ALL FLESH MUST BE EATEN!
I wrote about AFMBE four years ago back on that other blockchain, but the images from that article are all broken, and as we're in September and I'm planning to run a spooky-themed version of this game in October, I thought it would be fun to re-visit this little-known tabletop RPG and introduce a new generation to a bloody good time. Strap yourselves in, we're taking a field trip back to the early 2000s, when the zombie pop culture uprising was just getting underway.
(As always, all images used in this post are scanned from my own sources).
The Dead Stir
Horror-themed RPGs were nothing new at the time of AFMBE's release. White Wolf studios had spent much of the previous decade introducing players to supernatural horrors in their World of Darkness setting, where players could take on the personas of vampires, warlocks, restless spirits, werewolves, mummies, and shape-shifters of all sorts, or even the metaphysically-enhanced humans who hunted them. A decade prior to that, Chaosium began publishing rules and scenarios for cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian vein with Call of Cthulhu, a game where your character's mental fitness mattered more than their ability to absorb physical punishment. Zombies themselves, at least in the George Romero Night of the Living Dead-style, had been an element of tabletop roleplaying since the first incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons, and shambling corpses were likewise potential enemies for players to encounter in all the previously-mentioned games as well as virtually every other fantasy RPG. Indeed, "Rots" are a common low-level enemy encounter for newly-minted characters in White Wolf's Hunter: The Reckoning. But it took AFMBE to posit gameplay in a Dawn of the Dead-style universe, mixing the survival horror aspects of ordinary people and resource management seen in video games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil with a world of pen-and-paper tabletop gaming, and in doing so, they were incredibly successful.
Notice that this is not "The Zombie Roleplaying Game". This is "The Zombie Survival Roleplaying Game". AFMBE is not your typical power fantasy like other tabletop RPGs, and while the rules system allows for the creation of more battle-hardened Survivors and True-Faith-powered Inspired, the real heart (and spleen, and liver) of the matter are the Norms. Norms are your "normal" folk: typical everyday examples of humanity who populate every walk of life. They're retail staff, office drones, baristas, cooks, airline pilots, video gamers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, physicists, librarians, college students, wankers who run comic book stores like @blewitt, and so on. The 99.7% of humanity who aren't military, police officers, world-class athletes, hardcore survivalists/preppers, MMA fighters, and so forth. Ordinary people, just like you and me.
What happens to people like that when the dead start walking?
Great question! Best way to answer it is to round up a troupe of your buddies and have them create characters based on themselves to see how long they'd last in a world where the dead outnumber the living by 10,000 to 1. That includes all their strengths: if they speak fluent Mandarin in real life, then so does their character. Proficient in veterinary science? Then their character knows how to fix up animals too. Do they regularly run Marathons? Then they've probably got a higher-than-normal Constitution score. But the converse also applies: if they don't know how to shoot a pistol, suffer from asthma, can't drive a car, are addicted to cigarettes or vape pens, then their characters suffer the same flaws. Nobody said the apocalypse would be all fun and games, and this emphasizes the more personal aspects of the horror. (Note that this is not the only way to play the game, it's just the method I find most entertaining for first-time participants.)
This is the Way the World Ends
Once you've subjected your players to the personal nightmare scenario of a world gone undead, you can always up the ante by bringing out the Survivor and Inspired character types to give players more of a fighting chance. On top of that, the main rulebook presents a slew of potential scenarios for where and how the zombie uprising has taken place, so you aren't limited to your standard early-21st-century post-apocalyptic wasteland. What's more, the Zombie Master has plenty of room to create a world of rotting corpses tailored to their exacting specifications to keep players on their toes. The rules offer options for everything: how did the zombie plague start (was it a virus that came down on a meteor, the result of toxins dumped into the environment, radiation from a solar flare); how weak or powerful are the walking dead; what is the vector for transmission of the pathogen responsible for turning living beings into shambling corpses; is it possible to re-kill the zombies and if so how ("shoot 'em in the head" may not be the answer in your scenario); how intelligent are the zombies of this world; are there varying sorts of zombies like we see in games such as Left 4 Dead and Dead Island; do the zombies possess any special skills (can they spit disease, have acid for blood, retain the knowledge of basic tool usage) or means of locomotion (are they "fast" zombies, "slow" zombies, can they teleport around, burrow under the earth, fly, or worse...?); are there one or more beings controlling the zombies, or do they operate like a 'hive mind', or is it every Rot for himself; do the zombies need to feed and if so, on what and how frequently (and how long after the flesh runs out do they start breaking down); is it only human bodies that turn, or is any critter on the planet doomed to rise again if bitten (R.I.P. Australia)? As Zombie Master, Eden Studios has given you a slew of options for building out the world the way you see fit.
