28 Months Later – Encounter 2

Meanwhile, back in the House of Weird Games (as the children’s friends have christened Chez Slack)…

I think Encounter makes more sense than Episode for these little vignettes, so I’ll switch to that.

Let’s try something smaller. It’s February 2015, and our multicoloured heroes (now dubbed respectively Reed, Blaauw, Green, and Yale) decide to raid an isolated rural settlement for supplies, in the hope of meeting fewer zombies and/or trigger-happy survivors. That’ll be a “loot raid”, then.

The tables on p. 30 tell me there are 5 buildings and two vehicles on hand. Again, I run into a problem of how to determine what buildings are, which is important for deciding which ones are worth the risk of entry; I really must check the Yahoo group for that.

To show why this is an issue, let’s look at building #1. I roll 2d6 for each possible outcome, and work my way down the list in order. Is it a church (needs a 2 on 2d6)? I roll 8, so no. Is it a house (2-7)? Another 8, so no. Is it a military base (2)? 7, so no. Is it a restaurant (2-7)? A 5, so yes. OK, so I got an answer that time, but for episode 1 I went through the entire list and got nothing for half-a-dozen buildings. What were they, then? Ruins? So thoroughly looted that it doesn’t matter? Whatever the equivalent of Obviously Dead is for a house? It also seems such a clunky way of determining building purpose that I’m sure I’m doing it wrong.

By the same process, building #2 is a house, #3 is a house, #4 isn’t any of the listed items, and #5 is another restaurant. One ruin out of five seems reasonable so we’ll let #4 be a ruin, too badly damaged to be sure what it was originally. Two restaurants and two houses; that would make sense to me as a large road, with one restaurant on each side, each with a house for the former owners.

A similar process for the vehicles shows that we have a pickup truck and a semi with a trailer.

The tables on pp. 32-33 show me that the houses would be a good place to search for weapons and ammo, but likely to have zombies, and the restaurants are likely to have medical supplies, and likely to have survivors. Hey, there’s only four of ‘em; let’s just do them all and see what happens.

The Activity Level for Zombies in a rural area in phase one of the campaign is 1, so we have 1d6+1 = 2 zombies on the board at the start of the game, one 12″ to the group’s front and one 12″ to our left rear.

Unlike Warrior Heroes, it’s necessary to set the table up for each encounter. My plan was to use my Zombies boxed game, with the box halves representing the restaurants and DVD cases for the houses, and some sheets of blank paper to be the road; but my dining room table is otherwise engaged tonight, so I’m fighting on graph paper, as you can see below. I decide that the group is moving along the road, to give them the best chance of spotting zombies early on. And we’re ready to go, having spent about half an hour setting up.

Turn 1: Zombies roll 5 for activation, party rolls 2. Zombies don’t activate as they have Rep 4. Party opts to fast move, all of them pass 1d6 and so move 12” towards the nearest building, a house, hoping to get inside before the zeds turn around and see them.

Turn 2: Zombies roll 5, party rolls 6; neither side activates. Reed and his friends have stopped a couple of inches short of the building and are checking their weapons before they go in, glancing at the nearby car and wondering whether to examine that also. I decide to save that for the way out.

Turn 3: Zombies roll 4 and activate, party rolls 3 and activates (Reed’s Rep is 5). Zombies go first as they rolled higher. The closest zombie is 15” from the party (I’m using a ruler and graph paper with a scale of 5mm to the inch, if that makes sense). The zombies should now move towards the nearest human, but the party is not making noise and is not close enough to see (zeds can only see 12”). So they’re not sure which way to go. There is a wind direction table on p. 12 so I decide to use that for each zed; one moves east and one west, 6” in each case. The one moving east gets to the edge of the “table” so I decide he stops there.

Turn 4: Zombies roll 6 vs 4 and don’t activate; party rolls 3 vs 5 and does. Into the first house then; Reed and Green move in through the door, now an inch or so away, and Blaauw and Yale flatten themselves next to the door in support, watching the nearest zed, which is now close enough to see them, but there are buildings in the way so it has no line of sight. I now roll 2d6 against the Zombie Activity Level of 1 (for a rural area in phase 1 of the campaign); 3, 6 passes no dice, so although the rules don’t actually say so, I decide we meet no zombies. Then likewise against the Survivor Activity Level of 1; 2, 6 and again pass 0d6 – the building is empty. This would be a good time to loot the house; the loot table on p. 33 looks like I should roll 1d6 vs 3 for weapons (basic number of 2 in phase 1, +1 for it being a house) and 1d6 vs 2 for surplus ammo. I roll 5 and 4, and get nothing.

The zeds now move, and continue moving in the same direction as before (p. 26). This means one moves off the table completely, so I decide he will treat it as an obstable and turn right (left also takes him off the table). The other moves forward until he bumps into a restaurant, then turns (randomly) right, which moves him closer to the party.

