The Setting of Gamma World (Part V)

Before presenting my final thoughts on this topic, I wanted to take a brief look at one other aspect of Gamma World that sheds a little more light on its setting: cryptic alliances. The 1978 rulebook has this to say on the subject:

As if the monsters and creatures of GAMMA WORLD weren't fearsome enough, many of them have banded together into secret or semi-secret organizations called CRYPTIC ALLIANCES. Some are remnants of organizations that existed in the Shadow Years ... some are of very recent origin. 

Very little else is said about cryptic alliances in general. However, the descriptions of several of them include tidbits of information that offer some insight into their origins in the pre-apocalyptic world. For example, the Brotherhood of Thought was "founded by a biochemist who survived the holocaust," while the Healers were "founded by a medical technician during the Shadow Years." The rulebook of the 1983 second edition of the game is even more spare on such historical details (though, to its credit, it includes much more information on the present activities of the various alliances).

Issue #25 of Dragon (May 1979), however, includes an article by the game's creator, James M. Ward, with the rather banal title of "A Part of Gamma World Revisited." The article looks more closely at the cryptic alliances, with an eye toward their use in an ongoing campaign. In several instances, though, Ward also reveals information that grounds them more strongly in the setting. For instance, the Brotherhood of Thought mentioned above is described as having been 

started by a biochemist from the University of California that was putting the finishing touches on an ecological monitoring station in the mountains near the university. The time of the "great destruction" pulverized the campus while Dr. Dotson and two assistants were at the station ... The years went by and that scientist and his assistants had sons and daughters that carried on their work.

The article mentions a leader within the alliance named Elenor, who is called a "5th generation granddaughter to the first biochemist." There is thus a direct, lineal connection between an important figure in the 25th century Brotherhood of Thought and its pre-apocalyptic antecedent. Meanwhile, the article describes the aforementioned Healers as having its origin in

a group near Duluth, Minnesota [begun] by a number of med-technicians that had been working on sleep therapy and accidentally made a vast break through in artificial telepathy through electrode induction. 

This is another case where setting details reveal the wonders of pre-holocaust high technology.  

Prior to the introduction of the Empire of the Sun, the cryptic alliances were among the most cohesive organizations to exist in the setting of Gamma World. Even so, they're stretched thin across North America. Several, as described by Ward in his Dragon article, have a fortified base somewhere on the continent, but, unless your campaign happens to be set in an area close to one of them, the player characters are most likely to encounter the cryptic alliances in small, often secretive groups, hence the adjective "cryptic" used to describe them.

When I played a lot of Gamma World in my youth, the cryptic alliances fascinated me, in large part because they were the only power groups described in the game. Each had an overriding philosophy or worldview, as well as an agenda. The cryptic alliances were working toward – or against – something and that made them very easy to use in a campaign, whether as allies or antagonists. Still, I was frustrated by how little any of them had achieved. Despite their presence, the setting of Gamma World largely remained a shattered wasteland, even more than a century after the End, which seemed unlikely to me. Unfortunately, published materials, as we have seen in previous entries in this series, provided scant – and often contradictory – answers to this and most other questions.