Zombi RPG – lategaming

Twilight Tangents 2.0 – ZOMBI

So, we decided to change some things.

Twilight Tangents is by far our best selling book. People just love zombies in Twilight: 2000. It’s probably been tempered by the release of The Walking Dead but it’s still a solid seller.
I had a load of writing for Zombi stuff that I wanted to use but it seemed out of place in with the psychic powers stuff.
Twilight Tangents is also my oldest supplement by a country mile. It was the first thing I put together for the Free League Workshop so its update was well overdue. I mean it’s been up there for about four years!

We’re splitting Twilight Tangents into two separate books – so if you previously got it you won’t lose access to anything Zombi-like or even the rules for Psychic Abilities. You’re getting the Twilight Tangents upgraded Zombi content for free and retaining all of the previous book.

Twilight Tangents: Zombi warps the cold realism of Twilight: 2000 into a fungal nightmare of paranoid aggression, plague-scarred survivors, and walking corpses born not of mysticism, but bioweapons. Set in a world where Agent INFERNO, an engineered mould, has twisted fear into fury and death into zombification, players navigate a crumbling civilisation where trust is deadlier than bullets and infection is only a breath away.

This sourcebook reimagines the apocalypse with horrifying biological plausibility: zombis driven by neural-hyphae infestations, panicked survivors clutching to faith, violence, or denial, and institutions turning to the dead as weapons of control. It’s not survival horror. It’s a war against your own instincts, played out across ruined cities, quarantined zones, and overrun compounds. With new campaign options, adversaries, factions, life paths, and grim narrative hooks, Zombi doesn’t ask if you’ll survive, only how much of your humanity you’ll lose before the end.

We will be following this up later this year with two new books. Twilight Tangents: Espers and Twilight Tangents: Lycanthropes. I’ve not started writing them yet but the summer is coming up and I’ll have plenty of time to put stuff together.

Twilight Tangents: Espers

The Mind Is a Weapon – But Who Pulled the Trigger?

Twilight Tangents: Espers tears back the veil on a secret war fought not with bullets, but with thoughts sharp enough to kill. Born from classified experiments and the shattered psy-ops of The 23rd Letter, these are the invisible soldiers of the Twilight War; remote viewers, psychic assassins, telepaths embedded in command bunkers, and precognitive assets burned out before their twentieth birthday.

The Twilight War didn’t just scorch the Earth. It ruptured the human psyche. This supplement brings full psychic warfare to Twilight: 2000 4th Edition, revealing how nations cultivated Espers to manipulate battlefields, undermine leadership, and rewrite reality one mind at a time. Players step into a world of neural blacksites, psionic backlash, mental conditioning, and conspiracies so deep they were never meant to be remembered.

Twilight Tangents: Lycanthrope

We didn’t create them. We just stopped giving them a reason to hide.

In the smoke and chaos of the Twilight War, something older than humanity emerged from the forests, the mountains, and the ruins. Not a bioweapon. Not a myth. Something that had always been there, watching. Waiting.

Twilight Tangents: Lycanthrope is a savage expansion for Twilight: 2000 4th Edition, introducing werewolves not as fairy tale monsters, but as apex predators whose packs have turned warzones into hunting grounds. These aren’t cursed peasants or Hollywood beasts. They are strategic, feral, and organized and they remember what humanity has forgotten: how to stalk, how to kill, and how to survive.

From black-ops werewolf handling units to insurgent packs tearing through the last enclaves of civilisation, this sourcebook explores lycanthropy as a battlefield reality. Inside: new lifepaths, rules for transformation, hunting instincts, and feral politics. The beasts are real. And they’re not hiding anymore.

An old ZOMBI review…

Because ZOMBI is back on sale, I figured looking at an old review might be timely.

From Caliverbooks (Valkyrie mag)

Zombi RPG
Crucible Design

Zombies have appeared in RPGs since D&D first appeared. Those early zombies were the sword fodder for many questing bands. Recently though the zombie horror movie has become a focus for games. Zombi, along with All Flesh Must be Eaten (AFMBE) from Eden Studios, are both part of this new wave, yet they take very different approaches to the same subject.

The skeleton of a character is similar to Crucible’s earlier game Space Ninja XDO Cyber Crisis. Ten traits (including close combat, scrounging and medicine) along with a character’s panic statistic (which simulates their reaction to the presence of the zombi menace) define a character. This system leads to characters that are significantly less detailed than those found in AFMBE but are also quicker to generate from scratch.

The game’s muscles are embodied in its simple mechanics. A dice roll, modified by the panic statistic if there are zombies about, is compared to a trait or an opponent’s roll. This mechanic is readily applied to a variety of death dealing methods. Zombi relies more on a referee’s judgment than providing rules, and so this section is considerably less detailed than AFMBE combat rules. Then again, how often do you need rules for dogfights in a zombie horror game?

The meat on the carcass in Zombi comes in the background section. The setting is detailed in a few pages and is straightforward enough. The Zombi plague-infected dead rose from the ground at the end of 1999 and shortly afterwards the widespread collapse of civilization ensued.

