Description
The original edition of the game takes place on a generation spaceship, the starship Warden that has been struck by an unknown cataclysmic event that killed many of the colonists and crew. Thus, the characters must survive their missions in this ship (which they believe to be a world) where they no longer understand the technology around them and they encounter numerous mutated creatures. In essence, Metamorphosis Alpha is a dungeon crawl in space.
Players can opt to create a human, a mutated human, a mutated plant or a mutated creature as their character. A number of articles in Dragon expanded upon these options to include clones and robot characters as well as adding rules for cybernetics. There are five common player characteristics: radiation resistance, mental resistance, dexterity, strength, and constitution. Human players added a sixth characteristic, leadership potential, while mutated humans and creatures add a random number of mutations, both physical and mental. Metamorphosis Alpha's combat rules are very similar to those used in the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).
Metamorphosis Alpha is the intellectual pre-cursor to Gamma World (1978), also produced by TSR.
Read more about this topic: Metamorphosis Alpha
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