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War of the Dead is intended to be a series of 52 linked scenarios, each taking roughly a single session to complete, starting with the PCs discovery of the first outbreak and leading to… well, wherever it leads. It’s not finished yet, and I’m only reviewing the first 13 scenarios which form War of the Dead: Chapter 1. But before we get to the scenarios I should cover the large chunk of the material that comes before them. For starters we get an introduction to the basic zombie. No concrete answers are given as to how they are reanimated, or exactly why they moan when they sense the living, but things like their decay rates, their senses, how to destroy them, mechanics for the speed of infection (“one bite and you’re hooked” to steal a line) and how effective amputation is as a treatment are all covered. Honestly, the dead get enough broad detail for GMs to gauge how to use them in other scenarios. People familiar with Romero’s “Dead” movies or Kirkman’s “Walking Dead” comics will find a lot of this familiar, but it’s good to establish up front the basics of how these particular undead things work. Some mystery is left for GMs to discover of course, but since this is a scripted campaign I won’t hold too much of a grudge; GMs following the campaign might want to know more, but they don’t need to know more.
Okay, but what kind of cool perks do the survivors get? And the answer is: none really. This is one of those grim, dark, seemingly hopeless zombie settings. No magic, no cool powers, just limited ammo and rapidly dulling melee weapons. Survivors can spend a benny for one use of a combat-related perk they don’t already have (but meet the prerequisites for), but that’s one less benny to soak wounds with later. And if you don’t soak all the wounds from a zombie bite attack, that means you’re doomed to join the rotting citizens’ brigade in short order (and the book spells out just how short that order is). There are also a handful of new Hindrances and Edges fitting to the setting; they could easily be ported to other genres or settings for those who just like the H&E, but this isn’t like the huge selection of game changers found in some other Savage Worlds products.
As for the campaign itself, it’s a scripted campaign. Meaning that characters aren’t expected to wander the world following their own whims and interests (a “sandbox campaign”), but rather that events draw them into a pre-made story. Some groups despise scripted campaigns, and to them I say move on. There’s some good material here and room for players to “wander around” within the script, but I’m not going to try selling a vegan on veal or a hater of “railroad games” on a scripted campaign. For the rest of you however….
The setup is fairly straightforward. The PCs are all travelling on the maiden voyage of a new massive cruise ship (think a Carnival vessel or the like). Maybe they already know each other, maybe not, but once the voyage is out to sea something happens and the dead begin to rise. The PCs are assumed to quickly group together as the situation on the ship deteriorates. Along the way the players will (assumedly) come together as a group, face off against the dead and learn the basics (“shooting ‘em in the head seems to work”, “don’t let them bite you!”, “it’s worse than that, he’s dead Jim”), and have to deal with a rapidly worsening situation.
I really don’t want to go into spoiler territory here, but I feel it important to touch on a few issues. Firstly, there’s a progression to the campaign. Characters are introduced, die off, and new NPCs arrive. There are plenty of opportunities for the initial PCs to die, and new PCs to take their place. And players should probably accept that their characters will in fact die, and probably die often. This campaign is brutal, possibly too brutal even, so don’t get attached to anyone. On the flipside, the very nature of the setting is such that surviving PCs (and NPCs) are likely to be the best equipped survivors around, giving new PCs a valid reason to join them. All too often in my games I saw players forming cliques, or going solo, because it was “in character”. Doing that here will soon result in a screaming, messy death.
Having said that, while this is a scripted adventure with lots of NPCs, they really do feel as plot devices meant to aid the PCs rather than as characters meant to drive the story. For example, early on there’s an NPC, Jason Kirkman, that handles security on the vessel and serves as a tool for GMs to guide the action. Normally in RPG supplements and adventures, there’s a trend for NPCs to outshine the PCs and have “script immunity”. Here though (and throughout the rest of the book) I got the sense that Kirkman really is intended just as a tool for GMs to help corral the PCs together and fill in places where the PCs may be weak. And script immunity is wonderfully absent. In other words, those familiar with scripted adventures in the style of the old World of Darkness or Tribe 8 (i.e. the PCs stand around while NPCs outclass them and do all the cool stuff) will probably find these scenarios to feel very different.
