Your Zombie Primer

Zombies: A Hunter's Guide is an entry in Osprey Publishing's Osprey Adventures line of sourcebooks. To date the line includes Ken Hite's treatment of the Nazis' esoteric interests in The Nazi Occult, the truth behind the Templars in Graeme Davis' Knights Templar: A Secret History, and an examination of what the 'Greys' really want in We Will Destroy Your Planet: An Alien’s Guide to Conquering the Earth by David A McIntee. What each title in the line does is blend the fact and the fiction of their respective subject matters, but without providing either game mechanics or game stats - these the Game Master has to provide himself. Essentially, what each entry in the line is, is a systemless sourcebook, a background to which the Game Master adds the rules of his choice. Although an entry in the Osprey Adventures line, Zombies: A Hunter's Guide pre-dates the line, beginning life as a parody of the traditional history books that the publisher is better known for. Originally published in 2010, in 2013 it was reprinted as a deluxe edition and that is the version that is being reviewed here.

Take any number of treatments of the zombie, from The Walking Dead and The New Deadwardians to All Flesh Must Be Eaten and Zombicide, and the common theme between them is that the dead have arisen and civilisation as we know it is doomed... Not so in Zombies: A Hunter's Guide. It posits a world in which zombie uprisings are a known threat, in which Zombie Wars have been fought by military units, in which the zombie hunter is a recognised profession, and in which the zombi phenomenon is common enough to be the subject of academic study. Once myth and conjecture, the number of zombie outbreaks have increased year by year since the end of World War 2, despite the attempts of numerous governments to cover them up. Zombies: A Hunter's Guide is also an actual book that could be purchased in this alternate Earth, so barring the suggested 'Further Reading, Watching, and Gaming', the contents of this book can be accessed by both the GM and his players - and even referred to during play!

Over the course of several chapters, Zombies: A Hunter's Guide presents everything that the prospective zombie hunter will need to know in order to combat the corpse challenge. Over the course of several chapters, the fictional author of Zombies: A Hunter's Guide examines the origins of the zombies, the types of zombies that might be encountered, their strengths and weaknesses, and not only how to recognise them, but also eliminate them. These include necromantic zombies, voodoo zombies, Nazi zombies, revenants, atomic zombies, viral zombies, zombie masters, and viral hounds and zombified animals. Other chapters cover the matter of zombie hunters themselves, as well as zombie hunter weapons and equipment, and zombie hunter tactics.

In describing these various members of the corpse cortège and the means to combat them, the author draws deeply on the pop culture of zombies and the history of that pop culture. The combined effect of this is to make the contents of Zombies: A Hunter's Guide very familiar, for example, the island of Haiti is given as the home of the Voodoo zombie, Wade Davis exposed the secrets of the Voodoo zombie in his The Serpent & The Rainbow, and Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier used Voodoo and zombies to keep himself in power as president of Haiti. So far, so good, but what Zombies: A Hunter's Guide does is add elements of a secret history. For example, the USA sent the US Marines in not to keep the peace in 1915 after the assassination of the president, but to engage in a war against the threat represented by zombies. Of course, Haitian refugees and immigrants have since brought Voodoo and Voodoo zombies to America...

It does this over and over with each type of zombie. For example, both the Miskatonic University and the Bodleian Library are known centres for 'Necromantic and Animate Necrology Studies', and the best-known revenant, a particular type of zombie that is driven to perform a particular task, is William Bonnet, better known as 'Billy the Kid'. Which is why his grave is caged off! For the Game Master and his players there are organisations to join, such as 'Bureau 9' (founded by Allan Pinkerton during the American Civil War), the Vatican's Corpus Mortuambulanticum, and the mercenary unit,Command: The Blue Unit. Also included are discussions of the contemporary weapons and tactics needed to fight zombies in general.

Physically, Zombies: A Hunter's Guide is a slim hardback. It is well written and as you would expect with an Osprey Publishing book, it is well presented with a good mix of full colour and black and white artwork. If there is an issue with the book it is the options given in 'Further Reading, Watching, and Gaming' for gaming are all war games and board games. There is nothing wrong in the choices given and none of them are surprising given that war gamers purchase Osprey Publishing titles, but no role playing games are suggested, which is a major omission. Certainly, All Flesh Must Be Eaten deserved a place on the list of suggestions.

At its gaming core, the concept behind Zombies: A Hunter's Guide is a world in which zombies are a known threat and outbreaks are dealt with by sanctioned organisations as well as the foolish amateur. This is an incredibly easy set-up to do for the RPG of your choice -- Savage Worlds from Pinnacle Entertainment Group and Evil Hat Productions' recent FATE Core would work very well with the setting material presented in Zombies: A Hunter's Guide. Lightly drawn -- after all, who needs depth when dealing with the cadaver cavalcade? -- Zombies: A Hunter's Guide gives a juicy setting that is easy to add the rules to.

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The Walking Dead Board Game

Given the popularity of The Walking Dead comic book and television series, and of combining zombies with board games, it is no surprise that there are not one, but three games based on The Walking Dead. Z-Man Games publishes The Walking Dead: The Board Game, based on the comic book series, while Cryptozoic Entertainment publishes The Walking Dead Card Game and The Walking Dead Board Game, both based on the television series. It is the latter board game that is being reviewed here.

