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Chapter1: Introduction (10 pp)
The book opens with a short (four page) piece of fiction; it's not bad and doesn't take up too much space. The chapter also gives a list of inspirational sources, and as you go through the book's contents you'll see that it doesn't veer to far from them, either in the game information or settings.
Chapter 2: Starship Shamblers (66 pp)
This chapter is the meat of the book as far as new rules and equipment are concerned. There are a few new skills, but they're nothing unexpected. The "gifted" character type is renamed "powered", and characters will be Powered far more often than be gifted in a typical AFMBE game. Being Powered is required to obtain abilities related to the new techs (as I call them): biotechnology, cybertechnology, and nanotechnology. Depending on your setting no one to everyone would be powered. Having one of these techs is a prerequisite to purchasing the abilities that the tech provides, such as dermal armour, regeneration, data and skill chips, etc. Weapon grafts are available for those who want razor fingers or guns hidden in their forearms. These rules to work out the cost of these weapons are effect-based, though there are some abilities, like burst fire, that aren't covered. Having a certain type of tech may limit what qualities and how many levels of a quality you can obtain. Many of these techs, qualities and drawbacks can also be used by zombies, who also get a smattering of new Aspects.
Rules for making alien races are given, but they’re mostly a process of coming up with default qualities and drawbacks that the race has and coming up with an overall cost for the racial package. Nothing too special, but it’s workable. There is a Robot quality that is notably different, though.
Psionics are here and are largely the same as in Witchcraft or Armageddon, but in streamlined form. There is only one skill for each psionic ability, not separate skills for power and control, and defensive uses of psionics are skipped. The psionic abilities that you can choose from include the ability to harm or heal bodies, clairvoyance, remote viewing, mesmerism, pyrokinesis, telekinesis, reading minds and communicating telepathically.
There is a list of new equipment, ranging from general spacesuits to the Crown of Thorns, which forces the wearer to experience their own personal hell (Queen of Angels is in the list of inspirations). There are also many new weapons to destroy zombies and the living alike. Vibroweapons, energy swords, monofilament flails, flechette guns, blasters, portable rail guns and antimatter grenades are just some of the toys provided. They can be modified in various ways, such as jacking directly into you, security settings, homing projectiles and more. Armour includes personal force fields, inertia shields and so on. Many of the weapons aren't huge improvements on modern weaponry, but the book does give some advice on how to make them more lethal if you'd like. Equipment is given a style code, making it easy to limit choices to gear that's appropriate to biotech or space opera settings, for instance.
Point-based starship construction rules let you design spacecraft (if you’d like to own your own, you get a certain number of points when you buy the Starship quality). Suggestions for mecha and power suits are given but feel rushed. They’re built by buying various “builds,” which modify a base ship type and are similar to qualities and drawbacks for characters. Builds include size, weapons, FTL capacities, onboard AIs, sick bays and the like. The construction rules are vague in places; what's the size of an "average cargo ship", for instance? It’s not given in any absolute sizes. You can make pretty much anything you want up to the size of a town as long as you can deal with the lack of details and flexibility in some places. Stealth, for instance, can be bought at two levels, one which makes you invisible to sensors and one which also makes you invisible to the naked eye. No imperfect stealth that just gives a penalty to attempts to detect you, and all stealth systems must be turned off to fire weapons. Similarly, it's not mentioned if teleportation systems operate through defensive shields. This is definitely a system devoted towards making starships, and isn't a truly generic vehicle construction system.
The complexity of rules for starships in action are at the usual Unisystem level, so you won't need to keep track of velocity vectors in three dimensions or how many burn points you've spent. All in all, it leans in a somewhat cinematic direction. Damage tends to wreck ship components before it destroys the entire ship, which can make for some good tense fight scenes, although it would be nice to know how long it takes to jury-rig damaged components in battle.
If you want to hack into someone’s network, there are of course rules for this. They’re of the old-school Gibsonian jacking-in variety, with futuristic firewalls that can fry your brain if they’re powerful enough. This set of rules is surprisingly short, only five pages or so.
The final rules section in this chapter is environmental; dealing with vacuum, high- and low-gravity situations and radiation.
Finally, the chapter closes with hints on how to set up a science fiction campaign and some technobabble reasons for zombies to rise in a science fiction setting. SF is an extremely broad genre with lots of possible assumptions, so it’s important to think about how you want to set up your particular game.
Chapter 3: The Cybered Dead (20 pp)
This chapter and the following five are all settings to set your slaughter in, based in part on various works of science fiction. The Cybered Dead is what many people consider to be “classic” cyberpunk, with street samurai, data jacks in the neck, cyberpsychosis and katanas. Of course zombies show up as well, but on the whole this feels like a Unisystem take on R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk game.
Chapter 4: The Cycle of Death (18 pp)
This is the most interesting, original, and hopeful setting of the bunch: the world confronts a manufactured oil crisis, succeeds in making effectively limitless energy and ends up something like a semirural nanotech-powered hippie utopia. No, really. Sure, there are zombies, and because of the overall technological level available to PCs they’re pretty powerful, but on the whole this wouldn’t be a bad world to live in, certainly compared to most Deadworlds. I have no idea why it has a Mad Max-inspired intro illustration, though.
Chapter 5: Cyber Marines and Death Scenes (18 pp)
The Aliens film is the inspiration here. Unlike most of the Deadworlds in the book, it’s more of a short-term mission than a long-term setting. Go to the colony, find out what’s going on, get out with what you can. Aliens and zombies are both waiting for you, of course.
Chapter 6: Virtual Armageddon (18 pp)
Zombie Matrix! Humanity has by and large left the crappy, decaying real world to live their lives in a wonderful virtual existence. Unfortunately, it’s got zombies, created by computer glitches. Thankfully you can get those nifty Chi martial arts supertechniques from Enter the Zombie, though you’ll have to own that book to actually be able to use them.
Chapter 7: Death of the Alliance (18 pp)
The space opera setting is heavily based on Star Wars. Hoo boy is it, complete with a society of mystic knights and a dark lord who was once part of their order but went rogue. The evil empire has won due to its use of zombies.
Chapter 8: Future Shock (9 pp)
This chapter is a scenario on an isolated colony and a setting in the far future that I suppose were too brief to warrant their own chapters.
Overall Thoughts
All Tomorrow’s Zombies is on the whole a strong product, though with some flaws. The strongest is that I would rather have had the settings be more original and less like famous films with the serial numbers filed off. Granted, lots of people will probably want to play “Aliens” with zombies in it, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to pick and choose from the equipment lists to do that without devoting 18 pages to it. A few pages devoted to each of the film-inspired settings, giving hints on how to make them Deadworlds, would have left more space for rules instead of taking up half the book.
The vagueness of the rules is both a bug and feature. Cyberware, for instance, can be bought with character points, but there's no cash equivalent for those who would like to buy it later. It’s invariably going to be up to the ZM to work out exactly what technology is allowed in the campaign and exactly what it does, especially for something as troublesome as, say, teleportation. This isn't a comprehensive science fiction sourcebook; that would require far, far more space, but it does give a good amount of ideas that you can draw from to make your own high-tech settings, whether they have zombies or not.
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