It's a Corpse Cavalcade II

When the apocalypse comes – and surely it will whether it is tomorrow, next week, or yesterday – and the dead rise to shamble across the Earth, the “lucky” survivors are barely going to have enough time to grab their trusty .45 handguns, first aid kits, complete sets of Elvis Presley on vinyl, iPods and iPhones, and whatnot before the cast of the corpse cortege are upon them. And before they know it, Grandma is down amongst the dead… Only to get back up again and be coming around for a bite out of her late dearest and nearest. Once past their flesh-eating Grandmothers, most survivors are going to looking to the government for help. Then the army. Then anyone. Which is when they discover that their survival is down to them and their decisions. All they can do is hope that their decisions are anything other than stupid, as stupid can get them dead…

So with everyone still occupied with the daily needs for survival and fending off the brain feeding zombies, it will be the rare dreamer or philosopher who has the time or inclination to ask that all important question, “How did this happen?” That might not be a question asked in the zombie apocalypses you might see depicted in books or on television, but when it comes to roleplaying it is a question that not only has to be asked, it has to be answered too. Especially in playing out a zombie apocalypse over the long term. The reason is simple. Whilst in a roleplaying campaign the survival needs have to be addressed, entirely focusing on soon becomes repetitive and quickly lose their drama. Need shelter? Kill zombies. Find shelter. Need fuel? Kill zombies. Find fuel. Need food? Kill zombies. Find food. Need ammunition? Kill zombies. Find ammunition. Wash, rinse, repeat, as necessary. Which is repetitive and dull.

It is an issue addressed and not addressed in War of the Dead: Chapter Two, which as the title suggests is the second release in the series. Published by Daring Entertainment through Cubicle Seven Entertainment, this is a fifty-two part campaign that charts the adventures and travails of a group of survivors in the face of the rise of the dead and the fall of civilisation. Written for use with Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Savage Worlds, the campaign offers one adventure per week so that a group could play it out over the course of a whole year. Each adventure does not actually represent a week’s worth of game time, but anywhere from a few hours to a few days, essentially enough material that can be played through in a session or two.

The campaign was originally released as a series of fifty-two PDFs, and is now complete. Cubicle Seven Entertainment has divided the campaign into four parts, each collating thirteen episodes. To date, only War of the Dead: Chapter One and War of the Dead: Chapter Two have been released. The campaign began with the player characters – all ordinary men and women – aboard a cruise liner on holiday. It quickly became apparent that the suspected outbreak of an illness aboard the ship was something more, and very quickly the player characters found themselves to be no longer passengers but survivors aboard a vessel of the walking dead. Eventually as War of the Dead: Chapter One drew to a close, the player characters made it ashore only to discover that the infection was not confined to the ship and that everywhere the dead has arisen.

Subtitled “Sanctuary and Loss,” War of the Dead: Chapter Two opens two months into the end of the world. The player characters have been on the road for a month after the events that lead to failure of their first refuge, the town of Dalesbury, as described in the final weeks of War of the Dead: Chapter One. Theirs is a nomadic existence, forced on the road in the search for supplies – food, fuel, and ammunition – that across this Hell on Earth have become increasingly scarce as the cities have become the domain of the Living Dead. As the group makes its way from one desperate situation, it begins to learn of events further afield, including news of where the President went – Colorado, which becomes a much discussed objective as the events of War of the Dead: Chapter Two progress. After all, this is where the government went and it surely must be able to see to the needs of the survivors, right?

In the interim, the group also learns of possible salvation – Sanctuary. A nearby city has been supplying the few outlying communities of survivors with supplies. If the city has been cleared of the Living Dead and is in a position to supply food, could it be the refuge that the player characters have been looking for? Could it be the first signs of government since the characters came ashore? Well, the answer to both questions, is a qualified “yes and no.” Sanctuary is in the hands of UniMed, a pharmaceuticals corporation that has created a safe zone protected by the remnants of a US Army battalion. It is even hinted that the UniMed CEO had information about the Living Dead that the President needed to hear.

Nothing is quite what it seems. Of course it is not. It is true though that Sanctuary offers a degree of respite from the horrors without. Unfortunately, Sanctuary is the focus of new horrors and ultimately, the characters will find themselves on the road again, ready for the events of War of the Dead: Chapter Three.