Designed for between one and four players or Survivors, aged thirteen and up, it is a light, fraught game in which the Survivors must visit four important Locations and get back to Camp, all the while fending off Walkers – as the zombies are called – and scrounging for guns and tools that will aid in their survival. Each Survivor will need to be resourceful, carefully husbanding his guns, his baseball bats, and his Allies if he is to achieve his aims. Loose too many Allies and a survivor may be the next to fall to the bony strength and the flesh-rending teeth of the Walkers. When that happens, the Survivor is not only dead, but rises as a Walker himself and will hunt down the remaining Survivors!

Initially, The Walking Dead: The Board Game is won by the first Survivor to visit all four Locations and return to Camp. When two Survivors get turned into Walkers, the players split into two teams – Team Survivor and Team Zombie (why Team Zombie, ‘zombie’ not being a term known in the setting of The Walking Dead?), and the game becomes a co-operative. If Team Zombie manages to kill the remaining Survivor, then it wins, but if a single Survivor manages to get back to Camp having visited all four Locations, then Team Survivor wins – even if there is just one Survivor remaining!

The game consists of the Game Board, six Character Cards and six Survivor Game Pieces with Bases, two Walker Game Pieces, sixteen Ally Tokens, forty Scrounge Cards and forty Encounter Cards, thirty Walker Cards, sixteen Location Cards, four Badges, and a single six-sided Die. Everything is done in full colour using stills from the television series. The Game Board is done in cloth and is more of a ‘play mat’ than a board, and is marked with a track around the edge, connecting the four Locations – a Police Station, the Center for Disease Control, an Abandoned Car Lot, and a Department Store. Four tracks lead from the Camp to each side of the board. Sewers connect one adjacent sides of the board, though only Walkers can use them. The Scrounge Cards represent items and events that will help a Survivor; the Encounter Cards represent Walkers and Events that will beset Survivors; and the Walker Cards are used by players whose Survivors are killed and rise up again as Walkers. The Location Cards are awarded to Survivors who visit each place and the Badges indicate which side a player is on – Team Survivor or Team Zombie.

At game’s start, each player selects a character card, either Rick, Lori, Shane, Glenn, Andrea, or Dale, and a corresponding playing piece. Each Survivor has a single ability that he can use once per game. For example, Rick can re-roll an attack with a +2 bonus and Shane can steal Scrounge Cards from other players, both once per game. Each Survivor also receives five Scrounge Cards and two Ally tokens. The Scrounge Deck is filled with ten cards per Survivor. If this runs out, the only source of Scrounge Cards is the discard pile and whatever each Survivor has in his hand.

On his turn, a Survivor rolls the die and moves that number of spaces, in any direction, and resolves certain actions on the space he landed, typically by drawing an Encounter Card. Most spaces are blank and will result in a single Encounter Card being drawn. Others give the Survivor a bonus in the subsequent Encounter, give him another turn, a Scrounge Card, or No Encounter. Most Encounter Cards force a Survivor to fight a Walker, but others do things like force a Survivor to discard Scrounge Cards due to personality conflicts.

Whenever an Encounter Card indicates that the Survivor has been attacked by Walkers a fight ensues. This has the Survivor roll the die and expend Scrounge Cards, mostly weapons to add a bonus to this, to beat the Strength of the Encounter Card. Walker Strength on the Encounter Cards varies between five and ten, with Scrounge Cards giving a bonus of between one and six. A roll of a six always wins, but if a Survivor loses, an Ally is lost, or if he has no Allies, then he is bitten and will rise as a Walker on his next turn. Winning an Encounter allows a Survivor to take a Scrounge Card, if there are any left.

As soon as a Survivor reaches a Location, he stops and draws not one, but two Encounter Cards, which he has to deal with in order. If the Survivor deals with both, he receives the appropriate Location Card. This gives him a permanent bonus. The Police Station gives an attack bonus, the Abandoned Car Lot a movement bonus, the Department Store an extra Ally if you visit it first, and the Center for Disease Control more Scrounge Cards, either two new ones, or one from the bottom of the discard pile – the latter is useful if you know what that card is and useful later in the game when the Scrounge Cards have been all taken.

Should a Survivor die and rise as a Walker he receives all new Walker Cards. His task is to chase down the remaining Survivors and kill them if he is to win. The Walker Cards allow a Walker player to increase his movement, cancel an Encounter card drawn by a Survivor and play a Walker Card that the Survivor must fight, cause a Frenzy and increase the Strength of a Walker on an Encounter Card, and worse, cause an Ally to be Bitten! and be discarded. If the Survivor manages to beat a Walker Card played on him, then not only does he beat the Walker Card, but also the Walker player as well! Unfortunately, you cannot keep a good Walker down and he will rise again in the nearby sewers.

Additional rules allow for solo player, but the main alternative is a four-player Team Game. This has the game start with the players divided into two – Team Zombie versus Team Survivor, just as if two Survivors had died in the standard game. The Survivors only need to get to the four Locations between them and only one of them needs to make it back to Camp to win.

