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Amazing masterpiece Zombie Toolkit!
Ashame not many people know about it, I think its because of the name, almost like its not spelled correctly :)
Best money Ive ever spent!
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There's a lot packed in to this, what with an introduction to the town of Summerfort (which is intended to be the home base for a whole series of adventures) along with some of the prominent citizens as well as the temple of an evil cult to investigate.
The town is a nice prosperous trading settlement, and there's an attractive if not very useful map - it's a bit small and nothing's labelled, but it looks nice. The organisation is well-described, though, and you get a real feel for the place in a few short pages.
The adventure part is straightforward but atmospheric, and establishes some background for further adventures as well as being quite gripping in its own right.
This should serve to get your Ingenium campaign off to a flying start.
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To start with, the design premise is intriguing: an adventure based on random rolls designed pretty much on the fly during the course of a convention. Having actually done this, albeit in a much less structured way, I can tell you it means the game master doesn't get much sleep until the adventure has been run!
Using a loose interpretation of the Æther core ruleset, modified to suit the setting chosen for this adventure, the situation is quite simple. A wild wood in Romania, around 450AD (but in an alternate history that provides for somewhat more advanced technology) is the home of an Eater, a deranged human being whose powers derive from certain unpleasant dietary habits. Naturally locals give his tower a wide berth, but for various reasons - wolves, bandits and lawmen being on their trail - the party find themselves in the area and likely short of resources...
What is provided here is more of a framework than a complete adventure. There are notes on character generation, and how the Æther system is tweaked for this setting. There are some thoughts on what the party is doing there, and how they might interact with each other as well as with other inhabitants of the forest. There are game stats for wolves and bandits, along with suggestions as how to use them. Finally, there's a plan and quite detailed room-by-room descriptions of the tower which, it is assumed, the characters will end up investigating. Now it's over to you, pick up these pieces and run with them.
This is suited to the GM who likes one-off adventures and who is quite comfortable winging it rather than having everything planned in advance; and for a group which enjoys such a session should prove enjoyable - perhaps as a welcome break from a long campaign, or when nobody has time to prepare an adventure. The underlying concept is fun and may well prove an interesting exercise at a convention, something a bit different from merely signing up to play in an adventure that sounds interesting or that is a system you want to try out.
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It was a great little product that helped me create a great unexpected traps.
My players never expected a falling bone parts of skeletons.
It gave me some life threatening some ingenious traps.
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This short piece is more of an adventure outline than a full adventure, yet it is designed to embed characters firmly in the underbelly of Wellstone City. The situation is simple: the Cross crime family has a couple of problems. Someone is snitching various low- and mid-level operatives to the cops, with enough hard evidence that convictions stick. And someone is siphoning off their ill-gotten gains and laundering them in such a way that they cannot track it. Initially reluctant to let the matter out of Family hands, the characters are called in when the crime bosses realise that they don't know who to trust. This could be the big chance for the characters to make a name for themselves, maybe even be invited to join the Family! (And it's well known that turning down a job offer for them can blight your prospects...)
Whilst there is considerable atmospheric detail about what is going on, at least in respect of the money laundering, the investigative process - such as leads to follow - is left to the GM to put together, possibly introducing NPCs of their own and nods towards future events, or it can be abstracted to a single die roll... bit risky, as if the roll is flubbed, what happens to the adventure?
There's good material here, a few interesting people (who may or may not survive, depending on how the characters interpret their instructions) and a couple of nightspots than you may well want to make regular locations in your game, and it's all very atmospheric. The assumption is that your characters are determined to make their living on the wrong side of the law and want to get involved with the leading crime family in town... yet, if your characters have other ideas or your game concept is different, you could take the material and twist it to your own ends: maybe a police procedural following up some of the evidence provided by the snitch are led to the money laundering operation. Whatever you decide to do with it, it's going to require some thought and development before you can run it... but it's an excellent 'seed' to start you off.
(It's the fact that you will have to build your own investigative process that gives this 4 rather than 5 stars...)
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This is a merry romp of an adventure, best played as a one-off as character survival is (intentionally) quite unlikely. Mix zombies with a stereotype of an American summercamp, stir in a little Native American lore, stand back and watch the fun!