War of the Dead: Chapter Two wastes no time in getting down to the adventure. There is almost no preamble before the GM and the players are thrown into the difficulty of the apocalypse. It makes a much fuller use of the Savages Worlds rules, in particular the Mass Combat rules, as the battles in War of the Dead: Chapter Two escalate in scale and take a more military feel when compared to the skirmishes of War of the Dead: Chapter One. If there was a lot of combat in War of the Dead: Chapter One, then War of the Dead: Chapter Two ups this, not just in terms of the hardware to hand, but also the foes faced.

Physically, War of the Dead: Chapter Two is somewhat perfunctorily presented. What little art there is, is grim, if sketchy. The writing though, is rough around the edges and it could have done with a closer edit. There is some repetition and inconsistency between sections that the GM will have to adjudicate on. As with the previous chapter, War of the Dead: Chapter Two could do with maps to make it easier for the GM to run.

Similarly, War of the Dead: Chapter Two suffers from many of issues that were a problem in the previous chapter. It is linear in nature and it is heavily scripted in places, and it suffers from repetition in terms of structure and in its encounters. Primarily, it is heavily combative in nature and this becomes both wearisome and grim. Then again, this is a world in which the dead walk the earth… That said, the over arcing plot does introduce several twists to its exploration of the zombie genre and in between the gunfights, there are numerous NPCs to interact with, many of them quite memorable.

At the start of this review, it was stated that War of the Dead: Chapter Twoboth addressed and failed to address the repetitious play of the genre and the question of why the post-apocalypse came about. It addresses the repetition essentially by replacing it with different forms of repetition, but ones that still revolve around the slaughtering of the Living Dead. It addresses the question of “why” only so far, and that is not really a failure upon the author’s part. After all, this is only the second part of the campaign and as such, is far too early to fully answer such questions.  They will only come in War of the Dead: Chapter Three and War of the Dead: Chapter Four. In the meantime, War of the Dead: Chapter Two is as good as the previous chapter, which means more good, but not quite perfect zombie roleplaying fodder.

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If you ain't got that...

An alternative title to Agents of S.W.I.N.G. from Postmortem Studios might be The Avengers RPG – and by that we do not mean the American comic series, but rather the iconic British television series, The Avengers, in which the umbrella swinging, bowler hatted John Steed investigated an array of Cold War, criminal, science fictional, and supernatural threats with a pretty and capable assistant by his side. Similarly, an alternative title to Agents of S.W.I.N.G. from Postmortem Studios might be the I.TC. TV RPG. For those of you not in the know, I.T.C. was a British television company headed by Lew Grade that during the 1960s and 1970s produced some of the United Kingdom’s most iconic television series and sold them worldwide. The Saint, Danger Man, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Department S, The Persuaders! , The Champions, and Jason King to name but a few. What these series had in common, including The Avengers, was their genre and the fact that they were “Cool.” Their genre was that of the “Adventure Series” or “Spy-Fi” and their Coolness was borne not just of the fact that they were good shows, but also that they were British and the 1960s, Britishness was cool and London was swinging…!

In Agents of S.W.I.N.G., you get to be cool, suave, and sophisticated, working as an agent for S.W.I.N.G. – “Supreme World Intelligence Network Group,” an international espionage and counter-espionage organisation that deals with threats to world peace and security above, beyond, and below the global obsession with the West versus East of the Cold War. Just like The Avengers, the agents will be investigating an array of threats and mysteries, but Agents of S.W.I.N.G. has the capacity to push further at the envelope of its genres in a number of ways. First, it draws upon the equally as cool action films of the period, most notably the James Bond films, thus moving more towards the “Spy Fi” genre. Second, it follows both the Adventure Series and I.T.C.’s output out of the 1960s and into the grimmer, more cynical decade of the 1970s, best typified by series such as The Sweeney and The Professionals, so shifting towards the crime genre. Third, it can shift towards the supernatural and the outré with series such as Doctor Who and Sapphire & Steel, neither of are necessarily produced or distributed by, but are nevertheless both Adventure Series and thus not only part of the genre, but also cool. Fourth, it can do the Science Fiction Adventure Serial such as Thunderbirds or Joe 90.

