Content

Foreward

More of an introduction of the author rather than of his book, by Serena Valentino, creator and writer of the comics Nightmares & Fairy Tales and GloomCookie.

Chapter One: Introduction

The standard “about the book” and “about the author” information, some inspirational material, and a damn fine bit of game fiction to set the mood.

Chapter Two: Prey No More

New rules and rules options practically spill out of this chapter, starting with two new methods for character creation: random attribute rolling and combining point allotment categories (i.e., no separate pools for Attributes, Skills, Qualities, etc.). The former helps eliminate min-maxing but may produce characters of wildly different ability levels, while the latter could be a min-maxer’s paradise without careful GM control.

New skills include Agriculture, Camerawork, Persuade, Repair (Type), and Scavenging. I’m not sure exactly how Camerawork factors into the “After the Fall” theme, but the other four certainly do.

No less than sixteen new Qualities and Drawbacks follow, most of which have obvious applications in a post-apocalyptic Deadworld. Bag of Tricks ensures that the character will always have the right tool for the job, Jury-rigging gives him the ability to cobble together all manner of improvised gadgets, and Jack of All Trades lets him use any skill he doesn’t know with an effective rank of zero. Black Thumb and Green Thumb make the character the bane or blessing of the survivors’ precious crops. Physical Disability (One Eye) may hurt depth perception, but the eye patch is sure to make the survivor look like a post-apocalyptic badass. And Suicidal Tendencies – complete with a self-damage table for various methods – adds a fitting Drawback for those characters driven to the edge by life in a world of the living dead.

The Inspired get some new options of their own. GMs wanting supernatural-heavy settings can make Miracles and/or Essence cheaper. And the Inspired themselves get seven new Miracles with a post-apocalyptic flair. Bountiful Harvest guarantees food in the bellies of the survivors, and Pride of Lions creates an inspirational sermon to put fire in those bellies as well. Find the Path guides the Inspired through the post-apocalyptic wastelands to his goal, See Beyond the Veil tells him where the zombies are along the way, Walk through the Valley hides him from the zombies’ senses, and Sanctuary prevents the zombies from violating his shelter once he arrives. Finally, if all seems lost, Martyr allows the Inspired to sacrifice himself in order to temporarily boost the abilities of his surviving comrades.

Of course, what good’s a book about a battle for survival without new combat rules? Accordingly, the chapter reprints the optional rule allowing defenders’ Success Levels to subtract from attackers’ success levels that first appeared in the WitchCraft Chronicler’s Shield, along with a new rule having attack-defense ties go to the attacker rather than the defender, albeit with reduced damage. I’ve always been a fan of the former for its breaking of the “Glass Ninja” effect inherent in the standard Unisystem rules, and the latter seems like a nice addition as well, if a minor one. I also like the new rules options for guns, making them either less lethal (by removing the extra damage they normally cause) or more realistic (by factoring in gun noise, heat, and recoil, as well as the danger of inexperienced shooters).

Four new archetypes round out the chapter:

• Grizzled Vet (Survivor)
• High School Janitor (Survivor)
• Tabloid Reporter (Norm)
• Local Politician (Norm)

I can’t say that I’m thrilled with the selection. I love the Grizzled Vet, with his equipment list of “Guns, Lots of Guns, Lots of Ammo for the Guns, Survival Bunker, Pick-Up Truck with Reinforced Grill, More Guns,” but the other three don’t seem to fit with the book’s post-apocalyptic theme. Instead, they appear to be showcases for some of the new Qualities, Drawbacks and skills, like Scavenging for the High School Janitor, Strong Stomach for the Tabloid Reporter, and Persuade for the Local Politician. There’s nothing wrong with these characters, really. I’d just have expected to see more Mad Max types.

Chapter Three: Making It Up As You Go

Survival in a world overrun by zombies would take a great deal of ingenuity. That’s what this chapter’s all about.

The first step in survival is finding what you need to survive, obviously. The chapter introduces some simple but quite serviceable rules for scrounging useful items out of the remains of civilization – it’s easier to find parts for a car in a car lot than in the woods, for example, and anyone without the new Scavenging skill is likely to have a tough time of it either way.

