Game 1: A Session Report

By vintagekd, in Zombie Apocalypse

Posted at

I'll preface this session report by saying that I went very light on the rules for this. I ran it as more of a story engine than a mechanical RPG, even more so than RAW. Negative dice were plentiful enough in terms of failures, but I would dole out stress based on the situation more than the dice. I played with five PCs only one of which had played an RPG before. Everyone enjoyed themselves and wants to continue, and I told them we'll start to get a little more mechanical/consistent on the stress and damage tracking on players and enemies (though they rolled a lot of doubles...) anyway here it is in the form I sent to them. I'll edit in some context, since you aren't all familiar with my neighborhood/town. Also, we are in the south so guns are readily available. I changed the place names to generics. Many of us work or have worked at the local hospital. The players and relationships are below as well. I escalated the disaster pretty quickly. About 2-3 hours passed in game and at the table.

Me

K - My Wife

C - Old Coworker/Friend

J - Old Coworker/Friend

M - Old Coworker/Friend

C2 - Sister

S - Brother In-Law

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So after dinner, you guys all but witness a nasty car accident and go to investigate. A truck hit someone in the road and lost control flipping end over end into one of the nearby yards. Someone else was clearly ejected from the vehicle. EMS and Fire Dept first responders showed up within minutes. They cover the person in the road almost immediately. They start working on the driver and the ejected passenger while local residents gather around to see what is happening at a safe distance. They soon cover the person in the yard as well.

* My house in a very small town with clear blocks and EMS/Fire Dept are only a block away. I played it as them clearly hearing and responding themselves.

At this point a girl from the "Murder House" pretty much sneaks up on me while I'm observing the scene and attacks me. K tries to act, but freezes up momentarily. C2 manages to pull my attacker off, but not before she takes a nice chunk out of me. The EMS/Fire workers quickly try to restrain her (the attacker) and see to me, basically shoving me in the ambulance as quickly as possible and heading toward the local hospital.
* The murder house is just a house down the block that looks unsavory and constantly has different people in and out. Lots of busted 80s model cars in the yard.
At this point you guys head back to the house, but not before noticing the "yard body" stand up and start pulling at it's sheet and people moving to help them and get them back down so they can get some care. You start to hear screaming and a lot of general chaos from that area during the next 20 mins including some gun fire and more screaming vehicles.
You guys spend the next 15-20 arming up with what you can find, calling families, and hopping in the cars to head to C's. Traffic is jammed up around the armory on the way into town and C being the excellent driver that he is manages to get the explorer stuck a little. After two attempts to push him through the area J gets him out and you guys continue on the back roads to C's.
* The PCs are now armed with 3 pistols, a few clips, a pocket knife, a baseball bat, a Mjolnir Replica and a Captain America Shield Replica, and 5 steel tipped pointed walking sticks.
When you arrive, there is an unfamiliar truck in C's yard and the door is kicked in. J, C and M cautiously rush in (that's a thing) to find a body with a shotgun wound to the chest right inside the door. Kid 1 notices you guys come in and warns his Invader Dad that you guys arrived. He's armed with the shotgun C keeps loaded for home defense. After yelling that all C's stuff belongs to him since he paid for it (child support payments...), M tosses something inside at the bedroom door where Invader Dad is taking cover causing him to discharge the weapon harmlessly. J immediately takes this opportunity to rush the other bedroom where the kids are and smack Kid 1 around a little, who had Kid 2 "held hostage". C takes several shots into the bedroom hitting/startling Invader Dad enough for him to drop the shotgun. Invader Dad falls back farther into the room and picks up an empty pistol while C and S enter the bedroom. S picks up the shotgun and shoots Invader Dad in the head like the cold blooded murderer he is. Too many video games I guess. C is a little pissed about this...since he wanted to take the shot himself...
* History of bad blood between Invaded Dad and Step Dad -C-. C has A LOT of guns and ammunition.
Meanwhile, in the living room, M notices the guy laying on the floor beginning to stir. As he tries to roll over and sit up M attempts to get any human reaction from him he can, but when he gets none he pops the guy in the head.
* Rolled well to notice the movement and got to act before he managed to get up. Lots of blood with a hole in his chest...clearly shouldn't be moving around.
J calls his family again and finds they were in a car accident at a local intersection. Major accident, but minor for their part. When you arrive there were several Zombies milling around trying to get at people in cars. There are several cars in the middle which clearly collided with force and many, many more stuck and in minor accidents from trying to get through the intersection.
J and M move up to take them out but get the attention of the first one. M drops it with a headshot. J climbs up on the hood of a nearby and takes some close range shots from relative safety dropping the second. They begin unloading his family and gear from the van.
While this is happening the rest of you notice a group of five zombies coming for you. You start firing. C drops one. S manages to drop two with a single shot (They were massed up and he rolled triples, but wasn't used to the kick of a the high powered rifle and took some stress). C2 and K wound several with some wild shot from pistols at "long range" (for a pistol). Another drops from a barrage of fire as K moves up firing with the Cap Shield and Mjolnir with her. After the shots miss due to the extra weight she smashes the last attacker with Mjolnir and manages to get behind the shield for protection, but wasn't strong enough to push back. S moves up and jams one of the pointed walking sticks right through the zombies neck and watches it slump to the ground.
* My Avengers replicas are pretty sturdy, but aren't real weapons obviously. The hammer has some weight and appears to be a solid build weighing about 10lbs and the shield is about 10-15lbs fiberglass. It would hold someone at bay, but would probably take alot of damage or break if a person fell on it...mostly it's just fun to picture rather than being realistic...
After everyone takes a moment to recover you head toward the Hospital and Business Park looking for C's Wife and I. When you get to (Big Local Intersection) it's total chaos. There are zombies everywhere. Cars abandoned. Several smaller accidents. There is a (My Town) Ambulance crashed through the front of (Local PC Repair Shop). You have to proceed slowly, but there are clear paths through the madness. K notices one of those milling around near (Repair Shop) is wearing a "Not Infected" tee shirt and jumps out of the vehicle and heading that direction.
*I had a Zombie table one of you posted here (thanks it was very helpful) and rolled a 66 for "15 aware zombies" and just took that to mean "Total &@^% Storm" in this instance.
**I used the resources in this thread https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/143573-unplanned-events-groups-zombie-generator/ Thanks to Panic and the other contributors there (and elsewhere on these forums).
You guys leave her to her presumed death without much thought and carry on toward (Business Park) through the (Nursing Home) parking lot when you hear a HUGE explosion on the other side of the hospital. You can see the roiling black smoke in the light of the flames over the top and sides of the building. It's about 9PM.
* K got rail roaded a bit and basically committed suicide at the end of the game. She wanted to go look for me at the hospital (which is rational for her), but things got bad quickly so the other vetoed her for now. She didn't feel like she got to participate the way she wanted. This was my fault I'm sure (I haven't GMed much at all), but I explained that it was generally going to be a group consensus on the next "scene" and it just had to be accepted at the time and act in that scene. Geographically the group progressed from destination to destination based on what was closest from my place to the hospital area. I'll write her back into the next session. Should make for some fun since she was left for dead with no thought.
Edited by vintagekd
Posted at

