All Zombies on the Eastern Front [Session 3] - Or, how fear of a monster is often worse than the monster itself

Yesterday we played some more All Zombies..., and it was another good session. You know you've got the tone of gritty survival horror right when your players are celebrating the discovery of six duck eggs hidden in a patch of reeds by a pond.

Less violent than previous sessions (there was only one combat encounter, though quite a big one), this one was all about the harshness of trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic Siberian wilderness: endurance saves against the cold and starvation; constant delays so as to undertake foraging and hunting for food; and taking pleasure in small mercies (like the aforementioned duck eggs). Even the few inhabitants of this place are hostile - invited to share the food and shelter of a mysterious cult of Old Believers, the players found themselves drugged by stew (made of human flesh) in order to be quietly murdered and eaten later. They were saved only by the fact that one of the players was sensible enough not to actually eat the stuff.

It was also the first session in which no zombies have appeared or been encountered. This has had a noticeable effect on the mindset of the players - the more rumours they hear about the things the more their suspicions and fears seem to grow, so that they're now far more keen to avoid zombies than the danger actually warrants (in terms of the mechanics). Indeed, encounters with shotgun or rifle wielding bandits have far more potential to result in death than would a zombie sighting at distance, yet the players are remarkably more sanguine about the former than the latter.

Less is more, and all that, but it doesn't hurt to remind onself as a DM that this is very much a truism.

All Zombies on the Eastern Front [Session 2]

Session 2 of All Zombies... was a good few weeks ago now, so my recollections are a little dim, but I remember the broad details. Session 1 ended with the PCs (a group of escaped German, Italian, and Finnish POWs), after having roamed for a few days around a mostly deserted but somewhat zombie infested Siberian wilderness, commandeering a half track off an NKVD squad they ambushed. After a somewhat protracted discussion they agreed to head West back in the direction of their homelands, despite some (sensible, in my view) support for the idea of going East and ending up in Manchuria with the hope of catching a ship home.

These are seasoned players so, as they followed the Transiberian railway Westwards, they studiously avoided any of my attempts to lead them astray and into difficulties. I dangled a good few temptations their way - even a rumour of a crashed cargo plane with plenty of food on board - but they pushed on regardless in relatively pell-mell fashion, surviving a few encounters with roaming zombies and NKVD deserters. (They still aren't aware that the Soviets are pursuing a scorched earth policy and retreating both Eastwards and Westwards from the Tomsk area - the source of the plague - leaving any stragglers to their fate.)

Finally they made it to a river with a bridge, which they quickly assertained was being watched over by some of these NKVD stragglers, presumably in the hope of ambush. I listened with some amusement to their discussion of how best to proceed - they must have talked for about an hour; correctly, they've come to the conclusion that eventually they'll reach a blockade or firewall of some kind which the Red Army will have set up to contain the zombies, but incorrectly they seemed to believe for a while that this bridge constituted it. Eventually common sense prevailed and they realised any blockade would be considerably stronger and better fortified than this.

The result was a charge across the river via a nearby ford, in hell bent fashion, which resulted in a conclusive victory but the half track being pranged by a PTRD anti-tank rifle. This was a severe blow as it meant continuing on foot, which they did for the remainder minutes of the session - which lead them apparently towards the outskirts of a large settlement of some kind, though they're not sure what or where.

It was another fun session, though I have to confess I was a little frustrated by the gang's determination not to get sidetracked from their journey - I had a good few side scenarios lined up which will have to be scrapped now. They're unfortunately experienced enough to smell the DM's bait. But experience is a two-edged sword - it also means that they're willing to chip in with good house rule suggestions (using poker chips to represent amounts of calories when it comes to rations, etc.) and also ideas on armoured combat, which Cyberpunk 2020 apparently lacks detailed rules for but which became relevant when 14.5mm calibre weapons started being fired at half tracks.

Session 3 is this Sunday, so I'm in the planning stages now. I'm trying to decide whether a zombie woolly mammoth awakened from the permafrost is too gonzo or not...

Role Playing in the PBEM Wargames Community and the Roots of the Hobby

Something I have a mild interest in, from an anthropological perspective, is the way in which people tend to naturally role play during any sort of game scenario. (By "people", I mean irrespective of whether they have any experience with role playing games or even know what they are.) You get it a lot with games like Diplomacy and Risk of course - people begin to take on airs and behave in a self-consciously "ruler"-ish sort of a way (usually with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks), or make threats to one another and talk with funny accents. I'm sure you've all experienced this.

But it also happens with games which are more abstract, like, say, Monopoly and even Snakes and Ladders - any sort of leisure pursuit, I suppose, which requires some level of investment in a character, counter, or other physical representation of some kind. (You can't really imagine it with a genuinely abstract game like Go, Backgammon or Poker...) Immediately the little toy iron or piece of plastic that acts as your avatar takes on a kind of personality of its own, and suddenly you feel as if you really are travelling around an early 20th Century London buying houses on Regent Street or climbing up a ladder to beat your spouse in a race to the prize.

