Powered by Fate Core, World Gone Mad is my zombie apocalypse campaign. The official kickoff date is Sunday, April 7th. I have (as of this post) nine survivors ready to make up characters and adventure in a world torn apart by the living dead.
This will be my first time using Fate Core...or any Fate game, for that matter. I'm a little worried as to how the collaborative nature of Fate is going to lend itself to a game of survival horror, but we'll just have to see.
Chapter One: Welcome to a World Gone Mad
April 7th, 2013
Of the eight people who signed up for the event, five showed up. Not too shabby, but it would have been great to have seen the others. Hopefully they'll show up next Sunday!
Cast of Characters
So here are my first five survivors in WORLD GONE MAD:- Patrick, a minor leauge baseball player with crippling self-doubt issues;
- Louis, an accountant-turned-diver with a drinking problem;
- Audaire, a Southern belle rape survivor who understandably has some trust issues with men;
- Eric, a crime-scene investigating academic;
- Seth, a manipulative schemer.
The Adventure
Chapter One was a freestyle session, more about testing the system and giving the players a chance to role-play, work together, and establish some details about the world then doing a real, full-blown adventure.
It began with the players waking up in the morning, their tenth day of holing up in a CVS Pharmacy in the heart of the city (haven't determined what exact city, yet). They were out of food, and were finally forced to exit their safehouse in search of more supplies.
Here were the scenes:
- Escaping the CVS via fire escape, which required working together to bring the ladder down and boost people unto it, without making too much noise to alert the zombies in the alley;
- Entering the neighboring condo complex, again requiring teamwork and problem solving to get over to the building, open the nearest door or window, and be ready for whatever may be inside;
- Clearing and exploring the floor of the complex they entered, then establishing a new safehouse in one of the empty condos.
Overall thoughts
For a completely improvised adventure, I felt the game went really well. I didn't realize when I wrote up this campaign that "sandboxing it" was going to be such a decent little option! It'll make prep for future games extremely easy and fun.
My players are AWESOME. They caught the hint right away and brought all kinds of excellent dramatic hooks with them. An alcoholic? A man-hating, tell-it-how-it-is Southern girl? A minor league zombie-killing machine? These adventures may as well just write themselves! There was even some decent comic relief from Eric, who due to some spectacularly bad dice rolling came off as the world's worst detective! As if that weren't all great enough, the adventure ended with a bomb-drop: Audaire is pregnant from the rape! These players KNOW THEIR STUFF when it comes to making a grand zombie apocalypse!
Thoughts about FATE
From one short session, FATE seems like it is what you make of it. It felt like less of a cohesive game and more like a toolbox FULL of ideas on how to make characters and narrate action. That is awesome, because I felt like the rules were working WITH me and not against me for making a good story, but it was also a little troublesome, because having so much to consider meant I had to make on-the-spot judgement calls about how to handle nearly every situation.
For example, take combat. The story was flowing so well that I didn't feel like I wanted to break the action down into turns and draw a map and establish zones and junk, so I just made the zombies go down on a simple Attack action. I then narrated results dependent on the roll. This definitely kept the fiction moving at a fine clip, but I felt like combat was not as intense as it should have been. We all know zombies can't be killed except on a headshot, and that getting bitten from one is likely a death sentence, so I wanted to see these fights as white-knuckled, tension-fraught events. Instead, they were just hurdles, no more dramatic then trying to pick the lock on a door.
But for an example of how it worked, take climbing the side of the apartment complex. I wanted it to be a problem to be solved and not just a simple roll, so I decided to use the challenge rules. I wrote a few tasks on the dry-erase board and asked who was doing what, then had them all roll at once and give me the results. I then took the results and narrated the entire thing. This process allowed me to inject some creativity and drama in what might have otherwise been just a mundane "Roll your climb skill. 5? You made it. Now YOU roll your climb skill. 4? You made it. Now..."
So, overall, I felt that FATE, like most RPG systems, is really about the little details, the tweaks and rulings that you and your group make to the game. There is no DEFINITIVE application of Fate, which is good because you have a greenlight to monkey with the system, and bad because every new game feels like a beta test instead of a polished, complete product.
Again, these are merely my observations after a single play. In coming weeks, I may change my tune.
Next week, on WORLD GONE MAD...
Adventure-wise, I'm going to have some definite goals/plot points injected into the game. In doing feedback with the rest of the group, the consensus was that they want clear goals but they want to retain the "sandbox" feel for tackling the many problems the survivors face. I agree with this, and I'm going to deliver.
System-wise, I'm torn. Part of me wants to keep using Fate Core and continue to roll with the system and get a better feel for it. Part of me wants to switch to Void Star Games' excellent STRANDS OF FATE, where I'll have a lot more solid rules to work with, yet still have Fate's inherent flexibility to make my own judgement calls. Another part of me wants to continue work on my Fate/Apocalypse World mashup hack, a system made from the ground up for this specific campaign. I'll think it over some more this week and we'll see how it goes!
Chapter Two: The Others
April 14th
For the second session, I decided I was going to introduce some more survivors. But how? I didn't want mere NPCs to show up and be zombie bait and plot points for the players. But at the same time, I didn't want anyone taking the spotlight away from the PCs.
The solution I came up with? I had the players make the other survivors.
When the session began, I started describing their wake-up from sleeping in the condo. They thought they were just starting their previous adventure, but as I went on with the narration, they realized that they were actually hearing about another group of survivors on a different floor of the building.
