19th Level

With a two week break between classes at Brandeis, I had a little bit of time to goof off and make use of the PS4 I received as a birthday gift last month. I finally made my way through Naughty Dog's The Last of Us . This isn't really a review of the game, there's about a gazillion out there on the internet - though I will give a brief overview of it. I'll also note there are spoilers about the game in this post so if you've not played it and want to play it unspoiled, you should read no farther. A bit unlikely for a game released in 2013, but just in case... The Last of Us tells the tale of Joel and Ellie in a post-apocalyptic world. Joel is a survivor of the original outbreak in his late forties. Ellie is 14 and for unknown reasons, is immune to the infection. In September of 2013 a mutant Cordyceps fungus wipes out civilization.  Cordyceps is a real kind of fungus and is a parasite, with some species able to alter the host's behavior. Luckily for us, ...

While I've been examining zombie gaming possibilities, I've got a late 19th century Call of Cthulhu game going on. Some of the players in my group suggested we do a zombie Call of Cthulhu  adventure. While we've got the pulp dials cranked up pretty high, I do want to keep the game Lovecraftian. I'm a huge Jules Verne fan and can  see at some point doing a Victorian-era adventure and/or horror game in the vein of Pinnacle's Rippers or Cubicle 7's Victoriana . But for this game I do want to stay grounded in Lovecraftian horror. Which brings us to one of Lovecraft's least favorite creations, Doctor Herbert West, the "protagonist" of his serial "Herbert West - Reanimator". This serial examined West and his obsession with reversing death. To quote the first section of the serial: In his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had b...

I recently posted some of the games that are distracting me, causing one player to ask me "what about a zombie apocalypse?" So... What about a zombie apocalypse? Truthfully, I've never done an all-out zombie apocalypse game, though I have rather enjoyed liberal use of zombies in D&D games. I've actually always wanted to do such a game, though truthfully I find it a little bit on the intimidating side - while a one-shot zombie apocalypse game is pretty easy to do, the challenge is in keeping the campaign interesting. Obviously, game after game of killing zombies would get rather boring. One of the inspirations I'd take would be Max Brooks' World War Z. While I found the movie to be so-so, I found the book fantastic. Its premise is it is written several years after a zombie apocalypse has been contained, with the author being the interviewer of numerous personalities. Most of the interviewees appear in only one chapter, others are revisited through...

Over the past few days I've seen some previews for Immersion RPG 's upcoming Infected  RPG, set in a world crawling its way out of a zombie apocalypse. Now to be honest, their website does have an amusingly bold declaration: " We are a pen and paper Role Playing Game company in the final stages of creating the most exciting system and settings you’ve ever played."  Their starting RPG, Infected , is due to launch on Kickstarter in about a week. To be honest, it was the artwork that first caught my eye, being strongly reminiscent of the Playstation game The Last of Us. From reading the reviewer/preview copy at their website, I see Infected  takes place a few years after the outbreak of a zombie epidemic. It started with a kind of superflu which put people into a coma that slowly slid towards death - a coma they sometimes "recovered" from as zombies. It's a bit of a change from the infection vectors in The Walking Dead by making it more of a vi...

Lurch (in my front yard...) My last blog post dealt with the decidedly uncheerful post-apocalyptic novel The Road . It's a difficult book to read. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to play an RPG in such a setting. Heck after posting that marked the longest gap between posts I've had on this blog so it must have drained my will to post... Aside from a few brief Aftermath and Gamma World games I've not done much gaming in the post-apocalyptic genre. Probably a bit too depressing for my tastes. I like intact societies, not remnants of civilization sulking in ruined cities. With that in mind, one "sub-genre" I have given some thought to gaming in is the "Zombie Apocalypse" genre. The basic premise is pretty simple. The dead rise in the form of zombies. Usually they bite people and the people bitten become zombies. I'm far from an expert in the genre but you can find examples it pretty easily - The Walking Dead comic book and television series co...

Poor Richard Matheson didn't make the cut for the inspirational reading section of AD&D 1st edition. That said, his short novel I Am Legend casts a wide shadow, creating the zombie apocalypse genre in a novel with nary a zombie in sight. George Romero of zombie fame and Stephen King have both acknowledged his influence. I Am Legend  has produced three film adaptations. The first adaptation was 1964's The Last Man On Earth , starring Vincent Price, a film I've not seen. Reading its wikipedia entry it seems they stayed pretty close to the plotline of the novel. The second was the classic 1970s Charlton Heston film, The Omega Man . Finally there was the more recent I Am Legend  starring Will Smith. Both The Omega Man  and I Am Legend  have their virtues but I don't think either of them really "got" the novel. With that preliminary out of the way, let's talk about the novel itself. It takes place some twenty years in "the future", though it...