Best played with four players, The Walking Dead Board Game is not a great game, but it is better than you think. It is hard for the Survivors to win and everything they do is challenging as they must carefully husband their Scrounge Cards before they all run out. It is not a challenge to learn and play and it involves more luck than skill, making the game suitable for play by fans of the television series who are not seasoned gamers. The latter are unlikely to really enjoy the game because of the lack of challenge for them and the degree of luck. That said it captures the desperation of the television series, more so if the players know the series and play to the characters on their card.

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Fighting Fantasy Undead

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, especially if the things that you love can be brought back. When it comes to being a British gamer of a certain age, there is nothing to be more nostalgic about than the Fighting Fantasy series. Launched in 1982 with the release by Puffin Books of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, co-authored by the founders of Games Workshop, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, this series of “choose your own adventure” books holds a special place in the hearts of British gamers — The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in particular. It would run to some fifty-nine titles in the initial line-up, and in the process, sell millions of copies and popularise the concept of roleplaying, spearheading its presence in bookshops everywhere.

Since 2002, the Fighting Fantasy series has been published by Wizard Books under whose aegis two anniversaries have been celebrated. The first was series’ twenty-fifth anniversary, for which a special hardcover edition of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published; the second was the thirtieth anniversary, in 2012, for which Blood of the Zombies was released. This is the first Fighting Fantasy title by Ian Livingstone since 2005’s Eye of the Dragon. It brings the series up to date, not just in terms of mechanics, but also terms of subject matter. After all, no threat is as contemporary and in vogue as zombies were in 2012 – and still are in 2013.

In Blood of the Zombies, the hero – as controlled by the reader – can be best described as “field researcher” with an interest in myths and legends, or at least a student of beasts mythological. As this hero, travelling across Europe in search of one beast after another, you find yourself taken captive in Transylvania and imprisoned in Goraya Castle. Its owner, Gingrich Yurr, is an insane megalomaniac who has plans for both you and the others he holds prisoner – that is, to turn you and everyone held captive into a zombie and then unleash the undead horde on the world. Being the resourceful type you have managed to escape, so all that stands between you and the end of the world are four hundred paragraphs of exploring, gathering the weapons and resources necessary to defeat Gingrich Yurr, and holding off one wave of the corpse cortege after another…

To handle the action, Blood of the Zombies presents a stripped set of rules. In the original Fighting Fantasy titles each hero had three statistics – Skill, Stamina, and Luck. The first of these represented a hero’s fighting ability, the second his health, and the last, his good fortune or otherwise as he proceeded through each adventure. In Blood of the Zombies, the hero has a single statistic – Stamina, essentially the number of attacks the hero can withstand before being overcome and killed. Combat is kept simple with the hero always being able to attack first – zombies after all, are notoriously slow; the hero always hitting and inflicting damage, each hit putting down a zombie, so the better the weapon the more zombies it destroys; and when it is the zombies’ turn to attack, the hero loses a point of Stamina for each zombie he faces – so it is a good idea to find the biggest weapon possible as quickly as possible! The reader will also need to note exactly how many zombies he kills in his escape attempt, otherwise the undead are still a threat to both himself and the world.

Creating a character is simply a matter of rolling two six-sided dice – which is all that a player will need along with a pencil – or flicking through the page and randomly stopping on a page, each of which has dice symbols marked between one and six and adding the result to twelve. This is the hero’s beginning Stamina. Besides the dice and pencil, a player will also need scrap paper, although the book does come with a character sheet.

As much as the adventure has a contemporary setting, in true “Grand Guignol” style, Blood of the Zombies takes place in a castle. Well of course, it is set in Transylvania! As the hero, the reader will find himself working his up from the depths – or the dungeons – of the castle to its living areas to face his gaoler, Gingrich Yurr himself! Along the way, he will encounter members of Yurr’s staff, strangeness and oddities, death-traps, and of course, members of the cadaver cavalcade.

Playing Blood of the Zombies is tough! It is not just a matter of collecting the gear necessary to defeat the zombie threat, but one of collecting the right equipment – though of course, the reader never knows ahead of time what exactly he will need. Beyond the decisions as to what to pick up or leave behind, which door to open and which to ignore, and so on, Blood of the Zombies is all about making the right dice rolls. For combat these are primarily high rolls – the higher the roll, the more zombies are wiped out – but the adventure’s design mixes the rolls up so that the reader never knows the outcome ahead of time. The likelihood is that if the reader manages to survive the rigours of escaping from Goraya Castle and its undead hordes, then it will be by the skin of his teeth.

The downside is that if the reader fails on his first time, then having to play through again is more time consuming than challenging. It does not help that there are moments in the adventure where its linear nature becomes apparent – the preponderance of long corridors makes this unavoidable. Thankfully once the reader towards the end, the various scenes and locations seem to come crashing down onto the reader, one after the other, leading to cinematic ending. The character of the hero is something of an 'everyman', an ordinary fellow, who is driven to undertake extraordinary feats in saving the world and more. He is not necessarily a capable fighter as the human opponents he may well face during the course of Blood of the Zombies are more capable than he is. This should be seen as a reflection of his weakened state as much as it is the fact that he is an ordinary man and not the trained fighter that would instead be treading the caves and passageways of Warlock of Firetop Mountain. He can of course, blast zombies away with the best of them… that is, unless his dice rolls let him down.

