All Flesh Must Be Eaten Adventure – Diablo Gulch

I have just posted my first free adventure for the All Flesh Must Be Eaten game system. It is called Diablo Gulch and is set in a Weird West genre. The adventure features zombie survival in the Wild West! Several of us played the game at our 2008 May Day gaming event and had a fantastic time. Afterward, I polished it up a bit and have now made it available for download.

The adventure serves as a great introduction to the Unisystem™ game and is intended as a one-shot scenario. With some tweaking, it could also kick off a Weird West campaign. This adventure is a fan-based work of fiction and is not endorsed or supported by Eden Studios in any way.

May Day 2008 Results

Game summary for May 17, 2008; present players included Casey S., Colby W., John O., and Shane B. We played a custom-written adventure I designed for All Flesh Must Be Eaten set in the Weird West called Diablo Gulch. We spent 5 hours playing and successfully concluded the adventure.

The characters, Brock Hollis, Jed Pinard, Jose Cortes, and Wyatt Wells rode into Diablo Gulch, New Mexico Territory after riding for over a day to escape a Ute war party. Exhausted, out of supplies, and low on ammunition, they sought a shot of whiskey and a night’s sleep. Entering the town, they spotted a man tottering around with his pants down around his ankles. As they approached, the man turned around and revealed a bloody torso, buzzing flies, and swarming maggots all over his body. He waddled toward them hungrily. A young woman shouted at them from the upper floor of the undertaker’s office to get their horses safe into the stable; she said it was vital the horses survive so they could escape.

The group hurried into the stables and found a body lying face down with a shovel rammed through the spine. They quickly searched the stable and found a pair of zombies within. Jose shot the walking corpses through the head, but it kept coming. Brock began beating the creature with his axe handle, while Wyatt knee-capped the shuffling, pants-down zombie and locked it in a stall. The group discovered that the spinal column must be severed to kill the creatures, and the zombies could function fine without a brain. During the scuffle, Brock took a nasty bite as the creature gnawed through his boot and nibbled his big toe.

With the creatures dispatched, the four crept (in broad daylight) across the street and over to the undertaker. Several climbed upstairs and in through a window to talk to the woman, Marley. She revealed that the creatures appeared close to a week ago, and she had not seen a living human in a couple days now. Marley told them the creatures seemed to sense living people and could find you even when they cannot see you. Meanwhile, Brock stirred up a bunch of zombies around back and came running around to climb up the front of the building. From the upper floor, the group shot the zombies dead and looted the bodies.

In the marshal’s office, the group found the zombie of the deputy marshal and a prostitute. Jed lost an ear to a munching zombie and was deafened when Wyatt put a gun in the zombie’s face and shot it while it chewed on Jed. Next door, in the grocery, Jed discovered the zombies can spit some kind of acidic spray that dissolves flesh. A face-first dunking in a water trough got it off of him.

Later, in the dry goods store, two zombies were killed, and lots of ammunition and dynamite was discovered. Grinning, the group ran over to the bank. Within, they discovered the mutilated corpse of the bank manager, along with the vault key. Opening the vault revealed five zombies, one of which sprayed acid into Brock’s eyes. Wyatt and Jose slammed the door shut and locked it, but not before they noticed money bags and a golden amulet on one of the zombies. Leaving for a time, they explored the saloon and found a shotgun.

With only the brothel left to explore, the men went in and cleared the building. Within, they found a journal that described a prospector’s finding of an Indian burial mound, which he pillaged. Included was a golden amulet, which sounded suspiciously like the one in the bank vault. The group went back to the bank, setup in strategic locations and let the zombies out. Using superior position, the men destroyed the zombies with ease. They took all the gold in the vault but left the amulet. A cluster of dynamite brought the bank down and destroyed the amulet, which de-animated all the remaining zombies.

With bags laden with golden coins, and sporting some interesting new scars, the four men led their horses out of Diablo Gulch without once looking back.

PlemCon III Results

Saturday, August 4th, was a celebration of 5 years of our gaming group getting together to play role-playing games. I dubbed this event PlemCon III. Several friends came over to participate in a gaming event that started at 11:00 a.m. and lasted until a little after 7:00 p.m.

The first game used the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition rules with a Masters of the Universe setting. We had a good time having the Heroic Warriors such as Ram-Man, Teela, Man-at-Arms and Fisto brawl it out with Evil Warriors like Stinkor, Skeletor, Clawful, Evil Lyn, Tri-Klops, Trapjaw and Two-Bad! The setup was a variation of capture the flag, which turned out in the end to be a little less exciting than was hoped. I think a good time was still had, but the game went downhill toward the end.

