I used to be the one who ran Metamorphosis Alpha for our group. I don’t have any of my original MA material, it was all lot in the great water leak incident.

Thanks to DriveThruRPG and RPGNow, I can get PDFs of such things. Unfortunately, I could not justify $80 for the hardback re-print Kickstarter last year. I really wanted to, but talked myself out of it. I still want to order it off Goodman Games, but $80. Yes, I know, I paid a lot more than that to get a Dieties & Demigods with Cthulhu and Melnibonean mythos last year.

I have things I need to do to my own AD&D campaign, but I have had an itch for several weeks and finally, I printed out my MA PDF and put it in a binder, and read the rules for the first time in what must be 30 years. I must say that I did not recall the rules being the way they were. We played a lot more Gamma World and I recalled things being more like I recall it instead. However, I have not read the Gamma World rules in nearly 30 years or played, so I could be jumbling that with Star Frontiers, and our home brew science fiction game. [I later found a reference and how close the GW and MA rules were, so I’m not sure what rules I was remembering.]

What amazes me is how complete a 30 page rule book is. There are rules for generating characters, various physical and mental mutations. Animal and plant specific mutations, and a way to generate your own mutated creatures. There is a rough description of a 17 deck generation ship with mid decks and other spaces, and the GM has free reign to make it their own.

Here is a picture of my Metamorphosis Alpha rules, printed from my PDF, with a note card colored with a visual reminder of what each wristband does, and my notebook for ideas for adventures and other things to put my ideas into it. I also grabbed 17 sheets of graph paper and hole punched them to start making rough maps of each deck. I used one sheet to show how big each deck is in 10 mile squares.

The manual suggests 2 mile squares or hexes for maps of a complete deck. This has me thinking about how I might use the quadrille ruled desk pads I got in recently.

I will be posting articles with my ideas on MA as I build my version of the Starship Warden. The thing I like about MA is just how rules lite it is, and one can easily run a game on Roll20 & G+ Hangouts without worrying how all the players will fair if they don’t have a copy.