All Zombies on the Eastern Front [Session 1]

There was enough interest expressed in my post on prepping my current campaign that I thought I'd give a heads up on how the first session went: Swimmingly. (It was two weeks ago, though, so my memory is getting hazy... And the next session, incidentally, is booked in for three weeks from now - the joys of trying to find time to game in adulthood, eh?) A good time was had by all, mainly because I think all the players really bought the concept; for whatever reason the right tone of gritty realism and slightly pulpy adventure was struck from the get-go. I started things off in media res (with the PCs escaping from a prison train heading into Siberia which a pair of IL-2s were mysteriously attacking) and I'm glad I did, as the momentum just flowed from there and didn't really let up for the rest of the session.

Cyberpunk 2020 works fantastically well for a gritty WWII game, as its sheer deadliness when shorn of its rules for armour and cyberwear makes combat genuinely terrifying. (A rifle bullet is guaranteed either to kill or render hors de combat with a single hit, not to mention a 12.7mm round - and given that any competent soldier can score easy hits at 200 yards with a Mosin-Nagant, firefights are incredibly short and brutal.) Suspecting this would be the case in advance, I came up with a system whereby the players had at least some sort of control over their own destiny (a primitive "save" feature, really) - at the start I gave each of them a number of cards corresponding to their luck score from a doctored deck composed entirely of 3s, 4s, 5s, Jacks, Kings, Queens and Aces; they could then play these at any time to get various 'lucky' results (a 3 allows you to add 3 to a single dice roll; a Jack allows a single re-roll; an Ace allows you to reduce the damage of a single hit to 1, etc.). Two of them were forced to rely on this to save their characters from death at various stages.

Yet the speed and lethality of the combat didn't result in anticlimax-style fights. Quite the contrary; things built to a natural climax in which the PCs were gunning down NKVD men in a race against time before one of the enemy reached a half-track mounted 12.7mm HMG which would simply have made mincemeat of them. There was genuine tension in the dice rolling at that moment, as things really were touch-and-go.

My only regret from the session was that in actual fact only two zombies were encountered - the players were so traumatized by these events that they spent the rest of the session studiously avoiding any possible meeting with the undead! That's good for a GM to experience, as it means the players are clearly getting a visceral reaction, but still, it would have been nice to see more zombies being blasted with anti-tank rifles...