How do you make a zombie survival campaign entertaining? What are your preferred systems for this kind of thing?How do you make zombies scary in the largely oral TTRPG medium, given that players have pretty firm expectations of what a zombie apocalypse entails?
>>97944103Oh shit, Savageland. Neat movie, but man some of it gets fucking blatantly retarded to brute force "racism bad".Anyways, I sadly haven't gotten to run a zombie focused game myself, but I've only heard good things about All Flesh Must Be Eaten. As for fear? Make things tense. Build that tension with unnerving descriptions and make them get a bit paranoid. Music and ambient sounds are very much recommended, and if you want have the zombies sound more like Return of The Living Dead or No More Room In Hell 2, not the running or anything, but the moans/screams of pain.
>>97944255>Oh shit, Savageland. Neat movie, but man some of it gets fucking blatantly retarded to brute force "racism bad".The photos are so eerie and are such a good framing device for the mockumentary format.I think part of it is just playing it straigt. The walking dead that are hard to put down are scary. So is societal collapse.
>>97944416Oh yeah, the pics in it are fucking amazing! Quite a few of them left me a bit on edge even after I first watched it lolAnd yeah, playing it straight and not silly is an absolute must. And if you want to really add something to nail the tone, make them attached to an NPC, then have that NPC get infected. Having to Old Yeller a character they like can do wonders. Hell, if you feel like they might be a little too nonchalant about that, make it a kid. Did that with a game of Delta Green I ran and it made for a nice and fun (for me at least) conflict AND really drove home to point of "you aren't heroes that will save the day/world".
>>97944103>Zombie Apocalypse GamesI would love one where one guy can play the survivors with guns and the other plays the zombie side. But I'd imagine it would be more fun to play the survivors somehow.Anybody have such wargame suggestions?Hopefully a good one sprung out of the zombie media craze.I remember being swept up in it as a kid.
>>97944103>How do you make zombies scary in the largely oral TTRPG mediumThe most a single zombie has ever scared me was in the first episode of The Walking Dead, when that kid's mom tries to unlock the door and looks around like a confused animal. Freaked me the hell out as a kid seeing a dead body trying and failing to be human, still gives me a little chill rewatching it as an adult.As a horde, describe them as if they're a natural disaster. I never ran a zombie system but i remember giving my players a good scare years ago in Tomb Of Annihilation by describing a passing horde like it was a hurricane made of dead bodies. Straining the trees and battering their shelter as they blindly trampled past, a gentle roar from all directions made of uncountable wheezes and groans.
>>97944103>How do you make a zombie survival campaign entertaining?It depends on who I'm trying to entertain.>What are your preferred systems for this kind of thing?I prefer to make my own games, because every TTRPG needs some personal tweaking anyway; why pay time and money to learn what someone else wrote and rewrite it, when you can just write what you want from the get-go for effectively free?>How do you make zombies scary in the largely oral TTRPG medium, given that players have pretty firm expectations of what a zombie apocalypse entails?Doesn't matter to me; game is about killing zombies, I'll feature ways to kill zombies, require strict time and resource management befitting a zombie apocalypse, and add in some things I find fun, like zombie variants, armor/damage types, crafting, etc.I'm not out to get approval from people when I make or play a game; the TTRPG medium is about playing what you want and having fun your way, so I'm going to use the medium to play what I want and have fun my way.
>>97944103>How do you make a zombie survival campaign entertaining?This is such a broad question. It really depends what your players want. It could be a chance to make a mark on the familiar world, a tense exploration of social horror, a desperate survival situation, etc. There's no one way to do it.>What are your preferred systems for this kind of thing?AFMBE is the gold standard, and everything else either does a very specific thing (Red Markets) or is aping the best in the biz.>How do you make zombies scary in the largely oral TTRPG medium, given that players have pretty firm expectations of what a zombie apocalypse entails?You don't. You make pressure, scarcity, bodily betrayal, dementia, human desperation, seemingly inevitable cyclical violence, and a hundred other things scary. Zombies are a great tool to suggest those things and credibly force a group into horrible situations.
>>97944103>set in a time or place without a lot of guns (seen some aussies play a zombie campaign for a bit, was entertaining)>deadly combat, players should avoid it>find a group serious about roleplay, set in a world where no one knows about zombie tropes
