates live lives where an energy-hungry brain would actually be somewhere between worthless and an actual detriment. To be precise, there are three types of life patterns that different species of sea squirts employ. On the one hand are the completely sessile solitary sea squirts that take root on the seafloor and filter out nutrients from the water; there is also a more socially organized form of sea squirt, where they are still sessile but form larger sea floor conglomerations, several squirts all rooting in more or less the same spot. And then, going in a completely different direction, are the much more mobile colonial sea squirts, considerably smaller than their sessile cousins, who form larger organism-esque colonies that can float and swim around the ocean, each individual squirt contributing to the whole. They're still filter feeders though, just ones that can move around. While I find colonial tunicates super cool and fascinating, the land squirts in Elden Ring are very obviously from the second type of sessile squirt, forming small communities rooted in close proximity to one another. Maybe a colonial tunicate monster would be a good opportunity for a post in the future?

A super cool free floating colonial tunicate... not relevant to today's post, but very cool nonetheless!

Additionally, sea squirts in real life are actually not uncommonly used as food! And I don't just mean by animals, though of course the sessile sea squirt is a perfect prey item for many predators who don't really want to bother chasing something around the ocean (and, as an aside, the presence of tunicates on land has fascinating implications for what eats them). But it is also human food in many parts of the world! In Korea and Japan, for instance, a species of sea squirt known as sea pineapple (Halocynthia roretzi) is actually cultivated in captivity and served raw, sashimi-style, or as part of bibimbap! Sea figs or grooved sea squirts (Microcosmus sabatieri) are eaten in France, Italy, and Greece, served raw with lemon or as part of salads! In Chile, the piure (Pyura chilensis) is served as an ingredient in seafood soups! There's more examples of sea squirt based cuisine around the world, but I just wanted to share these as inspiration for potentially more creative applications of squirt based creatures in your elf games!

A bunch of wild sea pineapples all rooted in place!

Before I get into the actual game stats, there is one question that has to be asked regarding the very existence of the land squirt. In real life, sea squirts are filter feeders, they subsist on the floating particulates of the ocean, with orifices open for water currents to just flow through, almost like a sponge. Elden Ring's land squirts are, rather obviously, on land, where last I checked there weren't any ocean currents carrying nutrient particles (maybe small grains of dust or floating seeds caught on the wind?), but they still have the distinctive openings characteristic of real sea squirts. I don't really know how they eat! They still live in wet environments, swamps and on shallow coastlines, so perhaps they have openings that are lower to the ground to pick up food from the water? The openings on the top are where they release poison in-game, so maybe those are waste openings? The poison is also a bit out of nowhere since, rather obviously, real life sea squirts don't spit poison out of their orifices, but I don't care!!! I like the weird lumpy poison shooting swamp dwelling giant invertebrate chordates!!!

The "land squirt ashes" that let you summon spectral squirts in Elden Ring

Land Squirt

Number Encountered: 2d6+1

Hit Dice: 3

Attacks: poisonous liquid (see below)

Armor: as leather

Morale: N/A (they can't flee!)

Cluster: Land squirts gather together in closely packed clusters.

Poisonous Liquid: Land squirts can spew a toxic liquid from their anterior openings. Those in the spray's range and on the front of the land squirt must save or take 1d8 damage.

Sessile: Land squirts are completely immobile, rooted in place by a fleshy stalk. They are reliant on water to survive.

Toxic Overload: Despite being poisonous themselves, if they are poisoned they explode and release all of their toxins in a wide radius. Those within the radius take 2d6 damage. If there are any other land squirts within range, they are also poisoned and thus also explode.

I thought about trying to model their poison ability off of the Dark Souls/Elden Ring poison mechanic, but I think that may have to wait for another day. Also, because I think larval sea squirts are so cool and weird, here's a stat block for a larval land squirt despite those not appearing in game.

Larval Land Squirt

Number Encountered: 3d6+1

Hit Dice: 1-1

Attacks: bite (1d4)

Armor: none

Morale: 6

Self Digest: Larval land squirts can begin to digest their stiff notochord and other inner organs, typically three days after they hatch. Touching a larval land squirt while it is self digesting deals 1d6 damage due to the creature's acid.

