In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of hideous post-apocalyptic mutants...

I've been developing a yen, of late, to run a brief space-opera-ish game of some sort. I don't know why, exactly; it's just the sort of thing I like to do from time to time. It's probably because I was re-reading some old campaign logs from a Space Hero game I ran some years ago. I thought that I'd do it using the Mutant Future rules by Daniel Proctor and Ryan Denison.

From Wikipedia:

Mutant Future is a post-apocalyptic, science fantasy role-playing game created by Daniel Proctor and Ryan Denison and published by Goblinoid Games. The game is compatible with Labyrinth Lord, which emulates the rules of classic era Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) using the Open Game License (OGL) from Wizards of the Coast. The game is thematically patterned after genre predecessors such as Metamorphosis Alpha and its more widely known and published follow-up, Gamma World.

There's a lot that I like about Mutant Future. Being based on old-school D&D systems makes it easy to run and play; everyone is already familiar with the basics, and there aren't too many gotchas to trip us up. It uses the standard six character stats, except that Wisdom is renamed Willpower to more accurately reflect its use in the game.

I really like its character creation and advancement too (though in truth, character advancement isn't likely to be too relevant in a short-form campaign).

Unlike in D&D, characters in Mutant Future base their hit-points directly on their CON score, getting one hit-die per point of CON (hit-dice vary depending on species; a standard un-mutated human gets d8). That hit-point total won't ever change with level unless CON changes. As a character rises in level, they get one of the following benefits:

1. +1 melee damage (10%)
2. +1 attack per round (10%)
3. +1 to a randomly-determined characteristic (80%)

I guess, for a straight space-opera game, you could just ignore the mutations for PCs. Then again, they might be fun. On the other hand, that opens it up to the potential for psionics, which I loathe in roleplaying games. On the other other hand, some of the Mental Mutations are pretty cool. On the other other other hand — psionics. Bleeuch.