A wide variety of encounters with other survivors, from a loner in a recreational vehicle right through to major settlements, are suggested. This is where Zombi really shines. Instead of a long list of optional twists on the zombie, as found in AFMBE, they are treated as a force of nature. Zombi suggests they are used to force disparate groups of survivors together, creating the tensions from which great stories spring.

Zombies aren’t neglected though, along with game statistics come a random appearance generator and rules for the zombi plague. The book is rounded out with over thirty short adventure hooks.

Zombi is a sixty-eight page, A5 booklet. The layout is clear and effective with competent black and white, full-page illustrations. It certainly isn’t as pretty as AFMBE but the presentation certainly doesn’t detract from the product either.

While the system is competent, the focus on the living rather than the dead is where Zombi’s real strength lies. Anyone considering running a game in the zombie horror genre would make a wise investment of a bit of cash if they picked up a copy of Zombi. A nice little game that won’t burn a hole in your pocket.

Zombi is a game very much like the films that inspired it. There are zombies everywhere, it wasn’t made on a blockbuster budget and it’s full of interesting ideas.

ZOMBI now available on DTRPG

ZOMBI is now on DTRPG. Originally distributed in hardcopy through the US and Europe, this is the first digital version.

The first few pages of this journal have been destroyed by fire and by weathering. The actual location of the structure is unknown. It becomes legible halfway down page six.

“Though the sun overhead had been baking the skin from their backs, his men had been digging without pause for several hours. After all, they were two hours behind schedule and they were losing money with every minute that passed.”

Some pages have been damaged describing the outer defenses of the structure.

“The stone rolled away quite easily, surprising two of the men who panicked in their attempt to get out of the way. The stone rolled on, oblivious to their cries and over a mans leg, crushing it from toe to knee. I didn’t notice until later for my attention was riveted to the space the stone had left. A hole, an opening!”

“Laverne could not decipher the hieroglyphics. He would shake his head and mutter about eternal life and how there was no opposite to eternal life. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I had what I wanted. In a few days I would be recognised among my peers with this discovery”

“Two men in the workforce have died. The first one, the man whose leg was crushed, was stricken with a strange fever that seemed to abate but an hour later he was awake again and attacking the other people in the camp. He’d managed to kill his nurse before the men subdued him. Apparently they had to smash his skull open with a spade to stop him.”

“Five men came from the village today. They spoke to the workers in private. First they herded all of us into a single tent. Maurice shot two of them before they knocked him senseless. Then have taken the charges and the equipment and resealed the chamber. They are returning now. I think we may be in hot water.”

Transcript from the journal of missing archaeologist Alain LaFontaine unearthed in Egypt, 1992. LaFontaine discovered an unknown pyramid and went missing after a workers dispute in 1907. Translated from the original French.

What if the people who were dead got up one day?
What if they got up and started killing other people?
What if the people they killed just got back up and killed some more people?
What if it had already started?
What if that day was yesterday?
Zombi is a roleplaying game set in the world of the Zombi. The Dead walk the lands, killing and eating the living. Society has fallen and the only thing left now is to break out, find an island somewhere, live a little…before then end. But there must be more than just static and deserted cities out there? Sometimes you hear the radio talk for a while, sometimes you see lights in the sky and they remind you that even as the streets are haunted with shambling, rotting monsters, humanity is out there waiting for a chance to reclaim everything.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/380498/ZOMBI

And we released the chargen and combat rules for ERIS MODERN, the system used in The 23rd Letter and our upcoming superhero game.

ZOMBI PDF for download

Here

This is missing the art for the most part which I’m going to re-scan and insert into a later copy of the PDF as well as post on here as well. The book itself is still for sale should someone want a hard copy with the art included. Without the art, the book weighs in at a lightweight 990K so it’ll even be light enough to download to a palmtop or smartphone.

I’ll include a link in the downloads section too. Enjoy! Please add a comment below if you download it 🙂

The Books again

Orders for the books have been trickling through which means that people are getting them into their hands. The Paypal links are working well and the post office is just round the corner from my work so I pop out and do the postage at lunch time and everyone is happy. We’re down to about 15 copies of Zombi already and I’m working hard on prepping a PDF for sale as well as getting a second printing done – the news about Key20 really threw a spanner in the works there.

It feels good to be getting the stuff out there however – not quite as good as getting someone else to handle the US distribution but good enough nonetheless.

I’m still wondering what to do about Key20 and the non-payment of money from books sold. I have a feeling that’s going to stick in my craw for a while yet.

The Books

A few days ago I received some chilling and frankly angering news.

We’d been distributed through Key20 for the last 18 months (and previous to that as well) and we’d sent them the vast majority of our stock. As of last week, they couldn’t pay so they’re sending back the remaining books and the only money we’re getting is likely going to be paying for shipping back to us.

This is angering me because they received nearly all of our copies of Zombi, for which we’re getting diddlysquat – and that leaves us up the creek without the proverbial paddle.

To this end, we’re just going to offer fulfillment directly through Paypal and work on getting the PDFs done. It’d hard to find the time to do all of this especially when you consider that we’re out a lot of money.

We’ve got a few books of each variety and we’ll be receiving the shipping of the remainders coming soon and aiming for a second printing as soon as we can afford it.