Hi all... I have a group of friends who love to play Pathfinder and have been doing so for more than 20 years. I just started becoming an avid boardgamer about 3 years ago, but RPGs always seemed a bit too difficult for me. I recently bought TEoTW:ZA to kind of bridge the gap between me and my group because it is a genre that I am really into and the system seemed pretty easy; however when I bought the book and read through it, I was kind of lost as to how to actually run the campaign. Their pathfinder books have very detailed campaigns about every step of the adventure whereas this book leaves a lot to the imagination.

Any ideas and how to go about developing a campaign? Thanks!

Set up a timeline of things that happen. And create location agnostic events-events that could happen anywhere and arent fixed to specific location. Then just let the players do whatever they want. You can herd them in the direction you want by blocking roads with more zombies they can fight and such.

One idea I had was to give them a really good reason to be somewhere by a certain time, like there is a evacuation taking place in a nearby town in 10 days.

I'm a big fan of zombie boardgames and video games, there can be a lot of inspiration found there. Honestly although playing as yourselves in your starting location like the game suggests could be neat I'm thinking of running it differently. I'm thinking of running my PCs through the missions that you get in State of Decay which is an excellent zombie survival game. I'd have the players just returning from a two week camping trip to find zombies roaming the camp sites and a few survivors hiding in the nearby ranger station.

Zombie Apocalypse is a very easy game engine, but it certainly leaves a lot of the details up to you. The advantage of such a loose system is there aren't that many rules to remember. The down side is you need to be able to improvise to fill in the gaps during play. Compared to d20 v3.5 (Pathfinder) which is all crunch, all the time. Crunchy systems give you all the answers (OK, most of the answers) in the books, but they also have many more rules to keep track of because of it. It's a matter of tastes, really. It sounds like you already know you don't like Pathfinder that much, so hopefully ZA's loosey goosey system will work out for you (and them.)

Regarding your campaign, no matter how much time you spend preparing, there WILL be things you didn't think about that crop up during play, so first and foremost I would focus on painting a "big picture" level for your campaign. Know everything in broad strokes, but don't sweat the details. Have a few generic stat blocks (easy zombie, hard zombie, human) that you reuse for all the NPCs/enemies that your players run into. Describe new NPCs differently, but use the same generic stat block. Don't be afriad to toss in the odd bonus/penalty die based on your description of a character/situation. Your players shouldn't notice anything, since the game puts emphasis on flavour over crunch.

Thanks everyone... Our play session is tomorrow and I think I've prepared the best I could. I'll report back and let you know how it goes.

Good luck storming the castle!