More clever still are the new jury-rigging rules. Now anyone with an appropriate skill can try to MacGyver-up whatever they like from whatever materials they’ve managed to scrounge… but the more improbable the jury-rigging, the tougher it’s going to be to pull off, and the level of success on the jury-rigging roll determines how often a roll must be made to check for a malfunction. So, even if you somehow manage to cobble together a horseless carriage out of a wash tub, a vacuum cleaner, and assorted produce, there’s a really good chance you’re going to break down while making your getaway from the zombie hordes…

The Post-Apocalyptic To-Do List rounding out the chapter makes a fantastic resource for any post-apocalyptic setting, zombies or no zombies. “Making Juice” covers the ins and outs of producing electricity, including such valuable factoids as the gradual deterioration rate of stored gasoline and the effectiveness of corn husks and prunes in making ethanol and methanol – with the by-products serving as animal feed. “The Machinery of Life” explains how survivors might acquire clean water, grow and store crops, and gain lighting, radio communication, and transportation – the latter including stat blocks for both a cobbled-together “junk buggy” and a cool makeshift APC with a zombie-scattering “cow-catcher.” And then, of course, we come to “The Machinery of Death”: how to keep yourself supplied with do-it-yourself ammo for scavenged weapons, or, failing that, how to produce simple homemade firearms like the pipe shotgun and the makeshift musket. Rules and stats for homemade explosives, armor, and melee weapons follow. (You twisted Dead Alive fans should be overjoyed to learn of the inclusion of stats for a “zombie mower”…)

Chapter Four: More Implements of Destruction

Despite the name, this chapter includes a variety of new equipment, not just weaponry. Weapons are front-and-center, however.

The Phillips and Rogers Model 47 Medusa revolver makes an obvious choice for survivors, with its ability to fire over 25 types of ammunition. Some of the other selections appear less practical and/or silly, such as the dart rifle (tranquilizing zombies?), the potato cannon, and the spear gun. Melee weapons range from the ultra-mundane chain and cleaver to the anti-shark bang stick. (Oh, and those who can’t get their zombie mower to work may just settle for a single lawnmower blade as an improvised machete.)

Keeping a post-apocalyptic settlement safe probably would require some defensive weaponry as well. Again, the book provides: everything from bear traps and caltrops (although giving the typical zombie a foot ouchie seems pretty pointless) to AP and claymore mines.

The selection of new vehicles mostly sticks with the basics, like airboats, hot-air balloons, inflatable kayaks, snowmobiles, and various sizes of prop plane. The combat-ready steel-reinforced skateboard makes an amusing addition, however, and “Monty Haul” GMs now can provide their players with one of the legendary Black Helicopters, appropriately souped-up with alien technology from Area 51. (No, I’m not joking.)

The general gear section gives all new meaning to the word “miscellaneous” – avalanche transceivers, caffeine pills, foot air pumps, GPS handsets, patient isolation chambers, portable motion sensors, toiletry kits, and more. Most of these aren’t the sorts of things GMs or players might find themselves needing prices and stats for on a regular basis, but any of them might come in handy. It’s not so much a matter of, “At last! Stats for X!” as it is, “Huh. I never even thought about stats for X! That’s kinda cool…”

Finally, the chapter moves from normal equipment to the paranormal variety: eleven supernatural artifacts. Only three of these relate directly to zombies, and some of them are very setting-specific – Anansi’s Thread, for example, is basically an indestructible, perfectly climbable thread spun by the father of all spiders. The Book of the Dead’s here, too, as a nod to you Ash fans who haven’t picked up the Army of Darkness game yet. It allows characters to learn Metaphysics more easily, which is fine… except that if you just have the AFMBE core rulebook, you really don’t have a whole lot of non-Miracle powers from which to draw. In any case, these could work well in conjunction with Enter the Zombie, Pulp Zombies, Dungeons & Zombies, or even (if you’re allowing for working Indian magic) A Fistful o’ Zombies.

Chapter Five: Envy the Dead

One criticism frequently leveled at AFMBE is that it’s not suitable for a long-term campaign. While this entire supplement counters that argument in various ways, nowhere does it get more specific than here.

Discussing campaign types is the first order of business. How do you establish the thematic and mood differences between a 28 Days Later-inspired game and a Resident Evil-inspired game, for example? An insightful look at campaign styles follows, discussing the sorts of campaigns resulting from various combinations of Narrative vs. Episodic and Character-Driven vs. Story-Driven – e.g., “Narrative Character-Driven” results in a “deep immersion” campaign.

