Here marks the end of the Zombie blog.

We will be replacing it with a mailing list, possibly attached to it's own forum, given time.  The address for the mailing list is ohgodmylegs@googlemail.com, and should you wish to subscribe please send us an email.

Reasons?  Well, not everyone reads the gamessoc boards with frequency, and not everyone has livejournal, and I think it's time to establish our own reliable presence on the interbutts.  Everyone has email.  The forum address will be posted here (which will be the actual last post, not this fake one that I used to get your attention) at some point in the future.

I haven't posted saying thank you to everyone for Zombie 4 yet, which is something that I'm keeping for the mailing list's first email.  Once we have more than five subscribers.  (please sign up, also get your friends to sign up, etc)  It was an awesome night, though, and I think we learnt an awful lot about what makes Zombie fun and what makes it not-fun, and balancing these while having a good time ourselves.

The next game is still scheduled for march/april, more Silent Hill than anything else.  But we'll still be trying to go for quick execution rather than complex set pieces.

ZOMBIE 4 - THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

When - Saturday 25th October, starting at 8pm and running until around 3am.

Where - University of East Anglia, Congregation Hall, somewhere downstairs

Who - GMs for the night - Grant Howitt, Chris Taylor, John "The Todd" Tudball, Ben Pavey, Mary Hamilton (to varying degrees).  25+ Zombies.

How - Equal parts graft and charisma.  How much?  £2.50 for the night.

What - Zombie is a Live-Action Roleplaying game.  This means that instead of sitting around a table and describing what your character does, you'll be in the thick of it as you fight off the undead with NERF guns and foam weapons.  It is rules-light (it takes fifteen minutes to learn all the rules we are using), easy to get into and a gathering for players from all over the country. 

Zombie operates on the "Run" system - instead of one long game going on throughout the session, as with normal LARPs, we run around eight.  In each, six players are chosen to take the parts of those attempting to escape from the complex while the other 20 or so participants take the role of Zombies or NPCs.  Once their plot has been resolved - a process taking around half an hour to forty-five minutes, on average - then they act as Zombies and some of the undead from the previous run have a go at escaping.

We aim to have players take part in two runs each over the course of the night, but depending on time we may have to limit repeat runs.  Rest assured everyone will get a chance to play.

You will be playing as a civilian trapped in the Bioflex complex, a company that works on the cutting edge of biomedical research.  As the workday draws to a close, the doors lock and you are trapped with five other people in a dark room.  Outside you hear screaming, moaning, the sound of weapons fire, and distant alarms.  Hours later, the doors unlock, and you emerge into a series of dark corridors packed with the shambling undead.  You'll have to use whatever weapons and equipment you have to escape alive.

You will using one of three character classes, detailed below:

Security Guard: You wear black, and you carry a gun.  Security guards start the game with a pistol or shotgun variant.

Medic: You are a trained doctor or nurse, or maybe you have a natural aptitude for patching other people up.  Medics start the game with two "spare" health strips with which they may heal other players.

Survivor: You have no idea what's going on and you grabbed the first thing you could find.  Survivors start the game with a melee weapon.

Full details of the (ridiculuously simple) rules will of course be given on the night in presentation format.  If anyone has any rules queries please leave a comment or send me an email at ropey_d@hotmail.com.

You should bring some snacks and drinks to keep you going until we wrap up (although nothing with peanuts in, as GM Mary has a severe allergy to peanuts and the building is poorly ventilated so they may well cause her to die), some card games if you fancy something to do between runs, and any NERF guns or LARP weapons you don't mind other people using.

Why - Zombie was written by two guys who liked LARPs but never enjoyed a session they had attended.  We had tried normal LARPs and felt they were a little stop-start for our tastes, or full of talking and politely pretending to be a vampire.  We wanted something that would let us use Live-Action gaming as something different - something visceral, exciting, something which mattered when you were in it.

This is what we ended up with, refined over two years.  Zombie 4 is the eventual evolution of the basic rules set, and with it we're returning to our roots.  We love running it - we love scaring people, we love the adrenalin kick you get as you emerge into the complex, we love having the capacity to do something that makes a lot of people very happy indeed.  It's simple, it's easy to get into, and it works.  Plus, you don't have to wear elf ears or plastic vampire teeth at any point. 

There are almost no rules, no dropping out of character, no calls, no skills system, no character names.  You are trapped in a building, and all that stands between and you death at the hands of that wave of zombies coming down the corridor are the four bullets left in your revolver.  What do you do?

- TAPE RECORDING STARTS -

"Hello?  Hello?

It's so cold.  I can't find the others.  I think it took them.

I don't know how long I've been in here.  My watch stopped working and I can't find my phone.  There's no light here.  No light at all.  Can't tell when it's daytime.  It feels like I've been in here for ever.

I managed to find a gun - why do they have guns in an abandoned building?  No-one's come near here for months.  The police cleared the whole thing out.  It was in the newspaper, wasn't it?  With the bodies.  Ritual murder and cults and stuff like that.  Lots of dead bodies.  I remember that.  Lots of dead bodies.  Maybe the cult hid the gun here for safe keeping.  When I found it, it had five bullets in.  Now it's only got two.  I had to shoot at it, but it wouldn't go away.  I ran instead.

