By Optimus Design Systems

I stumbled across this book in the bargain bin at the local hobby shop. It was only $3, so I grabbed it up.

The cover looked great, I was excited, anticipating some great stuff to add to my Gamma World Campaigns. Flipping through the book, I realized the cool artwork continued throughout. Nice very nice. Then something bad happened. I started reading it….Quickly, I was happy I had not spent more than three bucks for it.

Let me back up a bit, Blood Dawn is a Post-Apocalyptic RPG put out by O.D.S. back in '96. No supplements were ever made, I can see why. The book to me was rather uninspired.

Humans hang out in fortress-like cities, and purge the mutant scum whenever/wherever they can. Add Druids and Witches to the mix and you kinda have an idea of what the designers were aiming for. They didn't make it. Mind you, I have no problem with magic in a P.A. setting, but it just seemed like more pages of junk to me, at least in this book. Now the idea of Mutant Druids trying to heal the Earth is cool, I will probably use it. I think they would make for an interesting Cryptic Alliance. What really bugged me was NO Critters! I mean zero! Those were supposed to be in a later supplement. The GM is encouraged to make up his own. Which I can do, but you'd expect at least some in the core rulebook. A couple of Mutant races are discussed ; Ghouls (geez, that's original, NOT), & Albino Giants (I kinda like these, and will be converting them to GW). Overall the mutant rules were lackluster, nothing really new to add to my GW files.

The equipment section has some interesting items (more cool art). I will probably adapt some of it to Gamma World ; Tire armor, Alabama Skull Crusher (basically a Morning Star), Texas Boomerang (basically that thing Xena throws around), Anti-Drizzlies (medicine that stops diarrhea) among other items.

The next section gives some ideas for different settlements and communities that may be found, but my initial perusal of it left me mostly uninspired though tidbits were scattered here and there. The final chapter is more rules, some NPC templates, & a few predictable P.A. maps of the U.S. All in all if you are looking for resource material for your Gamma World games, I'd pass this one by, unless you can get it for a great bargain, like I did. It was worth $3 for the art alone, but don't get bidding happy on E-Bay for this one, spend your Domars elsewhere.

Regards,

Brutorz Bill