The chapter next gets around to covering something I found lacking in the AFMBE corebook: the implications of the source of the zombies in any given setting. Specifically, the chapter divides zombie origins into the Paranatural, in which the Rise is the only aberration in a world otherwise governed by normal physical laws, and the Supernatural, in which the zombies are only part of a world that may include various forms of magic, miracles, or even (horror of horrors!) other types of monsters. I thought the corebook played way too fast and loose with these two concepts, combining them in ways that this section specifically advises against – pitting Inspired heroes against the alien-spawned zombies of “They Came From Beyond,” for example.

Wrapping up the chapter in a big way, the text presents the 5-step Heirarchy of Needs developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow – Physiological Needs, Safety, Love/Affection/Belongingness, Esteem, and Self-Actualization – and how survivors of the zombie apocalypse might meet each of them. Along the way, the section includes mechanics for starvation, dehydration, and insanity.

I found the latter particularly clever, combining accumulating Madness Points from blown Fear Tests – and the various forms of mental problems produced at increasing Madness Point levels – with a temporary insanity mechanic activated when Essence drops below the current Madness Point total. The result resembles a sort of inverted version of the Call of Cthulhu insanity mechanic without quite so much of a mental “death spiral” – increased Madness Point totals don’t make Fear Tests more difficult, but they do make temporary insanity more likely. Temporary insanity, in turn, invokes a penalty to Fear Tests for its duration, which makes increased Madness Points due to blown Fear Test rolls more likely. In other words, after picking up some Madness Points from seeing a two-headed mutant zombie, seeing a chopped-up cat isn’t likely to drive you over the edge if you aren’t there already… unless you see the latter while still temporarily insane from the former, in which case you just might be frazzled enough to blow what should otherwise be an easy Fear Test. I absolute love this system and am quite tempted to export it into other Unisystem games.

Chapter Six: Blowin’ Up Dead Guys

Generally speaking, zombies in AFMBE settings form a pretty unified lot: you die, and you turn into a statistical duplicate of every other member of the shambling horde.

This chapter changes that just a bit for GMs wanting to add more detail to the zombie “life” cycle. It does so by the brilliant application of actual scientific facts regarding what the chapter divides into four stages of corpse decomposition – Fresh, Bloat, Decay, and Skeleton – with modifiers to the setting’s “standard” zombie model applied to each stage. Zombies at the Bloat stage will be weaker than their Fresh counterparts, for example, but will stink badly enough to hinder any mortal in the vicinity. And I love the suggestion for making the players think they’re facing slow-moving Romero zombies, then revealing to their dismay that their foes are actually fast-moving zombies just coming out of rigor mortis!

Of course, all of this assumes (1) that the GM wants to be bothered with such details, (2) that scientific facts even apply, and (3) that the GM wants his zombies to eventually rot away.

Which brings us around nicely to the new zombie Aspects presented in the chapter:

• New Weak Spots:
  • Sacred Item: an item carried somewhere outside the creature’s body animates it.
  • Mirror, Mirror: the thing can’t stand the sight of itself.

• New Special Aspects:
  • Blight: the zombies render the soil infertile.
  • Boneless: the zombie can squeeze through tight spaces like that freak on The X-Files.
  • Bulletproof: resistance to the impaling effects of firearms.
  • Death Mask: through some form of trick, the zombie looks and smells like a human to other humans.
  • Doppleganger: the zombie takes on the appearance of its last victim.
  • Gremlin: the zombie produces its own EMP field.
  • Hive Mind: the zombie horde acts as a single entity.
  • Liche Lord: this brighter zombie can control his lesser kindred.
  • Locust: lacking human flesh for food, the zombie can make due with anything organic.
  • Sticks Around: the zombie resists the aforementioned affects of decomposition.
  • Will of the Dead: the zombie can mesmerize its prey.

The selection here does what any new list of powers should do: it adds creative powers that aren’t just retreads of those previously published. And I take fiendish glee at the thought of the chaos produced by a hive-minded zombie horde that shorts out electronics, eats everything in sight, and leaves the land barren in its wake. Now that’s a zombie apocalypse!

Chapter Seven: Sunset Falls

Okay, so now you know the ins and outs of how survivors can survive the zombie apocalypse, and you know some more about the zombies making that survival more difficult. Now the book offers up an example of a fully-detailed survivor enclave – in this case, one based in an abandoned prison that’s gone from keeping prisoners in to keeping zombies out.

As anyone who’s seen Romero’s zombie movies knows, humanity is its own worst enemy during a zombie uprising. Accordingly, the chapter includes four factions within the prison and introduces an extremely clever Clout mechanic for them to use.