Throughout, the design and writing in Blood of the Zombiesis decent. It is not overly descriptive, but the tension is kept high at the right points, and the few personalities that the hero meets are more than mere bodies waiting for death at the hands of said hero. In addition there are numerous in-jokes scattered throughout the halls of Goraya Castle, though some of them might be a little obscure to younger readers.

Blood of the Zombies is an enjoyably nostalgic trip back both an older style of game and and older style of adventure. It updates the format to provide a contemporary cinematic blast of an adventure and a few tense hours alone...

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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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Victorians & Vampires (& Zombies)

In 1905 the dead rose and fell upon the living.

Whole countries collapsed under the onslaught of the cadaver cavalcade, but society and civilisation held. In the United Kingdom the declaration and implementation of martial law meant that society could hold on and hold out long enough to learn about the new world around them. It would take decades, but slowly the nation’s cities were reclaimed from the dead and refortified to prevent attacks from without, much of the countryside being left to roving bands of animates and the blight that poisons the very ground. Having retaken the cities, the Domestic Security Force – known as the Deathwatch – mans the walls, protecting the cities from threats without whilst having the mandate to ruthlessly put down any outbreaks of the Plague and the rise of the dead within. In the tightly packed slums, the living conditions mean that disease is rife and Outbreaks of the Plague and the dead are far from uncommon.

In the two hundred years since the first Outbreak, the well-known Victorian reverence for the dead has been more than reappraised. The cremation of the recently deceased, lest they rise again, with most bodies going to the great public crematoria – it is a prosecution offense not to send a body there. Only the very rich can afford to have the deceased lie in mourning, and even then, a member of the black clad Mourners’ Guild must watch over the deceased, ready to behead the corpse if he should rise. Other undead threats besides the animates – vampires and ghouls as well as the Frankenstein creations of the alchemy and embryonic sciences – lurk deep in the sewers, tunnels, and warrens below the cities. When the Deathwatch cannot deal with these, Undertakers will delve into the depths, seeking the bounty on the head of each at the branches of the Office of Urban Defence.

Whilst Great Britain remains a parliamentary monarchy, a new aristocracy has arisen as the old has ossified. The industrialists have become richer as the work place reforms of the nineteenth century have been repealed. Of course, this does not dissuade the industrialist nouveau riche from wanting to marry into the aristocracy for the name and the status, and of course, that money gives accesses to the anti-aging treatments that prolong life for up to two hundred years. Another path to unaging is vampirism, although the Office of Urban Defence places a bounty on head of all vampires – or rather their dust – as they are dangerous predators who spread their condition by disease and mind control. Vampires most commonly infect prostitutes, but there are some who survive the infection and live out an existence as that most romanticised of tragic figures in this new age, the Dhampiri. Eschewing their progenitor’s sanguinary desires, the Dhampiri express a hatred of all vampires and often turn to hunting them for their bounty.

The atrocious living and working conditions of the working class to be found in Britain’s cities are not only the breeding grounds of disease and new outbreaks of the Plague, but they are unsurprisingly the breeding grounds for dissent. Food riots are common and anarchist bombing campaigns not unknown, although the men of the City of London Police and Metropolitan Police do their best to rout the terrorists out. They are aided in this task by the clairvoyants, mediums, and telepaths of CID’s Psi Branch. The police also have to deal with the Resurrection Men who trade in bodies for experimentation and as food for the Meat Market; the swelling desire to kill in the growing number of murderers; and having to monitor the otherwise legal practice of prostitution, whose practitioners must be checked lest they spread disease and even vampirism.

The skies over the cities remind the inhabitants of both life and death. They crackle with the galvanic energy of the Tesla Towers that power many of the devices that people use daily, including the Van Haller Lightning Gun favoured by the Deathwwatch, yet are laden with the outpourings of the factories and the public crematoria, forcing everyone to wear protection from the ash coated London Peculiars – even the horses! The working classes often can only afford the cloth “dust masks” to wear over their mouths, whilst the middle and upper classes can afford gas masks of brass, glass, and rubber, as well as clothing in similar material, a style known as “Gas Mask Chic.”

This is the setting for Unhallowed Metropolis, a neo-Victorian set RPG that combines horror, manners, and zombie and vampire hunting set in an alternate future. First published by New Dark Age through by Eos Press in 2007, the Unhallowed Metropolis, Revised returns in 2012, this time published by Atomic Overmind Press, best known for Ken Hite’s superb The Day After Ragnorak. This can only be good news because the few supplements released by New Dark Age for Unhallowed Metropolis were either unavailable beyond the borders of the USA, or inordinately expensive to obtain. As the title suggests, Unhallowed Metropolis, Revised, the book has been redone, both character creation and combat being streamlined; the setting information being expanded to cover the USA, most of Europe, and beyond; new character Callings or types (the Deathwatch Soldier and the Detective) being added; and an array of new material incorporated from some of the supplements previously released. The result is an improved rulebook and background, but as will be explored, not all of game’s original issues have been addressed.

