Zombies
A long post.
I'll admit it, I love zombies. A lot. I've been getting into the Walking Dead for a while now and it's got my wheels turning.
I've run a zombie themed campaign in the past, not on site mind you. I won't rehash it, the fact is though it went well for a little while, and then it sort of trailed off. My players complained it was too gritty and they didn’t get what my “thing” with zombies was.
After a lot of consideration however I realized that branching out to a different set of players would help. That, and a zombie game with the sluggish pace of an online campaign, which is but one game on a sticky list of a dozen or more, might not lose its novelty very quickly even for people who don’t like Resident Evil video games or Romero films. There might be enough people willing to give this a shot, so I thought I’d come and pitch it.
So based on what I learned from that experience a few years ago, I’ve been mulling over this idea for several months now and I decided if I do it, I’ll use Savage Worlds, just SWEX, for the rule set.
I do own and considered AFMBE. I like the AFMBE source books and take inspiration from them, especially for putting variety into zombies, but I never cared to game in the Unisystem and have never run or played it at all. It’s okay, but I like generic SW better. It doesn't seem hard but SW does something very similar with more familiarity and elegance.
However, I felt the need to see if there’s enough overlap between SW players and survival horror/zombie fans to make this idea work. Else, I’m probably better off taking some time to learn Unisystem and running it with the comparatively more popular AFMBE rules plus you know if someone has a copy of AFMBE, you know they dig zombies.
Keep in mind this is just to gauge interest, I’m sort of in a weird time pickle right now for another couple of weeks or so and I’m actively job hunting, so if I get a lucky break I might have to vanish for a while to move, get new internet service, etc. So even in the unlikely event everyone on earth thinks this idea is wonderful, it wouldn’t materialize for quite some time yet.
Premise:
You write your own prelude, and if you’ve ever seen a zombie movie you know how. Basically you are minding your own business, and suddenly, zombies! However it happens you should encounter the undead, you lose consciousness quickly after this initial encounter. Your character knows, definitively somehow, that the dead walk the earth and it’s a global phenomenon.
Perhaps you heard it over the TV and work and decided to go home immediately. Perhaps you are one of the authorities immediately dispatched to go deal with the situation somehow. Perhaps you thought you were safe camping out in the woods where there aren’t any people. But somehow the dead found you. Perhaps you are in combat with the undead, but your partner suddenly shoots you, and it all goes black. Perhaps you flee into the street where an out of control driver hits you with his car. Perhaps you simply faint upon the sight of your sister, who died of cancer three years ago, returned to your door step, her visage rotted and bloody.
It does not have to be long or elaborate, it does however have to be realistic and concludes on the date of JXXX 15, 201X (TBD later). You are playing a person from the contemporary real world, after all.
The game begins for you when you wake up in a strange room. You are wearing a very modest but loose chocolate brown (for men) or slate gray (for women) coverall garment made from some thin, flimsy fabric with elasticized cuffs, adjustable snaps in key places, and a built in draw string at the waist. It’s a very generous garment which could conceivably fit the very short and petite, if you tightened it up completely and rolled the legs and sleeves up all the way, but its full potential could cover the very tall and the very overweight. It probably doesn’t fit very well but at least it’s roomy. Your underwear isn’t even yours, it’s plain and white with no tags, stitched from some rough hewn fabric and it doesn’t quite fit properly either. You are barefoot.
However it seems that whoever took your work boots, clothes, purse, IPod and/or wallet left you at least a little something. As you bend to pick it up, you hear a noise coming from outside the plain room you find yourself in.
Rules:
The player characters wake up mysteriously in a strange room wearing new clothes with only one personal material possession of use (a water filter, a handgun, a headlamp, etc.) It has to be something a person could conceivably carry in their hands a long distance without difficulty, and it will have minimal accessories (the water filter doesn’t have a replacement cartridge supplied with it, the handgun has only one magazine with a few rounds in it, the headlamp has only one set of batteries, etc.). Basically you make your character with skills, attributes etc., request one item, and you are done. It may be an item your character personally owned, or not.
A lot of Edges and Hindrances may not work or be allowed; basically anything depending on social or economic situation probably won’t make sense. You can say your character is rich for example, but the Rich and Very Rich edges will be completely useless. You could however still have the Attractive edge, for example. I’ll have to help the players out here.
The player characters have gender parity forced on them(there is actually an in setting reason for it). Neither male nor female may go below 40% of the PC population. If one or more PCs should die or otherwise be removed from the game, the newcomers or replacements will have to close the gap. I will have to assign character gender according to some system, likely a first come first serve list of some kind. I know that sounds really weird but there truly is an in game reason for it, the players may be able to figure it out eventually.
All characters speak English fluently. They can speak other languages if they should but I’m imposing this.
Beyond that the characters can be anyone fictitious great or small, although I would gently suggest most be adults between 18 and say 50. American European Asian, tall short fat thin, well educated, illiterate, all the rest is left to you.
Execution:
This is something of a mind screw plot where the PCs try to unravel the mind screw while trying to survive, and a bit of a sandbox. The characters, total strangers to each other, wake up nearby one another in a strange place in a strange city none of them have ever been to before. They all have different stories, but the common memory is that the dead have risen and walk the earth.
How did they get here? Where is this place? Who put them here? These are all questions nobody knows the answers to. As they take their first few steps, they realize there’s an entire city surrounding them, and they can hear the moans of the walkers as they shuffle aimlessly down the street…
This campaign uses Google satellite views of a real city as its map, but with the labels removed. Your characters aren’t even sure if they’re in the Americas, or Europe, or Australia or some other continent. Can you escape the city? Do you want to?
Now if that sounds horrible to you, you needn’t say a thing I will assume radio silence is non interest and you can stop reading if you haven’t already. However if this intrigues you even a bit, I have a follow up question.
Content wise, this game would have to be flagged Mature. Gore, violence, swearing and the like are going to be part and parcel of the experience. This is just due to the nature of the genre and subject matter, most zombie movies are rated R after all. I don’t necessarily need gore and the like to tell a story, but it’s just going to be completely lame if I censor it for a general family audience. This is a game where people get hurt and die for real in realistic ways and the tone I'm going for just isn't suitable for absolutely everyone.
However I’m considering flagging such a thing Adult, mostly as a measure to insure easier compliance with site policies, not because I’ll have very much “adult” content and any of that would be mostly implied. Being gratuitous is not the point as it would simply be easier on me to know that descriptions of horrid zombie combat and unchecked rampant swear words weren’t going to land anyone in trouble. However I know a lot of people refuse to play an Adult game or can’t for legal reasons or site policy reasons.
The point being, if this interests you, would you prefer it be Mature or Adult?