If this seems like a lot of genres for Agents of S.W.I.N.G. to encompass, it probably is, but its actual genre is not many but one – the Adventure Series – and that genre can include elements of many other genres. It is up to the game’s GM or Control to decide how far he wants to go with any one genre with his Agents of S.W.I.N.G. game.

For its mechanics, Agents of S.W.I.N.G. uses the FATE 3 engine. First seen in Evil Hat Production’s superb pulp action RPG, Spirit of the Century, the Fate system is a Fudge variant, one in which Fate Points play a major role. Just as in many other RPGs they can be spent to gain a bonus to a roll, but here they have a greater versatility. Like many “Indie” style games, a player can spend them to create and bring small elements into the game, what is known as “dramatic editing,” but under the Fate system, Fate Points can do a whole lot more. They can be spent to invoke a character Aspect and bring it into play, to tag another character or location related Aspect to bring it into play, to power a Stunt, or to make a Declaration, adding some small element to the story. The Fate system also ditches traditional attributes, instead defining characters by Skills, Aspects, and Stunts. It plays fast and easy – the player rolls two six-sided dice, each of a different colour, and deducts one from the other to a number from +5 down to -5. This number is added to any bonuses derived from Skills, Aspects, or Stunts to try and beat a target number, or to roll higher than an opponent in a contested roll. In a contested roll, the amount by which one side beats the other determines the amount of damage or Stress inflicted, whether Physical, Composure (mental), or Social Stress.

Sometimes though, a player will need a third die – a “SWING die.” Whenever a player rolls well, he earns one of these dice and gets to keep it in front of him. Later on in the game, the player can choose to use his “Swing die” to substitute the negative or the positive die in order to get a better result.

For example, the S.W.I.N.G. agents want to get a pass from an enemy agent, Gustav Zimmerman, which would give them access to a high security laboratory. They have followed Zimmerman to a masque ball where Claudia Romanov will engage the agent on the dance floor and attempt to distract him whilst slipping the pass out of his pocket. Control decides that this will be an opposed roll against Zimmerman’s Mental rating of +2. Claudia’s player decides to use her skill of +3 (Solid) Sleight of Hand and spends a Fate point to trigger Bump and Grind Aspect. Control agrees and allows her a +2 bonus to her roll. Control rolls +3 and -6 to get a total modifier of -3, which reduces Zimmerman’s +2 Mental down to -1 Bent. This gives an excellent target for Claudia to beat and her player’s roll of +6 and -3 gives a modifier of +3, which when added to her current Sleight of Hand skill gives a total result of +8 or Atsonishing. Since this is 3 higher than the target, Control awards Claudia a Swing Die to use later. Control also rules that Zimmerman was so oblivious that he will be delayed getting to the laboratory himself whilst he looks for it!

Characters are defined by their Skills, Stunts, and Aspects. Skills are areas in which a character is trained in, his knowledge and expertise; his Stunts are related to his Skills and grant a character small bonuses or permissions within the game; while Aspects define the character in some way, such as “You won’t break me” or “Champagne Charlie” and are the more interactive elements within the game. Sample skills might be +1 (Cool) Guns or +4 (Neat) Science, while possible typical stunts include abilities like Architect of Death and Hide in Plain Sight or possessions such as Custom Ride gives you a favoured vehicle that you have added a gadget to (tied to the Drive skill). Most Stunts do not require the expenditure of Fate Points, but those that do are slightly more powerful. A Fate Point can be spent to Invoke one of a character’s Aspects and so gain a bonus, but if Compelled by Control and brought into play, so developing complications and driving the story along, then the character earns a Fate Point. Lastly, Aspects belonging to another character, or to an object, place, or a scene can be Tagged by another character, again by paying out Fate Points. When choosing Aspects for a character, the designer’s advice is that they should never be boring and it should always be possible to view an Aspect in both a positive and a negative light. Otherwise, a character cannot participate in the game’s Fate Point economy – bring negative Aspects into the game and letting it act as a story hook, gets a character more Fate Points to spend in his favour.