Factions can have Clout ratings in Aggression, Security, Luxury, and Survival, with Aggression opposing Security and Luxury opposing Survival. If the leader of one faction wants to convince the community to take a particular course of action, he rolls his Intelligence plus his faction’s Clout rating in the relevant area – the greater the success levels, the greater the community’s enthusiasm for the project. But, if a different faction opposes the course of action, the opposing faction’s leader resists with Intelligence plus his faction’s score in the opposing Clout rating. The side with the greatest number of successes wins. Naturally, a faction’s Clout may rise or fall depending upon how well the idea it promoted actually pans out.

Here’s the really brilliant part, though: the greater the difference between the opposed success levels, the harder the feelings between the factions involved, and the greater the chances for potentially disastrous infighting. So, the Survival-minded Preacher’s impassioned call for more crops might completely blow away the Aggression-oriented hip-hop singer Silva Dollar’s drive to raid the National Guard Armory… but Silva Dollar’s embittered faction just might subsequently decide to blow away the Preacher’s group in a far more literal sense.

Just to keep things on an uneven keel, the prison’s inhabitants have yet to become self-sufficient, leading to a list of wants and needs falling under the four Clout headings to which the PCs might lend their support… and thus risk earning the ire of one or more opposing factions in the process.

The chapter lacks a map of the prison – which would have been nice, assuming the GM wants to stage a full-blown zombie siege – but it does feature a fairly comprehensive description of the buildings and rooms, and both major and “stock” NPCs get full stats.

As to those major NPCs, I have a bit of a problem with the Inspired character known only as the Preacher. Well, not a problem with him, per sé, but rather with his place in the community. The man has the Touch of Healing and Divine Sight, and can call down Holy Fire. I’d think this would give him a rather more prominent role than just the leader of one more faction, not to mention having some enormous implications for a setting that otherwise appears to be of the aforementioned “paranatural” variety. Instead, his abilities don’t even warrant a mention outside of his stat block. I can only assume that as of the default time of the PC’s arrival, the Preacher has yet to display his supernatural prowess… but even then, I think at least a brief mention of what effect such a display would have on the community is in order.

Four adventure seeds finish off the chapter, only one of which deals directly with zombie combat. The rest stick admirably to the theme of the setting: conflict among the human survivors. I particularly like the idea of a murder mystery within the walls of the prison, with the culprit clearly having been living rather than undead. Just imagine a community of paranoid, well-armed semi-strangers, trapped by a sea of zombies and dealing with an unknown murderer in their midst…

Chapter Eight: The Future’s So Dark

This is it. This is where the rotting rubber meets the road. Can AFMBE serve as the basis for an interesting, sustainable, long-term campaign?

As a long-time skeptic on that very point, my answer after reading these new Deadworlds is: “Oh, my, yes.”

Croatoan Rising

My main concern about AFMBE campaigns has always been that a setting based around a single type of adversary with a single set of abilities would bore me to tears, the sort of intra-community conflict exemplified in Sunset Falls above notwithstanding. “Croatoan Rising” neatly nukes that concern by making the zombies the most prevalent monsters in the setting, but definitely not the most important ones.

Ten years ago, the same sort of dimensional rift that led to the disappearance of the Roanoke Island colony in 1587 – with the only clue left behind being the word “Croatoan” carved on a tree – happens to the entire world. Half of the population vanishes overnight, and those left behind find the world inexplicably merged with Someplace Else… someplace where the sky holds no stars, the sun is a large, angry orange, the dead rise as zombies… and where Things Man Was Not Meant To Know have begun to stir.

The book leaves the exact nature of the latter – the setting’s eponymous Croatoans – up to the GM, although it suggests Lovecraftian horrors or cousins to Clive Barker’s Cynobites as obvious choices. The chapter includes stats for not just the zombies, but also one tentacular non-zombie horror and one possible breed of Croatoan of the Cynobite-like persuasion. Zombie Aspects could produce any number of other such monstrosities. And as with so many standard Unisystem games, the free download of WitchCraft includes even more – not to mention a full range of Metaphysics that this extradimensional apocalypse may have awakened.

This setting overflows with potential, mixing “standard” zombie survival horror with the best of Call of Cthulhu or Kult. I’d play it in a heartbeat.

Digging Our Own Grave

The spread of a virus that reanimates the dead as stupid-but-strong zombies leads to a nuclear conflagration, with various nuclear powers trying to “burn off the infection,” so to speak. In the aftermath, a horrified world abandons warfare for a new era of peace and cooperation.

