ROTWORLD now available!

[Zevious Zoquis]

Oredered my copy this morning. Judging by the preview at Lulu it appears to be a densely packed 65 pages...

[DavetheLost]

Got the PDF. Densely packed is right. 65 pages and almost all of it game mechanics, tips and examples of mechanics in play, and other useful goodies. Very little "fluff", but with a genre like this you don't really need fluff, just pop a zombie movie in the DVD player or read some zombie fiction.

The Action Table is a great mechanic and the book is full of examples and descriptions of how to use it.

I'm slavering for victims, err players...

[Goblinoid Games]

Thanks for the comments guys, glad you are enjoying the book!

Got the PDF. Densely packed is right. 65 pages and almost all of it game mechanics, tips and examples of mechanics in play, and other useful goodies. Very little "fluff", but with a genre like this you don't really need fluff, just pop a zombie movie in the DVD player or read some zombie fiction.

The Action Table is a great mechanic and the book is full of examples and descriptions of how to use it.

I'm slavering for victims, err players...

I'm glad people understand my intentions. I've avoided comparing Rotworld with All Flesh Must Be Eaten for a variety of reasons, but I suppose in this case I will. First I must say, I'm a big fan of Eden Studios and AFMBE. I used to write a lot of fan material for their games, and I have a couple contributions published in two of their books. One is a zombie world in Worlds of the Dead. But one of the things I find problematic with AFMBE is that once you strip away all of the fiction mood text, the game is mainly a system of character generation and zombie generation, with little advice for how to actually run a zombie game. The Dead Worlds are cool, but they don't actually walk you through how to setup your game. You would have to dive right into a world with the zombie apocalypse already underway. The supplement One of the Living does help with that, but there are still unanswered questions. So my goal with Rotworld was to be succinct but as useful as possible to let you take the information and run with it. There is no way to cover all possible situations, but I think the rules in Rotworld will get you going in the right direction. There is a framework there that can be extrapolated.

But anyway, I'm so glad people are enjoying it!

[Blood axe]

What we need now are some "adventures" or scenarios for Rot World, Or even a bunch of scenarios that link into a campaign.

[DavetheLost]

The biggest problem I see with writing adventures is that it is hard to keep them "generic" enough. Every Rot World is going to have different reasons for why zombies and different zombie "types". These differences can result in very different scenarios fairly quickly. Romero and the Walking Dead both feature slow zombies of low intelligence, but Romeo's zombies are still connected with their living memories to greater or lesser extent. The Walkers seem not to have memories, hunt by smell, etc. Then there are the smart zombies from Return of the Living Dead, fast zombies from new Dawn of the Dead, parasitic space slug infected zombies from Night of the Creeps, voodoo zombies, chemical waste zombies, viral zombies, etc.

Of course if some of the assumptions are spelled out at the beginning of a scenario pack I would have no problem with one-shot or campaign packs. Night of the Living Dead would make a great one-shot, so would a "simple" supply run into town...

I'll have to put some serious thought into developing a series of "encounters" or settings that can be dropped into a game or used for a quick night's play.

Examples of what do you do besides besiege your players with a horde of zombies.

[Mark]

The biggest problem I see with writing adventures is that it is hard to keep them "generic" enough. Every Rot World is going to have different reasons for why zombies and different zombie "types".

I had the same thought. I was pondering a set of smaller encounters / locations with details that could be adjusted to fit diverse infections/settings. I have 2-3 sketched out but nothing worth revealing yet.

[Blood axe]

I dont think that you have to keep them generic. If someone wants to modify them- they can. My thought is that it really wont be a open sandbox game. The players will probably only have a few choices of action.

[Thakazum]

...the Walking Dead both feature slow zombies of low intelligence

As for the television show, they've been sped up in the second season. Also, episode one had that dude's wife who obviously had some kind of memory - where her house was at least.

[Blood axe]

I just got my print copy from LULU today. Just 5 days. Nice copy too!

[Zevious Zoquis]

Got mine today. Haven't had time to read it yet but just giving it a quick flip-thru is enough to convince me I'm gonna love it. Some great old school artwork, a few nice floor plans in the back and lots of zombie lore...perfect!