Slippery: Larval land squirts are incredibly difficult to grab, and they will always slip out of attempts to grapple them.

Perhaps I exaggerated the metamorphosis process... well it's whatever, hyperbolic monstrous presentations of real life animals is what fantasy games are all about!

Also, since I think land squirts would fit super well in a Gamma World or GW esque game, here are stats for them for use with 1e and 2e Gamma World. I can very easily see myself putting them in the Great Black Swamp of my Gamma Ohio or on the shores of Lake Erie!

Land Squirt for GW 1e

No. Appearing: 2d6+1

Armor Class: 8

Movement: N/A

Hit Dice: 6

These swamp and coastal creatures are the gargantuan mutated descendants of sea squirts, filter feeding sessile invertebrates. They are reliant on water to survive, but the openings once used for filtering water now spew noxious poison. The poisonous liquid of a land squirt is a contact poison with a poison strength of 9. If a land squirt is poisoned, they will explode and release a large cloud of poison, and they can be poisoned by the poison of another land squirt. Land squirts cluster together in large sessile groups.

Land Squirt for GW 2e

Number: 2d6+1

Morale: N/A

Hit Dice: 6d6

Armor: 8

Speed: Does not move

MS: 1d4          IN: 1d4

DX: 1d4          CH: 1d4

CN: 1d12+9    PS: 1d12+6

Attacks: Poison spray

Mutations: Poison Susceptibility, Water Dependency

Description: See GW 1e description above.

The Janissary Deserter (A Class for the Gamma GLOG)

 I actually first wrote this class roughly two months ago, but I have since revised it somewhat and have been meaning to post it for a while. It was the first class I wrote up in my haphazard messy GLOGhack based on Gamma World and similar post-apocalyptic science fantasy games (or other forms of media). Colloquially I'm calling it the Gamma GLOG, but its full name is building on a game I made many years ago: Mutants and Machines of the Baffling Badlands. Technically, this makes this abortive attempting at a rules hack a second edition to that game, even though the rules are essentially nothing alike. Oh also, you should check out my previous posts about Gamma Ohio, since this class (and Gamma GLOG more generally) are set within that world.

CLASS: JANISSARY DESERTER

You are a stranger in a strange land, brought here to fight enemies you've never seen before on the orders of a king you've never seen the face of. You have no lot in this futile battle, so you left. The generals of the Amish King do not take kindly to deserters.

Each template of Janissary Deserter you have gives you +1 to hit +1 to rolls for stealth.

Skills: Animal Husbandry, Lying, and Foreign Customs

Starting Equipment: A polearm of some sort (1d8), a submachine gun (no bullets), a tall silken hat emblazoned with pheasant feathers, an ill-fitting ostentatious uniform, a slip of paper guaranteeing pay (now null and void) (all of the above are stolen). A small thing to remind you of home, fear (the only things that are truly yours).

A Piercing Pressure, Anxious Aura, Hunted

B Run for your Lives

C Faceless Enemy

D Auspicious Incident

Piercing Pressure

All ranged and reach attacks that you make pierce through armor, even if the weapon is not listed as armor-piercing.

Anxious Aura

You are never surprised. The rest of your group may be unable to act due to a surprise round, but you will be able to act. However, because of your intense anxiety, you are always able to be detected by psychics or creatures that can smell fear. You lose anxious aura when you are no longer being hunted.

Hunted

You are being hunted. You know that you are being hunted, but by what you don't yet know. The general you deserted, a bounty hunter he hired, an executioner-droid, just the feeling of guilt weighing down on you?

Run for your Lives

You have advantage on rolls when fleeing during a chase. You are also able to give advantage on rolls when fleeing to a number of other people equal to your number of Janissary templates minus 1.

Faceless Enemy

If you do not know the name of the enemy you are fighting, then any damage you deal in excess of how much it takes to kill them goes to the nearest creature. This continues until you hit an enemy you know the name of.

