The saving grace is that the system isn’t terribly complicated, so once you’ve looked something up once it shouldn’t be too hard to remember. I get the impression that graphic design and staying true to the “survivor’s journal” theme were prioritized over creating a usable, well-organized RPG book. If there were an index, I would have found it right away. It’s at the front of the book in an unlabeled sidebar in the About chapter, which explains that checks are all based on statistics and are impacted by Difficulties, and it took me several minutes to find.
#Outbreak undead pdf free download how to#
For example, I wanted to look up how to make a skill check, which isn’t covered in the Skills section. Trying to look up specific things is equally aggravating. There are no page-level headers to help you orient yourself within a chapter, so I always found that it took longer to locate specific things than it should have. It lacks an index, which in a book this large is a huge oversight and a crying shame.Īfter spending some time with the book, I found it annoying to navigate because of the lack of differentiation between sections within chapters. OU is broken into 10 chapters: About, Characters, Skills + Traits, The Turn, Zombies, Combat, Vehicles, Equipment, Gamemaster’s Section, and Glossary. (It also means that while this is a ginormous hardcover, there’s a lot less text per page than you might expect, which isn’t necessarily good or bad.) Organization This was cool for the first few pages, but became grit-my-teeth annoying by the end of the book - handwriting fonts aren’t as easy to read or as conducive to the kind of clarity you need from an RPG rulebook as plain text. Unfortunately, OU uses a handwriting font throughout, interspersed periodically with typewritten text.
#Outbreak undead pdf free download manual#
The sketches are almost uniformly awful, but I think they’re supposed to be - in the context of a zombie survival manual cobbled together in a post-zombie-apocalypse world, they look like what a non-artist would sketch to illustrate the stuff they’re writing about. The photos are actual photos of scenes that, for the most part, fit the subject matter: empty parking lots, abandoned buildings, blurry people as zombies, shots of weapons, etc. It’s a slick, immersive presentation that really sets the tone for the book. The whole book is presented as if it were a survivor’s journal found after the zombie apocalypse: The background for every page is a lined page from a spiral-bound notebook, and the pages are plastered with sticky notes, taped-on bits of paper, polaroids, and sketches. It’s $45, which is about right these days. The cover art depicts a woman in two states, uninfected and zombie, with a polaroid showing her as a zombie with a note on it: “She is still pretty to me.” It’s printed on heavy, high-quality paper, and it looks and feels nice. It’s a monster hardcover, 452 pages, with a full-color cover and a B&W interior. So how is it? Here’s the short version: It’s got some flaws, but if you like zombies and want to try a different kind of RPG, you’ll love Outbreak: Undead.
So I wrote to the publisher and asked for a print review copy, which I tucked into right away.
It’s also an “avatar game,” an RPG in which you play a character based on yourself (though you can, of course, also play any kind of character you like), which presents some unique challenges and opportunities from a GMing perspective. I love zombies, horror, survival horror, and all the intersections thereof, and Outbreak: Undead (OU) is a zombie survival horror RPG - right up my alley. After seeing a preview of Outbreak: Undead ( warning: has sound) online, and then again at GenCon, I knew I wanted to review this game for the Stew.
0 kommentar(er)
