Yeah, we were primed to play 3:16 and all of a sudden that gets canceled due to illness. I look in my ph@t Gen Con l00t bag and pull out Zombie Cinema. So we play the hell out of some Zombie Cinema.
We set it in our town - Carrboro, North Carolina - tomorrow. Our crew:
A hippie mom with a baby in a sling. Useless! A Detroit cop in town to put his elderly mom in a retirement community. Angry! Elderly mom. Senile! A PTSD-wracked Iraq veteran. Opportunist! His younger brother, with a soft heart and a broken shoulder. Weakling!
This game works beautifully. I think we were a little off our game - I'm getting over a cold, one guy had never played anything but D&D - but the game totally worked. I highly recommend using local landmarks to guide the first session! We were all holed up in Weaver Street Market, then shot our way out and ended up barreling down Highway 54 and crashing into the Fiesta Grill out by White Cross. It made it easy to frame scenes and deliciously fun to desecrate local businesses. The game's mechanics relentlessly enforce Romero-like zombie tropes - we started with rumor and innuendo and ended up with crazy mobs of deadly zombies flipping pickup trucks. And the escalation ensures that interpersonal conflicts have genuine weight. At one point me (grandma) and Robo (the hippie mom) found ourselves in a situation with three posible outcomes:
1. We both die. 2. Grandma shoves Hippie Mom out to survive. 3. Hippie Mom shoves Grandma out to survive.
Conflict! Grandma loses, because her own son supported Hippie Mom! Yaaaargh! And best of all, I'm still in the game, now as the zombie hordes. We had five players and out game lasted 80 minutes, which seems fast, but everybody enjoyed it. No one survived. The last survivor, the teenager with the broken shoulder, took pity on a whimpering dog that was infected and ate his face.
This is my new A-1 pickup game, and my wife Autumn is now eager to try it out. The procedural bits map brilliantly to any "looming chaos", so I can easily see repurposing the simple game to showcase, for example, a pandemic or the Iraq war.
It worked frighteningly well for the conflict in Iraq. One modification we made was to have each player choose a goal for their character. Things like "protect my men" for the one playing an American military officer. I chose "give a good graduation present to my son" for my Iraqi business man. In the first turn I had my character take part in smuggling in drugs for black market medical purposes, and got caught by at a check point by the officer.
And my experience has also been that it works great for pick up play. From Zombies on the Love Boat to Walmart when a must-have electrical gadget was just about to debut. What you have in the setting, plus the zombies makes for super fun tension.
Sweet, Em. If only we can convince Eero (baked goods? sexual favors?) to release an open version of the rules or allow us to license it for educational purposes. Lots of good things could be done there.
We talked about this last winter with Jonathan and Emily, and I haven't forgotten it - in fact, I have a layout draft proposal for the Iraq thing on my home computer, which I've been intending to finish and send you guys when I have the time to work more on that project. I've had a very busy summer because of Gencon - I basically had to priorize the projects that justified going to Gencon at all, which is why I haven't worked more on what we outlined in the winter.
That's a long-winded way of saying that as far as I'm concerned, making up some variant versions is still a very current notion! Feel free to work up your own ideas, or wait for me to come back to Day in a War sometime next month, when I return up north to my office. I'm still expecting to drop the thing on Emily's lap insofar as writing the background fluff is concerned.
Also, good that the game worked for you, Jason - and I'm interested to hear your ideas about using the system for other things.
I want to see an educational anthology that teaches players about current conflicts and issues, hopefully book-ended with a kick-ass zombie game as a palate cleanser.
I'd love to see them available as separate pamphlets too that can be easily distributed for charity and educational purposes. The model I am inspired by is Hostage!, a free jeep form scenario that directs people to donate to Amnesty International in lieu of paying for the game.
Please do send me the template you have in mind, Eero. I'd like to start on it soon.
[insert rabid enthusiasm here] [followed by an overzealous commitment to produce pamphlets on various current / historical conflicts, starting with something China-related]
I always wanted to do this for Shock: too, if Joshua is paying attention. Your game is NOT just about Sci-Fi! It's about how societies respond to challenges! Release an educational version (Shock: Societies in Crisis) so I can write supplements! Or license it to me! Something!