Turn 5: Zeds roll 3 and activate; party rolls 6 and doesn’t. Oops. Their attention is obviously distracted by looting. The zeds carry on moving as before, one bumbling up the west edge of the table and one staggering towards Blaauw. The zombie staggers partway past the car parked outside the first house before I realise it should’ve seen the party earlier; never mind, we’ll go from where it is now. There seems to be no option for zombies to charge – these are obviously the shambling kind from 1950s B movies rather than the faster and more aggressive versions recently seen on our screens.

Turn 6: Zeds roll 3, party rolls 6 – same as before. The closer zombie gets into base contact with Blaauw. I realise I should have done an In Sight test earlier, as Blaauw and Yale would have seen the zombie in the middle of last turn, but press on regardless; let’s assume they were looking into the house. It seems reasonable that Blaauw takes a “Being Charged” check, though; this results in passing 2d6 so Blaauw can fire, then prepare for melee. This is no time for subtlety, and Blaauw fires twice. Rolls of 1 and 3 on the dice give results of 6 and 8; the 6 misses, the 8 hits. Rolling 1d6 against the weapon impact (2) gives a 2 – the zombie is “Obviously Dead”. Huzzah. However, shotguns are noisy, so at the end of the turn I roll two dice per shot for the number of zombies attracted; it’s a rural area, so each 6 will bring one. I roll 2, 3, 4, 6 and get one reinforcement zombie, which is placed to the party’s left rear, 12” away, by a die roll. Zombies are attracted from anywhere on the table to gunfire, so it’s time to move!

Turn 7: Both sides roll a 5 for activation, and Reed’s group moves. We’ll duck through a side door in the house and fast move over to the first restaurant. Everyone passes 1d6 on their fast move check except Green, who passes 2d6. This gives Green 16” of movement and everyone else 12”, which is enough to get them to the restaurant, though again I have everyone pause just outside the door. The zombies meanwhile march 6” towards the sound of the guns; this means one of them turns around and moves south along the wall of a building, as they are not smart enough to open doors and move through. This is the position shown in the photograph.

Left side door breach, stack up!

Turn 8: Both sides roll 3, so a tie; neither activates. Again, Reed and friends are checking their weapons before entering.

Turn 9: Zombies 3, Reed 5; both activate and Reed goes first, into the house; only one  person can enter this turn as it’s only a single door. I roll 1, 3 for zombies and 1, 1 for survivors, so we have survivors inside. I now roll 1d6 per Survivor Activity Level, with a 4-6 meaning a survivor is placed; I roll 5, so there is one in sight. A roll of 4 shows a location of 4” away from the wall Reed entered from, and a roll of 2 shows he is 2” from the wall to Reed’s left, putting him against the opposite wall – looking out of a window, no doubt, at the passing zombies.

Dice and cards reveal this survivor is Ambidextrous, with Rep 3 and a machine pistol. I now roll an Awareness Check on the table on p. 35, and even with the extra die for recent gunfire, the survivor passes 0d6 and is completely surprised. The survivor can’t roll an In Sight test, therefore, but Reed can; I roll 5, 6 and pass 1d6; Reed is the Star, so I use the Free Will rule to change this to passing 2d6 so I can hold fire. Reed can now “Talk the Talk” and does so. Reed’s group outnumbers the survivor by more than 2:1, and he has the drop on the survivor, so his effective Rep is 7. Since no die can roll higher than 6, he must pass 2d6. The survivor rolls 4, 6 vs 3 and passes 0d6. Reed passed two more dice, so strictly speaking should open fire because his group outnumbers the survivor; I decide to use Free Will again go to the Cooperation Table. Reed now rolls 1d6 vs Rep5, passing 1d6 (as he still has +2 on the roll); the groups join, and because the player side won, this is permanent. We have a new recruit; I have brown and black pawns left, so we’ll call this one Brown.

The zombies now move 6” towards the site of the last gunshots.

Turn 10: Largely because it still takes me a lot of flipping back and forth in the rulebook to figure things out, I’ve now been playing about 90 minutes and it’s getting late, so I call it a night.

“Come with me if you want to live,” says Reed. He and his four colleagues fast move off the board to the east.

Reed gets another experience point; I decide not to bother tracking experience for the others. Reed is already Rep 5, so needs 10 points to advance to Rep 6. I also decide to roll for gender of my little band; 1d6 per member, with odd numbers being male and even ones female. This tells me that Green, Yale and Brown are female, and the others male; so be it.

28 Months Later, Episode 1

With Johann and Gottfried captured by Ekran knights, I thought I’d try an earlier incarnation of Two Hour Wargames’ house system, namely All Things Zombie. (The original version, not the later expanded rules, which I haven’t acquired yet.)