Things picked up with the second game session, though! We played an adventure called Road Trip of the Damned using the Unisystem rules from All Flesh Must Be Eaten. The players fought a horde of zombies (including zombie cows) in the sleepy town of Wherewith, Alabama. The group did a good job finding weapons, including baseball bats, tire irons, flashlights, shotguns and even a rifle. Several zombies met a second death at their hands, and one of the characters turned into a zombie. Most of the group seemed to escape on a motorboat across Lake Martin only to be executed by the military later on. The handful of characters who had not been bitten were able to get away and live to party another day.

All Your Zombies Are Belong to Us

Finally, after being overdue for months, Eden Studios has released All Tomorrow’s Zombies in both print and watermarked PDF! This sourcebook details the rules for running a futuristic zombie survival horror game with All Flesh Must Be Eaten. The web site for their pirate/zombie campaign book, Argh! Thar Be Zombies! has been updated and lists August 2007 as release date.

Argh! Thar Be Zombies

Next month sees the release of Eden Studios’ latest All Flesh Must Be Eaten product, Argh! Thar Be Zombies. Fairly obviously, it combines two genres, pirates and the living dead. It should be interesting. I plan on getting it myself, but I’m curious if anyone thinks it sounds like something fun to play?

First All Flesh Game in the Books

Casey and Colby got to experience our first All Flesh Must Be Eaten game, using Eden Studio’s Unisystem rules. In a four-hour time period, they successfully completed the adventure, Thirteen Ways to Die… Choose One.

The evening began as the Coppertons (Carl and son, Daniel, and girlfriend, Linda) along with their bodyguard, Stefano, and hired driver, Norton, picked up injured teenage hitchhiker, Eli Landau, while trying to find their way to San Francisco in a raging thunderstorm. Eli gave them directions to the little town of Thirteen Pines, where the group hoped to find a fast way to an interstate or expressway.

The group’s minivan crested a ridge and drove toward the dim lights of town. About halfway down the incline, the car’s power cut out, sending them spiralling out of control as the power steering failed. After a few tense moments, the group crashed into a stone flower pot in the center of a roundabout.

Crawling out into the rain, they ran into Fly’s Hardware and General Store only to find the proprietors eating a man in the back. The group snatched up axes, chainsaws, and flammable liquids and torched the hardware store, but the proprietors pursed them into the rain. The group fled to the J.P. Landau municipal building, only to find it partially burned. They rushed within and locked the doors.

After a bit of rubble clearing, the group proceeded into the basement and found some large firearms storage safes. Three were standing open and empty, but a third was sealed. Using a key from upstairs, they opened the safe to find the animated corpse of Constable Reeves within. Norton surprised everyone by pulling a large revolver from his coat and blowing the head off the zombie. The group then found eight semi-automatic rifles, with no bullets.

They then proceeded into the information center and the town library, and killed a half-torn-in-two zombie who spewed acidic slime all over Stefano. They also watched a “survivor” of the town die in the upstairs room as she succumbed to her injuries. A bit of research revealed things were not right with the Landau family, and the group began suspecting J.P. Landau to be behind the events.

They went out and searched the forestry station and found two bullets for the Ruger Mini-14s they had collected. Like the other buildings they had visited, they burned this one down too. They then went to the church and graveyard and found some strange things in the Landau mausoleum. As they moved back toward the center of town, the world seemed to spin, and suddenly buildings they had burned down were still standing. To make things worse, they found zombies of themselves moving down Romero Street and up Barrow Hill!

The gang killed some of their zombie “clones” and went up the hill to the Landau estate. There, they found Landau sitting on a black stone throne surrounded by thirteen zombies. Daniel shot and killed him, and the zombies attacked as hundreds more came shuffling onto the scene. Norton went berserk and shot Daniel, and Carl and Stefano hacked Norton apart with an axe and chainsaw. Then, the zombies began turning into Landau everytime the man was “killed”. Desperately, they fought against the man and the zombies. They discovered a living “clone” of Daniel, and the real (injured) Daniel went to untie him, but had his throat ripped out by a zombie as the last bonds fell free. Carl went berserk, and Stefano whipped out his spring baton, and the remaining of the thirteen zombies went down hard. Finally, Landau was defeated, and the storm dissipated in an instant. As the clouds disappeared in a puff, the remaining zombies fell lifeless to the ground. The horrors had ended for now, but many questions remain unanswered, including the origins and humanity of the “clone” Daniel.