We started around 9 PM with four characters: Vlad, an Outdoorsy Type; Mort the Mortician, who used Emergency Services to represent his medical knowledge; Mini the Midget Girl, a Street Racer; and Chad, the stoic Techy. It all began, as all great RPGs do, in a bar. To be specific, Ott’s, a rather depressing bar in our hometown. I chose to run the game in our own hometown because all of us know the town well, and it was a good way to encourage the players to think and come up with plans for how they’d survive the oncoming zombie horde.
Mort and Chad left the bar briefly while the Flyers were losing to smoke in the parking lot when they heard moaning coming from the woods, so they set off to investigate, only to find a dead body (they failed their Will checks, and started to get scared at this). They ran back towards the bar while Vlad and Mini ran out to find that the first zombie was staggering towards them. Chad, ever stoic, was beginning to act a little reckless (thanks to his Stoic Nature) and started just swinging his fists at the zombie, earning a blood scratch for his effort. Mini and Vlad grabbed bottles from inside to try to beat the zombie back, then they made a break for their cars.
A loud argument ensued while they tried to decide where to go. Vlad wanted to get across town to the police station and get some weapons and then hole up in a local pharmacy with very high and hard-to-reach windows. Mort (by this point quaking with fear) was yelling that they needed to go to an Army and Navy outdoors store down the highway to stock up on supplies. He also thought their ultimate goal should’ve been to get to the marina on the Delaware River and steal a boat to get out safely to open water where the zombies couldn’t reach. On the way, they were pulled over by a police officer for running a red light, and when the zombies got too close, they chose to run the officer over with one of their cars, steal his weapons, and then high-tail it down the highway to the Army/Navy store.
Once inside, Vlad slapped some sense into Mort with a pep-talk and the group of survivors scavanged for some gear. Mort dug up some good MREs, while Chad grabbed a bow and arrow, Vlad a big hunting knife, and Mini a big high-powered flashlight, as well as some odds-and-ends like rope. They heard moaning outside and knew zombies were closing in, so they charged out the door, Mort with a shotgun stolen from the police officer, Chad with the pistol, Vladamir with the knife, and Mini shining the huge flashlight in hopes that the zombies would run away (they didn’t). In the ensuing scuffle, Mort was almost bitten, and Vladamir was badly hurt when a zombie shoved him through the broken glass door onto a large shard that almost impaled him.
Chad managed to take a zombie down point-blank and give Mini the cover she needed to rush to Mort’s van, and while Mort managed to wrestle the zombie attacking him off, Mini ran it over and got everyone inside as more zombies were coming in, attracted by the sound. They sped back down the highway to the aforementioned pharmacy, where they grouped up with Shadow (a Darn Punk Kid) and Ernie (an Amateur Athlete), who had barracaded themselves in the pharmacy when the zombies came. Inside, Mort made use of the medical supplies to patch up everyone’s injuries and the group stocked up on more food. They decided their plan of attack would be to go to the local big box hardware store, get the supplies they’d need to fortify a building, then drive out to a farmhouse in town which would be more isolated from the more population-dense, large housing developments.
At the hardware store, Chad and Mini stayed with the van while the others ran inside, dismayed to hear a zombie moaning somewhere in the pitch-black store. They managed to gather many of the supplies they needed (ignoring what seemed to be someone bleeding to death nearby), only to find a pair of zombies closing in on them while they tried to escape. Mini and Chad ran into troubles in the parking lot when a poor Vehicles check to attack a zombie resulted in their van breaking down. Mini and Chad made a break for the store, and the group decided to send Shadow and Mort to sneak over to the power tools and make a racket to distract the zombies so the party could escape. Mini wound up leaping at a zombie through one of the racks on the isle, smashing it with a big, heavy flashlight (though she was horrified to see it get back up… turns out she hadn’t gotten a headshot and failed to destroy the brain). Shadow and Mort reached the chainsaws and managed to get them screaming, and on the way out, Mort started a fire with some Tiki-torch oil at the entrance in hopes of trapping the zombies inside. Vladamir, Chad, and Shadow all kept a look-out and covered the group while Mini, Mort, and Ernie got the van running again (though only barely).
The van managed to chug its was a mile-and-a-half down some back roads to a little farm out of the way. Mort tried to kill a zombie near the out-of-the-way farm by throwing the van’s passenger-side door open, but he timed it poorly and only knocked the zombie over. The group got the rest of the way to the farm house and scrambled inside, where to their horror they found that the family inside had committed suicide (shot themselves in the head, luckily, so little chance of coming back as zombies). Still cautious, the group tried to decide what to do. Ernie and Shadow snuck out front with a bow and arrow from the army/navy store, and Ernie made an incredible shot, scoring a lethal blow to the zombie’s head in a single shot. Meanwhile, Chad and Mort dragged the dead bodies out behind the farm house, dismembered them (to prevent them from rising as mobile zombies), and then set to work under Vladamir’s direction to fortify the house, boarding up both doors and the one big window in the back (with them planning to dangle a rope out of the second-floor window and shimmy down onto the roof of the van to get out).
That was when we decided to call it, as it was already after 1 AM and it was getting cold on the porch where we were playing. I had intended the game to be a one-off, but the players were pretty adamant in their desire to play again. They really seemed to like the way the game played (and while they grumbled about how hard it was to kill a zombie, they did like that it really seemed like they were ordinary every-man characters trying to kill a tough undead monsters), especially the rules for fear (even when poor Mort was almost paralyzed from fear for the beginning of the game). They also admitted that while it was frustrating that everything was prone to breaking or jamming or running out of ammo, they liked the Unreliable system as opposed to tracking ammunition, as it captured the chaos better than a neat-and-clean ammo track did. They also really, really liked having the game set in our home town, as it gave them a really unique opportunity to plan things out well in advance, decide where they’d go and what they’d expect to find there, and most importantly, what they’d need to survive. So for now, I’m the caretaker of their character sheets, and I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I will have to run this game again for them so they can finish playing “Escape From Delran”.
As a side-note, the rules supplement I used to run this particular session of d20^, How I Survived the Zombie Apocalypse, will be available for sale in the near-ish future, for all you zombie fans out there 