All Tomorrow’s Zombies (hereafter “ATZ”) includes what may be the most extensive rules additions to the corebook yet in an AFMBE supplement.

Character Types

ATZ adds no new character types; however, it does rename the “Inspired” character type “Powered.” This wouldn’t be that big of a deal, except that Metaphysics points can go to the purchase of technological body augmentations such as cybernetics as well as psionic powers. While ordinary Qualities can go towards purchasing augmentations as well, this means that a truly bad-ass street samurai type will be a Powered character rather than a Survivor as one might expect.

Nonhuman Races

Like Dungeons & Zombies, ATZ creates nonhuman racial packages by combining Qualities and Drawbacks. Unlike Dungeons & Zombies, ATZ doesn’t include many new special abilities especially to create these packages, per sé, instead relying upon zombie Aspects for that purpose. That makes rating the value of these rules a little problematic, since their usefulness relies in large part upon what other supplements the GM owns. That said, the scope of zombie Aspects in this book plus the corebook should provide a good start.

New Skills, Qualities, and Drawbacks

The new skills focus on handling high-tech equipment, such as cyberware installation, starship operations, and robotics. In a rules addition particularly appropriate to the genre, skills can default to related skills at a -2 penalty; i.e., a starship pilot can use Piloting (Starship) in place of Systems Operation (Starship Sensors).

The book offers several significant new Qualities for the purchase of bioware, cyberware, nanotech, and starships, as well as Qualities to make the PC psionic or robotic. The Obligation Drawback adds a useful catch to all the high-tech goodies those PCs are packing.

Cybernetics, Bioware, and Nanotech

I’m not entirely comfortable with the way ATZ handles physical augmentations, although it probably makes sense from a game balance standpoint. The book ranks augmentation types as, from lowest to highest power, bioware, nanotech, and cyberware. With the exception of robots, who may have both nanotech and cyberware, no character may possess more than one variety of augmentation – the more powerful version neutralizes the less powerful version in the same body. This limits the role augmentations can play in your ATZ settings, particularly if transhumanism through genetic engineering plays the sort of key role that it does in, say, Blue Planet, or if you want nanotech’s “little builders” to be capable of the magical-to-godlike effects some sci-fi authors attribute to them.

In any case, the augmentation types serve as prerequisites for a respectable menu of powers, with many powers having multiple possible prerequisites. Where multiple augments can offer the same power, the power ranking of the augmentations frequently set the upper limit on the power in question (e.g., enhanced attributes). The chapter includes 19 powers total, and given the aforementioned power levels, it should come as no surprise that they skew much more toward cyberpunk than transhumanism. I should point out that many of these powers may be used as zombie Aspects, which in turn makes them eligible for use in the creation of nonhumans. In that sense, at least, the book does provide some more options for alien species, albeit not in a very obvious manner.

New Zombie Aspects

Speaking of zombie Aspects, the book includes only four of them: one that makes them resistant to disruption field guns, one that makes them vulnerable to stun guns, and two new non-flesh sources of food – radiation and solar power.

Psionics

ATZ streamlines the rules first printed in WitchCraft, combining raw power and finesse into a single score. The trade-off works fine for me, given the amount of extra space this allows. Powers include biokinesis (heal/harm), ESP, mesmerism, pyrokinensis, telekinesis, telemagery (illusions), and telepathy. Of the reprints of psionics so far – the others being Pulp Zombies and Terra Primate – I’d rate this as the best combination of powers.

Sci-Fi Equipment

Although light on individual items, the chapter does manage to cover a nice range of tech levels, from flechette bullets and pulse rifles to blasters and energy swords, throwing in such goodies as vibroweapons and monofilament flails along the way. A nice selection of ranged weapon modifications appears here as well. It’s not all weaponry, of course – miscellaneous equipment includes Star Trek standbys like the scanner and the teleport anchor, a couple of spacesuits, and a few examples of nanotechnology. (Nanogel, which reshapes itself into complex devices as needed, is a particular favorite of mine.) Armor gets short shrift, sadly, the only four examples being inertia fields (as in Dune), nanoweave armor, personal forcefields, and reflective (anti-laser) body suits. Those hoping for power armor are in for a disappointment, as such technology only gets a nod in a sidebar in the following chapter, suggesting the use of the Robot Quality at reduced cost to simulate it.

