Mostly Dead: Modern Magic Zombie RPG

[Mike]

My son is turning 13. For his birthday, he wants to have an overnight with a couple friends, and he'd like me to run a modern-day zombie RPG using Pathfinder rules. I ask him what kind of characters, and he says that basically, they should just want to play kids like themselves caught in the zombie apocalypse. A couple years older, but basically like themselves.

Okay, this I can do. My basic premise will be that the zombie outbreak is connected in some way to the introduction of magic to our world. Nothing huge and flashy, but stuff that can have minor game effects. To go along with this, I have to go with the concept that a zombie bite is not 100% fatal. 99.9%, yes. But for some (likely those with some connection to magic) will suffer the zombie fever and have a chance of recovery. The boys will know nothing of this when the story starts. To them, it's going to look like The Walking Dead.

In the long term, this creates a world where zombies are everywhere and civilization has collapse, but the majority of survivors will have some sort of "super power". Magic will touch them in some way. And those who have struggled through the zombie fever and come out alive will eventually realize that they are immune.

In the short term, I just need a one-shot plot for three characters who are all 15-year-old boys that can be played through in a single long session. I want them to feel like they were awesome and epic and that they survived by the skin of their teeth. This plotline should be satisfactorily resolved in one session, but obviously leaves the world open for future play if they choose to pursue it.

And ideas?

The exact location of the game is completely open... big city high-rise, small town suburbs, rural farmhouse... whatever. The timeframe is also flexible. He says modern-day, but gave me permission to move it to "near-future" if that helps. The boys know nothing about my idea for magic, so exactly how it works, and what abilities each of them will ultimately express/develop is also wide open to serve the plot. What do you think?

[Mike]

Note that the addition of magic also allows me to introduce different types of zombies as well. The vast majority will be your stereotypical mindless, shambling cannibals, but there's room there for some with extraordinary abilities. Or the rare exception that somehow retains its mind. Or maybe people who "survive" the zombie fever but come through as some sort of hybrid or tainted version. Who knows? Any or all or none of this can be used as we need it.

[Eliahad]

Stories of safety are often too good to be true, but rumors of an Oracle in downtown Omaha have been circulating lately. She is the one that can get you to the Promised Land, but only if you can find her...

[Tahlvin]

If the characters are teenage boys, then appropriate settings could include: a high school (could be a school day, or could be a dance or ball game or school play), a movie theater, a mall, or just the street where they do their Friday night cruising. I think it'd be kinda interesting to say the outbreak starts during the performance of the school's musical, and have some of the characters from Into the Woods go nuts and attack the audience. It certainly doesn't need to be limited to that starting location, but can take place all over the town/city. But starting out with something that any typical 15 year old kid would be doing (or at least your son and his friends) would be good way to get things going.

The magic idea is nice. Can I play?

[Mike]

The magic was originally just a solution to a problem. He wants deadly, walking dead zombies, but he also really wants to use Pathfinder. You can't get mobbed repeatedly by zombies in a d20 system and not take a game-ending fatal bite within your first two or three encounters. This was a way of giving them an out. The first zombie wound is horrifying and it looks like you might die. Subsequent ones are nasty and infected, but not so dangerous. After a while, they're just like any other injury.

It just occurred to me that in the initial phase, I need to give them a glimpse of someone who doesn't die of zombie fever (but probably gets torn up and killed later for effect). That way they know it's possible, even if they don't understand it.

I like what you guys are giving me so far. My son is envisioning starting in a big city, but I think I'll get them something closer to home to start. Familiar. That's good.

And it definitely needs to be a quest.

If this works out, I would definitely consider using this world for a short game on Roll20 with you guys. Maybe set it six months post-disaster. Enough time for everyone to have figured out the rules a bit, but still soon enough that we are still in survival mode and haven't yet sorted out the business with magic and powers.

I may have to adapt something closer to the Mutants & Masterminds damage system for this.

[Elle]

[Elle]

[Eliahad]

Oh man! Hand out scripts ahead of time. Here are your lines, read them when its your turn and describe how you're acting... But then you start screwing up some of the NPC's lines...and they're all like, what? Oh....oh...do that! DO THAT!

[Mike]

The play thing is a brilliant idea, but I ain't gonna use it. I wish I could, but three of these kids are new to roleplaying (yeah, there's four of them now), and I think giving them a script and then tearing it up would be confusing.

On the other hand, based on what you guys have given me and a really awesome talk I had with Aidan about it today, I think I'm going to be able to do this in a satisfying way.

Rules: There will be a d20 involved, because Eli said we had to use Pathfinder rules, but as I've been adapting stuff, I finally realized that I've reconstructed my rules for Terror at Camp Pinewood except without any scouts. Once I figured that out, I just went into the Pinewood document and cannibalized a bunch of setup and rules stuff that will make this work.

For character creation, I will have 7 or 8 inherent traits (Brave, Strong, Quick, Alert, etc). I will have chips with the traits on them (2 chips for each trait), and to start their characters, each kid picks two traits that they will be strong in. Then I will have about 50 chips with different skills written on them (Archery, Sports, Driving, Academics, First Aid, etc). Each kid gets to pick 4 skills. There. Character creation takes 15 minutes, and since they can't duplicate skills between them, they wind up with a diverse array of abilities to cover most situations.

In actual gameplay, everything is based on a d20 roll. High numbers are good. Low numbers are bad. If you have a chip that applies to the situation, put it in and it counts for +2 (or something). As GM, I'll also have a stack of red chips to throw out. Each one counts as -2 (or whatever) to represent difficulty and conditions.

Plot: They will be four 15 year old kids in a moderately sized town. During the course of some mundane high school related activity, there's news reports of disturbances. Sirens go off. Everyone is ordered to take cover and protect themselves.

Moderate zombie activity. The boys band together and work on surviving/getting help. They see people get bit and die and become zombies. They understand the basics of zombieland now.

The impetus. They take in a woman who has obviously been bitten multiple times, but she's not dying yet. Soon it becomes clear that she's not going to die at all, and in fact is getting better. She has with her a glass orb filled with [mystery]. The orb will break and the gasses from it get to all four boys, knocking them out briefly, but then they are okay. Soon after, the woman will be killed by [TBD]. But before she dies, she tells them that she was there when all this started. If they want to put an end to it, they need to get to [place in big city] and destroy the [thing that caused this].

The truth. She really was involved, although mostly unwittingly. The project was to bring something that we will define as [magic] into the world. Now that [magic] is here and spreading. She was chosen because of a natural affinity for this [magic]. Only one person in 10,000 (maybe) has such a natural affinity. When [magic] "infects" a person, those without the ability to deal with it simply die, and the [magic] reanimates them as zombies. Those rare exceptions though, if they survive the zombie fever, reawaken with new abilities that they may not even realize right away that they have, and are ever after immune to zombie fever. It would break credibility to imagine that these four random friends all just happen to be naturally immune. Therefore, the mystery gasses from the orb, combined with the woman's awakened power, has resulted in the four of them being immune. But they will not know that.

Eventually they will get bitten, get sick, and get better. Their awakened powers will all be creepy and zombie related. I have four figured out already, but if anyone has better suggestions, I'll take them.
1. Zombie control. By sheer force of will, cause zombies to do your bidding. Probably just one at a time at first, but in time... who knows.
2. Zombie clairvoyance. Can mentally link with a zombie and then see/hear through it as it stumbles about.
3. Zombie strength. Physical strength is enhanced by the presence of zombies. The more zombies, the stronger they get. The closer they are, the stronger they get. Strength will be mildly enhanced at all times simply due to zombies being in the world at all.
4. The cure. This is the ability the woman has. With it, one can "cure" a person of zombieism. If you do it immediately after they are infected, even up til shortly after they turn, they'll live and be mostly fine. If they've been a zombie a while, you basically bring them back just long enough for a dramatic death scene where they impart crucial information. Dead too long, and the "cure" simply turns them into an ordinary corpse. In practice, it looks a lot like a cleric turning undead most of the time. You can use it to save the recently hit, but otherwise, it's just an anti-zombie weapon.

When they reach their goal, I have no idea what will actually happen.

[Cazmonster]

I like the pared down attribute idea. It will make it play faster and still get you d20's to play with.

Potential Powers

Walk Among Them: By clearing your mind, you can go unnoticed by the undead. The more active your character is while Walking, the harder it is to maintain.

Breath of the Grave: You can take a deep breath and exhale a cloud of glimmering blue mist. Zombies caught in the mist stop functioning for a short time.

Helping Hand: Somehow or another, a zombie's dismembered hand took to following you around like a macabre pet. You can give it orders and it will obey them as best it can. Think of it like an undead familiar.

[Mike]

We played our first session of Mostly Dead (the game has a name now!) this weekend, and it was amazing. I could not have asked for better reactions. I knew Eli would love it, because he loves roleplaying, and the who thing was his idea. But all three of his friends got into it as well and at least one of them is a true believer now... a tabletop RPG convert. He came into it thinking a tabletop RPG would be similar to video game RPGs (which he hates), and he was happily surprised. At one point he said, "We can do anything we want! I thought this was going to be grinding for gold and building up weapons and stuff, but it's not that!" So joyous.

We played for 6 hours. They were stuck in detention when the zombie apocalypse begins. Caz, Kyle... do you remember the beginning of our teen-horror game? Remember you guys in a tent arguing about superheroes like you were 13 again? That's what these guys did without any prompting at all. They started arguing in detention over whose fault it was that the stage curtain got pulled down and broke the set, and "Oh yeah... well you were the one swinging the wooden swords around!" etc, etc. They were good.

The first three hours of the game were them stuck in the school for a little over a day. They realized they were alone. They finally got their phones back. Scary media reports. Sirens going off. Everyone's forgotten them here. Can't reach anyone. All that good stuff. They're scared to go outside because of some mystery contaminant. Then stuff starts happening. A few stragglers are coming in. We see zombies. We fight stuff. We find zombified Ms. Kitchens (the old lady receptionist) locked in a closet. Weird stuff.

Then they meet a mystery woman whose name they don't find out. She tells them of the experiment that started this. She's clearly bitten but not transforming. She explains that she's special. Part of the project. They attack and tie up a crazed cop. More zombies. Finally, mystery woman releases a gas "Hey, do you guys smell almonds?" that knocks everyone out. When they awake, she's dead--bled out--with a note beside her. Alan, a guy who was protecting everyone is trapped in a hallway and is a zombie now. Clem, the old farmer guy, is a zombie, but seems to at least understand them and isn't killing them.

The note gives them the location of the project. 70 miles away. They have to get there and shut things down before it all gets even worse. They find the cop's car and her arsenal. They check on their families (find nothing). They hit the road. The second half of the game is the road trip into Omaha. They find the building they need. Eventually they find a way to blow up the storage tanks out back. One of their number has zombie powers now (forgot to mention that), and he senses that something has changed now. But what?

And that's where it ends.

Yeah, only one of them got zombie powers, but it was cool and effective. He was the player having the most trouble inserting himself into the action, so making him special was probably for the best.

And afterwards, they all couldn't stop talking about how awesome it was. It just happened so smoothly. Everything fell into place, and we were all happy. I was never struggling for what happens next. They never seemed at a loss for what to do next. Perfect night.

[Mike]

Things I learned:

1) I really like games where the PCs are 12-15 years old. Games I've written and LOVED: Terror at Camp Pinewood (12-15 year old Scouts), Pariah (12-15 year old superheroes in an asylum), BFF (13 year old kids in a cross-dimensional horror mystery), Mostly Dead (15 year olds in the zombie apocalypse). Specifically, I like horror-like games with young teen protagonists. I should perfect the rules for Mostly Dead and use adapted versions of that for all four and publish them as a series. I did not notice this unifying theme until after this game.

2) The character creation concept worked like a DREAM. I had pre-printed cards for all the abilities and skills, and then put them in piles on the table and let them pick what was appropriate. Since no two skills were the same, they all had different skills. Thus, in a tight spot, all of them would search the table for who is the best person to handle stuff. It was awesome. Any time they had to roll dice, you could see them mixing and matching cards on the table to see what could be applied--especially since I was a little loose on how much "assisting" was allowed. The hands-on nature of it was surprisingly effective. I'd like to see it work with varying levels of ability... right now, you just have "stealth" or "camping" or "fighting". There was no allowance for being an expert in anything. But on the other hand, they are only 15. I've got ideas to refine this card-character system, but I'm completely sold on its utility and effectiveness.

3) 2d6 sucks. The exact type of dice I use aren't a huge deal, but I need a bigger range. I could certainly use d20, but I do like having at least a little tendency towards the middle. Probably 2d12. We'll try a couple different things and see what's comfortable.

4) We played with 7 as our target number. I need to move this up. My thought was that 7 is the middle of the range on 2d6. If you get a 7, it counts as not quite a miss, but not quite a success either. Anything above that is good. Anything below it is bad. Higher is gooder. Lower is badder. But this meant I had to hand out "difficulty chips" for tough tasks. If something is going to be hard, then I have to give you 1 or 2 or 3 penalty cards that give you -2 each. In theory, that makes a lot of sense, but handing out "-2" cards is difficult, and it makes me the bad guy. On the other hand, if I had a really high target number, then for difficult tasks, I just do nothing. For easy tasks, I get to hand out "easy cards" that give you a bonus. Then I'm the good guy. No one sees me as intentionally thwarting them (even when I am), and instead they remember all the times I handed out free bonuses because the jobs were so simple. It's a psychology thing, but it's important, I found out. So I'll use the 2d12 for tasks and have the target number at 20. I think that will work a lot better. I can still have a penalty card or three for things that are seriously out of their league, but most of the time, I won't need them.

5) Zombie games are AWESOME for moving along the action. Not sure what to do next? Zombie breaks in! OR Gunshot goes off! OR What the hell is that noise?!? And I've discovered that the more stuff that happens, the more excited they were. We had the cop handcuffed to a radiator. Zombie Ms. Kitchens was still rattling that door in the office. There's a half-dozen zombies banging on the glass where we barricaded the front door. There must be a breach in the gym, because wounded mystery woman just entered from that way with a small child. Clem's been wounded. Alan just killed two zombies and is charging to the gym to (probably) sacrifice himself and save everyone else. All this at once, and the boys dealt with it all. They were probably pissing themselves, but they did what had to be done.

[Cazmonster]

Congrats man.

And yeah, kid games are really the best. That's why Covert Generation was fun to play. Kid hijinks that were going to save the world.