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An excellent product, especially when you consider that it's free, free, free. I hope these fine folks will continue to produce additional artwork.
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I can sum up my opinion of Floyd the Mailman in six words: I CAN’T HEAR THE DOGGONE NARRATOR! Seriously, either speak up or tone down the blasted music that's SUPPOSED TO BE in the background. Sure, I know the old saying “You get what you pay for,” but the poorly edited audio in this product takes that statement to a whole new level.
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An excellent selection of multi-genre portraits, with everything from zombies to knights to pirates.
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This is a fine collection of character illos. The fact it comes with an html index of the drawings and each drawing is included as a stand-alone graphics file makes this more useful than other art packages i've looked at on these sites.
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Amazing! And it is for free what makes it odd, but AMAZING!
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108 Terrible character portraits is a self deprecating little number that isn't at all bad actually. The quality of the portraits ranges from good to passable and whilst there are none that are great, there certainly aren’t any that are “Terrible” either. Many of them have a fair bit of charm.
I'll be honest there are more expensive art packs out there that are a lot worse.
I picked this up with very low expectations given the title and was very pleasantly surprised.
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This is a great assortment of character illustrations that could be used in a wide variety of games. I'm looking forward to printing a few of these illustrations on cards to use as NPC images for an upcoming game.
The linework is clean, the images are evocative. If I'd known about the kickstarter project I probably would have spent money on these.
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2:37 that I will never get back.
Floyd the Mailman is a slightly humorous story about a man who is bitten by a zombie, but continues his life as a mailman w/o anyone really noticing because,
1) Mailmen are boring (apparently) and
2) Floyd doesn't seem to need or want to attack people to eat them.
For me, this story did not really follow the zombie meme, as it broke some of the cardinal rules about how zombies behave. You might like it, but I didn't.
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A simplistic RPG with a simple scope, but a fun concept. You get to play the zombie! and not the horrific tragic monster either, instead you actually get to go out and have some fun with your unlife!
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Some time ago, Duane O’Brien, blogger and owner of the RPG Bloggers Network, provided me with a free copy of Shambles, his Zombie RPG. But it’s no ordinary Zombies RPG. This time you don’t get to defend yourselves from the undead, you are one of them.
Shambles is currently available as a 55-paged (digest-sized) PDF is optimized for the screen. A print-optimized version will be released in the future.
In Shambles you don’t play the heroes. Before your characters were turned into undead nobodies with a craving for brains, you were living nobodies, spending uninteresting lives in a boring part of the world. The most exiting thing that ever happened to your character was his death.
There’s not much of a setting in Shambles, but that’s not a bad thing. Basically your setting is the modern world with Zombies thrown in. But Duane provides us with three campaign styles: Fast Food Zombie Fun, I Want My Life Back and Feeding Frenzy. In the latter you pretty much play a brain-dead, brain-eating Zombie right out of most Zombie flicks. In the first two campaign styles the characters still cling at least partially to their former lives. But all three styles are meant to be Good Clean Fun, Shambles is no horror game.
Shambles comes with it’s own game system called LAFFS, that’s the Light, Adaptable, Fast, Flexible System. To make action checks you roll pools of six-sided dice. Each die result that is in excess of a difficulty set by the GM is a success. A player can also spend LAFF points to adjust the value of a single die roll. LAFF points are earned by good roleplaying, getting the whole table laughing, et cetera.
The rules are pretty light-weight and should never get into the way. Shambles is clearly about the fun and not complex rules.
Each Zombie character consists basically of six skills: Lurch, Flail, Clutch, Brawn, Chuck and Sense. Skills usually range from 1 to 6 with 3 being the average. Character creation is either random or you can distribute 18 points and distribute them between the skills. Human characters aka Victims have different skills, that cover pretty much the same concepts: Speed, Dexterity, Stamina, Throw, Alertness and Strength.
Combat usually consists of simple contests of skill. Imagine a Zombie character want to grab a human. So he has to roll his Clutch skill against the human’s Speed. That means, the Speed rating becomes the difficulty of the roll. Damage caused is usually between 1 and 6 (1 pt damage is usually caused by bare hands, while 6 pts of damage are caused by acid, or being hit by a moving vehicle). Having more than one success does not cause additional damage but the victim drops something, is thrown to the ground or something more spectacular happens.
Aside from combat damage, Zombies have to worry also about decay. Usually Zombie characters lose 1 hitpoint per day, but they can regenerate hits by eating brains of humans. Yummy! Shambles even has rules for severed body parts and other small nuisances a Zombie character faces every day. Nothing a stapler and a bit of duct tape couldn’t solve.