At its most basic, character creation is simply a matter of choosing Skills, Stunts, and Aspects. A quick method of creating characters is provided, but of course, the game wants a little more than that from its players, asking them to create a simple background and tying Aspects to their character’s Section (the department that they work for in S.W.I.N.G.), past, and cover identity before being given a free choice of another five. A player has twenty points to assign to Skills, these ranging from +1 (Cool) and +2 (Hip) up to +7 (Far Out) and +8 (Out of Sight); four Stunts to choose; and lastly some equipment to take. It should be made clear that although Agents of S.W.I.N.G. gives detailed lists of Skills and Stunts, players are expected to create their Aspects, tying them into their agents’ concepts.

The first of our two sample characters is based on a character that I originally played in a friend’s James Bond 007 RPG campaign. She is of an impoverished White Russian noble family, who followed her father into his elicit trade of theft and burglary, stealing from the rich to support the family. She worked the high society scene around the world before being caught by a S.W.I.N.G. agent into whose room she had broken. Now she commits burglary as a S.W.I.N.G. agent herself.

Name: Claudia Romanov
Concept: Reformed Jewel Thief
Section: Section 10 – Acquisition
Cover: High Flying Photographer

Section: “In and Out Without a Trace”
Past: Nobility in Reduced Circumstances
Cover: “My camera gets me in everywhere…”
Aspects: “Looks can be deceiving…”, Takes a thief to catch a thief, Like good Russian vodka, Always dressed the part, “I did complete finishing school”
Skills: +5 (Groovy) Burglary; +3 (Solid) Sleight of Hand, Stealth; +2 (Hip) Academics (French, Russian), Photography, Social Standing; +1 (Cool) Contacts, Deceit, Fists
Stunts: Acrobatics, Bump and Grind, Network of Contacts, Unruffled

Stress
Physical Stress OOOOO Composure OOOOO Social OOOOOOO

Our second example character is based upon a friend of mine who happens to be a fan of the Adventure Series genre and uses elements of characters that he has played in the past. Doctor Exton was kidnapped whilst working in Nepal and when he returned, found that he had developed strange abilities. These were detected by other members of Section 8 who recruited him into S.W.I.N.G.

Name: Doctor Simon Exton
Concept: Psychic Doctor
Section: Section 8 – Uncanny Affairs
Cover: Consultant Toxicologist

Section: “I know your body, I know your mind”
Past: It was a strange holiday
Cover: Let me through, I’m a Doctor!
Aspects: “My, that does look painful”, It’s just a scratch, Sardonic Wit, I have just the thing for that in my bag, I sense that there is more to this
Skills: +6 (Fab) Science; +4 (Neat) Academics; +3 (Solid) Fists; +2 (Hip) Empathy, Intimidation; +1 (Cool) Contacts, Mysteries, Resolve
Stunts: Cold Read, Developed Immunities, Psychic Telepathy, Sixth Sense

Stress
Physical Stress OOOOO Composure OOOOOO Social OOOOO

The setting and genre is supported with rules for equipment and gadgets, organisations, a year by year breakdown of events of the setting’s timeframe – the 1960s and 1970s, along with some notes on Superscience! and the Supernatural. If Control wants to push his game in either of those latter two directions, he might find the guidance somewhat light. Then again, both usually figure as elements within the Adventure Series genre rather than serve as its mainstay or focus. Further, the primary genre for Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is “Spy-Fi.”

Advice for Control on running Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is well done, but essentially boils down to keep the game light, keep it moving, and take your cues from the players and their agents. Agents of S.W.I.N.G. do not come with a scenario as such. Instead it includes a detailed outline that can be used as scenario, all but ready to play.

Perhaps where its Adventure Series genre is best displayed in Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is in its chapter of SWINGers. Or rather, its chapter of some thirty or so S.W.I.N.G. agents, each of them drawn from the various television series that are the inspiration for the RPG. If you know your I.T.C. and other series, then there will be certain pleasure in recognising who Cobalt and Iron, John Chain, Agent Crimson Saul Metford, Andrew Bowie and Richard Foyle, Jackson Queen, and John Swan are, and which television series that they come from. That said, there is no explicitly given use for these characters, whether as sample player agents or NPCs. The given sample “Villainous Schemers,” which include a Chinese criminal organisation, an extremist Left wing revolutionary movement, and a American neo-Nazi movement, are of more immediate and useful use, providing something iniquitous for the player agents to investigate and interdict.