Secondly, there’s quite a bit of freedom in each individual part. Make no mistake, there are some things the PCs probably shouldn’t be able to change, but even still I never felt like the players’ actions were truly meaningless or that they couldn’t go off the rails at least somewhat if they really wanted to. To help GMs fill in some of the gaps in the adventures (e.g. a decoy mission in a nearby town) a few of the scenarios include random encounter tables that present a decent variety of ideas. Many of these random encounters also provide opportunities for new NPCs or PCs to join the group; I was surprised how much simply naming a character in a random encounter made my imagination take off and make the “throw away” character seem more alive and the situation more perilous.
Finally, War of the Dead walks the line between “gonzo zombie horror” and “dramatic zombie horror” pretty well. There are some moments of gruesomeness that are over the top to the point of being almost comical, but then there are other parts that come back down to earth and drive home the cost this situation has on one’s humanity. Case in point: religious NPCs. Early on we’re introduced to a whack job old woman, crying for “expiation” and forming a panicked mob of converts who believe her cries that it’s God’s Judgment that’s raising the dead. Later we meet a priest who’s just trying to help people survive; no judgment or anything, just a desire to aid his fellow man. I’ll be honest, taking potshots at exaggerated stereotypes of religious folk in horror stories is old hat (and in this case a homage of sorts to Stephen King’s “The Mist”), but I really appreciated also having someone be both a religious authority figure and a sympathetic character. Touches like that make me feel like the NPCs are more thought out, and draw me (and hopefully my players) deeper into the story.
Style: The layout is dark but easily readable, making it feel like a horror adventure book should. The art is fairly generic zombie apocalypse stuff really and yet relevant to the text. I can’t tell how much of the art was based on the text and how much of the text was written to match the art, but the art is pretty good nonetheless. The editing however makes me think nepotism was involved at some point. There are so many lone consonants, misspelled words, and the like, that I seriously doubt the editor did more than give a single read through before passing it on. We’re talking stuff that a simple spell-check in Microsoft Word would’ve caught here. Which is a real shame, since the actual ideas and flavor of the text is pretty good (but I’ll get more into that under Substance). I didn’t notice any glaring mechanical errors, missing paragraphs, or other issues some RPG books wallow in, so the important (and more obvious) stuff seems to have been edited well enough. Anyway, I’m going to give it a solid 3 for Style. The art and layout are worth a higher score, but the poor basic grammatical editing pulls it down. If I was double-checking all the mechanics and found errors, I’d drop that further.
Substance: It’s good. It really feels like a mixture of Romero’s and Kirkman’s zombie stories, but probably more heavily influenced by Kirkman (Romero has more of a sense of humor in his stories, and this adventure collection is more grim and serious). I’m not a big fan of scripted adventures, but this one is good. The only really bad thing I can say is that it ends on a bit of a flat note. Not really a cliffhanger, but no idea of where the adventure is going to go next. I won’t hold that against the book, since it’s only meant to cover the first 13 of 52 scenarios, but I do think some groups would want to know. Anyway, this first collection keeps me interested in more and I think would make groups interested in continuing the storyline. A solid-to-high 4 for Substance. I think what holds me back from giving it a higher marks is that it feels like a chapter in an incomplete story. I suspect I’d give a collected 52 scenarios a much higher mark.
But what about All Flesh Must Be Eaten? You’d have to rework the mechanics of course, but if you preferred running the scenarios under the Unisystem you could. While I prefer Savage Worlds over Unisystem for basic zombie games, there’s nothing mechanically that makes one objectively better than the other. I do think that the initial information on the zombies would prove useful to anyone wanting to build classic “shambler” undead, and the random encounter tables might also prove inspiring; they’re not enough to justify buying this book, but they are good material.
Conclusion: Honestly, I’m not a huge hater of scripted adventures or a huge fan. But I like zombies, and I like a certain minimum of intellect and drama in my zombie stories, and War of the Dead actually exceeds my minimums by quite a bit. It’s a well thought out, well written (but poorly edited), attractive little story that I think groups wanting a zombie survival campaign would enjoy. I can’t wait for the next collection.
