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All Flesh Must Be Eaten is, as the cover says, the "Zombie Survival Horror Roleplaying Game". That's mostly about fighting zombies rather than having zombie PCs, for those unclear on the concept. This compact book - hardcover, 9.5" x 7.5" inches - contains the non-cinematic version of the Unisystem, including character creation and development, task resolution, combat, and all that good stuff, plus a history of zombies in prose and film, a toolkit for designing zombies, and a whole slew of "deadworlds" or ready-to-use settings, each with its own distinctive explanation for where zombies come from, zombies with distinctive features, and adventure and campaign hooks. The revised edition also includes an appendix covering d20 Modern conversions for the crunchy bits.
The Game
This is an extremely practical book. The presentation is good-looking but simple, with a suitably gory Christopher Shy cover, generally good illustrations, and straighforward layout with columns of text and a simple page border. There are places where I felt it was a little cluttered - in a volume this size I'd prefer to dispense with the page border and go for the sort of crisp, clean typography that characterizes Nobilis 2nd edition and Malhavoc's beautifully simple releases - but at no point did I ever have to struggle to read the text or to find something in a hurry when I needed it in play. The smaller-than-industry-standard size is a plus for me as well, making it easier to shelve and easier to scan whole pages in search of specifics. I find it easier to hold and carry around than most of my game books, and would gladly buy more books with these proportions.
The same spirit of practicality applies to the game in setup and play. C.J. Carella's Unisystem is a classic demonstration of genuine evolutionary development in game design. I see his influences, but I also see that he's added new, good things to them. Attributes (six of them) and skills (a dozen or so for typical characters) are rated on a 1-6 scale, with 2-3 representing the human norm in attributes and general competency in skills. Qualities and drawbacks provide customizing features that supplement general attributes and specific skills, and include both mundane matters like better senses or physical defects and paranormal ones like the ability to summon holy fire. Obviously not all of them suit all settings, and each of the sample settings below notes what does and doesn't fit.
All tasks are resolved by someone rolling 1d10 + attribute + skill + relevant modifiers and aiming for a total of 9 or better, with benefits for additional levels of success every few points beyond 9. Weapons inflict damage multiplied by the strength of the attacker, for hand-to-hand combat, or by a fixed number, for ranged weapons. Life points track lasting physical damage, endurance points track fatigue that doesn't involve real wounds, and essence points track magical energy for those with supernatural power and overall morale and determination for others.
There's ongoing discussion among gamers about how much you can figure out what a game will be like in play from reading it. In the matter of damage, I have to admit, I didn't get it on reading. The stat scale was of course familiar to me from my work with the Storyteller system, but life and endurance points exist in much larger pools, from a low below 20 up to nearly 60 points or so, depending on the character stats. Why have nigh-D&D-like quantities for these, I wondered, and I considered proposals for Storyteller-like health levels once I'd given the system a try. But once I did, I was hooked and appreciated Carella's design wisdom. The pools for life and endurance are large enough to allow measuring minor damage: a life point or two for falling down some stairs, a couple of endurance points for running hard or breaking down a door, and so on. It's therefore possible for characters to succumb to nickel-and-dime wearing down even if they never get shot or bitten or thrown off the roof, and I like that very much for this kind of horror. It adds to the tension and pacing a great deal.
The Settings
AFMBE and its supplements come with generous helpings of ready-made templates, each providing stats, a picture, and background notes. My players found it very easy to take these and add their own touches and end up with vividly distinct characters who were a lot of fun in play. There's a full-blown system for building characters up with points, and I'm sure it works well, but it's of less interest to my group. We very much appreciate the pick-and-go approach, and the quality of the ensuing roleplaying has been really excellent. The system allows for meaningful distinction between incompetent, average, and significantly skilled characters, so that normal people can shine in their areas of expertise while remaining at the mercy of overpowering forces. I can't remember when we had this much fun plain genuinely regular folks. It's been a while, in any event.
Carella and the Eden folks have done more than any game publishers I can think of to maximize flexibility of supported play style. This concern comes to full fruition in the Buffy and Angel RPGs, published after this one, but even here there's clear explicit support for playing with full rolls for everything, with use of fixed results for some features like weapon damage and rolls for other aspects of play, on to more or less completely diceless play. They manage to do this without editorializing, too, simply noting reasons folks might prefer the options and then explaining how they work. I respect that a great deal, and have myself used various combos of chance and determinism in the games I've run so far as seemed to suit particular scenes.
The deadworlds themselves are a wonderful grab bag. Here are now-traditional zombies in the style of Night of the Living Dead, animated by evil space radiation or something, and zombies created by a horrible virus gone even worse, and zombies created by alien invaders, and zombies created by voodoo, and so forth and so on. There's a historical treatment as well, with zombies created by medieval magic. (There's a stand-alone adventure in this setting as well, which I'll review soon.) There's a deadworld in which karma's gone all wrong that supports player-character zombies, too. I like them all, and find each one an intelligent, fun riff on its inspirations.
Odds and Ends
The d20 Modern appendix doesn't actually say "d20 Modern". It uses the image of an icosahedron and the word "Modern". This is not Eden being cute; it's a matter of the terms in the d20 license. In any event, it's concise and comprehensive. Qualities and drawbacks become feats, and look well-balanced to me. (Drawbacks are "nega-feats", which allow players to choose additional positive feats in compensation. The potential risks of this when it comes to too-rapid power advancement are discussed in a sidebar.) Tables show the d20 system equivalents of Unisystem skills, mostly also skills, but feats in some cases. The miracles are adapted to spells, and there's a really good discussion of figuring out a suitable character level in d20 based on Unisystem character point total and specific ratings. Finally, there's an equally good adaptation of the zombie creation options, including a Challenge Rating guideline that produces quite good results. (Anyone who's worked with d20 adaptations much knows how much that can be worked all by itself.)
The index is concise but has yet to let me down. Copyable character sheets and supplemental forms like ammo trackers round out the volume.
Concluding Remarks
I like this game a lot. My first session of it was really just dabbling, as part of a general plan to dabble my way through all these game books piled up that I've never used. We all found the results surprisingly engaging. A simple setup - the adventure in the Zombie Master's Screen, which I'll review separately - held us all rapt, with really excellent roleplaying and tense drama building to a suitably tragic climax. More recently, the Little Town of Hamlin adventure worked out the same way.
The system plays fast enough that it doesn't drag online. Since we play online, that's a big deal for us. It's clear enough to provide solid information about what's going on, while allowing both players and GM room for flexibility and innovation. We could get as mechanically loose or tight as we cared to without ever straying outside the bounds of what the game supports.
It's much harder to make a game about normal book engrossing than it is to make a game about people with super-powers of one sort or another engrossing. Powers are obvious: they readily distinguish characters from each other and from their environments. Normal people differ more in degree than in fundamental kind, and their challenges are lower-keyed. AFMBE provides enough detail in resolution to distinguish marginal success from full and narrow failure from catastrophe. And there's just something unexpectedly engaging, at least for my players and I at this point, about struggling for survival and humanity in the face of such unnatural challenge.
I look forward to playing this a great deal more.
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