This campaign is a pure sandbox/hex-crawl in a modern, zombie-apocalypse setting. After some discussion with the Players as to the nature of the Event, I decided to go with an eschatological explanation, a “what if Supernatural/Constantine/The Prophecy/Legion went horribly wrong” scenario. It’s first appearance in the Daniverse has the Hosts of Heaven™ and Hell™ in a more “mythological” role (as typically depicted in modern cinema), with a bit of a mix of (movie) Thor’s “extradimensional advanced aliens” and Babylon 5’s Vorlon/Shadow war—but that’s really irrelevant for the time being, as what’s happened has happened, and humanity is just trying to move on in the aftermath (though they will undoubtedly become involved later). As with all Daniverse campaigns, it will also feature a great many composite/mash-up elements and homages from other fictions.
As a GM, I’ve been struggling with out-of-game workloads and general lack of motivation, while trying to keep the game going and contributing to the success of the group. As much as I struggle with improvisation, encouraged by several online articles on the subject (this one, this one, and this one), I decided that, with judicious use of random table systems, a sandbox campaign might be the way to go. In specific, I have access to some All Flesh Must Be Eaten material, and the core Twilight 2000 books, which will be featured heavily, combined with the use of Google Earth, and other online resources. For inspiration, I have been watching a lot of post-apocalypse movies and TV series, some of which are really bad (*coughrevolution* 😛 ), but I’ve forced myself to persevere, for the sake of the art. In fact, the little planning I do have in mind for the future is to take scenes and elements from the shows I’ve watched and play them out for the PCs—we’ll see if they make better choices than the usual protagonists. 😉
This will be the first campaign I’ve run that will have its play-sessions recorded via weblog—due to its’ more improvised nature, I’ll have to record what happens on a regular basis, rather than afterward via my notes (which will be mostly nonexistent, as far as the goings-on of the PCs are concerned).
Side note: The start of this campaign predates the official GURPS Zombies or GURPS After the End series.
♫ It’s the End of the World as We Know It ♫
So, what form did Man’s doom take? Here are the basics as known by the survivors (other than the PCs, who missed the fun):
It starts with the appearance of some sort of structure (Ref: Conquest Icons from Chronicles of Riddick) in the middle of major cities (as it turns out, worldwide). Shortly after, a disturbing, loud “horn” is heard (Ref: Tripods’ “horn blast”-War of the Worlds (2005)), repeated seven times. Then everyone on the planet “blacked out” for what would be determined (on analogue clocks) to be 11 hours, 38 minutes; also, any electronic device with a circuit board was fried. Every city wherein the Icon appeared bore evidence of a massive nuclear explosion. Within 24 hours of the Event, the recently dead are seen coming back to life, seeking human victims; they spread infection to other humans, and wither plant-life, and those infected exhibited signs of increased paranoia and aggression, resulting in widespread rioting and small-scale warfare. By the end of 4 weeks, world population is down ~60%, as a result of war, death, plague and famine; nobody has a clue why any of it happened, but the running theory is that “our time was up.”
Campaign Tropes:
After the End, Crapsack world, Zombie Apocalypse, Slept Through the Apocalypse, Late to the Tragedy, Action Survivor
Campaign Rules and Conditions
General Campaign Info on the Core Group forum