The set-up is simple. Take a remote and isolated summercamp with 60 youngsters and slightly older camp counsellors, raise a crafty old Native American warrior as a super-smart zombie and... you can guess the rest. In this book you get a basic sketch of the campsite and a few details of the structures and other stuff there. If you like more detail, I'd recommend a look at Fabled Environments's Summer Camp, which would be ideal for this adventure. (Indeed, if you hunt around in the Fabled Environments listing on here, you can buy it in a bundle with this product!)
Whilst you can, of course, generate your own characters, a bunch of stereotypical camp counsellors are provided and are the recommended player-characters for this adventure. Will they defeat the threat? Will they keep the kids safe? Can they contact civilisation for help? Or will they become zombies themselves? In best zombie-movie style, this is up to you and your players...
This is pure escapist zombie fun and to be treated as such. A good game to let hair down with, to enjoy for an evening, perhaps as a break from more 'serious' gaming! Well-developed set up, pre-generated characters that are realistic enough to imagine but perhaps not quite real enough to care about, all the ingredients for a classic zombie adventure.
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I went in wanting to love this game, and at first Ithought I would. Character creation was fast and intuitive. I started to run into trouble when I tried to work out my character's capabilities in comparison to the sample combat. There were too many blatant contradictions in the rules to figure anything out. Specifically, the armor tables list a defense value but later, a deflection value is mentioned, and neither are worked into the sample combat. There are also disparities in the general trait list (shield training). I just had a hard time determining how the game was supposed to run, and for a rules-light game, that is a fatal flaw.
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For more discussion about Savage Worlds and other games, please visit my blog at www.solaceofsavagery.wordpress.com
Red Blizzard is a 29 page adventure for Savage Worlds released by Silver Gryphon Games. The adventure is location based and setting neutral.
The core story of Red Blizzard revolves around the pc’s getting stranded at a large mansion in the middle of a snow storm. The mansion becomes the stage for a series of events that play out between the pc’s and a family of werewolves that reside at the house. The tale takes on a Turista’s like spin as it becomes clear that the lycanthropy struck family is harvesting meat.
The mansion is fully mapped and keyed and descriptive text for the players is shaded and written in a different font to make it easy to spot. The rest of the adventure is clearly presented and is arranged in such a way as to make it easy to pick up and play with minimal prep required.
The story is presented as a modern horror piece but it would be very easy to change a few minor bits of descriptive text to place the events in a variety of settings and times.
I like this adventure. It’s perfect for a one shot and it’s possible to drop it into different settings by changing some of the flavor text. Even replacing the central antagonists, the werewolves, wouldn’t be too difficult. This is a nice module to have in the arsenal.
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This Savage Worlds sourcebook is packed with information on running a game in the zombie apocalypse/survival horror genre - a "zombie kit" for SW games. Many options and possibilities are provided, many of them based on popular tropes from zombie movies, films, and fiction - the cause of the uprising, the attributes of zombies (slow vs. fast, intelligent or unintelligent, etc.), the aspects of survival, and more. While most subjects don't get more than a paragraph or two of attention, there is enough of a springboard to help the GM develop the apocalyptic world he truly desires.
The book includes sections on fighting zombies (with lots of info on different types of weapons and tactics), a very rich scenario section (which includes scenarios set in different time periods), a "Zombinomicon" of different zombie types, and an adventure set during the American Civil War.
This is an excellent treatment of the zombie genre that is well-organized, and filled with great horror artwork. While best used for Savage Worlds, a lot of the material here would be useful for inspiration for any RPG, and it's very reasonably priced.
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A great collection of room traps for Savage Worlds or any fantasy RPG (with a bit of conversion). These traps are rated by ease of detection and disarming as well as lethality. The traps range from mere inconvenience (such as the Endless Hallway) to utter carnage (such as the Hot Box). The fantasy art is very good, and all traps feature humorous musings from a master dungeon architect as an added bonus.
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WHAT WORKS: I'm a sucker for a magic system with some flavor, and this one has some good flavor. The character generation is FAST, and there are a ton of option for customizing your characters by mixing and matching the Three Words, as well as the vast array of Talents (with an additional 30 Talents available in a free sourcebook).
