28 Months Later: Morgan - Setup

“Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.” - Clive Barker

It's back to the zombie apocalypse, an old favourite of mine, not least because there is almost no work needed to set it up.

As usual, the title is both an homage to the movie 28 Days Later and an objective; get the PC to 28 months after the zombie outbreak without being eaten, shot, or starving to death. I've never yet managed that, but hope springs eternal.

Objectives

Things I want to achieve in this season:

• Enjoy playing the game.
• Get the PC to month 28 alive.
• Avoid skills fade on SWADE, especially the advanced combat options.
• Try out a new combination of tools.

Rules and Tools

When I do this, I see myself as Tuco at the gun shop in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

• The base rules will be SWADE, as that is my current favourite and the one I am using both as a player in Deadlands and a GM in The Aslan Route. However, despite its many virtues, SWADE is not designed for solo play, so we need to supplement it with...
• Grimdark Future Star Quest, which will provide us with the NPC AI and scenarios; we'll need to add some rulings as we go in the first few sessions, for example how many days are there between games, what do we do about finding and consuming supplies, and so on; but the important thing is to get started, so we'll leave those for later.
• The All Things Zombie Risks and Rewards Deck, which we'll use instead of the GFSQ wave generator to add enemies to the table.
• And finally, since it's not practical to leave our dining room table set up for days at a time, Roll20 to act as a VTT, with maps from Loke Battlemats and tokens from Fiery Dragon.

Player Character: Edgar Morgan

Basing a PC on the Soldier Ally (SWADE p. 112) worked well last time, so let's do that again. I take the template, bump the Smarts to d6 to give it the right number of attribute points for a PC, and that gives me two more skill points, so let's push the Stealth to d6 and add Healing d4.

Usually, I spend ages trying to work out a good name for my PCs, but a lot of people keep the name their parents gave them and they have no choice in that, so I roll up a few using Space Corsair's Traveller name generator and take the first one that looks monocultural rather than a mixture of several Earth cultures; this proves to be Edgar Morgan.

Looking up those names online tells me that Edgar is an Anglo-Saxon name meaning "wealthy spear", and Morgan is a Welsh patronymic whose original meaning is probably something to do with the sea. None of those suggests any obvious Hindrances, which is why I bothered looking them up; it pleases me when character names reflect their personalities. Edgar does suggest the Rich Edge, but that is worthless in the zombie apocalypse so I'm not wasting points on it, might as well keep Soldier which does have some benefits for survival.

Let's take some traditional military virtues for Hindrances - Code of Honour and Loyal - and add Vengeful (Minor) which is bound to get him into trouble at some point. We'll use the points from those to bump Strength and Vigour, as both will be useful and in play, you can only increase an attribute once per Rank.

We now have the following:

Edgar Morgan, Soldier

• Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d6, Spirit d6, Strength d8, Vigour d8
• Skills: Athletics d6, Common Knowledge d6, Fighting d6, Healing d4, Intimidation d6, Notice d6, Persuasion d6, Shooting d6, Stealth d6.
• Pace: 6; Parry: 5; Toughness: 6.
• Hindrances: Code of Honour, Loyal, Vengeful.
• Edges: Soldier
• Gear: Whatever the army thinks he should have; that probably means an assault rifle, a knife, and a little cash which won't be much use for long.

If he survives long enough to gain Advances, I'll move him towards the Experienced Soldier template. My usual solo rules for SWADE are in play; Bennies refresh every four posts, and PCs gain an Advance every eight posts, while NPCs don't gain Advances at all.

Let's be about it, shall we?