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Review of Dead Meat: Ultima Carneficina Dello Zombie!
"You roll WHOMP when you want to kick some undead ass."
MetalMan's Review of "Dead Meat" by Sean Wipfli
The Premise:
The undead have risen from their graves and hunger for fresh flesh to satisfy their unholy need. It is the role of the players of Dead Meat to defeat the menace or simply survive it depending on how dark and/or action-oriented the GM (GoreMaster) wishes to make the game.
What Ya Get:
Dead Meat is a very quick printout as it is only a four page Microsoft Word document. You will need Microsoft Word or some other word processing program capable of reading the doc format. Dead Meat opened fine on both Word 97 as well as WordPerfect 9 in my tests. Your milage with other programs may vary.
Cost:
Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Gratis. Free.
Appearance:
Its four pages whadda want? Its text typed right on the page without any columns although it is broken up into easily read chunks with makes it a breeze to take in. No illustrations which is a shame because I think this one really could use some really gory or grotesque drawings. Ah well... its free so we'll have to use our imaginations which generally tend to be more horrific than most produced images anyway.
The Game:
All players create three different characters (body counts tend to get high) based on what the GM says the film title will be. Each character gets 7 points (each point represents a d6) to divide between three attributes. ZIP is how fast you think and react. WHOMP is roughly the equivalent of strength and GUTS is how brave and resistant to being chewed on you are. These attributes function as sort of like a dice pool that you can draw upon when required to make task resolution rolls. So you may have 3d6 in an attribute but choose to only use 1d6 of it. Your dice replenish themselves each round.
Combat is simply a matter of rolling your WHOMP (modified by any weapons you may be carrying) against the WHOMP of the zombies. Successes cause CHUNKS (the zombie equivalent of GUTS) wounds on the undead. A roll of five or six counts as a success. Average run-of-the-mill zombies are going to go down by the truckload to really prepared characters but thats okay as there are hordes of zombies and only a few players. Combat can get really fun (and deadly) when players are caught with only "wimpy weapons" that only have a small percentage chance of killing (lucky head shot). This type of situation is probably what you'd use for more of a "suvival horror" game rather than a zombie bashfest like Army of Darkness.
The "notes for the gore master" section on the third page deserves special mention and shows the influence of a very sick mind and one that many sadistic GMs would appreciate. Some quick examples: "this is always nice to trap your buffet between zombie packs" and "zombies seem to zero in one choice victim as being the tastiest." The rules wrap up with sample stats for various undead nasties and a list of films to watch for inspiration (I'll confess to seeing all the ones listed except for Let Sleeping Corpses Lie ... I need to get out more often). Games end after 90 minutes of play or all the characters have become shambling zombies themselves.
Overall Impression:
I don't think you'll find Dead Meat replacing All Flesh Must Be Eaten on your shelf, but, to be fair, it wasn't intended to be. However, if you want to run a fast-paced zombie bloodbath and don't want to fork over $30, Dead Meat is very well worth your consideration. Its fast to learn and you can easily have a game up and running within an hour. The mechanics are light (although you'll be using lots of dice) and seem to be adaptable to almost any situation that could arise in game. I'd certainly recommend giving Dead Meat a trial run with your gaming group as, by using its "film" motif, it was designed for one-off games rather than lengthy campaigns. Its a natural choice for Halloween gaming.
MetalMan signing off.
