Anvil of the Sun Belongs in Gamma World 1e

 Michael Gibbons has a great blog called Metal Earth and it is chock full of his delightful thickly inked line drawings for his games and books. I fell in love with an evocative map he published early in the blog's history, a map I like to refer to as Anvil of the Sun. It screams 1e Gamma World and my favorite post-apoc comic from the seventies, Kamandi, Last Boy on Earth. Now that I am playing in a Gamma World 1e/2e campaign (as a PSH called Kamanja) I had a terrible jones to world build on the old blank United States of America map which was included in the original game.  

Many a wee lad had trouble like I did when first exposed to this vast blank map. While the outline of the USA was lovingly tortured by the early age of the global devastation which besets the campaign world, the map was empty. Where and what should middle-school kids put in this future earth? Where to start? DC, New York, Miami? I played the great module The Albuquerque Starport but never connected it to a greater Gamma World.

Metal Earth solves all this, for me. Last night I reviewed Anvil of the Sun and contemplated where I should set it on the original 1e map. The important feature of Anvil is that there are large bodies of water on either side of the land mass. This being the Atomic Ocean and the Stained Sea. A quick search of  the US map gives me only one logical place for this Metal Earth map and that is the Baja of Mexico, Baja California, which once enclosed the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez. Now I'm going to set up a scale to interpose the Anvil map onto the new and reduced Baja.

I've chosen 16 kilometers per hex on the Anvil map and extrapolated this to the 43.7 kilometers of the greater US map. I've actually changed the official Gamma World scale to 48 kilometers per hex because this neatly conforms to a 3x3 hex area on this new campaign map.

Here is what it looks like: Now I only need to populate the radioactive sandbox with my own original details as suggested by Michael's great map. I've decided Shaft 17 is home of a large PSH colony of Restorationists (I do love PSH's it seems) determined to restore their world into a New Earth akin to the past world which has been lost. The Tower of Zola has been tagged with being the shrine of the dominant religious belief on the Anvil with the Priests of Zola residing in the fascinating city Skull. Skull and the Priests of Zola are the dominant power of the region with the small nation-state of Szan and the Shaft 17 colony the next legitimate recognized powers of note. Notice the hex labeled "Ghostland" just east of Shaft 17 standing in the poison waters of the Atomic Ocean. What exactly is these water-based ruins and its relation with Shaft 17 is the first mystery of the campaign world I wish to resolve before I move on to the Tower of Zola. A forbidden, taboo site for the average Shaft 17'teener is my first obvious leap, but the devil is in the details they say :)