Let’s talk about fun. As soon as you start reading Shambles you notice that is was written very much tongue-in-cheek. The game doesn’t take itself too seriously and that’s a good thing. While reading the book I laughed out loud several times and the artwork is just hilarious. But beware, if you can’t stand gratuitous amounts of blood and pictures of rotting people, Shambles is probably not the game for you. But if you don’t mind some gore you can have a lot of fun with just reading Shambles. I haven’t played it yet, but I am sure it’s a blast.
So, is Shambles the right game for you? If you enjoy watching movies like “Shawn Of The Dead”, you’ll love Shambles. I think I could go on for hours praising this game. If you are into humorous games, you should definitely check this fine game out!
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Subtitled 'The Wholly Unremarkable Life of the Living Dead' this game proves that, within these pages at least, being a zombie might even present a bit more interest than being alive. Read the Introduction and see how a humdrum existance can be changed, if not for the better, into something worth playing a game about. The aim is for the characters' "pre-zombie" life to be quite dull and unexciting - they are not the people you'd generally play in a role-playing game (unless it's the mythical Papers & Paychecks of course). However, that's the default setting, readers are encouraged to play the game with whatever setting they please - Old West, out in space, wherever.
Next, System. It is a custom one, designed to be fast, simple and flexible. Called LAFFS (Light Adaptable Fast Furious System) it is not as frivolous as the acronym might suggest. Using d6s, you roll the appropriate number of dice (based on an apposite stat) against a GM-set difficulty, and your sucess gets better the more dice that are rolled over that difficulty. And if the dice won't cooperate, you have LAFF Points to add to your roll - you get them by doing something positive towards the game (but can lose them for sins like rules-lawyering, wibbling about other stuff instead of role-playing, or arguing with the GM). You can use them to cancel someone else's successes too. The whole idea is to keep the story moving along, and fun for all the players (their characters may disagree, but hey!)
That understood, a bit more detail on making characters. Some background on previous life is suggested, with an eye of course to keeping it dull and humdrum: you may not particularly WANT to be a zombie but the base concept is that it's a bit more interesting on a day-to-day basis than whatever you did before. You get six stats to describe your character, each rated from 1 to 6; and you can either point-assign or roll for them. This section rounds off with a few sample characters to give you the idea. And then on to the notable feature of zombies: they decay over time, however careful you are. Fortunately you can stay the loss of hit points by eating brains, each brain eaten means you keep a hit point you would otherwise have lost. There's also Gore, which is a measure of how scary you look, and a bit about how to use severed limbs to best effect (and that duct-taping them back on is established zombie practice).
Next, Combat. Bound to be the odd brawl, especially when pesky human beings (the still-alive sort) want to keep their brains inside of their skulls. It's quite basic - you either hit things, grab onto them, throw something or use something in an attempt to cause damage. The object of the exercise is to get brains...
This is followed by a note on role-playing. Depending on the sort of game being played, it can be as serious as attempting to hang on to the tattered remnants of your former self, or a good mindless rampage played for laughs. A discussion of how life as a zombie is likely to be moves on to GM resources, starting with a reminder that like real life, interesting things do happen to the living - just not those ones who are now the zombies. They never did get invited to the best parties, and certainly won't get in smelling and looking like dug-up corpses. As well as some ideas, should you feel the need for them, about what causes zombies in your world (although they just ARE will suffice), there are some organisations that may hinder or help our zombies on their merry way.
Finally, there is a sample scenario should you feel the need for that much structure to your game. Basically, a group of zombies decide to go to a punk rock gig. Maybe they like the music, or maybe it's just the thought of all those brains (mmm BRAINS!) gathered in one place. Or indeed, that they'd bought the tickets prior to becoming zombies and don't want them to go to waste.
That's it. Fast, fun, and perfect for a night when nobody feels like serious role-playing but fancy a game of something rather than just sitting around chatting. It gets the spirit of every zombie movie ever shown but with the twist of the characters being the zombies rather than trying to escape from them. Mmmmmm... BRAINS!!!!
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This sheet is included with the game, but it's nice to be able to print it off separately. It's a very good sheet, graphically representing the character's attributes as well as their inevitable deterioration as you decay and start falling apart.