Unfortunately, the zombies don’t sign the peace agreement.

As a result, civilization exists inside massive, high-tech walled “cities of the future” right out of World’s Fair science pavilions or sci-fi anime movies connected by Maglev trains and V-TOL airline service. Zombies and human outcasts share a Road Warrior-like wasteland outside these new utopias, while Advanced Zombie Military (AZM) units equipped with advanced ceramic armor and laser rifles do their best to keep the zombies in check.

The setting combines opportunities for governmental intrigue, “normal” post-apocalyptic survival of both the nuclear and zombie varieties, and Aliens-style “bug hunts” both inside and outside of the city walls.

Unlike the previous setting, the zombies are the only unnatural adversaries, and all of them are of the same sort by default, although one of the two adventure seeds suggests an encounter with newly-mutated undead. Other than that minor complaint, I do wish the section had included stats for the high-tech equipment carried by the AZM Soldier character archetype.

On the Ground Floor

A fantastic display of “What if…?” thinking about the results of a particular sort of zombie uprising – specifically, what would people do if the zombies couldn’t climb? The answer – if you happen to be downtown, that is – should be obvious: destroy all the stairs to the ground floor and take to high-rise living on a permanent basis. The humans have largely turned primitive and tribal, linking skyscrapers with primitive bridges and relying on an elite caste known as the Scavengers – an ideal role for PCs – to dare the zombie-infested ground below to find vital supplies.

Speaking of the setting’s caste system, it includes the Unique: those possessing supernatural powers. Given the paranatural explanation for the setting’s zombies, this seems to violate Chapter Five’s warning about mixing the paranatural with the supernatural.

Despite the clever thinking behind the setting, I can’t really imagine using this one long-term. It’s basically the standard zombie survival horror scenario with one interesting twist. The novelty just wouldn’t last for me.

Necropolis!

A Deadworld practically custom-made for use with Pulp Zombies, this one features a mad villain who uses an ancient mask of the Egyptian god Anubis to make himself the Dark Pharaoh of San Francisco circa 1928, cutting the city off from the outside world with a sphere of darkness and raising an army of leaping, khopesh-wielding zombies to enforce his will. Only the desperate refugees gathered in Golden Gate Park and the mobsters controlling the North Beach area dare resist the Dark Pharaoh… along with whatever pulpy do-gooders your players decide to throw at him, of course.

Like the settings from Pulp Zombies, this seems more like a single adventure – or, at most, a single campaign – than an ongoing setting. Like “On the Ground Floor,” it shows some creative thinking on the part of the author, but also like that setting, there’s not enough variety here to keep me interested for the long haul.

Make Space

And now we come to my favorite of the lot.

By the turn of the 22nd century, huge self-sustaining space biospheres orbit the Earth in answer to the overpopulation of the planet’s surface. Then the appropriately-named Romero’s Comet pays the planet a visit for the first time since the Jurassic period, spewing radiation that kills the occupants of the space biospheres and raises the dead on Earth as stupid but nearly unstoppable zombies who seek to kill the living out of instinct rather than a need to feed. The irradiated soil not only sustains these creatures, but also ensures that anyone dying on Earth will join their ranks.

The U.S. government becomes a military dictatorship and eventually gets the zombie problem under control… sort of. Those who can earn or afford citizenship live inside walled Safety Zones. Those who can’t live in squalor outside those walls, left to their own devices against the zombies.

Overcrowding in the Safety Zones and food shortages caused by the ecological damage wrought by the comet make the status quo untenable… but then scientists figure out that the radiation won’t have stuck around in those orbital biospheres.

Unfortunately, the dead up there became zombies, too. And while they aren’t uniformly as unstoppable as their earthbound counterparts, without the radiation to sustain them, they do hunger for flesh. Worse still, while the terrestrial zombies are all of the same sort, the space zombies display a wild variety of weird mutations. So, it’s up to the heavily-armed and highly-trained Z-Marines to go up there and clear out the biospheres for human re-habitation.

This setting shares many of the same elements with “Digging Our Own Grave” – the fortified communities surrounded by zombie-filled badlands, the futuristic timeframe, and the potential for Aliens-like zombie “bug hunts.” Given the added variety of undead foes intrinsic to “Make Space,” however, it really makes “Digging Our Own Grave” seem much less interesting. The mutations of the space zombies give the GM the ability to throw in just about any sort of Zombie Aspects he likes to keep the players off-guard. (And besides, unlike “Digging Our Own Grave,” “Make Space” actually includes stats for the relevant high-tech equipment.)