Physically, Agents of S.W.I.N.G. comes as a three-hundred-and-fifty-six page black and white digest sized book. The layout is done as if from a series of report files, illustrated with silhouettes of ladies in various action poses, sometimes armed, sometimes not, but either way, reminiscent of the opening film credits of the James Bond series. The only other artwork in the book is the illustrations of the sample characters. Unfortunately, whilst Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is readable, both layout of the book and its editing are at best wanting. Some of the book could have been better organised, and whilst the choice of fount, Courier New, is perfectly in keeping with the book’s genre, its size is too large, often leading to ragged paragraphs because the column width is too short. As to the editing, the book just needed another polish, preferably from another pair of eyes than those of the author’s.

There is one last issue with Agents of S.W.I.N.G. and that is Mike Myers. Much like a game of Pendragon threatens to tip into absurdity a la the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a game of Agents of S.W.I.N.G. can easily lurch into a parody of its genre, the Austin Powers trilogy of films. Given the title of the RPG, there is certain inevitability to this, but it is certainly within the purview of both the players and Control to rein any such tendencies to “schwing” that way in their Agents of S.W.I.N.G..

Being a “Spy-Fi” or Adventure Series RPG, Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is anything other than a serious treatment of the espionage genre. Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is not Ron Edwards’ SPIONE: STORY NOW in Cold War Berlin or even Crafty Games’ SpyCraft, but is rather a light, almost coy take upon the espionage genre, whilst also serving as a toolkit to do other light, almost fantastical genres. So for example, whilst Agents of S.W.I.N.G. will do The Avengers or even The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with a wink, a tip of the bowler hat, and even a cocked eyebrow, with a little effort upon the part of Control, it would also do Thunderbirds, U.F.O. , or even The Six Million Dollar Man. Overall, despite lacking something of the flair its genre calls for in terms of its production value Agents of S.W.I.N.G. is a pleasingly light version of the FATE engine that demands just enough from the players to do its genre justice.

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Medical Malpractice

Invasive Procedures is a scenario written for use with Fear Itself, Pelgrane Press’ RPG that pitches ordinary folk into a disturbing contemporary world of madness and violence. Like the majority of the titles published by Pelgrane Press, it uses the Gumshoe System, and so is compatible with its other two horror RPGs, Trail of Cthulhu and Esoterrorists. More particularly, Invasive Procedures includes notes that the GM can use to adapt the scenario so that it can be run specifically for Trail of Cthulhu. What helps with this is the fact that the scenario can easily be set during any period within the last one hundred years or so such that it could be run in the contemporary here and now of Delta Green, the 1890s of Cthulhu by Gaslight, the 1920s for classic Call of Cthulhu, the 1930s for Trail of Cthulhu, or indeed, any when in between. The scenario itself makes use of a foe first described in the publisher’s excellent supplement, The Book of Unremitting Horror, the details of which are included in Invasive Procedures. In the version that Pelgrane Press was kind enough to provide for the purpose of this review, the foe is described in a nine-page booklet that comes in an envelope glued inside the back cover. Later printings of scenario will have the description and motivation of this foe written in as part of the book.

Invasive Procedures works best as either a one-shot or as the opening chapter of a campaign. Its set-up is very specific, making it difficult to run as part of an on-going campaign. A quintet of pre-generated characters/investigators is included, and these can either be used as is, or as the models for characters of the players’ own creation. Using the provided characters as models is necessary, not because the characters are in any way special, but because of both how and where they are.

As the scenario opens, the player characters find themselves in hospital. They are each patients who have been moved from a county hospital to older facility where they are to recover from recent surgery. Our Lady’s Hospital was meant to have been closed down years ago, but despite its crumbling façade and obsolete infrastructure, it has been kept open in order to handle patients who need rest and observation rather than actual treatment. Thus freeing up much needed beds at the more modern hospital nearby.

The medical condition of the investigators has a marked effect upon the scenario and just what they can get up to. For much of the scenario, they will be restricted to their beds by the nurses, as they are expected to rest after all. This does not mean that the investigators cannot conduct any actual investigation, but rather that they will have to have to work hard to get around the nurses. When they do though, their efforts will be hampered by the state of their health. In game terms, an investigator literally must expend points from his Health Ability in order to conduct certain actions, points that can only be restored through bed rest. In effect in Invasive Procedures, each investigator’s Health Ability has a reduced and more temporary feel to it, and this, combined with the reduced number of points assigned to all of the investigators’ Abilities, places an emphasis on the resource aspect of playing a Gumshoe game.

