Thinking about Gamma World again

One of the players in my West Marches has never DMed a game before, and another player has been pushing him to try running something. I've been giving advice to Player 1, including suggesting some game systems that might not be too much of a shock for him. (Player 2 was suggesting things with 200+ page world lore books in addition to the rules themselves...probably not the best thing to have to worry about on a first time as game master.)

After some discussion, Player 1 decided to check out Gamma World. Close enough to Classic D&D, but different enough to make him interested. I suggested he get the 2E PDF from DriveThru, and he did. He's been going over it slowly, and every now and then shooting a question my way. 

I'm not actually an expert on 2E. My cousin had the box set back in the day, but we never really did more than make characters with it. Later, when I was in college, I got 4E and we played that a bit. I like it, but it's a bit crunchier than 1E/2E. It throws in character classes on top of mutations and whatnot, plus there are a lot of derived statistics to juggle. 2E is a lot simpler, and also a bit better organized than 1E. 

So I've been brushing up on the 2E rules as well. I've also been compiling the creature and robot stats from the main rule book and the modules that I have on PDF. There are quite a few interesting ones that didn't make it into the 4E book. 

I mentioned to my sons a while back that we might be playing Gamma World with Player 1 soon, and my younger son got really excited. He has been transitioning from a love of bulldogs to a love of cats (because of some buff cat character on the internet? -- yeah, I'm old, get off my lawn). So of course he wants to play a mutant cat character. 

We looked through the 4E book's creature section together, and for bedtime reading we read through Light on Quest's Mountain, the old Endless Quest book set in Gamma World. He enjoyed it. 

Of course, now my son wants to pick and choose mutations to be catlike: heightened balance, jumping, night vision, claws, and of course chameleon power. :D 

Now I'm considering putting together a GW game for RPoL (a play by post site). Simple sandbox. Home town, different strange regions in each direction, ruins sprinkled here and there. Nothing as grand in concept as GamMarvel World that I tried to run a few years back. That just became a headache trying to work out a bunch of connections to Marvel comics in each ruin and adventure site. KISS Principle this time around, if I pull the trigger.

Also, it'll be fun to play some GW if Player 1 gets his game up and running.