Auspicious Incident

If you would be killed by a physical attack (this does not apply to psychic attacks or nuclear radiation), you can declare that you slipped out of the way in the nick of time. This is only possible once. The fear from that near-death experience allows you to have a new start. Once the auspicious incident occurs, you may take the A template of another class as if you never had Janissary Deserter's D template.

I have no clue what this is from (if anything), and the fungus stuff has basically nothing to do with this post but I found it when looking for janissary art and thought it was cool

Also here are some SUPER SIMPLE CHASE RULES so that Run for your Lives makes more sense:

When a chase begins (I believe it would be rather obvious when a chase has begun), each individual person/creature involved in the chase (not counting hirelings/pets) roll 1d20+DEX modifier. If the chasers roll higher than the flee-ers (not exactly certain what the term for the would be), then the flee-ers are caught, and may be forced to fight, or be captured or eaten, depending on what sort of creature was doing the chasing. If the flee-ers roll higher, then they get away with little to no complications.

However, if some of the flee-ers fail the roll (roll lower than their pursuers) while some succeed (roll higher), then the ones who succeed can simply choose to abandon the ones who failed, allowing them to get away just fine, or they can try to help them up and get back to running away. This prompts another roll, with no modifier; at that point, whether you're able to get away is up to chance. Also, players who fail a roll can choose to sacrifice a hireling in order to succeed the roll; this lets them escape, but will invariably cause strife with whatever other hirelings the group has. This system assumes creatures that are roughly of normal human speed; creatures that are considerably faster than a person will always win out in a chase with a person on foot, and players who are so overburdened that they cannot run with agility will always be caught.

Summary:

Chase begins

All pursuers and all flee-ers roll 1d20+DEX modifier
Pursuers and flee-ers compare the results of that roll

If pursuers roll higher, they catch the flee-ers; if flee-ers roll higher, they get away

If some flee-ers fail while others succeed, the flee-ers who succeeded the roll choose whether to just keep running away or turn back to try and save their friend(s)

If they choose to turn back and help their friend(s) back up, they roll 1d20 with no modifier

If a player fails a chase roll, they can sacrifice a hireling to succeed it

Gamma Ohio: Preliminary Notes on a Gamma World Game

So y'all might not know this since I haven't made any posts about it thus far, but I actually love post apocalyptic science fantasy roleplaying almost as much as or just about as much as I do the kind of weird fantasy OSR play that most of my posts have been all about. Gamma World was actually the first RPG I was exposed to that I really understood as an RPG (I had read the 4e Monster Manual 2 beforehand but I just thought it was a cool monster book, not something for a game), and Gamma World was the first roleplaying game I ever ran! I've made myriad attempts at making my own post apocalyptic roleplaying game or setting throughout the years, but pretty much none of them ever saw the light of day, and barely any made contact with play. So I'm gonna try and fix that! I'm going to run some games using classic Gamma World (probably the second edition), in an original setting centered on my homeland: the great state of Ohio. To get started on this, below are some setting notes derived from a conversation I had about this idea.

It is the 32nd year of the reign of Balthazar the Young (not so young these days), scion of the line of Methuselah the Great, ancestral King of the Amish.

Northeast Meriga 500 Years Since Apocalypse

The Empire of the Amish is a looming hegemon over what remains of Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York state. Ruled by a long line of anabaptist kings, it is an edifice of military power built on a foundation of pacifism, a land of contradictions. The Amish form a ruling minority, separated by language (they speak a future descendant of Pennsylvania Dutch, the rest of the population speak a future descendant of English), religion (the Amish have de facto asserted themselves as a select group within a kind of American politics-Christianity fusion), and mutation (genetic mutations, even slight ones, are not uncommon, but the Amish seem to be consistently genetically unchanged). The Amish do not fight, instead hiring beastman mercenaries from Michigan and conscripting their subjects into wars with the heretic snake-handlers of West Virginia or the pagan merchant lords of the Great Lakes.