In terms of characters, Unhallowed Metropolis, Revised offers eight Callings – two more than the original edition – each of which not only determines a character’s social class, but also his Class in game terms. The eight are Aristocrat, Criminal, Deathwatch Soldier, Detective, Dhampir Vampire Hunter, Doctor, Mourner, and Undertaker. In addition, rules are given that enable a player to create a custom character not using one of these Callings. Although a Calling provides a character with a set number of features and skills, each also gives plenty of options that allow a player to customise his character. For example, the Aristocrat Calling grants the Blue Blood and Deference Features, but allows the player choose from another thirteen, one for each level in his Etiquette Skill – the skill varies according to the Calling. The Features for the Aristocrat Calling range from Big Game Hunter and Casanova to Military Family and Vogue via Duellist and Gossip. Each Feature usually adds a bonus to skill roles or allows failed skill rolls to be rerolled, but each also adds flavour and background to the character too.

Once a Calling is selected, each player has twenty-five points to spend on six attributes – Vitality, Coordination, Wit, Intellect, Will, and Charm; and another twenty-five to spend on skills. Both are rated between one and five, and with the points available, most characters will have average attributes of 3 or so, with perhaps one attribute a little higher, whilst their skills will again average at 3 with one or two skills much higher. Each player has a final five points with which to customise his character, and he can also choose from a wide selection of advantageous Qualities and disadvantageous Impediments. Before that, a player must select his character’s Corruption. This reflects that although the characters have the capacity to be great figures of the Neo-Victorian Age, they possess a greater susceptibility to the moral decay that threatens the very fabric of society. This is represented by the three Corruption paths that a character could take – Physical, Desire, and Drive. A character begins with just a point in one of these paths and an associated Affliction, but through play can develop further Afflictions as he meanders along the Corruption paths into moral decay, eventually to turn into a monster, both physically and mentally. The most obvious way of being drawn down these paths is by being exposed to greater horrors, but there is a more common means of being driven along the path to Corruption. First a character has “Second Chances” and can make a number of rerolls per session equal to his Corruption, and if he needs more rerolls, then he must increase Corruption, and second, once per session he can call upon the “Devil’s Luck” to automatically get out of a perilous scrape, again at the cost of increasing his Corruption. Since the likelihood of a character requiring “Second Chances” is quite high, it seems odd that the desperate need for luck is so tied to a character’s path to Corruption. That said, at its heart, the Corruption paths are a pleasing roleplaying reflection of the setting.

Our sample character is Mrs. Arthur Fanshawe, the widow of the late Arthur Fanshawe, Member of Parliament for Deal. He rose as a vampire after being infected following continued dalliances with prostitutes and had to be staked after he had killed several of his servants. Thankfully his son, John, was at boarding school at the time. Florence was the one who did the staking and had to endure the scandal even whilst she was in mourning. Come the end of mourning, the scandal did not go away and she entered the “Quiet Service” of the Guild and became a Mourner.

Mrs. Arthur Fanshawe

Calling – Mourner

Vitality 3 Coordination 3 Wit 3 Intellect 2 Will 3 Charm 3

Skills: Concentration 4, Etiquette 3, Language 2 (French), Melee Weapons 4, Psychology 1, Ride 1, Second Sight 1, Shadow 2, Thanatology 3, Theology 2

Prowess 6 Wealth 4

Corruption: Desire 1 – Addiction (Laudanum)

Features: Death Trance, Disconcerting, Disciplined Mind, Exculpus Mastery (Preferred Weapon: Exculpus), Familiarity: Animate, Latent Medium, Twin Blade Fighter (Two Weapon Fighting Stunt, Ambidextrous)

Combat Stunts: Fast Draw, Free Parry, Lucky Shot, Snap Reaction

Qualities: Dreamer (6), Faith (2)

Impediments: Allergy – Pollen (1), Fastidious (1), Good Tasting (4), Ward – Son, John (2)

Equipment: Exculpus (Pair), Armoured Leather Corset, Mourning Clothing, Respirator, £8

Mechanically, Unhallowed Metropolis employs a pair of ten-sided dice, these being rolled and added together along with either the appropriate attribute or skill to equal or beat a Difficulty Rating. A Moderate Difficulty Rating is 11, Complex is 14, Hard is 15, and Virtually Impossible. Although the average result on the dice will be 11, with a character only adding a pertinent attribute or skill to a roll, the average of which will probably be only 2 or 3, there is nevertheless a high chance of a character failing even a Moderate Difficulty Rating. Although some Calling Features and some Qualities allow rerolls with certain skills, it is not all and the likelihood is that a player is going to need to turn to his character’s “Second Chances” more often than not. As much as the Corruption mechanic is an integral part of the setting, this potential reliance upon it is all but an imposition.

