Cover Stories: Eyes Up, Survivor

How long would you last in the zombie apocalypse?

This is a question anyone who has ever watched a zombie horror film has asked themselves – usually after the first actually intelligent character gets killed by the zombie horde. After all, the zombie is not an individual threat in the modern zombie horror but rather an extension of an unending horde of shambling death, spurred forward by a drive to kill. Invariably, there comes a point in every zombie horror narrative where the characters whom we all implicitly know will die have done so, and then the first character we actually identify with winds up dying. Perhaps they are bit and must be put down before they turn. Maybe they do something heroic as their last act. Maybe they are just dragged off screaming, merely for shock value. Regardless, we stop and ask ourselves the same question: “How long would I last?”

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This was the question I and my friends were forced to ask ourselves late one night in a conference room at Gen Con 2009. Having been my first Gen Con, the sheer press of being surrounded by tens of thousands of gamers had bewildered my senses and left me filled with a sort of manic elation which resulted in me wandering around the convention near to midnight looking for something to do. My friend Mark and I had unceremoniously been denied entry into a NERO boffer event, having been told that it was for teams only, and despite us finding a team eager to have two competition level fencers and experienced boffer fighters to die happily at their side, we were civilly informed that our tickets would not be accepted. Yet as luck would have it, our mutual friend John let us know about a demo going on that he was signed up for which was looking for more players.

And so, this is how Mark and I joined the 2009 demo of Outbreak: Undead.

Thriving On Existential Dread

Outbreak: Undead is a tabletop roleplaying game released by Hunters Books and Apparel in 2010, with a second edition co-published in 2018 by Renegade Games and Hunters Entertainment. It is an RPG simulation of survival during the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse.

Laser-focused on the concept of team work and survival against ever-increasing desperation, Outbreak: Undead uses a comprehensive character sheet with a percentile system to determine degrees of success or failure when either attempting a dangerous task, or a general task wherein a measure of success might shift the odds of later survival. Action is handled through rolling a check against a Skill value which correlates to one of the game’s four Attributes. The Second Edition version of the rules even features color-coordinated text for degree of difficulty within the universe of the narrative, ranging from rules-light “Arcade Mode” to the nickel-and-dime grind of “Survivalist”. The game itself is expansive and its focuses on a modular design allows it to be applied to many different outbreak and survival scenarios. Where the game truly flourishes, however, is as an immersive TTRPG for a zombie apocalypse.

Romero’s film hit gave rise to the whole modern concept of the zombie

Starting with George Romero’s seminal cinematic masterpiece of Night of the Living Dead in 1968, the zombie apocalypse has grown to become a hefty staple of the horror genre. Every year new forms of zombie apocalypse horror media are created, be they films, novels, video games, or comic books.

Outbreak Undead Rpg

The obsession with the horror of the zombie is ubiquitous to the modern world, and indeed if there is one monster who truly represents the fear and anxiety of the late 20th, early 21st century, it is the zombie. And as with our ever-changing modern world, the rules of the zombie apocalypse shifts with every new iteration of the story.

Outbreak: Undead wisely takes note of this, and focuses not on the specific rules of the undead which threaten the survivors who make up the player characters of the game, but on the toll which survival takes on those survivors. It is this focus where Outbreak: Undead shines.

The Gameplay

Outbreak: Undead uses a central mechanic called SPEW, named after the four traits of player characters in the game: Strength, Perception, Empathy, and Willpower. Players either use the SPEW AI to build themselves using an online survey, or they can construct different survivors using a point buy system. The game then uses these traits to generate a series of Skill values, each presenting the value you are aiming to roll under when making a percentile check. Roll under, and you succeed. Roll over, and you fail. For every value of ten you succeed or fail by, your success or failure is that much more pronounced, to a total of five degrees of either. As one might expect, Gear is a major factor in survival, and relevant Gear in the game adds directly to the target value of the check.

In order to represent complications to a check (naturally), the game also uses color-coded d6’s with a catch to modify a roll, representing for instance, the increased Difficulty of environment, Depletion of gear, and even Injuries as your survivor invariably grows more hurt. The final piece of the puzzle when making a check in Outbreak: Undead comes from Gestalt: a means to represent relevant experience had by the character which exists outside the rest of the rules of the game. This can mean anything from common internet memes on messenger boards when the world went dark to being able to balance a healthy diet from canned goods. Gestalt becomes d6s you can assign during character creation or during play and serve to improve your roll, rather than detract from it.

Now, as for that ‘catch’ part of the ‘d6s with a catch’. The catch is that each of these d6’s only count their values of 1 to 5. If a player rolls a 6, the die “explodes”, counting as both a value of 5 and adding another die of its type to the roll. This creates an incredibly dynamic and unpredictable resolution to nearly any action in the game, though especially so in combat. Combat in Outbreak: Undead is as fast as it is brutal, befitting the world it attempts to convey. As with most zombie-based environments avoiding combat entirely is generally the smart choice, but when one must fight, it is best to do it with all the odds stacked in your favor.

Teambuilding At The Edge Of The World

While the Outbreak: Undead core rules provide the means to generate a Survivor from any concept, it is the experience of placing yourself into the survival scenario of the game where the innate potential of Outbreak: Undead is truly revealed. The use of the SPEW AI to generate yourself into the rules of the game immediately invests you in the safety of your character, even though the tagline for the game itself makes the intention clear: “Your zombie survival plan will fail.” For me, it was one of the most memorable moments of a Gen Con which was filled with memorable moments, such as my first Legend of the Five Rings pubcrawl or winning the 2009 D&D Open World Championship. Yet to properly tell that story, it’s necessary to expound on one more thing that Outbreak: Undead gets masterfully right: teamwork.

Picture if you will that moment that I, John, and Mark each went through our SPEW AI creation. Mark, a computer engineer with a penchant for firearms and martial arts, seemed like a natural shoe-in for Best Survivor at the Table. John, also a computer engineer but much more importantly, someone who had grown up working on cars and houses, brought to the table a separate set of skills implicitly vital to survival in the apocalypse. And then…there was me. Sure, I had studied martial arts and fencing, but I was a writer who worked as a travel planner and researcher for th