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Very different, very unique game where you play a zombie. Because you're dead, you start falling apart. You attributes decrease over time, so you can start off as a "fast zombie" and end up, well, shambling. All characters have a limited lifespan. The object is to accomplish some goal before you're dead-dead. To stave off decay, you can eat brains, if you can manage to catch a living person. A lot of fun to play, for one-shots or short campaigns.
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| Shambles |
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by Joe T. [Verified Purchaser]
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Date Added: 02/11/2010 22:40:26 |
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Ran this for my usual group tonight. Here are some notes I have on it:
We used the first character generation method (aka point buy). From the get go, players realized what their dump stats were: chuck, and for some, clutch. Humans only have one HP per area, and if they get hit in the head or chest, they're done. So it's easier to beat them up with Flail, and then bite them later.
Some of the particulars of the system are vague. For example, there's no rules on initiative. When combat happens, what order does it happen in? Also, there are six hit locations, but nothing that says where someone is hit when you hit them. Is it random? Does the attacker choose? If the attacker chooses, why doesn't everyone aim for the head?
There's no way to just talk to stuff -- as in, there's no roll for persuading someone. I sometimes had them roll sense (with is really intelligence/perception, not persuasion), and sometimes just worked it out through role play, but my players tend to try to talk to stuff before hitting it.
Some of the rules are also disjointed. Humans, like I said, have 1 point in each area, 6 total. When you bite someone after clutching them, it deals two damage. It also says that if I deal 6 damage to the head by biting, I've eaten their brain. Does that mean in one bite I've killed them, and then I spend 2 more rounds gnawing through their skull? It seems almost that the bite/braining rules (which are given early on in the book) weren't written taking the human rules into account.
There's no good way to have a fight against a strong human. One hit to the wrong location, and the human is dead. Even the "tough bouncer" presented in the packaged scenario falls like a sack of potatoes against a zombie. I tried offsetting this with the optional brawn rolls to soak damage, but that just lead to stalemates as neither side took damage.
However, even with these issues, the game was still quite enjoyable. We used the packaged scenario, which led to some good terrible fun. We eventually got into the right mood, which included 10 minutes of "Country fried soup" jokes when they made it to Danny's chain bar, and a chain of brainless bodies across the state. Only downside of the scenario is that some of the premises (ie rail roading) require an extraordinary amount of hand waving to be plausible.
Overall it was fun, but the system leaves a bit to be desired. The system's sort of a simplified version of New Shadowrun / Old WoD, but it loses some important details in that simplification. I might try the setting with a different system at some point. It's a good value, and will certainly make for a fun one shot, but I don't see myself running this again for the same group.
Quote from a player: "best comedy game I've ever played. Maybe I just like zombies, who knows?"
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Publisher Reply: |
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Joe,
Thanks for purchasing the game, and for taking the time to write your thorough review.
The goal with Shambles and the LAFFS system is to provide enough system to resolve commonly contested activities (usually fighting), while not getting terribly involved with the dice. As a system, it's pretty boiled down. The intention is to focus on role-play. To that end, things like Initiative and Persuasion tend to be things that are worked out with straight-up role-playing, a fact I may need to clarify this a bit in a later revision. If you get stuck and need an initiative result to resolve an action, you can use Lurch as the general "This is how well you move" stat.
You do have the brain-eating and human rules correct. Humans are squishy meaty things that go down pretty easily. Without a good weapon, even beefy humans tend to drop hard. Combat usually follows the "Flail everyone to death, eat their Brains later" path. It takes a couple rounds to gnaw through a human skull to get to the brain and get a Brain token, but that would normally only come up if someone's trying to eat a brain in the heat of the moment, or if two players are contesting a brain.
On Page 13, under Character Degeneration, there's a small chart that shows hit location for the daily point of decay. The intention for this chart was for it to be the random hit location chart as well, and the die-rolls correspond to the numbers on the character sheet showing the various body parts under the Damage heading. I'll look to call more attention to this chart in a later revision. For called shots I usually raise the difficulty, or let them call their own shots if they wildly succeed.
It sounds like everyone had a good time playing. To me, this game is all about setting up a good time, like 10 minutes of Country Fried Soup jokes (I might have to steal Country Fried Soup for the Danny's menu I'm working on). I more or less bank on players remembering brains and eating people, and forgetting the hand waving, of which I freely admit there is a great deal, both in the sample scenario and in the game itself.
If there are any other pieces to which I can provide clarification, I'm happy to answer any questions (you can contact me directly through aterribleidea.com or through the contact publisher link). |
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I haven't had a chance to read this yet, so I can't give an accurate review.
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