This might be frustrating for some players, as might the fact that escaping Our Lady’s Hospital is intentionally difficult. Not just due to their investigators’ weakened health, but also later in the scenario as the forces they face isolate the facility. Nevertheless, this is intentional; Invasive Procedures is all about isolation and claustrophobia, as much as it is about medical malpractice and the classic duality of the medical practitioner. Despite the constraints placed on the investigators by their status and their situation, they do have room to manoeuvre and explore their environment, the nature of which changes between night and day. These elements are actually tools to help the GM run what is not necessarily an easy scenario to run if he is to both maintain its atmosphere and handle the flow of clues.

The difficulty that a GM might have in running Invasive Procedures is not helped by the pre-generated investigators, which feel underwritten; the lack of a timeline that could help him handle its flow of effects; and a simple map that could help him visualise Our Lady’s Hospital quickly and easily – both for himself and for his players. That aside, the scenario is nicely produced, and the writing excellent. Pasqual Quidalt’s illustrations are all suitably dark and makes for a moody change over the art usually seen in Pelgrane Press’ titles.

Lastly, there is the matter of Invasive Procedures and Trail of Cthulhu. The scenario is clearly written for Fear Itself, which shows in its choice of true foe and its feel as more a traditional horror scenario than a Lovecraftian investigative horror one. Mechanically, there is little that a Keeper needs to do in order to adapt Invasive Procedures from Fear Itself to Trail of Cthulhu. Thematically, he needs to work elements of the Mythos threat into the body of the scenario, the suggested threats being the Mi-go or Elder Things, the former being more appropriate and easier to work in than the latter. This, like the running of the actual scenario, is best done by an experienced GM or Keeper.

As a one-shot horror adventure, Invasive Procedures is a close, claustrophobic, and challenging affair. The challenge rises exponentially for the GM or Keeper if he wants to run this scenario as part of a campaign, though it would make for an atmospheric and scary start for a campaign.

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The 1980s RPG Undead?

With the “Old School Renaissance” barely five years old, the question is, has it grown too old for its inspiration? In those five years, the movement has been exploring fantasy roleplaying as it was played back in the early days of the hobby, but with the hindsight of over thirty years’ worth of gaming experience. In 2011 though, Goblinoid Games, the publisher of one of the major “Edition 0” RPGs, Labyrinth Lord, not only obtained the rights to a game published during the 1980s, but also its associated mechanics. The 1980s publisher in question is Pacesetter, the game is Timemaster, and the Action Table system. Now Goblinoid Games could have just simply republished Timemaster, and whilst it still intends to do so, the publisher has waited to do so in favour of applying the Action Table system to a more modern subgenre derived from the horror movie. The result is Rotworld: A Game of Survival Horror Against Undead Flesh Eaters.

Inspired by Michael Jackson’s Thriller as much by the films of George A. Romero, Rotworld is a roleplaying game of the apocalypse and its aftermath, in which the dead rise as “rotters” and seek to spread their infection with a single bite. Light in terms of advice for the referee or Corpse Master, the game is essentially a tool kit with which to run a zombie apocalypse campaign. To that end, it includes all of the basics needed for both an RPG and for its subgenre – characters and combat, and then the apocalypse, supernatural abilities for both humans and zombies, locations, and of course zombies.

At the heart of Rotworld, and of course, its raison d'être, is its Action Table. With a roll against this table, a player or the Corpse Master can reasonably quick discover the result and effects of a roll. The system uses ten-sided dice, with percentile rolls for all actions. In most instances, a character can get away with simply rolling under the value of his attribute or skill, but if he needs to know how well he did, he simply deducts the number rolled from his skill to get a Margin of Success. In combat, this Margin of Success becomes his Attack Margin, the result cross referenced against the difficulty or Defence Column. This gets a result ranging from a simple scratch to a crushing or crippling blow that knocks the defendant down.

