Hi everyone. Just wanted to let all you GenConners know that some of us on the other side played games this weekend as well. :)
We had an unusual session Sunday night. Our fledgling Dreamwalker GM canceled at the last minute and two old friends just "showed up" making our count five, including myself.
We had been rotating GM's (easy to do with Dreamwalker) but Mark was going somewhere with the campaign and I didn't want to interrupt his flow. Besides, there was no sense making characters for these guys because who knew when they would show up again.
What to do, what to do? I'm sure you've guessed by now.
I broke out my four page download of Sean Wipfli's Dead Meat: Criminica Fizosa (or something just as unintelligible)*, gave them some blank "character sheets" that I had printed out a while back and had each one make three characters.
Just to prove that no system is sacred, I had already designed a few homebrew rules for Dead Meat. Each player plays one character at a time. When that character dies, we work his next one into the story. Also, when a character is bitten by a zombie, he must continue to make occasional Guts rolls or else lose another Guts die, his condition worsening as the zombie infection takes hold.
I had the players make their three characters and not tell anyone what they were. Then they folded the sheets and we put them in a bowl in the center of the table. The idea was that everyone would pick one at random to start with, and then as they got eaten/zombified, they would draw a new character until all of them were gone. This ended up being extremely amusing.
The setting was an amusement park---Busch Gardens, Williamsburg to be exact, probably my favorite place in the whole world (it's a childhood thing). It helped those who had never been that I had the map for it, pictures, brochures and everything.
We had some interesting characters turn up---the owner of the park (placed by myself for plot reasons), a French acrobat, a Channel 8 news reporter (we will never forget Guy McNichols, narrating the events as they occurred into his pocket tape recorder, right up until the moment of his death), a sassy ticket girl, "Mr. Panda" (complete with balloons and giant Panda suit) and several men of varying age and on this I must say that in all the zombie flicks I have watched, I have never seen such an abundance of homosexual protagonists pop up.
The plot was pretty straightforward for a zombie flick---a strange cult planted biochemical bombs throughout the park, then informed the news of their intent to blow it up. The military quarantined the park. The bombs went off, simultaneously killing people and releasing the zombie creating chemical agent. The dead began to rise, shamble around and eat the stunned and/or freaked out tourists. The cult members also died but they had taken a special chemical to make them come back as sentient living dead (smart and fast as humans), identified by their purple scarves.
The characters took to the rooftops at first. They scoured the map for a way to escape, then took to the wooded areas, trying to leave by tour boat. They bumbled into a zombie who killed one of the characters as the rest escaped. They got to the river and saw the boats had been blown up in one of the explosions and now zombie tourists were shambling out of the water.
At this point they realized they needed to find some weapons so they located a maintenance shed, lured the zombie maintenance guys out of it, then picked it clean of "weapons". One of the characters stayed outside the shed while the rest searched it. I _so_ wanted all of them to go inside.
Anyway, they found some tools---a shovel, a monkey wrench, some screwdrivers and some gasoline. They took off again through the woods, only stopping because they heard the park tour train coming and thought it would be safer to ride than walk. Unfortunately one of the cult member zombies was conducting the train, which was packed full of regular zombies who attacked on his command. The cult member killed a character but was himself decapitated. The rest of the characters ran away from the horde.
They reached the fence to find the military on the other side, in full gas masks and biochemical gear, ready to shoot anyone who tried to climb over. They went down the length of the fence and hooked up with a few people, one of them a small boy who actually became the focus of the story as they all wanted to see him get out safely.
Some more traipsing around through the park/woods, some more zombie encounters, some more character deaths. Finally someone picked out the owner character who knew of a secret underground subway that led to the Anheuser Busch Brewery. They eventually reached the subway, found the cult leader and some of his zombie lieutenants down there. There was a small fight that ended with Guy McNichols valiantly sacrificing himself while the others boarded the train and escaped to safety. ("This is guy McNichols, signing off")
So in summary, there was a _lot_ of running away, plenty of zombie encounters and a few good ole, "character comes back as a zombie" scenes.
All in all it was hell of a time. In total I have played three sessions of Dead Meat and I can't say enough good things about it. Each time the game ended with smiles all around. The rules don't actually state an objective but I have learned that you have to have something for the characters to do, even if it is only to escape. I plan to plot out a more "Resident Evilesque" scenario for the next time we play.
While I like reading AFMBE, I've had some problems running an actual campaign. This game (Dead Meat) is great for quick play and absolutely _perfect_ for newbies. My wife had never roleplayed a day in her life and enjoyed it immensely when I tested it out on her last year.
I plan to run Dead Meat again on Halloween night, along with a homemade version of Once Upon a Time (but set for horror).
Great game Sean. I seem to recall you working on a new version. How is that coming along?
Pete
*The name of the game is actually
Dead Meat: Ultima Carneficina Dello Zombie! :)
Quote from: DemonspahnPS - Congratulations on the Diana Jones Award. You've got to be beaming. Do you get to keep the trophy?
I'm not Ron, obviously, but I'm pretty sure that the trophy moves from person to person over the years. We were joking about how every winner was going to want to keep a little piece of it for themselves (even spotted an irregular edge on the pyramid and said "See? That's where Adkison took his piece!), and so in 20 years or somethin' there'd be almost no trophy left . . .
Gordon