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The Complaint (Just One)
I have one significant complaint about this product: I wish it had been published in landscape orientation, so that the screen would be as high as the AFMBE rulebooks and the booklet would shelve alongside them and not stick up. If Eden ever does a revised version of this, I hope they'll consider that as a possibility.
Now on to the rest of the review.
The Screen
The screen consists of four letter-sized panes of reasonably sturdy cardboard. On the player's side, there's Christopher Shy artwork and a design that suggests a '70s movie poster. It's technically competent, because Shy just plain is a good artist and knows how to use his tools, but it's not particularly engaging, at least to me. Since I run my games online, it's not like my players are seeing it anyway. My interest is mostly about what's on the other side.
What's over on the GM's side is an excellent collection of tables. My preference is to run games without having to look much up in the rulebooks, and if possible not to open them at all. I don't think that this screen quite makes it possible, but it sure comes close. There's the outcome table, noting consequences of rising levels of success for combat, artistry, complicated tasks, and social skills, and the fear table, and the little chart for endurance loss (one of my favorite features of the Unisystem, as noted in my review of the core book), and miscellaneous combat charts, covering the sequence of actions, armor, weapons, modifiers for combat task difficulty, and the armor value and damage capacity of inanimate objects. This is all laid out in the same basic clear typography as the rulebook, with gray shading for alternate rows of each table to make tracking across columns easier.
I ended up looking up a few things in play even with this screen, but not many: specific zombie aspects, mostly. If I prepared a crib sheet about what the aspects mean, I very likely could run the game with just the screen and those notes.
The Book Apart from the Adventure
The book is laid out just like the rulebook, so my comments there about typography and all apply just as much here. A lot of the art seemed dark, and I admit to at first thinking, "Ah ha, must have been prepared on a PC without Mac gamma in mind, I'll just turn up the brightness", until I remembered I wasn't looking at a PDF. I'd like to see the brightness cranked up in future printings or editions. That criticism aside, I must say that it was all quite good for mood, and I ended up swiping some imagery for my own games, which is as useful as it gets.
The last two parts cover topics of general interest.
The first is titled New Rules, and that's just what it is There's a bit more about campaign level, a full-blown point system for character generation (combatible with the one in Buffy and other Unisystem games), rules for zombie PCs, and a grab bag of new qualities for PCs and aspects for zombies.
The zombie PC rules look good, and the examples offer up distinctly different styles from each other. I'd like to try these out; I suspect that with good players (such as I'm blessed with), some very interesting drama could ensue.
The new qualities are all good. Age covers unnaturally long lifespan in a tidy sort of way, and Essence Channeling let characters pull out Essence at varying rates. Likewise, the new aspects are a good bunch. There's a generalized Vulnerability with some useful example cases, fun movement powers (flying and wall crawling, which immediately made want to rip off that wonderful scene from Exorcist III), essence sense (which would sure make life more exciting for inspired characters), a new means of spreading the love (Nobody Loves Me, which amounts to not spreading the love, I guess), and odds and ends: being bound to some controlling entity, the ability to feed on animals, fragility, and toxic vomit. All of them look like they've got their place in fun zombie encounters.
The second is titled Zombie Survival Horror, and is one of those great genre essays of the sort that make the AFMBE supplements such a special treat. It's not long - just a couple of pages, in fact - but it covers various meanings of "survival" in survival horror, useful ways of collaborating with players in the design of a game, and tips on effective horror in play. I am always pleased to see some discussion of the ways in which supernatural menace acts as a metaphor for real-life experience, and that's here, with thoughts about how to draw on the underlying real experience to make the fictional horror scarier and more dramatic. Good stuff!
The Adventure: Coffee Break of the Living Dead
Here Be Spoilers
This was my first experience actually running AFMBE. Scheduling problems chopped my planned group of players apart, so I ended up running it twice, and both times were deeply satisfying for me and my players.
The adventure presents a generic city, and a generic business environment within it, laying out an office building and detailing the bank and jewelry business that use some of it. It comes with a set of pregenerated characters...
Hmm. Let me pause to say some words about pregens here. Like a lot of gamers who pride themselves on creativity, I have tended to look down on pregens as leading to less satisfactory, less deeply engaging play, than games where the players build up their characters themselves. My experiences with this and other AFMBE play require me to say that I was wrong. I've suspected it for a while, but now I've got direct experience to say so. My players took these sketched-out characters and brought them vividly and dramatically to life, with precisely the sorts of distinctive personalities, invented touches of background, and sense of depth that I'd expect from custom-made characters, and because we had these templates to use, we got set up and playing very quickly.
The adventure is day 1 of a zombie invasion, unleashed by an accident at a biotech facility on the outskirts of the characters' city. They start their day with some nuisances occasioned by the cleanup (and cover-up), go through their morning, take the eponymous coffee break, and then it all goes to hell. There's a stuck elevator sequence, tension and peril in darkened offices, desperate dash for survival, and - both times I ran it, at least - death at the hands of those whom the PCs might have expected to save them. Yes, there's room for a final ironic shot in the style of Night of the Living Dead.
The adventure is really well laid out, with nuggets of scenes to toss at players for them to chew on and clear organization between scenes. Characters have limited choices, and each case is covered in all the detail I needed to run it. (Darn it, neither of my groups went down into the basement, which is a shame, as that looks fun.) There are very good maps and excellent notes on the behavior of the various NPCs in each scene. (The maps lend themselves to recycling, I'm thinking, too, since a big part of the point is that this is a generic sort of location.)
I'm very big on atmosphere; my sense of whether a session went well hinges mostly on how well it felt like what we were trying to do, regardless of whether the PCs actually succeeded gloriously or not (except insofar as that is itself part of the atmosphere). Well, this went great both times, with steadily mounting tension - what the characters hear while trying call for help really marked a threshold of normality's collapse, I think - and a very full feeling of normal people caught up in something they're totally unprepared for. Fear and endurance both played good parts here, providing mechanical support for the nature of the straits the characters had fallen into.
Both groups of players promptly clamored for more when it was all done. I was actually a little surprised at just how happy they were with their characters' ironic deaths. What the heck, though - I had fun running for them, too. I actually took a number of liberties with the adventure, reducing the overall number of zombies to reflect the small number of PCs and moving some encounters around, but I could do this easily precisely because the adventure laid out such a good foundation for me. I could improvise and tweak thanks to Ben Monroe having done all the heavy lifting beforehand.
Conclusions
I very highly recommend this, particularly to people who may be new to running this sort of horror. You'll find great friendly help here. And the screen is good for GMs of any kind. This is, just like the rulebook, eminently practical.
Braiiins. I mean, gaaaames. Lots of gaaaames here.
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