A bit quiet

It has been a bit quiet on the zombie wargame front at "Shelldrake HQ" since the PBB ended.

 I haven't forgotten about the zombies, and I hope to play test the "7ombie" rules and type up a review very soon.

 I also need to make some of that scenery that I mentioned last year that I need to make and didn't get around to making. Doh!

 I will have to tidy up my gaming room first, and I intend to motivate myself to do that this weekend... but there is a Japanese festival on over this coming weekend that I want to check out, so that could reduce the weekend to one day.

Anyway, I having forgotten my zombies and I hope to get something up on the blog soon.

My Zombie Campaign - what I want to do with it and where it is headed

I just thought I would take the time to ramble on about my zombie campaign and what the game objectives are.


The primary objective is simple - to have the characters survive. Seems fairly simple, but the zombies want to throw a spanner into the works.


The next important goal is to find a safe location to hole up and use as a base of operations.


 Going hand in hand with objectives one and two are collecting supplies to ensure survival - the three f's: Food, Fuel and Firearms.


With this 'under control' my survivors will begin the next phase - finding other survivors, find out what happened, and establish a colony to ensure the continuation of survival.


As part of the last one, I will have rumors in the game about safe havens, why the zombie apocalypse occurred, and even a chance to find a cure.


 Each time a survivor is found I will make a roll on an 'occupation' table to see what skills, if any, these survivors will bring to the colony. Tradesmen and health practitioners will be in high demand, but so are workers to help protect the colony and act as laborers. 

 Of course tradies and doctors are not the only skills on offer but I need to come up with a good list of skills to see what I can do for my fledgling colony.  Military and Emergency services are also very useful.


On a game side of things, I will need to make up a lot of scenery, but once that has been done I should have to spend less time on buildings etc and a lot more time playing the game.


 It might be ambitious, but I want to make part of a housing estate for suburb settings (as well as shops to go with them) and a city block or two for bigger scenarios.


 To this end I will need to make a list of useful shop types and the useful things that can be scavenged from within them. This is intended to help the survivors build their colony.


 Things like tools, clothes, power sources, food, medical supplies and so on will all need to be considered, as will the chance of other looters having already taken useful items.


Obviously not all of these things will happen at once, but I will build up to it and see where it all goes.

Number Crunching

I had a "Professor Farnsworth" moment last night.

While watching TV last night I did a bit of number crunching during the commercials and statistically my survivors wont last many more games in my "No More Room In Hell" campaign.

Percentage wise my current three survivors will be able to hit 2.4 zombies when they shoot at them a turn.

 Of the 2.4 zombies they hit, they will only be able to kill off 1.68 zombies.

 Of all the shots fired to kill this 1.68 zombies, they will attract 9 zombies per turn. (Based on a medium Zombie threat level)

 And this doesn't factor in the chance of running out of ammunition, which I have found to happen quite easily.

Why did I work all of this out? Well, I was taking a look at my "On the Road" scenario set up and trying to figure out the best way to have my characters survive the game, and it doesn't look good to say the least.

 Now admittedly I am down about 600 points worth of Survivors as laid out in the actual scenario in the rule book, so this doesn't help one bit. This is compounded by the fact that I am using the suggested number of zombies.

This means I may have to do one or more of a few things:

a) get more survivors. I don't want to use this option because I don't want to fit the extra characters into the story line I am working with just yet.

b) make the weapons stronger. By ignoring the AZ value of weapons and using the AP rating only I double my chances of killing a zombie. This means some weapons go from a 30% chance of killing a zombie to a 60% chance. I could argue that survivors know that they need to shoot zombies in the head to stop them, otherwise they probably wouldn't be survivors, but it throws a few survivor skills out the window making them useless.

c) scale down the zombie numbers.  This is most likely the option I will take. Rather than use the full number of zombies that start in some games I will reduce the starting number of zombies, and or drop the zombie threat levels down a level, so a ATL of 5 becomes a ATL of 4.

I will play test a few different options and see how they go. Hopefully they wont unbalance game play, and I suspect option c) will be the best. If I played the "On the road" scenario as it is meant to be played, then 10d10 + # rounds fired each turn zombies can show up. Not only do I not have that many zombies, but the chances of surviving what is supposed to be the second scenario in a campaign would be very low indeed.

zombies can't climb, but can they crawl?

In most zombie films and the majority of zombie wargames I have seen (all three of them! :-P ) zombies can't climb, or only one in six can climb.

 This is very useful as it means you can barricade a place to the best you can do and use ladders to get into buildings and safe houses.

 It also means fire escapes on the side of buildings are useful - I hope to be making some for some of my buildings.

But - can  zombies crawl? We have seen the ones without legs crawling - they have no say in the matter. But what about the others? Can they get down and crawl?

If they can't crawl then many other 'zombie proof' ideas come to mind, especially for you safe house/base.

Tunnels - a net work of narrow tunnels rather like those the Viet Cong had during the Vietnam war (only maybe not so many of them, or full of nasty traps) could be a great way to go in an out of safe houses you do have to say to mum "it followed me home, can you shoot it?"

Small holes in barricades could make it easier to get in and out without the need to open up big wide doors in the barricade, thus keeping some of the barricade's integrity. 

Mind you, tunnels don't help when it comes to bringing in bulky items you have scavenged, and you can't drive a vehicle through them, but they could be good as an emergency escape plan.

Disease control - musings part two

I have been doing further thinking as to this post: http://zombiewargame.blogspot.com/2011/06/disease-control.html   and I think I will set my game in the U.S. simply because of the huge number of weapons available for survivors to find.

 Both the U.K. and Australia have strict gun laws and whilst there are firearms around, they are not as abundant as in the U.S. - something that isn't cool when you need a truck load of guns to fight off zombie hoards.

This will allow me to use the new Eureka bio suited U.S. figures as well as the Marine recon figures that I have been eyeing off for a long time and haven't be able to justify getting them.

I think I will also buy a FFL figure or two from Eureka and have their story as they were in the country as part of a multi-national training exercise when the apocalypse started.

 Having said that - I might take the advice of those that made comments on the initial post - set the games anywhere in the world as part of a larger campaign and play different settings as the zombies spread around the world.

 I most likely would use Australian and U.K. games for more of a military driven game simply because of the firearm laws.