Metamorphosis Alpha

So all of us in DIY DUNGEONS have at some point or another been involved in this sprawling Metamorphosis Alpha (old school) campaign over the past year, we have left it, come back to it, and some of our old characters's have now become NPC's and still after all of this time, Mother Brain is still quite insane.

If you are unfamiliar with the setting of Metamorphosis alpha, essentially the idea is that this huge gigantic planet sized ship is sent away from earth to colonize another planet. Somewhere along the way something terrible happens to the ship, radiation is leaked, and things get all mutated and weird, not to mention that the ships AI has gone bat shit crazy.

We are somewhere in there...

As of late, our party stands as such (minus a few auxiliary followers/characters.)

Check out the punk patches on the jacket.

Randy Buffet & Robo: Randy is pure strain human (probably was once an engineer or a technician) who awoke from his sleep chamber to find himself being poked and prodded by a telekinetic fox and a mutant gorilla, both completely sentient and with human intelligence and speech. Randy started off the game with a smart phone, bottle of whiskey, and a whip. Robo is Randy's robot (looks familiar im sure for SNES gamers) who Randy weened off the ship's AI in order to befriend the robot. Robo is now loyal to randy and recently saved Randy from having his brain fried by some strange weeds he walked near.

Emitting weird fox vibes. 

Oryx: Oryx is a telekinetic fox who is on a spirit quest with her friend Racs-Keol given to them by their village elder. A hole has mysteriously opened up at the edge of the universe and her and her buddy are sent to go investigate. Before leaving, her Shaman hands her a device called a food maker used to provide rations for the journey. When they get there, they find Randy Buffet who starts talking hysterically about something called a ship. Soon after they find Randy they encountered a gigantic snail that nearly killed them all if it hadn't been for Oryx's cunning to whisk everyone safely away from danger.

This ain't no Donkey Kong

Racs-Keol: Racs-Keol is a mutant gorilla who has (maybe had?) some telepathic abilities, and has been travelling with Oryx. Racs-Keol has often been the cool enforcer of the group who has been making sure people stay safe and sound, not to mention he kicks major ass as a gorilla. Both him and Oryx believe that if they continue to follow Randy they will eventually fulfill their spirit quests.

After the party had met up, Randy Buffet had realized that something had gone terribly wrong on this ship, and first went to see what he could do about it. It becomes clear that the ship is now miserably beyond repair and he has convinced the party to find a way to leave the ship. While the other characters want to leave the ship to go find help, Randy just wants to find a nice shack out somewhere in the woods and play chess with Robo until he dies peacefully. Tavis, the GM of our group wrote about my emergent player goal to retire over at The Mule Abides.

A map of what we've seen of the ship as players. 

In future posts regarding the game, I hope to give updates from A, the most recent session, and B, talks about what each of the ships levels were like, and what they inspired us as players to do. One I'll talk about now is this crazy weed that Randy found that totally rotted his brain right when the party had reached the part of the ship with the smaller spacefareing ships (1 on the map).

Once it was clear that randy had permanent brain damage, the group realized that getting off the ship (which was mostly all Randy's idea) would be impossible being that he was the only Pure Strain Human (PSH's in Metamorphosis Alpha are really the only characters that can access the ship's main functions and other technologies.) The party decided to take Randy all the way back up to the jungle level (7 on the map) and use this strange machine they saw randy use earlier to give a construct of the ships AI a flesh body (more on that another time). 

On a side note Chrono Trigger is a great game.

Feeling like I had most surely lost the character I had liked enough to want to get to safety, I rolled up a new character (again looks familiar for SNES gamers,) named Frog. I decided that Frog would be a chivalrous type (hard to find in Metamorphosis Alpha) and would have totally different motivations than randy, and while he would be an anthropomorphic frog, he would also start the game with a split personality, the other being of a human who believes himself to be a romanticized medieval knight, I figured I would totally love this character just as much as I loved Randy. 

Everyone eventually makes it to the Jungle after running into Frog along the way. The party all being fairly incompetent with technology actually managed to roll well bringing Randy back with only a few errors to his original personality using a large protein synthesizer on the grounds of the jungle. The party got greedy though and decided to use the machine again to make some cows for the local lizard people. Unfortunately that roll we messed up and ended up making a pair of Ibex that gored a few of the lizard people. The lizard people being fairly stupid thought these were all cows none the less. 

Now I'm left in a curious position  I have two characters! I've never really played a game with two characters (3 I guess with Robo) and I am super excited to continue the game tonight! I'll continue to post updates and interesting things from our campaign as it happens. 

Double Trouble

Hi & welcome! Let me tell you about us.

DIY DUNGEONS is a pen and paper gaming troupe dedicated to both playing games in unconventional environments and providing a dense, intimate, and fulfilling role playing game experience. NYC happens to have the largest concentration of role players in the country and possibly the world, but there are very few places to go and play without paying lots of money, or in big awkward convention spaces. We seek to jointly explore the existential implications of everything from original games from the 70s, modern games, & story games all while having unique problem-solving fun doing so. 

DIY DUNGEONS is put together by Ray Weiss, author of RPG Everything Is Dolphins and guitarist in Butter The Children; Tavis Allison, co-author of RPG Adventurer Conquerer King, and lead blogger at The Mule Abides; & Tim Hutchings, artist & creator of the Play Generated Map And Document Archive.