For example, the first of our sample characters, Ulises, comes to the rescue of our quivering second, Otterlie. She is being menaced by Zak the Zombie and has already failed her Fear check. Ulises attempts to sneak up on Zak, but knocks something over and alerts the menacing member of the corpse cortège. Our hero is weaponless, so must rely upon his superior fists to get the damsel out of distress. Fortunately, he has the initiative. He uses his Boxing skill of 81 which is compared with Zak’s Unskilled Melee Skill of 33. This gives the column upon which Ulises’ player will roll. In this case, column 3, a relatively easy column, the columns starting at 1 and rising in difficulty to 10. Ulises’ player rolls 21 and subtracts this from his Boxing skill of 81 to get his Margin of Success to get a result of 60. Cross referencing on the Action Table, this gives “C” as a result; which for unarmed damage, is a crushing blow that delivers between six and sixty points of Stamina damage. In Ulises’ case, this is 42 points of damage. Although Ulises did not get a “CK” result, which would have indicated that he would have knocked the zombie down as well as delivered a stinging blow, he has inflicted damage equal to almost half of the zombie’s Stamina. So the Corpse Master rules that Zak the Zombie is staggered and cannot attack until the next round.

The mechanics, with their use of the Action Table, look more complex than they are in practice. The problem with both the mechanics and their use of the Action Table is twofold. First, there is an almost bewildering number of conditional rules that apply to the various situations and skills that can come up in play. Second, the Action Table is essentially focused on combat. It is meant to, and it does, work with the use of skills, but to actually interpret the results of any skill role the Corpse Master has to look elsewhere in the book. Which can only slow game play down…

That said, when it comes to combat, perhaps the aspect that players today will find the oddest is that mechanically, no weapon in the game does any damage. Rather, the damage is essentially derived entirely from the results of the skill roll. Thus the weaponry tables in Rotworld are all about range modifiers (which do affect skill), reload time, and rate of fire. One interesting mechanic using the Action Table involves a defendant’s action when being fired upon. When this occurs, the defending character has to roll a ten-sided die to determine the Defence Column that the attacker is rolling against, but can influence this by expending Luck to make it a higher Defence Column and thus make himself harder to hit. This is a pleasing way of handling a character’s attempt to dodge.

Character generation in Rotworld again looks more complex than it is, in part because it involves a degree of arithmetic. Eight attributes, each ranging in value between twenty-six and eighty, are rolled for randomly, with a number of factors being derived from these attributes. These factors include secondary factors such as Penetration Bonus and Wounds, and also the unskilled values for various skills. The most jarring aspect of character creation is that the number of skills a character starts the game with is randomly determined, so that one character might start the game with three skills or as many as six. Like attributes, skills expressed as percentiles, with the unskilled value for any skill being equal to the average of two or three attributes.

The majority of the skills listed would cover any time within the last fifty years, but with the inclusion of the Beam Weapons skill could enable a Rotworld campaign to be set in the future, whilst the inclusion of the Horseman’s Lance, Mounted Melee, and Bow skills mean that it could easily be set in the past. From the skill list there is the one odd omission – that of a Drive skill. Every character has base chance when driving – equal to the average of his Agility and Perception attributes, yet in order to improve upon that, a character has to purchase the Stunt Driving skill.

Our sample character is a Hispanic-American ex-army mechanic who worked in Hollywood as an actor and stuntman. He used to run a boxing gym, but when that went out of business, he became a truck driver. He is used to standing up for himself, but even though he learned how to use guns in the army and then point them menacingly on camera, he does not like them.

Ulises Romero
Strength 70 Dexterity 68 Agility 58 Personality 58
Willpower 52 Perception 61 Luck 58 Stamina 60
Unskilled Melee: 64
Penetration Bonus: +15
Wounds: 14

Skills:
Boxing 81, Equestrian 78, Mechanics 70, Language (Spanish) 72, Stunt Driving 75

As an option, characters can also possess Paranormal Talents such as the predictable “Precognition,” “Distance Viewing,” and “Telepathic Sending.” These are joined by the Rotworld particular “Corpse Visage,” “Empathy with Undead,” and “Sense Undead.” Unlike skills whose number is randomly determined, the number of Paranormal Talents that a character can have is determined by his Perception and Willpower, up to a maximum of three. It costs Willpower to use Paranormal Talents, and although a character’s Willpower will refresh, the relatively high cost will preclude their being over used.