Given the historical connections between role playing and wargaming, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that wargames elicit the urge to role play very readily. This is something I've noticed a lot of during my career as a Steel Panthers: World at War PBEM player. Not content to merely trade insults or commentary on battles as they develop, I've discovered that most opponents very readily engage in fantastical accounts in which they are a battalion commander on the Eastern Front (or wherever), communicating with their troops and often coming up with highly detailed and entertaining fictional After Action Reports of their encounters. In their email exchanges they pretend to be SS or NKVD officers issuing humorous, over-the-top commands to take no prisoners, or British majors twiddling moustaches and swilling port. The roots of our hobby are very clear in these exchanges; the gap between pretending to be a Red Army colonel advocating death for those who retreat, and between pretending to be a Red Army colonel on a secret mission with a close group of comrades is very small. The only thing separating the two is, in the end, scale and rules.

In light of this one begins to suspect that the development of role playing games was inevitable once wargames became popular. I'm reminded of that old saying that, given the achievements of Newton, Einstein and Da Vinci, you would choose the latter as more important, because somebody somewhere would have eventually made the discoveries of the former two whereas the latter's were by definition unique. In a similar way, though Gygax and Arneson et al have to be commended for their creations, somebody else in the wargaming community, given the nature of gaming in general and wargaming in particular, would likely have come up with them sooner or later. Though obviously in a very different form.

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...

Be Prepared

I suppose an explanation is in order for the growing gaps between posts on this blog. I'm afraid it's nothing remotely interesting - just the daily grind of trying to juggle work, shoving together a PhD, social commitments and flat-hunting - but I hope it will serve as an explanation nevertheless. Suffice to say: I am both busy and knackered, all the time, at the moment.

But I am still finding time for actual play, on a bi-weekly/sometimes monthly basis. As coincidence would have it I happen to be planning a campaign due for launch in October, and since the blog carnival this month (which I am amazed is still going) is all about game prep, I think this is a perfect opportunity to both kick Monsters & Manuals into gear and show off my super duper game planning skillz.

The game I am planning is called All Zombies on the Eastern Front (AZotEF!!!! for short) and is a World War II/Zombie Apocalypse game. The core concept of the campaign is, essentially, "You're in the middle of World War II, then something even worse happens" - and in keeping with this spirit I've tried to make it as bad as possible for the players: they begin as Axis POWs in the hands of the Soviets, trapped on a prison train heading into Siberia...an area of the world which happens to be in the first stages of being overtaken by a zombie epidemic. The email blurb I sent out to the players sums things up nicely, I think, and runs as follows:

...All Zombies on the Eastern Front will be about one part Zombieland, one part Twilight 2000-esque “soldiers in a post-apocalyptic Europe”, one part John Carpenter’s The Thing, and one part I Am Legend (the book, not the cruddy Will Smith version). There’s quite a bit of flexibility in that players can be of any rank or branch of the armed services, and can be German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, even foreign volunteers in the Waffen-SS (though I stress the focus of the game is escaping the clutches of zombies, not Nazism), and although I’ll be using the Cyberpunk 2020 rules they’re quite heavily hacked (no classes, very different skill list).

Content-wise, there’ll be plenty of opportunity to mow down hordes of the undead with your stolen PPD-40 and its 71-round drum magazine, but combat is by no means the be all and end all, and there’ll be a lot of NPC interaction and investigative stuff going on too, as well as all the travails that go along with post-apocalyptic gaming (finding food, ammo and shelter; overcoming moral quandaries about protecting innocent fellow survivors; avoiding cannibal bandits, etc.) and quite a bit of wilderness exploration.

You read that right; I'm using a hack of the Cyberpunk 2020 rules. This is mainly because I want to lift the Friday Night Firefight rules wholesale; my philosophy on World War II games is that you want combat to be frightening and deadly, and without armour or cybergear believe me, Cyberpunk 2020's combat rules are very deadly. I'm yet to see how it will work in play (I'm slightly worried there'll be a TPK within an hour), but the first signs are encouraging - the players are making noises along the lines of avoiding combat and playing intelligently, which is always nice to hear.

Logistically my prep is involving lots of maps, random encounter tables, random NPCs, and random name generators - stuff which I generally enjoy - as I envisage a lot of travelling on the part of the PCs, and I'm leaving it open ended, which makes for little in the way of pre-planned encounters/adventures. (Whether the players want to head back to Europe, go East and try to make Japan, hunker down and see if they can survive or investigate the source of the Zombie plague is up to them.) I expect all this stuff to run into the pages and pages, which will be a further drain on my time but one I'll actually enjoy - a rarity at the moment.