#RPG – A Month of Monsters – Corpse Ooze

You can buy this piece of stock art, for as little as $1 this month as part of a promotion. We have a promotion running all month, 31 pieces of monstrous stock art, one a day until all are at on sale culminating on the 31st for Halloween.

This piece depicts a corpse or zombie, riddled with fungus or ooze.

Corpse-Ooze settles in and gestates within dead bodies, gradually eating them from the inside out until the entirety of the husk is consumed, after which the ooze dries and flakes, sending its spores out into the surrounding area to wait for more corpses. The ooze can drag a body across the ground, using it as armour much as a hermit crab might use a shell, and it will attack with its flagella in order to seek new hosts to infect and consume. Of particular concern are the risen dead – zombies – which when infected with corpse-ooze continue to shamble around and lend both the zombie and the ooze combined strength and durability.

To read the rest of this entry, with statistics for 5e D&D, please subscribe to me on Patreon for as little as $1 a month.

#RPG – A Month of Monsters – Gooey Zombies

You can buy this piece of stock art, for as little as $1 this month as part of a promotion. We have a promotion running all month, 31 pieces of monstrous stock art, one a day until all are at on sale culminating on the 31st for Halloween.

This piece depicts a somewhat ‘gooey’ zombie.

Zombies exist at varying states of decay, and they decay under different circumstances. After a certain amount of time flesh and fat begins to disintegrate into a thick, bacteria-laden soup and internal organs become a foul sort of jelly. Zombies of this sort are even worse to fight than the regular ones.

To read the rest of this entry, with statistics for 5e D&D, please subscribe to me on Patreon for as little as $1 a month.

#RPG – A Month of Monsters – The Zombie King

You can buy this piece of stock art, for as little as $1 this month as part of a promotion. We have a promotion running all month, 31 pieces of monstrous stock art, one a day until all are at on sale culminating on the 31^st for Halloween.

This piece depicts a colourful zombie, suitable for spot illustrations.

Every so often – seemingly without any predictability or pattern – a newly created zombie retains much of its intelligence, and an ability to direct other low-intellect undead such as zombies and skeletons to act with the same sort of intelligence and tactics as they, themselves are capable of. Hard to spot in the midst of the rest of the dead, finding and putting them down will make the rest easier to slay (for a second time).

To read the rest of this entry, with statistics for 5e D&D, please subscribe to me on Patreon for as little as $1 a month.

Crowdsourcing: Kagai! Design Assistance.

So Kagai! (which is my game of gory, Japanese B-Movie, ero-guro action) is just about done – it’s only a mini game – but I’d like to solicit some help.

I need to know what people would like to know about the setting and the game elements, if they were going to play or run it. What guidelines and assistance they would like to have. Here’s some basic info on the game, tell me the kinds of things you’d like/need to know so I can wrap this puppy up!

Elevator Pitch

The world has been invaded by monsters straight out of people’s nightmares and most of the world population is dead, or at war. One place is a little bit safer, a hyper-consumerist, high-tech Japanese arcology. Most of the remaining population is women and you’re a class of schoolgirls from the arcology who do a bit of vigilante monster hunting on the side, in a game styled after the hyper-kinetic, b-movie gorefests of Japanese B-list cinema. The system emphasises team tactics and differs from many games in that you roll first and then describe what you do from what you’ve rolled, rather than vice versa. You can also save dice for following turns, or push them into a pool for everyone to use.

Example Character

Ima Hasegawa – Age 18
Heterosexual.
Factory worker family.
Mother was killed by monsters, Father died in the war. Twin sister, Imako. Younger sister Ami – 16
She fights for kicks, getting a perverse excitement from it.
She fights with a baseball bat, Power +2, Accuracy -1.
Punk style.

Power: 3
Agility: 3
Coordination: 3
Fitness: 3
Social: 2
Beauty: 3
Awareness: 3
Smarts: 3
Health: OOOOOO
Defence: 2
Initiative: 6
Genki: OOOOO

Design & Technology: 1
English Language: 1
Geography: 1
Gym: 3
History: 1
Japanese Language: 1
Mathematics: 1
Science: 1
Social Studies: 1

Art: 0
Computing: 1
Home Economics: 3
Music: 4
Religious Studies: 0
Extracurricular Activities
Baseball: 4
Jiu-Jitsu: 2

Hand to hand attack: 5D, Power 3D.
Baseball bat attack: 6D, Power 5D.

Example Combat (Minion)

Ima is exploring a blood-stained contraception clinic in the lower levels when a pantsless zombie falls out of a cupboard and lurches at her, groaning ‘Booooobs…’

Ima only manages to roll one success for initiative, while the pantsless zombie she’s fighting manages to get 2.

It lunges forward, but it’s not pantsless exactly, they’re around its ankles, so with zero successes it fails to grab hold of her.

