I AM ZOMBIE: Field Manual RPGx. Mister Vampire: The Masquerade, Mark Rein•Hagen, hat gerade nichts Besseres zu tun. Die Untoten lassen ihn nicht los.
Total zeitgemäß – die Welt braucht ein (weiteres) Zombie-Rollenspiel von Make-Believe Games.
Welcome to one of the MOST BORING RPG announcements (and Kickstarters) in recent years!
Das Thema wurde schon VOLL innovativ ausbaldowert, aber zum Glück verwendet das Rollenspiel auch noch Spielkarten und Chips. Wow, das ist ja mal ein voll fresher Knaller, oder?
Dieses Crowdfunding-Wunder sammelt bis zum 31. July 2013 mindestens 30000 $.
„The world is poised at the brink of an abyss. The final outbreak is coming. You are leper, outcast & contagious. YOU ARE ZOMBIE…
WHAT IS I AM ZOMBIE
I AM ZOMBIE is a roleplaying game of horror and survival, set in a twisted version of the modern world, layered with secrets and enigmas. This is a world of rationality and science, not fantasy and magic.
You are a Toxic, a victim of an age-old disease, the Scourge. The cycles of your life revolve around picking up and getting rid of Odium, a by-product of that which ravages your body. Odium build-up threatens to transform you into a mindless zombie – a Skag – whilst granting physical prowess. You might half-dead, but if you control your Odium, you can retain your humanity, at least some of time.
When your Odium is high you start to rot and decay, accumulating syndromes – symptoms of various human diseases: a bad rash, blotchy skin, boils, gangrene, and even necrosis. When Odium is absent, such as after Purgis, you will look nearly human and the best possible version of yourself. For a few days you can live like a rock star.
Chasing, Killing, Eating. Who says Romance is dead?“
…
GAME SYSTEM
Forget about tedious math, complex charts and laborious mechanics. I AM ZOMBIE uses the Axiom system, which is as elegantly simple, yet as beautifully constructed as a Swiss watch. The system is designed to make introducing people to roleplaying as simple as learning a party game, while letting experienced roleplayers enjoy manipulating the system and finding the advantage.
Beginning with the approach to roleplaying championed by the Storyteller system and many popular indie games, Axiom takes everything a step further with the introduction of character cards. These make character creation fast and easy, enabling players to whip up rich, detailed and unique characters in a matter of minutes. The 112 starting character cards include human occupations and avocations, zombie Cartels, Rackets, and Lineages.
To create a starting character, a player picks 7 human cards.
That’s it. You’re ready to go.
Your attributes and skills are printed at the top of the card, and your personality and background (their advantages and disadvantages) are presented as bullet points at the bottom of the card. Grindhouse style art depicts the core identity of the archetype. Taking damage causes you to fill with Odium, represented by flipping over a card to reveal its “Zombie” side. The art on this side is far more gruesome, and your skills, abilities, advantages and disadvantages have changed to represent your heightened decrepitude.
Running a game is as easy as reading a few pages of rules, much like a board game. But unlike other simplified systems, this game is not just about „storytelling“ (although that is a big part of it). I AM ZOMBIE incorporates real game-play elements and strategic decision making. This is a deliberate attempt to bring a whole new style to the sphere of role-playing: elegant rules, simply told; giving the player a full strategic experience without being bogged down by the minutiae of slower-paced game systems.
What do I roll?
The cards come in five flavors: Social (green), Mental (yellow), Mayhem (red), Physical (blue), and Toxic (black). The game uses a dice pool mechanism that will be familiar to Shadowrun and Storyteller system fans, but on a smaller scale. Depending on your card selection and the feat you are attempting, you may roll dice of various different colors, but can have only as many successes as you have cards of that color, representing your potency in in that area. You want to make a roll? Take bunch of D6 and roll them. You got 5s or 6s? Good, they’re Successes. You’ve got 1s? They subtract from your Successes. Get more 1’s than Successes and it starts as a botch but can end as a disaster.
To determine how many dice and of what colour to roll, refer to the three traits (made up of attributes and skills) listed at the top of each card. For example, a player wants to bash a door down, and the narrator asks him to make a roll. The player is using his strength and body weight to break through, and because you always roll a combination of two traits, suggests that he roll Strength and Vigor. The Narrator agrees. The player counts up the number of times either of these two traits appear in one of his card stacks (see below), notes the cards’ colour (probably some red and some blue), and rolls 3 dice for strength, 2 for Vigor (a total of 5). The player rolls 3 Successes and 1 Botch. In this case, an aggregate of 2 Successes is enough to knock the door down. If the player hadn’t just failed, but had rolled more 1’s than Successes, things would have got really messy. Sometimes, this would mean their opponent would get some extra dice for their retaliation, but in this instance the narrator would be free to get creative (and lets face it, we love it when they do).
Card StacksA character is kept in three stacks of cards, in any combination you desire (5/1/1, 3/3/1, 2/2/3, etc). As your character develops and learns to better harness their infection, you will add more cards, up to a current maximum of 15 (more powerful cards will be added in the future as supplemental decks). Players can swap their cards between scenes or in low-stress situations to adjust themselves for anticipated events. This compels players to be creative and strategic during play, and in their selection of new cards. Tactics and strategy are vital if players want to survive and flourish in I AM ZOMBIE.
Note: If you don’t like cards, we have a traditional character sheet you can use. If you don’t want to buy cards, playtest versions of ALL the cards can be downloaded for free. With the Axiom system you get to choose which rules you want to play with and which you want to ignore.
Bump Chips
Bump-chips are not required to play I AM ZOMBIE, but they add additional level of strategy and fun to the role-playing experience. There are three main reasons why:
1. They’re an intermittent reward which the narrator can use to gently push players towards how they want them to play: good roleplaying, intense storytelling, and clever puzzle solving. Running a game can be like herding cats, Bump Chips are your catnip.
2. Players love game advantages, it give them more fine control over the game and it adds yet another layer of strategy on the game play.
3. Bump Chips provoke a whole new kind of game play, one centered around real human emotions and situations. The remind good roleplayer to express their character emotions instead of just their words and thoughts, and encourages the other to at least try. You’ve never experienced anything quite like Bump Chips.“
– I AM ZOMBIE: Field Manual RPGx product description
Zombie Cartels (Vampire Clans, Werewolf Tribes, etc.)? Wow! Hier wird tief in die kreative Trickkiste gegriffen. Doof, dass die World of Darkness mittlerweile anderen gehört, oder?
Sehr großzügig, dass man auch „traditional character sheet“ verwenden kann. Dennoch findet das Zombie: The Gathering-Sortierfest ohne mich statt. So einen an den Zeitgeist anbiedernden Totalausfall habe ich schon lange nicht mehr gesehen. Wird voraussichtlich ein Hit?!
Möchtegernzombies und/oder Jünger der reinen Church of Hagen bezahlen ihren Ablass (das Field Manual) bitte hier: I AM ZOMBIE: Field Manual RPGx …
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