I can't even remember why I'm here.  Someone was lost.  I can't find him, though.  It's so cold.  I think I'm bleeding.

Everyone I've met so far has gone.  I had to kill one myself - I had to kill a man - when he cut himself on some rusty fencing and went berzerk and tried to hurt me.  There was blood everywhere.  I left the axe in the room.   I didn't want it anymore.  I think he's still following me.

I don't know why I'm wearing this mask, and this cloak.  They feel safe.  They're the only thing that hasn't changed yet.  The mask has my name on it - I think that's my name - no, that is my name - yes - and the cloak keeps the cold away.  Some of the time. 

I think it's out there.   I don't know.  I miss them.  I wish I hadn't killed him.  I wish he wasn't so angry.

Oh Jesus.  Oh God oh God oh God no.  No.  Not now.  Stop it!  STOP IT!  I don't want to.  No.  Please stop.  Please don't.  Don't make me.  I don't want to.

- TAPE ENDS -

CHAOS

Coming Fall 2008

So. Yes! That all definitely happened.

Cult was our most successful event thus far; not because we made more money (we barely broke even, making 2 - COUNT THEM - 2 Pounds each) but mainly due to the fact that nothing went wrong and all the GMs made it through to the end of the night. I even had fun, in places. I'll be knocking out a brief list of Awards (and can issue paper copies should anyone feel they want them) followed by Thanks. Also, at some point in the future, I will be scanning all the fluff we put together for the event into a big zip file and whacking it online, should anyone want to catch up on the material they may have missed when they were running screaming through the halls.

( Read on... )

(a cross-post from the Gamessoc boards)

So - Cult is taking place a week tomorrow.  Eight days.

Toys R Us (and, oddly enough, Tesco) have started stocking more dart-firers.  At the moment both have the ever-so-useful Dart Tags in sets of one or two (visible here) which are sort of expensive but, you know, easy to use and pack ten darts.  They also stock the stubbier one-shot version in the Dart Tag Strike (visible here) which, although it only holds one dart at once, has five underslung points for ammo storage and is a) small and b) slightly badass.  It comes in at a tenner, so slightly more expensive than a Nitefinder, but it looks to be a solid gun.  Haven't used one myself, yet, though.  The NERF guns are stored several aisles away from the Buzzbee Tek Tens, Tommy 20's et al, persumably so they're not comtaminated by contact.

On visiting there with Keeper he has picked up two Tommy 20's (on a whim!   The disposable income of some people) and is talking about cutting them down and rewiring the battery packs.  All very exciting.

Any news from us?

Very little.  Since the playtest we're happy with the new rules (although we gave Occult spellcasters "Raise Dead" as a class spell replacing their Heal spell - so even if your friend gets shot to death the game doesn't have to be over for him.  Hell, if you cast "Control Undead" on him afterwards he won't even try to eat your face) and we're focusing on getting the individual runs streamlined and acquiring props.

There are a lot of props to acquire.  Like, four pages' worth.  This is an absolute bitch.

Not much more to report - we have some recons, and they're titting awesome; clip-fed pistols are where it's at, although the "armed" plunger leaves something to be desired as far as the cocking rate goes.

But yes!  Sign up - the link is below - if you're coming.  Tell you what, I'll make that even easier for you, and put the link here.

Oh, and here's the Brand-Spanking-New-Official Character Generation table, in no way written up last night at 3am.

Thanks to all who helped us out last night at the playtest!  We learnt a lot of things - namely, that the system is pretty fine as it is and we need only make a few tweaks, some situational changes, and limit the numbers of cultists.  Past that we have a moderately fluid system with guns and heroics and whatnot.

The wiki will host any updated rules - we're using "Sacrifice Mass" rules for magic, so rather than use two Scrolls to power a mass spell it requires one scroll and a Health level on the part of the caster.  We need to do some fine-tuning - some way of stopping divine magicians becoming a healing battery for Occultists - but the "go out in a blaze of glory" tactic witnessed went really quite well.

Also, we're banning NPCs from casting massed spells, as we found out in the first run that such an action can effectively ruin an entire player group in roughly thirty seconds.  Also, my apologies to the first group.

If anyone has any comments on the playtest - either from their experience as a player or a monster - then please get in touch with us.  You can leave a comment below or if you have something you wish to talk about in more depth you can email me at ropey_d AT hotmail DOT com.

But yes.  Thanks.  All comments appreciated.  Laters.

Playtest Details

Aims: To test the ruleset for Cult.

Monsters
1 - Armament of Cultists - heavy, light, melee, none.
2 - Number of Cultists versus average group of 6 Assault and 6 Investigative.
3 - Behaviour of Cultists - grouping, psychology, "fairness to players."
4- Mix of Zombies with Cultists.  Problems with, balance of, etc.

Magic (in the conditions expected)
1 - Spell Mechanics - Test for game-breaking and "best spell."  Clarity of spell calls.  Ease of remembering spell rules.
2 - Spell Strips - Determine ideal number.

Guns
1 - Number/type of guns in player control.  Reloading versus additional guns.

Time/Location: One 90-120 minute session in the Congregation Hall on Saturday the 23rd of February (24-hour Roleplay at 10pm.  We will run five small-scale test games in the session followed by interviews with the player crews.

Magic Rules