The campaign in this version starts two years after the first outbreak of zombie-ness, so with the last zombie movies I saw in mind, I decide the campaign will be called 28 Months Later and will start in January 2015, 28 months after the end of the world foretold by the Mayans, which I vaguely remember they thought would happen in September 2012. Whether that’s right or not, it’s as good a date as any.

Character creation is a snap. The star (representing me) is Reputation 5, with a weapon and one attribute of my choice; I select Boss, because it improves the reactions of the rest of my group, and a pump shotgun, because what else do you hunt zombies with? I select the red pawn from Zombies, since that’s my favourite colour.

I also get three “grunts”, whose attributes and equipment are determined by one die roll and the draw of a card. I get a Rep 5 Runt with body armour and a pump shotgun (blue pawn), a Rep 4 Brawler with a Big-Ass Pistol (green pawn), and a Rep 3 Ambidextrous character with another BAP. Imagination fails me tonight, so I shall call them Red, Blue, Green and Yellow for the moment. If they and the campaign both survive, they might get better names.

Unlike other THW games, I choose the type of encounter and the general terrain type. I decide that the group will conduct a Raid on the suburbs, looking for supplies. This and a few dice rolls means the table will have 13 buildings and 6 abandoned vehicles on it. Here I run into the first snag; I can’t figure out how the table for determining what the buildings and vehicles are works. I’d rather play than spend more time on that, though, so I decide there will be a shopping mall, a warehouse, and a group of shops – obviously we’re raiding an out of town shopping centre. (Question for the future: How does this table work?)

Using the THW mantra of “just play the game”, I again abandon waiting for the unimaginable raygun future when I might have nicely painted figures and terrain, and dig out my copy of the Zombies! boardgame from Twilight Creations (a Christmas present from a few years ago). This gives me six survivors, more zombies than I hope to need, playing cards I can use to represent vehicles, and two box halves which can be the mall and the warehouse. I pull some DVD cases from the bookshelf to represent shops, but run out of room before I get to the full 13 buildings; feh, who cares.

Next I roll for the initial zombies and their placement. It’s easy to see that I roll 1d6+5 for their number, but takes me quite some time to work out that I’m supposed to place them as if they were attracted by gunfire (p. 27 of the rules). The group of scavengers moves one full move (8″) onto the table, then a few dice rolls place zombies around them. At this point, play starts in earnest; it’s taken me 40 minutes to set up, but no doubt that will get faster with practice. And this is what it looks like:

All we want to do is eat your brains...

Turn one, and I roll activation dice for each side. The player side scores 4, the zombie side 3; this is below the leader’s Rep in both cases, so both get to move, but because the player side has a higher score, they go first. As you see from the picture, we are surrounded by zombies already, and some of them are quite close. I haven’t brought a vehicle because the engine noise attracts zombies, gunfire will surely do so, and I would prefer to avoid melee with them; so we duck into the nearest building.

At this point we need to dice for any occupants. I check the target number for the type of location (‘burbs) and time period (Phase 1 of the campaign, within a few years of the outbreak), modified by the type of building (shop) and roll two dice for both humans and zombies, trying to “pass” the target number, i.e. roll that number or less on each die. Both candidates pass 1d6, but the humans have the higher number, so we’ve met other survivors, and another quick dice roll determines there are three of them. Dice and cards reveal we have one Rep 4 Crackshot with a carbine, one Rep 2 Slow guy with a pistol, and one Rep 3 Medic with SMG. (Lesson for the future: Dice up a range of survivor groups in advance next time, write them on index cards, shuffle, and deal myself one whenever we meet a group; creating them on the fly takes too long.) The NPC side rolls for Awareness (2d6 against individual Reps) and only the Crackshot notices us coming before we’re through the door – at least the first two of us, only two can pass a standard door in one turn. His colleagues are too dazed to act.

Both sides now take an In Sight test by rolling 2d6 and trying to pass against their leader’s Rep. Both sides pass two dice, and since we’ve both passed the same number we will Talk The Talk, i.e. try to resolve our differences peacefully. Leaders roll 2d6 against Rep, both pass one die; checking the relevant table shows that we won’t start fighting, but don’t want to team up, so each group will go its own way and neither will loot the shop.

This concludes the player activation. Zombies now move as NPCs. I can’t find how that works in the rulebook (another question for later) so I decide those zombies within 12″ of a person will move towards the nearest person they can see. This leaves Yellow with a moaning zombie about half an inch short of the base-to-base contact which will trigger a melee; not good.

