Gunslinger, Cougars, and Gamma World 2nd Edition

Short update on Gunslinger and Gamma World. What does Gamma World have to do with a Wild West RPG?

I don't know if Gamma World is the first non-D&D RPG I owned, but it was certainly one of the first. To this day it is still my favorite iteration of GW. That strange apocalyptic world will always hold a special place, as it came into my sphere of awareness around the time I was really into reading Andre Norton. Her book Starman's Son had quite an impact. If you haven't read the book it is basically a Gamma World-like post apocalyptic setting. Not quite as out there in wahoo-silly land, but it had its quirks.

Because of Andre Norton, Gamma World, and maybe especially Mad Max, I have a real fondness for the genre. Maybe the genre is too bleak for mainstream as we don't get a lot of post apocalyptic movies as we do other genres. Then again I guess Walking Dead falls in that category, and that show has certainly done well.

Back to Gunslinger and the connection to Gamma World. One of the features of Gamma World was the art. The interior was lavishly illustrated by Larry Elmore. I may have commented more than once that I like a lot of his paintings, but it was his pen & ink illustrations that I really like. I proudly have an original page of SnarfQuest hanging over my drawing table. In the creatures section Larry Elmore did a tiny little illustration of just about every weird mutated beast to be found in GW. And I've always loved that about 2nd edition.

With that in mind as a sort of homage to Larry Elmore and GW 2e, I'm drawing a tiny little pen & ink drawing for just about every critter in Gunslinger. By the illustrations being so small they don't take a lot of time to draw, so it isn't really delaying completion of the book that much. And they're a lot of fun to make.

Side note. I've borrowed many creatures from the Monster Book 0e Reloaded (Monster Compendium) by Matt Finch, and modified them specifically for Gunslinger. A great resource for fleshing out the critters in your 0e game. There once was a Word Doc floating around the internet, but I can't seem to find it at the moment.