This mechanical issue is only exacerbated when it comes to combat, which can be very deadly. That said, one pleasing aspect of the combat rules retained from the original edition are the combat stunts, which a character receives for each level he possesses in a combat skill. For example, “Snap Reaction” enables a character to react before an foe can take an action, whilst Fast Aim allows a character to forgo an action rather than a whole turn in order to gain an aiming bonus. (In the previous edition, every skill had a series of stunts associated with it, which while it added detail, slowed down both character generation and play). Nevertheless, the deadliness of the combat rules not only exacerbates the unforgiving rules system and its reliance upon the Corruption mechanics, it is at odds with the cinematic leanings of the combat stunts.

The problem would not be so bad were the base roll consist of the result of the two ten-sided dice and both the pertinent skill and the pertinent attribute (or twice the pertinent attribute if an attribute check), but it does not. Then it does under certain circumstances, such as attempting to strangle someone, which requires an opposed roll of the Vitality plus Unarmed Combat. To have such inconsistencies is odd and undermines the game’s rules.

The setting itself is explored in some detail, such as a discussion of “unmentionables” and “combat corsetry” under equipment, which covers the setting’s weaponry with flavour aplenty and gives the tools of the trade for the various Callings. Animate Restraints or Dust Kits for collecting the fine ash of staked vampires? Just what every Undertaker needs! Almost a quarter of the core rules is devoted to the threats faced by humanity in the Neo-Victorian Age. In turn, the anatomy of the animate dead – Zombies and Zombie Lords, Vampires and Dhampirs, and Ghouls, as well as the creations of alchemical and galvanic science – artificial life such as the Anathema and the Homunculi, the reanimated dead known as Mercurials, the assembled Prometheans, and the half-living Thropes that are capable of switching between human and bestial forms. The chapters explore the science and philosophy behind the creation of each as well as presenting the stats, and there is plenty here that the GM can draw from for inspiration and flavour for his scenarios. There is enough here that a player could draw from if his Doctor character wants to delve into the alchemical, galvanic, and life sciences of the very modern Neo-Victorian Age.

Many of these elements and threats are further discussed, exploring in particular how they can be used in play, in the chapter for the GM’s eyes only, as well as that ever present danger in the Neo-Victorian Age – scandal! Accompanying these notes and advice is a set of eight plot seeds. The rulebook is rounded out with appendices that provide a glossary, a bibliography, an index, and a detailed description of Deathwatch uniforms.

Physically, Unhallowed Metropolis, Revised come as an attractive and sturdy hardback. The book is illustrated with an array of artwork, some of it black inks, some greyscale pieces, and some it actually photographs of posed models. Much of the latter illustrations are devoted to the illustration of the setting’s “Gas Mask Chic,” and whilst they do fetishize said style, they do not always capture the grime and grubbiness of the setting. The other artwork does though. The book comes with a very nicely done map of London on the inside front and back cover, and the book is generally well written. If there is an issue with the book it is that it is not all that easy to use. The glossary is probably all too short, whilst the index, which although present, is too broad to be really of any use, whilst the need to refer to various tables, such as the wound tables in combat, is hampered by their not being reprinted at the end of the book (though they are referenced).

As much as the setting of Unhallowed Metropolis lends itself to any number of scenario and campaign ideas – Deathwatch duty beyond the walls of the fortified cities, animate hunting through the streets of London, and vampire hunting through London’s high society being the obvious ones – there is pair of dichotomies at the heart of the game and its set up. The first of these is intrinsic to the Victorian era, and is one of class. The issue is that bringing characters of different social classes together, as certainly it would be a possible scandal for a member of high society to be seen consorting with a member of the lower orders. Yet characters of all classes are needed if a party is to gain access to all classes of society. The second is the dichotomy between the combat orientated and the non-combat orientated characters. Both types are necessary, but one type will find itself relegated to the role of bystander when the game focuses on the speciality of the other. Both dichotomies are addressed in the section on Dynamics of Play, and whilst the advice is good, it does not totally negate either dichotomy.

When Unhallowed Metropolis was originally published, I reviewed it in 2008 for Steve Jackson Games’ Pyramid e-zine. The issues that I had at the time were the lack of Callings, the underpowered mechanics that imposed the Corruption mechanic, and the social/combat divide. Four years on and with the publication of Unhallowed Metropolis, Revised, not all of the issues have been addressed. Certainly the additional Callings of the Deathwatch Soldier and the Detective are welcome, as is the additional new material and the streamlining of the stunts. Yet the failure to address the fundamental flaws in the mechanics is at the very least disappointing.

Despite the shortfall in the revisions carried out with Unhallowed Metropolis, Revised, the return of the RPG and the promise of supplements are both more than welcome. The game itself is far from unplayable, and the setting itself is rich in horror, suspense, and intrigue, being atmospheric to the last. Ultimately, the atmosphere is what sells Unhallowed Metropolis, ash-laden, gin-soaked, and perpetually in mourning…

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Zombies? None Today.