Turn two, and the activation dice come up higher than Rep for both the player group and the zombies. However, I now need a third die for the group encountered in the shop, and they do activate. They can see trouble brewing outside, so leave the shop through the rear exit and duck across the alley into the next shop. Inside, they find another group of survivors; next time I might just let them stay put, or ignore what they run into, because at this rate the board will be covered with survivors in no time. However, I let it ride for now and discover that the fourth group has a Rep 4 Crackshot with a semiauto rifle, a Rep 4 Drunkard with a pistol, a Rep 4 Clumsy dude with a Big Ass Pistol, and a Rep 3 Agile person with a pistol. The new group outnumbers what they can see of the intruders 2:1, so they initiate Talk The Talk. In Sight tests and a quick Talk The Talk check reveal these two groups are going to rumble, but neither of them activate immediately (because they tie for who goes first; it doesn’t actually say so in the rules, but the precedent elsewhere is that in ties, neither side moves) so we’ll park that for next turn. I picture the groups staring at each other, shuffling uncertainly, until someone makes a move that seems hostile, intentionally or otherwise.

Turn three, and we now have four activation dice. The player group goes first, then the zombies, then the second group of survivors – the first group won’t activate, but if they survive the first fusillade, a Received Fire test may let them shoot back. Yellow decides he doesn’t fancy going toe to toe with a zombie and fires his BAP twice. He rolls one die for each shot, adds his Rep, and compares to the ranged fire table; his scores are 8 (which hits) and 4 (which misses). The zombie has been hit once, so we roll 1d6 against the weapon’s Impact (2) and get a one – this is less than or equal to the Impact and means the zombie is Obviously Dead. Or Undead. Or not moving anytime soon, anyway. At this point I decide the player group will bug out; they’re surrounded by zombies, the gunfight about to start next door will attract more, it’s getting late in the real world, and it looks like I’ll get to try out all the basic rules, which is all I want from the first game. Yellow turns and runs away from the shops towards the table edge. As he rounds the first corner he sees another zombie and takes an In Sight test; however, he only passes one die, so because he is moving he can’t shoot. Green also fires twice and starts moving for the baseline; he misses both shots, comes around the same corner, passes one die on his In Sight test and also can’t fire.

Red and Blue back out of the building and both open up with their shotguns on the nearest zombies. Each shotgun rolls four times to hit, but only counts the best two results; this gives us four hits, but checking against weapon Impact shows no instant kills. Since they are still, errm, alive, the zombies are pushed back 2″ each (this being the weapon’s Impact). Turning the corner, they also see the zombie that alarmed the others, but fail their In Sight tests and can’t return fire. (Note that in ATZ, you can fire at any point during movement, and since you might shoot any time you have to take an In Sight or Received Fire test, as well as voluntarily once during your turn, you can do a lot of shooting.)

Zombies that can see humans now move 6″ towards them, which brings one into melee with both Red and Blue, and the others move  6″ towards the sound of gunfire. Melee is much simpler in ATZ than in Warrior Heroes, largely because WH doesn’t have an upper limit on Rep, so needs to allow for Reps higher than 7 (the best possible in ATZ). Both sides roll 1d6 against Rep. Red passes two, and his zombie passes one; because he won the melee, he has the choice of slugging it out mano a mano or using his gun at point blank range. Hmm. Let me think about that for a nanosecond… Blam! Blam! Blam! Three hits (because in point-blank fire he hits if he rolls his Rep of 5 or less on 1d6), two of which leave the zombie Obviously Dead. That melee is over.

Meanwhile, Blue and his zombie each pass 1d6. The contest is indecisive and will continue next turn. (Another difference from WH, where the melee continues until there is a winner, within the same turn.)

Shots ring out from the shop where the two survivor groups met, but I don’t bother to work that out because I’ve already decided to leave. However, I note in the campaign diary that any survivors might not be friendly to me if we meet again.

Turn four, and activation sequence is the player group, first survivor group, second survivor group, with the zombies not activating. Since he activates first, Blue has the option to break off melee, moving at least 1″ away from his opponent (well, actually, 8″ is looking good) and taking an In Sight test as if moving. This gives him the option to fire, so he fires three rounds; two miss, but the third leaves the zombie OD.

The multicoloured player group now leaves the board, so it’s a moot point how many more zombies are attracted by the shooting. Since they survived the encounter without taking results of Run Away (I know they did, but when it’s by choice it doesn’t count), Obviously Dead, or Out Of the Fight, and they were involved in a firefight or melee, each gains one experience point. (Gain enough, and your Rep increases.)

This was a lot of fun to play, and less mechanically complex than WH; but I hadn’t realised just how many zombies and survivors one would meet, so it would up being equally long as a session (40 minutes to set up, about an hour to play, and 10 minutes to pack away). Ranged weapons make a huge difference, and the THW system runs a lot more smoothly for gunfights than melee – which shouldn’t surprise me, as that’s what it was designed for. Maybe this view will change with more practice.