I love where I live. I mean, Peoria has issues, but it's my home. This has been reflected in my roleplaying over the last couple of years. In general, as much as possible, I like roleplaying stories that are set in Peoria. It's fun playing with the local color and referencing places that we know and all that kind of stuff. So, when we played Zombie Cinema last night, "your home town, tonight" wasn't only a natural choice; it was our assumed choice.

So, the zombie apocalypse went down in Peoria last night...and we were all in a bar. Gabrielle played the tough biker who led his gang with an iron fist. Raquel played the tough, competent cop, who was there to arrest me, the would-be Black Panther type, who I asserted was being played by Chris Rock.

I established a lead on the board early on by winning my first couple of conflicts trying to escape from Officer Hancock. Then, Bo and Hancock went head-to-head over his lounging on her police car, bringing the two of them at par on the board...one step below the starting point.

Then the zombies started showing up. One of the first was someone who the gang had actually killed. So Bo, having seen the right movies, coolly dispatches the two zombies, as well as the gang member who had been bitten, and then began barricading the bar. Ned (aka "Wildcat") came running back to the bar, demanding to be let in. Honestly, they probably would have been better off leaving him outside. When the zombies finally broke into the bar, he tried to make his lonesome escape up through a crawlspace, leaving the others to die.

This was an interesting move, actually. In the fiction, my character was backstabbing the group. At the table, I was trying to provide the other characters with a chance to advance towards escape. After all, I liked them better than Ned.

Eventually, Ned broke from the group and stole the police car. But then he was munched by the zombie pawn. So I narrated him trying to ram his way through a crowd of zombies, ramping into the far wall of I-74 in downtown Peoria. And then the zombies converged.

Yeah. Not good.

The other two were in pretty dire straits. They needed to succeed at three conflicts against the zombies in order to make their escape.

They succeeded at the first one, getting out of the bar and heading towards downtown to look for a boat.

They failed at the second one.

I have to run. More later....

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Posted By: Eero TuovinenThat sounds like a very minimalistic, hardcore zombie grind.

Yeah, pretty much.

At the end, Bo and Officer Hancock were trapped in a parking ramp on the riverside, surrounded by zombies. They had already placed cloth "wicks" in the gas tanks of the different cars. So, as the zombies slowly advanced, Bo turned to his companion. "I'm Bo. Pleased to meet you." She shook his hand. "Julie."

Then they lit the cars.

The entire place went up in a huge series of explosions.

The next day, as the Army was landing, the rubble was still smouldering. Seen among the ruins: Bo's leather jacket.

The End

Posted By: Eero TuovinenDid you have one or more clear protagonists emerge in the story? (For our purposes, a protagonist is a character who the audience is interested in and sympathizing with.)

Both Bo and Officer Hancock ended up as clear protagonists. Although I had gained a significant lead earlier in the game, I set my character up as an opponent for several conflicts to give them opportunity to advance. We all very much wanted them to get away and, when they were munched by the zombie pawn, we wanted them to go out properly.

Posted By: Eero TuovinenThe three-player game is rather short and grim, sort of like a methodical short film out of some back garage rather than a dramatic epic. I find it interesting that your game was so serious - it's pretty easy to go comedic with three players.

Well, these particular players tend to take our roleplaying seriously. Uh, I'm not totally sure how much of that actually came into play, but we don't generally go very silly, especially in a game about the zombie apocalypse. We like desperate heroism and doomed last stands and all the very human stuff that makes the zombie genre actually work. So I'm not really all that surprised.

All of us have played Zombie Cinema since this game. However, last night, as we sat down to play 3:16, Zombie Cinema came up in conversation. Gabrielle announced that she would love to be able to wipe her memory of this particular run so that we could do it again.

Submitting to a mind-wipe to experience the awesome of a game? Now that's a fanatic fan.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

"Hah ha; that's awesome, as the Americans say."

Apparently, so do some Finnish.

If it was a conflict against the zombie and the characters lost, the zombie does not move - the character pawns move towards the zombie, just like in all lost conflicts. The zombie pawn in general does not care about the type of conflict, it always moves according to its own rules. That is, it only moves on ties and after a full round has passed since its last move.

As for sacrifice, you can interrupt anything to sacrifice, but your own pawn cannot end up behind the zombie pawn. What this means is that if your character is next to the zombie pawn and the zombie pawn moves, you can't sacrifice anymore - the zombie pawn is coming to your own square. If you wanted to sacrifice before the zombie moved, you'd have to do it before the dice are rolled.

From what he said, it sounds like it would be too late to sacrifice at that point; The dice have been rolled, the movement has been ordained. The sacrificing character has to move back one, where sacrifice would put him behind the zombie. Even if the sacrifice came first, he'd still have to move back one, so it seems like the sacrifice cannot be done.

I'm not necessarily trying to answer the question for Eero; I definitely want him to come on and tell us the real answer, so I can know if I understand it correctly or not.

Well, I know that some of this is bringing in thinking from other games, specifically The Lord of the Rings, where you can play yellow cards for their effects before other game effects occur, like Sauron moving forward. Given that all the players that evening are LotR veterans, it seems like a reasonable hang-up. But Zombie Cinema isn't Lord of the Rings.

So, cool. I'll know for the future. I nominate this point for the eventual FAQ, though. (I'd also emphasize the point that a character's pawn can never end up behind the zombie pawn. This is implicit in the rules, but I'm not sure that it's explicitly stated.)

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Posted By: Eero TuovinenDuly noted, I'll put this stuff in a webpage FAQ when I get away from this ¤#)(&?`& pile of Gencon loot and have some "free" time.

LOL.

I'm also very much looking forward to new board overlays for alternate scenarios. Like a heist game. Yeah, that would be cool....

Though, honestly, you might do even better by coming up with a few scenarios and then selling them as an expansion pack.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf