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 Two both 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.

It's a Corpse Cavalcade

Remember back in 2010 when zombies were hot? It was all down to the continuing comic book series The Walking Dead, which under the guidance of the film director Frank Darabont made it onto our television screens. It proved what genre fans always knew, that unlike stories about vampires, those about zombies are never about the monster, but always about the survivors. After all, zombies are nothing more than a nameless, unthinking threat with no other motivation than to eat your brains or your flesh, and thus spread the love. The survivors in such situations are invariably ordinary folks pushed to the extreme by growing number of ever hungry dead. It is a situation that has often been explored in gaming, usually by the king of the zombie pile, Eden Studio, Inc.’s All Flesh Must Be Eaten and its range of genre twisting supplements that have done everything from Dungeons & Zombies to Zombies in Space. That said, All Flesh Must Be Eaten has never been supported by a full campaign that takes the likes of you or I – if you or I were American – from the point before the first appearance of the corpse cortege through a full blown outbreak and into a post-apocalyptic world where the need to survive is utmost in everyone’s mind. Complicated of course, by the constant threat of the walking dead.

Thanks to Daring Entertainment, we now have that campaign, though not for All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Published via Cubicle Seven Entertainment, War of the Dead: Chapter One presents the first thirteen parts or weeks, of a campaign written for Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s Savage Worlds. The whole campaign is fifty-two weeks in length, so there are another four parts to come, at least in book form. Individual chapters are available as PDFs and it is possible to subscribe to the series. Chapter Two is already available in PDF.

As the campaign opens, the player characters find themselves on holiday, aboard the Pinnacle, one of those massive cruise ships on its maiden voyage. Although they need not know each other, the player characters find themselves together more and more as strange events, and then stranger events take place. As it becomes apparent that there is some kind of contagious disease is spreading throughout the ship and then that the dead are coming back from, well, being dead, they come to the attention of vessel’s head of security, Jason Kirkman. He soon comes to rely upon them as the situation deteriorates and the survivors are forced to abandon ship. When they make it to land, the heroes find that there is no respite. Whatever affected the crew and passengers of the Pinnacle is not confined to the liner and society is already crumbling…

Structurally, War of the Dead: Chapter One quickly takes on a familiar feel. Each “week” does not represent a week of game time, but rather a single session of game play, each consisting of three acts and ending a cliffhanger type of situation. Thus, the campaign as whole is intended to take a year to play, though this will vary from one group to another. War of the Dead: Chapter One represents just two weeks of actual game time. Most weeks consist of the survivors getting to a location, establishing some kind of relationship with various NPCs, and then the living dead, or another threat, arriving to upset this new found situation. It is not until the last three weeks that there is any change in this format, when the survivors have an opportunity to rest and as these last three chapters progress learn something about the new world that they find themselves in. It these three weeks together with the three weeks at the start of the campaign where the player characters are confined to the ship, that the most interesting and the least problematic in terms of running the campaign.

The problem with the campaign is that it is entirely reactive in nature. The players and their characters are constantly being forced to react to events and there is never any let up from this. This issue is part of the genre, but players being players, they do like to have sense of autonomy over their characters, and the constant push, push of the cadaver cavalcade will probably grow wearisome quite quickly. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that on more than one occasion the player characters are captured and forced to do something against their will, and while this might work once or twice, it becomes wearisome very quickly. As do the scenes of confrontation in which the NPCs face off, guns drawn, against the players characters, who still have them holstered or shouldered.

The point is that a tightly scripted campaign such as War of the Dead: Chapter One might not be to the liking of everyone. Nevertheless, the campaign provides some creepy moments, such as being hunted by baby zombies – or is that zombie babies? There are also situations when the player characters are presented with tough choices, for example, between rescuing a mother and child and thus possibly alerting the dead and expending ammunition, and leaving them in favour of survival.

For the most part, the threat faced by the survivors will be “shamblers,” the slow, stumbling type of zombie that will use its hands and teeth to claw and bite at its prey, and which is usually dangerous when in a mob or in an enclosed space. They can be outrun and outwitted, but are attracted by noise, their own moans that indicate that they are on the hunt, also attracting other dead. Of course, the likelihood is that once a survivor, player character or NPC, has been bitten, then he has been infected and will rise again as a zombie. This is something that the player characters will soon learn themselves, as well as the need to take action accordingly. Later on in the campaign, other types of zombie will appear, all of them familiar to the genre.

In terms of rules, Savage Worlds seems a slightly odd choice for this type of setting. War of the Dead: Chapter One is a gritty setting with the only outré element being the zombies. Savage Worlds tends towards being more pulp action in style that allows for player heroics. Players in War of the Dead: Chapter One are expected to create ordinary folk as characters rather than zombie killing machines, and given that they are on holiday at the start of the campaign, are likely to have spouses, children, and other members of the family with them. Having a dependent or as the campaign puts it in the new “Responsibility to Others” Hindrance, is not mandatory, but it does provide a source for character motivation. The campaign also includes several situations where such a dependent can replace a given NPC and tie the responsible player character into its story. A list of suggested character types is given as well as a new Edge and several Hindrances.

The campaign does provide one new rule that allows for player character heroics. Under the terms of the “Heroic Determination” rule a player can expend a Benny – the equivalent of luck or action points in Savage Worlds – to gain the temporary effects of any Combat Edge that his character qualifies for. This only lasts a single round, and should be used sparingly given that Bennies are also used to soak Wounds that otherwise might infect a character. Other rules cover survival, food, and ammunition, as well as a detailed look at the living dead and the threat they represent. There is at least an avenue for heroics in the campaign then, and given the fact that Savage Worlds handles vehicular and mass combat with relative ease, then its use for this campaign is less questionable.

Perhaps the biggest problem in War of the Dead: Chapter One is one of player awareness. There cannot be a gamer alive who does not know what a zombie is, even if he has never seen a film by George A. Romero or more recently, watched The Walking Dead on television. He knows that zombies spread the love by biting their living prey and the likelihood is that he knows that the only way to stop a zombie is to shoot it in the head. In War of the Dead: Chapter One, nobody knows this. In the setting for War of the Dead, George A. Romero never made Night of the Living Dead, and in fact, nobody has ever made a film about zombies. Further, comic book series, The Walking Dead was never written or drawn, so never published, and thus never turned into a television series. In War of the Dead: Chapter One, the players are expected to roleplay the fact that their characters do not know what a zombie is, or the fact that the best way to kill one, is to shoot it in the head. The player characters have to learn this, either from an NPC doing or through random headshots. This is asking a lot of the players, who essentially need to suspend their own knowledge, which is not exactly helped by the fact that two prominent NPCs have the surnames, Kirkman and Romero…

Physically, War of the Dead: Chapter One is disappointing. While the artwork is suitably gruesome, the greyscale book as a whole looks scruffy, and really the book is in need of another edit. Preferably from a professional. If the book lacks for anything, it is maps. Their inclusion might have helped the GM visualise and describe several of the campaign’s locations to his players.

To successfully run War of the Dead: Chapter One, the GM needs to ensure that the players and player characters alike are kept motivated. In a setting that is as tightly plotted and as deadly as this, this is not going to be an easy task, one that is complicated by the fact that the campaign initially asks the players to forget a lot of what they already know. Nevertheless, War of the Dead: Chapter One is not without some horrifically horrible scenes of horror and some opportunities to roleplay. For the GM wanting to run a whole campaign based around the rise of the ravaging revenants, War of the Dead: Chapter One is good choice, though not a perfect one.