That's when I handed out some blank character sheets and told them they were making new characters. I made it clear that we were going to go back to the other characters soon, but this session is going to be about the others.
The (New) Cast
The new PCs the players came up with were:
- Michelle, a failed doctor turned chef who moonlighted as a stripper;
- Owen O'Malley (not sure if that's right, don't have his character right in front of me), a crotchety old Scot who was the super for the building;
- Mayor Patrick (can't remember his actual name, so I'm just calling him by his player name), the city mayor who happened to be visiting his girlfriend Michelle in the penthouse suite he bought her when the quarantine on the building hit;
- Todd, Michelle's neighbor who's a Medieval enthusiast and makes horseshoes;
- Logan, a deep woods hunter/survivalist who was scavenging the building for supplies and ran into the others.
The Adventure
The adventure was basically one giant trap scenario: the zombies who had been quarantined on the roof of the building had broken through the fire escape barricade and were now trying to pound down the door to the penthouse suite.The super worked on one side to reinforce the penthouse barricade with various living room furniture while the others worked on a plan to get out of the suite that didn't involve swimming through a horde of zombies.
Instead of a straight escape, the survivors decided to take a chance and climb to the roof, knowing that there could be some potentially useful supplies from the emergency triage set up there. The sneaky scoundrel of a mayor had set up a secret door in Michelle's penthouse suite that led to the roof so that he could take his helicopter and subtlely sneak into and out of her place for liasons. After getting to the roof and clearing out a few straggling zombies, the survivors searched for supplies.
There, amongst a treasure trove of medical equipment, was an iPad with battery power. The survivors discovered that, miracously, the cell towers were still up and running and that the tablet belonged to a doctor on the roof, who had been communicating with the nearby Central Hospital about the condition of the "infected." While the rest of the survivors tried to break into Todd's neighboring condo from the roof for more supplies, Owen sent an email to the doctors at Central. This led to the best laugh of the session, where Owen, who has OCD, wrote a long, rambling series of complaints to the doctors about the zombies causing damage and making messes in his complex. I had Owen's player, Seth, write an actual email to the doctors on his own iPad and read it to the group. Hilarity ensued.
The confused doctors decided that some kind of hell must have broken loose at the condo complex and so told the survivors that they would send a helicopter to airlift any remaining survivors out of the building.
The final scene of the adventure saw the players, ready to leave the zombie-infested building, standing on the roof and waiting for the helicopter. They saw the heli rising into the clear, sunny morning, fly over to them...then start spinning out of control and crashing into the side of the building.
Overall Thoughts
I'm still feeling my way through the game, sizing up the players, and trying to figure out what direction this story is going to go in. We discovered three important things about the world during this adventure:
- The infected turn to zombies almost immediately after death. We discovered this after Michelle related to the group a story about how the first zombie she saw was a customer she was giving a lap dance to had a heart attack. He turned as she was giving him CPR.
- This is not a total, complete apocalypse, like The Walking Dead. If the cell towers are still up and running, and there is a hospital still communicating with the outside world, then there are more patches of civilization in this game than in your typical zombie apocalypse. This campaign is looking less like an apocalypse and more like a war against the undead, like World War Z. A war humans are currently losing.
- Though I initially was planning on World Gone Mad to be a serious, somber survival horror game, the players have made things pretty crazy. Between the email from Groundskeeper Willie and a role-played argument between the Mayor and Michelle (Michelle was pissed that twice during the adventure, her life was in mortal danger, and the Mayor fled instead of rescuing her), the campaign is taking a much more surreal, dark comedy tone. Though I intend to continue to play it straight, I'm looking more to action-horror like From Dusk Till Dawn, Aliens, or Zombieland, than conventional horror like Dawn of the Dead for inspiration.
Thoughts About FATE
As I continue to feel my way through the campaign, I am feeling my way through the mechanics of the game, as well. I was having a "lazy GM Day", where I didn't feel like drawing maps and marking initiative and assigning difficulties; I just wanted to tell the story and roll with whatever the players did. FATE handles that better than most games but, as of these two adventures, not as well as other story-focused RPGs, like Vincent Baker's "Apocalypse World," or even the Story Engine.
I want a generic system that I can custom-tailor for the campaign, but I do not want to have to hack an existing game and create a bunch of house rules and things that may not even work once the dice start rolling. Fate, as it's written on the page, provides all the flexibility I need without having to invent new rules to cover something. For that reason alone, I'm going to stick with it, at least for another couple of games, and continue to fumble my way through it.
Next week, on WORLD GONE MAD...
I am going to go Aspect CRAZY on the players next weekend. I haven't been playing them up enough, and Aspects, being the most central and unique element of Fate, deserve a hot, bright spotlight placed upon them.
I am also going to keep following my gut and making everything "player-centric," with the players rolling against passive difficulties rather than wasting time by making separate rolls. To inject a little more chaos into the rolling though (to compensate for the lack of chaos a second die roll brings in) I may switch to regular D6's over Fate dice, though.
Finally, I'm not done thinking about Strands of Fate. One player in the group actually preferred Strands' way of handling skills and stats over Fate Core's. I do, as well, but I much prefer how Fate Core streamlines player interaction, with making every action one of four different types, as opposed to the confusing "manuevers" and such that previous iterations used. As much as I don't want to hack a game, that may be exactly what I end up doing...