Our sample character with Paranormal Talents is Otterlie Rios, a doctoral student, who worked in a funeral home to pay her way through college. Her abilities manifested for the first time when the dead rose, enabling her to walk amongst them and survive. She is still shaken by the experience and is reluctant to use either Talent again.

Otterlie Rios
Strength 48 Dexterity 42 Agility 48 Personality 66
Willpower 72 Perception 80 Luck 66 Stamina 60
Unskilled Melee: 45
Penetration Bonus: None
Wounds: 14

Skills:
Investigation 88, Social Sciences: Anthropology 91, Social Sciences: Psychology 91

Paranormal Talents:
Corpse Visage 73, Sense Undead 71

For the Corpse Master, Rotworld provides a discussion of the cause of the dead rising – from chemicals or toxic waste to radiation or the supernatural – and the effects that these have on a campaign. Similarly, it gives a range of ideas and options for how the zombies work in a Corpse Master’s campaign. Beyond the base corpse chassis, the Corpse Master is free to choose how lifelike or not his members of the corpse cavalcade are, their attacks, their weakness, what they hunger for, and how intelligent they are. If the campaign allows player characters to possess Paranormal Talents, then zombies can also have their equivalent, known as Zombie Talents. Some, such as “Living Visage” and “Sense Living,” correspond to Paranormal Talents, whilst “Absorb Vitality” enables a zombie to repair itself by draining life from the living.

Actual campaign advice examines the practicalities of having civilisation collapse around you, before describing a trio of places of refuge. These consist of a corner grocery, a county airport, and a shopping mall, each essentially a subgenre staple. Each one is fitted into a page and includes a nicely done map. Of course, the survival horror subgenre being what it is, it is relatively easy for the Corpse Master to find other maps or simple enough to set his campaign just in his group’s neighbourhood.

Similarly, the survival horror genre being what it is, Rotworld does not really suffer for its lack of advice on running the game. Certainly, the subgenre should be familiar to almost anyone who purchases Rotworld. If there is an issue with the game, it is that it really could do with an index given both the relative complexity of the rules and the likelihood that the Corpse Master will flipping back and forth through the book. The book also needs another edit and it could do with a re-organisation, as certain elements appear before they need to or away from the sections that they should be in.

Physically, Rotworld is decently written and is infrequently illustrated with some quite heavy art. Another physical problem with the game besides the lack of index is the frequent need to refer to the Action Table as part of playing Rotworld. Such that it really needs to be on the back cover, not just for ease of use, but also because it could have been in colour (which would also be for ease of use). Much of the flipping back and forth will involve looking up the rules that relate to the particular situation, so that the Corpse Master needs to refer to pages twenty-eight through thirty-six as well as the Action Table, and that mostly for combat and actions not directly related to a character’s attributes.

Rotworld feels very much like the archetypal RPG of its period. It obviously moves away from the class and level structure that dominated the decade before and continues to dominate the “Old School Renaissance;” it clearly pushes towards the use and application of a universal mechanic in the form of the Action Table; and its starting point is not necessarily the heroic protagonist, but the protagonist who has the potential to be heroic. Yet it is also archetypal in that its use and application of the universal mechanic is hampered by numerable situational rules and the need to reference individual rules for far too many things. As with so many RPGs of the period, in Rotworld the result is far from perfect and far from perfectly easy to run for the reasons already given, and ultimately, all it would have taken to address this problem is the actual page opposite the Action Table being devoted to notes and references that covered situations outside of combat and the character sheet being moved on a page or so.

Yet for all of its failings, Goblinoid Games should be praised for possessing the drive and desire to look beyond the boundaries of the “Edition 0” movement. Similarly, the publisher deserves praise for doing something more with the Action Table system than just releasing the RPGs that used it back in the 1980s, and whilst the truth is that the game and its treatment of its subgenre is hardly radical by anyone’s standards, its pages do contain a solid survival horror toolkit. Once you get past its all too close an emulation of the 1980s RPG, Rotworld: A Game of Survival Horror Against Undead Flesh Eaters is quite possibly the start of something new and interesting – the next period of gaming history for revival. Post-"Old School Old School Renaissance," anyone?

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