And of all the plot hooks in the book, I think I like the one for this setting the best. The PCs are all undesirables outside of the Safety Zones who decide to try to take a biosphere for themselves. This leads to a trek through the wastelands to find and repair an abandoned space plane, fighting off attacks from bandits and zombies all the while. Then it’s off to an unclaimed biosphere, where they must clear out hordes of zombies possessing unknown mutations using far less equipment and expertise than the standard Z-Marine squad. And speaking the Z-Marines, after finally securing the biosphere, the squatters may have to face off against them when they arrive to claim the biosphere for the government. Now that’s one hardcore sci-fi zombie campaign!

Silver

In perhaps the strangest of the Deadworlds, a breakthrough in nanotechnology allows human subjects to live disease free and heal at remarkable rates. Unfortunately, the nanobots do their job a little too well, fully repairing the subject’s body after death and taking over the brain. The resultant regenerating nano-zombies don’t need food, but they bite nonetheless to spread their nanobot infection, and wireless networking allows them to work as a team.

To make matters far, far worse, the nanobots eventually upgrade their hosts into Mechanites, undead creatures with superior physical and sensory powers and with machinery grafted on to make them akin to undead cyborgs. And these creatures spread their nanobots into human technology, destroying almost all of it and reducing humanity to an 18th-century existence.

I’m not sure whether or not I’d be interested in running or playing this setting as a campaign, despite the presence of zombies that can possess any number of Aspects due to nanobot upgrades. I would have to say that the setting presents jaded zombie survival gamers with a perplexing new challenge: instead of being able to fall back on superior firepower to hold off the zombie plague, the PCs will have little more than muskets and swords to oppose their high-tech undead enemies.

Appendix A: Surviving a Zombie Attack

For an even remotely “realistic” AFMBE campaign, this chapter will be a gold mine for GMs and players alike.

The first half of the chapter covers a full range of concerns when it comes to surviving a “conventional” Romero-style rise of the living dead: the pros and cons of various shelters, defenses, weapons, and transportation. For example, consider that fleeing to a military base for shelter might get you shot by paranoid soldiers, while holing up in an inner-city school will provide food, medicine, plenty of improvised weapons from the gym, and (as a sad fact of modern life) many of the trappings of a fortress already in place. And while it might be tempting to snag military firearms and rig up a Road Warrior-style armor-plated zombiemobile, are you really capable of keeping automatic weapons in good working order, finding plenty of ammo, and welding armor onto a vehicle without reducing its drivability and fuel economy alike to practically nothing?

The second half, a “Post-Apocalyptic Shopping List” brainstormed primarily by members of the AFMBE mailing list, proves equally useful and insightful. Some of it may be fairly obvious – lots and lots of ammo, for example – but what about extra bras? Or vitamins? Or rubber bands? Or condoms? Or diapers (which can also serve as bandages and as Molotov cocktails)? The section also includes a list of skills any colony of survivors will want to have covered – do you really want to deal with do-it-yourself dentistry?

Appendix B: The Government Handout

In one final clever touch, the book wraps up with information on how to create realistic government handouts regarding a zombie uprising to give to your players – both the subjects they will cover and the likely amounts of worthless crap they’re likely to contain. A sample handout regarding the rise of stereotypical Romero-style zombies follows, with a note that GMs can download a blank handout form from the Eden Studios web site.

Style

The art and layout seem standard for the game line – which is to say that the art is adequate and restrained and that the layout stays reasonably easy on the eyes while allowing for a lot of information in a small space. The writing both made the new rules clear and the new settings evocative. That one snafu with the weapon stats for “Digging Our Own Grave” was the only outright mistake I noticed.

And like all Eden sourcebooks, the book includes a detailed index.

Conclusion

One of the Living makes itself useful on a remarkable number of levels, from the clever scrounging and sanity rules to the practical survival advice to the intriguing new Deadworlds. It may not be a vital supplement to AFMBE, but if you’re planning to run an “After the Fall” zombie game, it’s as close to vital as an Eden supplement gets.

SUBSTANCE:

• Setting
• Quality = 5.0
• Quantity = 5.0

• Rules
• Quality = 5.0
• Quantity = 5.0

STYLE:

• Artwork = 4.0

• Layout/Readability = 4.0

• Organization = 5.0

• Writing = 5.0

• Proofreading Penalty = <0.5>