Starships

The book sports an efficient starship creation system that covers everything from a snub fighter to a town-sized mother ship. While the armament options are a little sparse – three sizes of guns (turrets optional) and one variety of torpedo (homing optional) – the system factors in a wide range of ship aspects, from speed and handling to emergency measures and cargo space. Furthermore, the options cover starship features from a variety of sci-fi sub-genres, including cyberpunk “jacked” controls, interstellar travel with and without FTL drives, and Star Trek-style teleporters and cloaking devices.

As with power armor, the book will disappoint those eager for detailed mecha rules; however, the section offers a serviceable alternative using the starship creation rules with reduced costs for land-based mecha travel.

Perhaps the best advice in the section comes in the sidebar regarding whether to bother with the starship creation system in the first place. If the ship is little more than a background detail, such as the warship Sulaco in Aliens, working out its stats hardly seems worth the effort.

Expanded Vehicle Rules

While some sci-fi authors may concern themselves with the minutia of interstellar travel, ATZ wisely chooses to cut most of that away in the name of space concerns (pardon the pun) and fun while still offering a few nods to “hard” sci-fi. The latter comes mostly in the form of dealing with ship speeds, and then mostly in a narrative sense. Once you get down to ship-to-ship combat, however, it’s space opera all the way, with rules for stunts like loops and barrel rolls more suitable for aircraft than spacecraft.

The Cyberweb

Since the Cyberweb presumably would be one of the last places you’d expect to find zombies, I suppose it should come as no surprise that rules for hacking are very bare-bones. The mechanics make no allowances for the quality of the hacker’s hardware or software; instead, all of the character’s mental attributes replace his physical ones, and the average of these attributes determines the damage the hacker can do in virtual hand-to-hand combat (e.g., a hacker with an average of 4 does D8 x Intelligence in damage). Hackers attack using Perception and the highest of their hand weapon skills. Hackers can also make ranged attacks that do damage equal to the character’s Willpower multiplied by the success levels on a Perception + Guns roll. (A sidebar points out that since the stereotypical hacker isn’t likely to be a combat monster, so GMs may want to allow the success levels from a single Intelligence + Computer Hacking roll to serve as a bonus to cyber-combat.)

Hazardous Environments

This section covers the various unusual environmental circumstances that can arise in a sci-fi setting, including vacuums, microgravity, radiation, and futuristic diseases. While space combat defaults to something resembling space opera, these environmental rules seem relatively realistic with a few streamlined and cinematic options. For example, by default, microgravity involves determining whether each character is braced, unstable, free-floating, or spinning, with each state having modifiers to attacks and dodges and changes of status for making failed attacks or taking damage; however, a sidebar allows for a flat -2 penalty to normal combat moves while in freefall with microgravity skill specialization removing the penalty. Radiation, by contrast, has no cinematic option: dosages of varying levels give you increasingly unpleasant side effects, not mutations or superpowers.

Sci-Fi Gaming

Here the chapter takes a look at the overall considerations raised and challenges posted by sci-fi gaming, including the roles of technology (and technobabble), science (as both background element and problem-solver), and language. I especially welcomed the discussion of adventure scale, particularly as it relates to a zombie apocalypse – as the book points out, a worldwide disaster looses a bit of its punch if the heroes can simply leave the planet. I also appreciated the observations regarding when one-environment worlds and stereotyped aliens are appropriate as opposed to more detailed planets and cultures. The use of assorted technobabble explanations for zombies could come in handy as well.

Archetypes

The chapter concludes with four ready-to-play archetypes that do a pretty good job of showcasing the supplement’s new character creation options, even if they don’t all necessarily fit in the same type of setting:

• Alien Bounty Hunter (Survivor)
• Robotic Tutor (Survivor)
• Stimmed Corp (Powered)
• Xenobiologist (Survivor)