Backing away, Ima swings her bat and gets one success. That’s enough to hit a zombie (defence 1) but leaves her no extra dice. Rolling damage she gets two successes and decides to do that as damage, to make it easier to kill later on, if need be. It’s not a special hit, just a Health hit, a solid smash in the chest, fracturing a couple of ribs.

This time the zombie grabs hold of her, practically tripping over its own pants and tumbling into her, all stinking hands and foul, drooling mouth. The zombie barely hit and did one damage – rolling a 5. Rather than do any damage though, the Games Master pulls the zombie’s dice, saving it for another action.

Ima tries to get it off her, struggling using her jiu-jitsu. Neither her, nor the zombie, roll any successes but since she’s already grappled she remains grappled.

Pressing the attack the zombie gets two successes – enough to hit – and bites at her for 3D damage, getting one success. The Games Master decides to hold onto that two, giving the zombie two extra dice in his pool of pulled dice.

Ima strives to struggle free, getting one success – matched by the zombie. Spending Genki gets her an extra dice and a success. The zombie tries to use his own pool but fails to get any more successes and is thrown off, landing with a thump and immeditely scrabbling back at her but failing to get hold.

Ima throws everything into her next attack and gets two successes, one more than she needed, which she throws into damage. With the bonus she rolls four successes for damage, but wants to get five so she can take out the zombie with a single stroke. Spending more Genki she fails – sadly – to get the success she needs and so banks the four successes with a pull action. The swing lashes out, over the head of the zombie, stalling it and giving her a great wind-up for her next attack.

Desperately the hunched over zombie makes a grab for her legs, but only gets one success – where it needed two. Its hands slip of her legs.

Ima swings down, dumping her previously banked dice into the attack. She gets four successes and banks three of them for damage after the one to hit. On the damage roll she finally gets five successes! Enough to damage the zombie’s smarts (1) and crush its skull.

“My bat strikes the top of the zombies head and smashes its skull open like a rotten gourd. Brains splash in all directions, staining my legs. A fragment of brain hits my cheek. I lick it up with my tongue and spit it out onto the zombie’s corpse.”

“Gross, regain one Genki.”

Sword-Fodder and Big Bads

Zombies aren’t the real point of the game, ‘big bads’ are. Tough and very dangerous monsters that require luck and friends to destroy. Being able to push dice means that characters can work together, help each other out and be good at things – like causing distractions – that aren’t directly combat, but which help everyone else.

Questions

So what would you want to know about the setting, the rules, the background? What tools would you like to help you run games? A random monster generator? Some example monsters? How in depth would the background need to be? What could I do to make it cool and to sell you on the idea?

Lady Bexington’s Home for Wayward Zombies – RELEASED!

Download it HERE

Buy a physical copy HERE

Lady Bexington’s Home for Wayward Zombies

A cooperative, self-constructed boardgame of zombie herding in Victorian Society.

Can you recapture the flesh-hungry fiends, protect Old London Town AND maintain a proper sense of Victorian decorum, all at the same time?

1-6 players.

It was a strange and beautiful event when, in the mid eighteen-hundreds, the Earth passed through a strange and luminous cloud. For several nights the atmosphere from pole to pole and east to west shone like the Northern Lights with a strange, pinkish pallor to the illuminations. 

Scientists were at a loss, postulating that we were passing through some band of particles or radiation though none of our Earth-bound devices could tell us much about it. Photographic equipment would not function correctly, images coming out covered in blotches or completely white. All we have are memories, paintings and speculation. 

The lights lasted for a week. A short enough time to remain remarkable. A long enough time that people stopped standing in the street, mouths agape, looking into the sky until all hours. A short enough time that it didn’t lose its wonder. Then, it abruptly stopped. 

People continued to speculate. Scientists with various ideas took the sudden cessation as absolute confirmation of their theories and things got back to normal. At least for a while. 

Three nights after the glowing ceased, the Earth burst open and the dead poured forth. Anyone and everyone who had died on or before that night arose from their grave, sepulchre and mortuary and assaulted the living. It was chaos. In many parts of the world cowardice and poor sense led to the living being overwhelmed. In others, such as London, the army made short work of the dead, destroying most of them, capturing others. 

Soon, at least within the bounds of the Empire, the crisis was over. The dead – unless killed by one of the walking dead – rose no longer and the overwhelming majority had been destroyed. Those that remained were kept as experiments, destroyed or – in rare sentimental cases – placed within charitable institutions or private sanctuaries retained by the great and the good who had the money, or standing, to put the government in its place. 

One such charitable institution is Lady Bexington’s Home for Wayward Zombies, a privately funded charity (much of it via Lady Bexington’s inheritance) which takes in those zombies that don’t have someone to look after them and would otherwise be destroyed. 

Lady Bexington cares for them, feeds them, grooms them. They even seem to have come to know and recognise her somehow. She’s absolutely potty, gone in the head, when it comes to zombies. Poor girl. 

It doesn’t help that there are scandalous rumours about what she feeds them and that, on occasion, it is said that they escape…