WHAT DOESN'T WORK: The bestiary just isn't very inspiring, due in part to the avoidance of common fantasy monsters combined with the lack of art. If you're going to go off the beaten path, that's fine, but pictures always help. There are only hints of a setting in the book, and the two factors mean it falls a bit shy of the promise from the great cover piece.
CONCLUSION: The lack of "spark" in the bestiary and lack of a setting aren't a deal breaker, especially given how easy it would seem to be to customize the rules, adding new Talents and Professions, maybe even races and certainly monsters. The system shows a TON of promise...hopefully it'll get the kind of support needed take it up that notch to truly capture the "epic" feel the cover evokes. Well worth checking out the PDF at a minimum.
http://mostunreadblogever.blogspot.com/2012/02/tommys-ta
ke-on-ingenium.html
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Zombies are great opponents in video games. Easy targets and programming their AI is a snap. It isn't a problem if they have a habit of bumping into walls after all. They're convenient monsters in movies. Not only do they symbolize the collapse of modern civilisation into mob violence (an increasing fear since the seventies) but they're one of the few monsters where convincing make-up for them isn't that hard or expensive to do. There have even been a couple of good zombie books. But me, I've never felt any urge to play in a zombie apocalypse, particularly not a Romero apocalypse. I never would have picked this up except as part of one of the disaster bundles. Which is pretty appropriate when I think about it. Still, this isn't a bad deal for the price. All Flesh Must Be Eaten mines the same territory but much more expensively and most of Zombacalypse is useful for any game system. The best part of it is that in the short scenarios that take up over half of the book, most of them don't in fact require you dedicate the whole campaign to zombie survivalism. That's a good feature for those GMs like me, who aren't necessarily Romero fans. Zombie babies are kind of cool...
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I probably wont play this as is, but will use it as a base for some d100 gaming. As a freebie I think it's a great little piece for bouncing story ideas off.
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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: This 8 page PDF is a "random events" chart designed for Wellstone City that can be used with any deck of standard playing cards (which are standard stuff for Savage Worlds). It is notable in part because many of the "randon events" can have HUGE implications on the campaign, like your own faction sending a sniper after you, or your rivals trying to recruit you as a double agent. The events are divided by suit, with a specific event for each card, although Spades/Hearts and Diamonds/Clubs use largely the same events with major/minor tweaks to them.
WHAT WORKS: Based off of a playing card deck makes the PDF incredibly simple to use, especially for folks on a printer budget. So many of the events having the ability to turn things on their ear is very much a plus in my book.
WHAT DOESN'T WORK: Given how big some of the events can be, and how closely they are mirrored in the Minor/Major scale, drawing once per scene seems excessive, especially when you factor in the "Joker" rule that can put multiple cards in play. I did note a few typos that made it into the final product. The PDF price seems a little high, *but only in relation to other Wellstone City/Silver Gryphon Games products*.
CONCLUSION: Great concept, but then I love random roll/draw charts, and the scale at which this chart works is very nice, with some real game-changing options present, which can lead to a series of double-crosses and and the like. A great idea for a great setting, adding an element of chance that can affect the game in minor ways (finding $20 on the street) to major ways (having the FBI offer you the chance to take down the Russian Mafia from the inside, or the CIA turning on you mid-op with an assassination attempt, for their own reasons). Especially recommended if you feel like your Wellstone City game is lacking a certain spark right now.
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This is essentially a toolbox for game masters (and probably players) to draw upon when creating, running and playing their zombie apocalypse games. That seems entirely appropriate for a Savage Worlds supplement, which is essentially one giant toolbox! Zombacalypse covers all the expected areas, including the origins of zombies, fighting zombies, and generally surviving the end of the world. It is well written, laid out logically, and easy to read.
What is very cool, is that a lot of this info is not system specific – it is just detailed discussion on the given topics, making it a versatile resource whether you play Savage Worlds or not. There is also a large “bestiary” of different zombie adversaries. The last twenty or so pages is an example setting and adventure set during the American Civil War – which I enjoyed a great deal.
This is a great addition for Savage Worlds players, or anyone that wants good, solid ideas for their zombie apocalypse campaigns.
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