Ohio is a bare hinterland of Amish country. While a band in the north is settled with Amish lords and ladies, the southern fringe of Balthazar's state is permeable, its largest settlement being the shantytown of Syoto in the ruins of what was once Columbus. Just beyond that border is the wide floodplain known as the Emerald Expanse, the area that was once the Miami River Valley and the city of Dayton. During the great conflagration that engulfed the world long ago, Dayton was a target of nuclear armaments for its proximity to Wright Patterson Air Force Base, destroying not only the military base but also the dam that kept the city safe from flooding. Add onto that the extreme weather from global warming and nuclear armageddon, and you get a city completely flooded, downtown Dayton turned into a swamp pockmarked with what remains of its buildings. Surrounding the great marsh that forms the center of the Emerald Expanse are dozens of petty tyrannies, little fiefdoms ruled by monstrous mutant dictators, prophets, warlords, and sorcerers in what remains of the suburbs that surrounded Dayton.

Dayton has a lot of really cool art deco style buildings, sure the apocalypse happened in the future but I would want to maintain that unique aesthetic.

In the minds of just about everyone, whether mutant from Injunboli, Amish prince-scholar, or conspiracy theorist mud-scavenger, the greatest mystery is what is hiding beneath the terrible sky-base that seems to have been the reason the Emerald Expanse was targeted. Most people believe the collapse to have been the Ancients committing nuclear suicide, and many wonder at what might have been at the sky-base that the Ancients wanted to keep hidden. Delving into its depths is the dream of every mud-scavenger and steel cultist.

The steel cult is a political-religious movement that has emerged in what was once the steel/rust belt, a cult born out of labor unions, Larouchites, the remnants of the American socialist movement, and post-apocalyptic cargo cults that emerged at the edges of robo-factories that use automation to incessantly churn out resources. While its true heartland is in the holy city of Great Chikago, Birthplace of Steel, the two most significant representatives of this cult near Ohio are the High Bazaari of the Union State of Klevan and the Grand Fordist of the People's Republic of Motown. These two, and the followers of the steel cult more generally, have a fascination with the Emerald Expanse, and always have coin for any who can bring forth glorious Machine, the blessed product of Labor. Of course, Amish and Amerikan bishops will remind you that the steel cult is the worst sin, just the latest way that Jay-Eff-Kay and his foul masters Papa and Castro have their claws dug into the world. Even still, Amish kings make pilgrimage to holy Chikago even as it is ruled by heretics.

I honestly really do love the monster art from the WotC Gamma World 7e

Another reason to pass through the Emerald Expanse is to make your way to Gateway, a merchant republic on the Ohio river and the first stop on the way to the Mississipi Kingdoms of the south, the true heartland of east Meriga. Amish country is a backwater compared to the elegance and decadence of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Though, even those places have their wastelands, beyond the shoreline.

So there we have three reasons to go to the Emerald Expanse: travel to Gateway for trade, scavenge for glorious Machines for the steel cult, or investigate the esoteric mysteries beneath the long-destroyed sky-base. Well, you could easily have lots of other reasons to explore and adventure, I just like having built in common motivations for settings. Also uh the Emerald Expanse is probably bigger than on the map, I just cobbled that together for a visualization.

Uhhhh other ideas for this:

In the conversation I had there was a parallel campaign idea where you would play as beastmen (mutant animal) mercenaries traveling from Michigan, buying up guns in Motown, crossing the Great Black Swamp (and contending with mutants from Toledo to Lima), getting in Amish country, and being carted on down to West Virginia to fight against the heretic snake-handler kings and whatever other petty tyrants hold sway over the valleys of Appalachia.

Extensive exaggerated Amazon fulfillment center inhabited by cannibalistic morlocks cowed by robotic task masters.

Peasant commune shining city on a hill style, inhabited by exile mutants building a better life for themselves, on top of the hill that was once Oakwood, while beneath the city-commune there is a vault of cryogenically frozen Ancient elites.

Opossum people curled up on trees, keeping watch with one eye open.

A mad sorcerer-queen of the fetid floodplain holding sway over fearful beaver-man serfs with reprogrammed gardening robots.

A free-for-all fight over the title of Mayor of Day Town when an Ancient polling location (a sacred temple to their glorious rulers) is uncovered.

Pale white squirrels swarming on vine-choked trees, acting as if by one mind. Albino rodents with thief-like cunning.