Awesome write up, thanks for sharing! Looks like your pcs covered alot of ground in the space of one session, was that down to you running your session as a story? Did you tell them that they were moving to these locations or did they make these choices of their own accord? Only reason I ask is that I'm having trouble getting my pcs to move beyond the initial starting location when we play, they just keep on choosing to barricade whatever location they're in making it hard to move them on to other locations.

Posted at

They made the choices on their own. I think it had more to do with them acting as they believed would if a crisis were to happen. They took very easy to the player vs character knowledge aspect. One player wanted to get to his guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. One player wanted to get to the hospital since that's where I was going. Another wanted to collect/check on his family. They came up with compromises on how the story could go so they could stay together as a group like telling the one player's family to meet at the other's players house, which gave me a story point to have them stuck in traffic and needing rescue.

I could have had more random moments between my town and C's place, but our back roads are pretty sparsely populated and I wanted to keep it to the scenes of interest for the characters. Once they take care of their immediate needs than they will have to deal with more of the randomized encounters.

There were plenty of dice being thrown around, I think I mainly went easy on the assignment of stress and tracking stress on specific enemies. I also changed how and where I assigned stress. If they made an attack from range and they got a negative die because they were worried about their family than I might give them a mental stress if they had uncancelled results. If dice can be added for a physical roll based on mental/social circumstances than some of the stress should be given to those categories in my opinion, especially when taking physical stress doesn't make sense.

Once they get some downtime they'll have to make some difficult rolls on how they feel about what they saw and who they murdered. Were they still people, etc. Right now they are running on adrenaline I'd imagine, but they'll need to reflect on it at some point.

I'll be trying to get Session #2 together for next week and I'll be sure to continue to report.

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One of the scenarios in the book has military rounding people up and taking them to camps for protection. One of these forced situations might be good for your PCs. Making time pass without much incident and having them run out of food or something could work as well. It shouldn't be too difficult to turn a fortress into a prison. I always like to read the sessions, so I'll be curious about what you come up with.

Edited by vintagekd