But just in case all those options aren't enough, Eden has also released a plethora of different sourcebooks for expanding your tabletop zombie mayhem. Want a typical fantasy setting, with Elves, Dwarves, magic, and other stuff? The Dungeons & Zombies sourcebook has you covered. Looking for a more futuristic milieu with space travel and laser guns? All Tomorrow's Zombies is the book you want. What if there was an Extreme Zombie Wrestling circuit set up after the fall of humanity? Glad you asked: here's Zombie Smackdown!. It's honestly insane how many different ideas Eden went out of their way to support. Martial Arts Mayhem? Enter the Zombie. Swashbuckling pirates more your thing? ARRGH! Thar Be Zombies!. Military-themed campaign more your thing, with tanks and planes and submarines and nukes? Band of Zombies, reporting for duty, sir! A zombie uprising in the Old West? Yup, Fistful o' Zombies has you covered. 1930s-style pulp action in the vein of Tarzan or Indiana Jones? Pulp Zombie, sweetheart.
And of course, there's the requisite Zombie Master Screen and sourcebooks like One of the Living and The Book of Archetypes to expand on the players' options for character creation, equipment, skills, flaws, and tactics. The main rulebook even has built-in conversion mechanics to the d20 system of tabletop games, so you could literally use it in conjunction with the Third Edition (or 3.5 edition) of Dungeons & Dragons, or the d20 Modern rulebooks, and ignore Eden's Unisystem rules if you don't like them.
BRAAAAIIIIINNNNNNSSSSS!!
If there's one weakness afflicting AFMBE, it's the actual rules for combat. Eden chose a d10-style of success-based system similar to that of White Wolf's line of storytelling games, and that can translate into a lot of dice being rolled (and sometimes re-rolled) on both sides of the screen to determine the outcome of some actions. Normally, this isn't a big deal: you want to sneak by a zombie without it noticing, you roll your d10 against your Stealth + Dexterity skill, the zombie rolls its d10 against its Perception skill, and whoever rolls higher after the requisite bonuses and penalties are applied wins.
In combat situations, this can degenerate into a series of multiple rolls just to determine what happened, especially if the opponents being fought are of the still-living variety, or a more powerful/capable/dexterous/intelligent undead foe. Say, for instance, that a player wants to swing a sledgehammer at a zombified police officer. The player rolls her d10 against her Dexterity + Hand Weapon skill to see if she hit the zombie. The zombie rolls a d10 against its Dodge skill (assuming it has one) to see if it got out of the way. Assuming it didn't, the player makes another roll to determine where she hit the zombie cop, and she hits center mass. She then rolls again to determine damage. But the zombified cop died wearing a kevlar vest, so the zombie then rolls to determine how much damage it absorbed. Only then can you actually determine how much the zombie was hurt, if at all.
But hold the phones--if any of those dice rolls come up a 1 (major failure) or a 10 (major success), then you have some more rolling to do, along with consulting a chart that shows just how badly you messed up or how much better you did than expected. And if that re-roll comes up another 1 (for failures) or 10 (for successes), then you continue rolling the dice until you stop getting 1s or 10s. Things can get...messy, and not just in a blood-spurting, skin-devouring way.
Fortunately Eden Studios anticipated this, and offers up several other ways to do things if you'd rather not rely on dice. These can be anything from drawing cards from a standard deck, using a simple compare/contrast of the requisite skills on both sides to determine who gets the upper hand, or simply allowing the Zombie Master to make the determination based on what they think will make things the most exciting. You can live and die by the dice if you want to, but you certainly don't have to, and I like that this option is floated right within the pages of the rulebook.
"Yeah, they're dead! They're...all messed up."
Probably the worst thing about AFMBE though is that it's been out of print for over a decade, making physical copies of the books uncommon at best, and expensive as hell at the worst. At the bare minimum, you'll want a copy of the main rulebook, and that can set you back $50 or more on the second-hand market.
The good news is that if you're OK with digital materials, then AFMBE is both easy to acquire and far less expensive to boot. DriveThruRPG offers up the full range of the game's products for completely reasonable prices: $15 for the core rulebook, $12 for One of the Living, and most of the supplementary sourcebooks and world books are available for between $8 - $12 apiece. There's even a PDF created by Eden Studios for Free RPG Day 2011 entitled "The Walking Dead" that offers the basic rules of the game along with some pre-generated characters and a scenario/campaign outline option for the Zombie Master for no charge, meaning you can literally start playing for no money down.
If you enjoy the in-universe samples of zombie fiction within the various sourcebooks, you can also find three anthologies of corpse-munching horror as well. These are The Book of All Flesh, The Book of More Flesh, and The Book of Final Flesh, each priced at $4.99, which will give you plenty of fuel for your own personal nightmares even if you have no intention of playing or running the game.
Simply put, whether you're looking to do a one-shot standalone creep-fest for Halloween, or are looking to begin a long-running campaign of survival horror based in a world where zombies have taken over, All Flesh Must Be Eaten has just about everything you could want, and I highly encourage you to give it a try. If nothing else, it can make for a fun break from your bog-standard power fantasy campaign and slap some respect back into your players. Nothing humbles the average human like the zombie apocalypse, after all.
Now get out there and shoot some puss-bags. Tell your players @modernzorker sent ya.
this is a nice playoff, well, surely not my flesh. nobody is eating my flesh.
I am sorry, @danokoroafor, but the rules specifically state that All flesh must be eaten... 😁