Since 1999, when it comes to zombies and RPGs, All Flesh Must Be Eaten from Eden Studios has been the holder of the corpse crown. Yes, there have been contenders, such as the unimpressive Dead Reign from Palladium Games and Goblinoid Games’ interesting and charming Rotworld, but All Flesh Must Be Eaten remains the cadaver king. Much of that is due to the Origins Award winning RPG being supported with some excellent sourcebooks that explored variations upon the classic shambling undead and showed how they could easily be inserted into genres beyond the collapse of our society as the dead rise that we know and love from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and more recently from The Walking Dead television series. Over the years, the RPG has received supplements that covered Martial Arts (Enter the Zombie), Fantasy (Dungeons & Zombies), and even Wrestling (Zombie Smackdown), amongst others, but never Science Fiction. Well, that latter claim is not really true, because All Flesh Must Be Eaten got its very own “Sci-Fi Sourcebook” with the release of All Tomorrow’s Zombies back in 2007. So I have had this book waiting to be reviewed for no little time, and in the meantime, I have picked up a copy of the next sourcebook, Argh! Thar Be Zombies! which is all about zombies and pirates. In order to review that, it behoves me to review All Tomorrow’s Zombies before I get to either Argh! Thar Be Zombies! or the forthcoming World War II supplement, Band of Zombies.

Anyway, All Tomorrow’s Zombies, the supplement that shoves zombies into outer space and into the future, shows the Zombie Master how to do the genre of Science Fiction in the UniSystem, the mechanics used in all of Eden Studios’ RPGs. It has a lot to deal with, primarily how technology works and how it affects both the player characters or members of the Cast, and members of the carcass carnival. Primarily, these technologies are Bioware, Cyberware, and Nanotech, the purchase of the associated Qualities (or Advantages) enables a Cast member to select Enhancements such as Bio Filter, Dermal Armour, and Infravision. Some Enhancements are also available to Cast members who are Robots – similarly available to select for player characters, and also to zombies, which are not available as player characters. Another option for Cast members is Psionics, the rules in All Tomorrow’s Zombies being a streamlined version of those previously outlined in Pulp Zombies.

As well as augmenting themselves with advanced technology, with All Tomorrow’s Zombies, the Cast members get to play with it. The equipment list is not extensive, but it covers all of the genre’s staples, from Motion Sensors and Teleport Anchors to Energy Swords and Pulse Rifles. If the Cast members want spaceships, then they can buy and design them with the Spacecraft Quality, which in effect works like the Bioware, Cyberware, and Nanotech Qualities, but allows the Cast to design a spaceship that is their personal property, fitting it out with Qualities and Enhancements of its own, including an intelligent ship’s computer and a teleporter. Some the supplement’s settings, or Deadworlds, come with their pre-costed starship designs. To accompany the starship creation rules, the vehicle rules for All Flesh Must Be Eaten are expanded to cover space travel and starship combat, whilst other rules handle cyberspace and hacking as well as the hazards of the various different environments that the Cast members might encounter. Over all these rules should handle most situations, but they are not all that hard in terms of the science in “Science Fiction,” tending towards the fiction rather than the science.

Similarly, the discussion for the Zombie Master about how to game the genre of Science Fiction tends to take a broad overview rather than delve into exacting detail. This is primarily because the type of Science Fiction that the supplement draws from, mostly film and television Science Fiction, should be familiar to most of its readers. One interesting aspect of the genre is that for most part, zombies cannot be created through magic, the supplement instead offering some contemporary alternatives, such as Tetrodotoxin or “Zombie Powder,” Scopolamine, and variant-Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease. This is in addition to the new zombie Aspects that have a more modern bent like being Solar Powered or needing to feed on Radiation.

As with other genre books for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, this supplement comes with its own share of settings or “Deadworlds” as they are known, that makes use of genre support presented earlier in the supplement. There are seven in All Tomorrow’s Zombies, which take up just over half of the book. The first of these is “The Cybered Dead,” which essentially takes the entirety of the genre elements discussed in the previous pages and dumps them wholesale into a Cyberpunk style future. Naturally, national governments have weakened as the corporations have risen to power and in many cases, sovereignty. As the rights of the individual has dwindled, some have either sought protection as indentured employees of the corporations, or slipped into the shadows to survive as cybered up street samurai and Cyberweb riding cowboys, working for principles if they can, or the highest bid if they cannot. Where the zombies enter the picture is originally as the victims of a biochemical act of terrorism, but these were then co-opted by various corporations as cybered up undead security and shock troops. Since outlawed, these combat zombies still turn up and they are still created, so finding out is just one aim of those that run the shadows like the Cast. The problem with “The Cybered Dead” is its “kitchen sink” approach to the genre. What this means is that it is all too familiar and too obvious. The only really interesting aspect of this Deadworld is the addition the undead and that is just not quite enough to make the Deadworld stand out.

If “The Cybered Dead” is all too familiar, the second Deadworld, “The Cycle of Death” probably suffers from the opposite. It depicts a future in which near barbarism following a radical decline in oil supplies has been avoided by genetic engineering enhanced by nanotechnology. Originally developed by engineers from India, the spread and application of this new technology has also been accompanied by the spread and widespread acceptance of Indian culture and Hinduism as a faith. Where it has not completely broken down, society has settled down into a pattern of city states that due to nanotechnology are mostly self-sufficient. Most people have been modified for the better by this technology, and that includes the Cast, each of whom have the ability to modify themselves to a limited extent. The Cast, whether security for a city state or a nanotech engineer, will face bigger problems than the gangs that roam the wilderness in the form of two types of tough zombies derived from the prevailing technology. Beyond facing these new types of zombie – and they are interesting in themselves – “The Cycle of Death” does leave you Zombie Master wondering what quite else to do with this Deadworld because it is never really discussed.

