This was to good not to post. I got this off of “The Big Picture”

The Flying Cholitas, Bolivia: Lucha libre (Bolivian wrestling), is one of the most popular sports in the country. Women wrestlers are known as cholitas and have in the last ten years become popular in the sport. Carmen Rosa and Yulia la Pacena perform in a benefit show to raise money for the bathrooms of a school in La Paz, Bolivia, June 26, 2010. Second Prize Arts and Entertainment Stories, Daniele Tamagni, Italy

The past few months people in our Warmachine/Hordes community have been feeling like Privateer Press may be following in the footsteps of (COMPANY NAME CENSORED). Part of these fears came in the form of seeing No Quarter turning into a $7.50 advertisement for PP product, much like (MAGAZINE NAME CENSORED) before it.

So I recently picked up No Quarter #34. Sure, the release schedule was there, and they had previews of stats, but that should be there. It just shouldn’t be the entire magazine. This issue had a fluff story, a fluff article on Retribution, interesting painting guides, and exclusive variant theme lists. This is the kind of stuff that makes the mag worth buying. Here’s hoping Privateer gets that.

Now, I know. The mag not being a waste of paper doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong. We still need to see if the Wrath releases bring in interesting modifications to gameplay without causing powercreep. We’re still waiting to get restocks of older models. But this one success give me hope that we’ll be happy with Privateer for good while longer.

Zombies are a very popular theme. A new zombie movie/video game/board game is coming out every couple of months. So what are your RPG options?

There are quite a few, not to mention home-brew hacks for other games. But here is a short list of the one that seem mainstream:

• All Flesh Must Be Eaten (AFMBE) - An over the top, zombie action game. Not a bad system, but not in any way serious.
• World of Darkness (WOD) - WOD is a horror game in general and I have been a fan of the system for a while.
• Shriek - A cheap game only available in PDF. Good for one shots. Has a little bit of parody in there.
• Year of the Zombie - Didn’t know about this one till I did research for this post. Can’t really give an assessment.
• Dead Reign (Palladium Based) - Dead Reign has a very cool take on zombie mythology. Worth getting just for the ideas. If you like the Palladium system it’s a great game.
• Outbreak: Undead - See below. This is the main point of the post.

There are more that are out of print and a couple of free ones that don’t have very solid rules.

But now, why I decided to post this - Outbreak: Undead (O:U).

O:U has three things going for it the the others do not.

• The level of seriousness - The original Idea behind the game was a method of testing whether your plan to stave off the Z-Apocalypse would work or not. Combat is brutal. You don’t heal easily. It’s easy to panic. Zombies are scary.
• The system is solid - Of the others listed WOD and Dead Reign are probably the only two that can really compare. WOD is fine as long as you don’t have a player who is munchkin-ing. Palladium is one of the most easily breakable systems ever. You don’t have to munchkin, the game does it for you. O:U uses a percentile system that keeps characters on the low side (rightly so), and character advancement is intended to be rare if at all (People don’t change that much unless they put effort into it).
• Play as yourself - On the website, they have a test you can take. Which, providing you are honest, will give you ability scores which will depict you in the game. Now that right there is awesome!

Now I’m not saying the game is perfect. This is this company’s first published game, and there are bound to be some glitches. By their own admission, the online test is still in the alpha/beta stages and they are hoping to expand it in the coming months. But, the game has a very strong foundation, and is the only Zombie RPG that I know of that really tries to be realistic. Check it out.