I won't lie. I have always had mixed feelings about random tables in role-playing games. When they're done well, they can really lighten the load of a GM who needs some quick fill in bits. When they're done poorly, they can result in bits that just don't fit into the flow of a game and brings everything grinding to a halt. Finding that balance between good content, and bad, can be a challenge sometimes, and for every book like the revised edition of The Metamorphica by Johnstone Metzger, there are a hundred lists of "D100 Of X" tables, where X is everything from random soldiers to names for inns to things that can jump out of the bushes at your characters during an overland journey.
I'm not saying that random tables are bad. I have a number of them that I use for different games, but so many of them are just uninspired jumbles of text with a number in front of them. Many, many of them fit into this category.
What makes random tables good for a game? First and foremost is usefulness. The results have to be useful to your game. If there are a lot of results that you respond to with "Huh?" then the table might not have good usability. Next, they have to be usable without a lot of work. Part of the idea of a random table is that you, as a GM, have reached a fork in the game that came unexpectedly. You need something to fill in quickly, and if the result of the random table is something that requires you to generate stats then it doesn't serve the purpose it is meant for. If the random tables can't cover these two needs, there's not much of a point in using them.
One of the players in my weekly online game introduced me to the first edition of The Metamorphica (now PWYW at the OneBookShelf sites) during one of our Swords & Wizardry games. We ended up using the tables in that book for his Dark God-worshipping Cleric who's healing magic would give the recipient a random "chaos mark" as an after-effect. This was probably one of the few D&D games ever that tried to eschew Clerical healing.
It also demonstrates how a book can put an impact upon a game. Nothing was actually changed mechanically in our game, but the tone changed dramatically with the simple change of adding a roll on the "body forms" table in The Metamorphica. There is always the push and pull between adding more mechanics to a game, and find less complicated ways in which to do these things in a game, particularly if you are adding things on the fly.
While the first edition of The Metamorphica was a really good addition to my GMing tool box, the new revised edition is even better, adding over 100 pages of material and branching out into genres like science fiction, super-heroes, post-apocalyptic and science fantasy. Regardless of the type of genre that you are going to game, there will be something useful for you in this book.
The Metamorphica is also good for generating monsters and other adversaries for your games. Between the Creature tables, Supernatural Abilities, Monster Parts and Monster Powers table you can quickly make up the basics for monster, assign a Hit Dice total and throw it at the player characters. As a fan of Weird Fantasy, particularly in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay/Realm of Chaos school, I love strange, chaotic creatures in the games that I run.
Don't get the idea that The Metamorphica is just something for use with OSR or D&D games, because it isn't. There are no real mechanical write-ups to any of the attack-oriented powers in the book, that all has to be done by the GM. This is a step that can slow things down at the table, but if you play Runequest or other fantasy-oriented game, that just means that you don't have the added steps of conversion work. This books could be cool for making up wild, Umbra sprites on the fly.
The flaws to the book are minimal. Some of the tables have a lot of options to them (I know, terrible, right?) and because of that require big dice to roll on them. I mean like d1000 big. I don't have dice like that, but there are enough dice rolling apps for phones and desktops to mitigate this. Also, my copy looked like it was a bit over trimmed in production. Metzger puts a lot of thought into the graphic look of his books, and if the production end isn't 100% on board, this can lead to sloppy looking output due to the production people not paying as close of attention as they should be. It didn't render my copy unusable, but it is something to consider. I may eventually invest in a copy from Lulu.com and see it that looks better.
So, my opinion on The Metamorphica is that it is a great tool that more GMs should have. It is completely a collection of randomness in gaming done right, and will get a lot of use at the table. I know that my copy will get even more use in my games than the first edition did.
As an aside, you may have seen my review of Metzger's last work, the D&D B/X inspired fantasy game The Nightmares Underneath here at EN World. As I discovered when I was looking for the links for this review, he has recently put out a collection of dungeons for that game called City of Poison. This collection of dungeons could be an excellent way to kick off a campaign of The Nightmares Underneath, and it could also be used in any OSR game with a little tweaking. Hopefully this means that we'll start to see more support for The Nightmares Underneath. I would love to see an adaptation of Metzger's Class Warfare for Dungeon World to The Nightmares Underneath.