“Cyber Marines and Death Machines” is an even more obvious Deadworld in terms of its inspiration. The “Cyber Marines” part of the title gives it away. This is a Deadworld of pure Survival Horror inspired primarily by the film Aliens, but also by Predator and Resident Evil. When contact is lost with the remote colony of MR-372, a recon unit of colonial marines, along with the usual corporate advisors, is sent in to investigate. As the world reveals its secrets, the team is forced to confront their worst fears, desperate isolation, a hostile environment, and monsters that are every bit as yucky as those from the Alien series. Plus zombies, of course. There is room in this Deadworld for expansion beyond a simple one-shot, both backwards and forwards. The authors suggest that it could be run as a sequel to the “They Came from Beyond” Deadworld to be found in the All Flesh Must Be Eaten corebook, and then use the supplement, One of the Living, for advice and resources on handling the Cast’s survival in the long term. If “The Cybered Dead” is all too familiar, so is “Cyber Marines and Death Machines.” Yet “Cyber Marines and Death Machines” is a more effective piece because its treatment of its genre is more focused and not as broad.

For its inspiration, the Deadworld “Virtual Armageddon” draws from the Matrix series of films as well as the MMORPGs of today. It depicts a future in which the solution to a society riven by disease is upload everyone’s consciousness into a global virtual world known as Neutopia. There some people continue to live an ordinary existence, whilst others see their new existence to play in virtual worlds of the imagination, able to adventure, but never truly die. This is, of course, the perfect excuse for the Zombie Master to get out his other All Flesh Must Be Eaten genre books and run adventures in these genres within Neutopia. Fistful o’ Zombies (Wild West and zombies), Dungeons and Zombies, and Pulp Zombies will all be useful for that, but Enter the Zombie (zombies and martial arts) will be the most useful if the Zombie Master wants to let the Cast employ Matrix-style moves in his games. The introduction of the zombie into this Deadworld is particularly fitting, drawing from the MMORPG playing experience, and the zombie is introduced not just in the virtual world, but the real one too. Overall, this Deadworld offers the most flexibility because it can draw upon many genres, and the Cast get to play some quite powerful characters.

Although its title is not quite as telling, of all of the Deadworlds in All Tomorrow’s Zombies, “The Death of the Alliance” is actually the most obvious in terms of its inspiration. For millennia, the twin empires of Thaxia and Zothia co-existed peacefully; the Thraxian Empire, governed by its Mystic Knights, providing foodstuffs and spiritual guidance whilst the Zothian Empire provided technology in return. Yet an ambitious advisor to the Zothian Emperor and a fallen Mystic Knight subverted the teachings of the Mystic Knights to usurp the throne and declare war on the Thraxian Empire. The latter managed to hold out until Emperor Krauss and Dark Lord Garth used necromancy to turn the inhabitants of Thraxia into zombies and so raise an unstoppable army of the undead. This then, is a Space Opera setting that should essentially be retitled “Star Wars and Zombies!” This could be huge fun and this shows in the well-executed efforts to work the undead into a familiar setting. It is also perhaps the easiest of the Deadworlds to run in All Tomorrow’s Zombies because it is so familiar and so light in feel. Bar of course, the existence of the zombies.

Rounding out the supplement in “Future Shock,” is a pair of Deadworlds that the Zombie Master will have to develop himself. The first of these, “Dead Contact,” is a variation upon “Cyber Marines and Death Machines,” but has the Cast as the inhabitants of a colony that discovers a secret, whilst “I, Zombie” reveals the dangers of a new form of near instantaneous travel.

Physically, All Tomorrow’s Zombies is well presented and well written. The artwork nicely depicts the grim nature of the various settings, and if the book needs a little editing here and there, it is only minor.

In all honesty, one of the reasons that I did not review this book when I first bought it was because I did not enjoy it. There was something about the supplement that was dissatisfying. On reading it for a second time, All Tomorrow’s Zombies is still dissatisfying, but not to the same degree. The source of the dissatisfaction is twofold. First, there is the breadth of the genre that the supplement has to encompass. In terms of rules and mechanics, All Tomorrow’s Zombies does encompass the genre successfully, but in terms of the Deadworlds, less so. Which leads to the second issue, that of uneven Deadworlds. The least interesting and most dissatisfying Deadworlds are too broad and leave the Zombie Master as to what to do beyond facing the members of recently risen retinue, which in some cases are not themselves all that interesting. The better Deadworlds, specifically “Cyber Marines and Death Machines” and “The Death of the Alliance” are better written, and more effort is made to work the undead into both.

Over all, All Tomorrow’s Zombies is still a good sourcebook for All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It does a good job of handling the Science Fiction genre for both the RPG and the UniSystem in general, such that in using its rules you could run a Science Fiction campaign in the setting of your choice or of your own creation. Plus you do get some really creepy, often nasty Deadworlds that bring zombie horror to the genre.

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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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