Monday, October 28, 2013

Random Inspiration: A Zombified Hex Crawl

Well, this should be fun...
Recently, I've been reading World War Z by Max Brooks and I'm loving it. I love well-written zombie fiction and its really interesting to see how the entire world my react and slowly adapt to a zombie apocalypse. Now that I'm close to finishing the book, I really want to run a zombie apocalypse campaign using some of the ideas presented in the novel.

While the campaign is still in the "cool idea" phase and I have no immediate plans to run it (I still have my Pathfinder game to worry about), I've been thinking about what system I would use and how I'd run the game. Last night, an idea popped into my head: Why not run the game as a hex crawl?

The game would take place a few months after the initial outbreaks and chaos. The players would belong to a group of survivors who have discovered an abandoned facility (I'm favoring a small military base at the moment) and have set-up a small community there. The characters would then be sent out into the surrounding wilderness to gather supplies, raid abandoned stores, and the like. Like a normal hex crawl, the players would explore a large hex map while on these missions, each hex containing different sites and encounters. For example, they might discover a small farm house inhabited by a family who has resorted to cannibalism due to the shortage of food or a wrecked RV filled with supplies, but surrounded by the living dead. Anything's possible really.

If I were to run a zombie hex crawl, I'd make sure to add some wandering zombies into the mix as well. For example, when the characters move out into the wilderness, there would be a chance of them running into a wandering group of undead. I'd probably represent this by a percentage roll that would be modified by the character's actions (if they were being very loud and drawing attention to themselves, that percentage would go up). I'd also focus on resource management, since those resources will raise the chance of the characters and their group surviving the apocalypse.

So, what do you guys think? Do you think a zombified hex crawl would be an interesting idea? How would you run such a campaign?

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