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Enthusiastic storytellers from all over the world wanted to playtest Mark Rein-Hagen's I Am Zombie. Region managers needed in the UK, France, Germany, US... Contact Fred Colman for more info.
Fred Colman: "I AM ZOMBIE is looking for a few able bodies.....YOU!
Hello there,
When this mail reaches you, you will be designated of a person with a large interest in roleplaying. Serious, deep Roleplaying. Lover of a game that can be gritty, dark but with a certain sense of humor. Great, Join the group..we need people like you.
In short (everyone LOVES a nutshell) a new game is coming soon from the mind of the one who created Vampire the Masq. and he needs your assistence....and so do i. I am looking for region managers. People who will be overseeing the promotion of the game in their country or region. This will be coordinating demo teams and talking about it A LOT! Your first job will be gathering data for your region concerning the RPG and zombie scene. Things will be going fast from here on so if you want to be part of the next game of greatness....JOIN!
Let me know by PM......you know you want to
Fred Colman"
Message from the creator and driving force, Mark Rein Hagen:
"A ROLEPLAYING GAME WITH NOTHING TO WRITE DOWN, NOTHING TO KEEP TRACK OF, NOTHING TO CALCULATE... just play the game and enjoy yourself.
This is the dream I have had since I first started designed RPG's back in college and what I kept telling J.Tweet (D&D-3) whenever he wanted to add a rules system to Ars Magica. "Sure, we can do it, and it's cool, but do we want to, simple is better, right?" And he would always sigh, but then stuff would creep in, because back then we were in love with intricate game system and our own minds and thought that anything that came our of our heads was 'great' and 'amazing'. So we made a great game, but it was complex and unwieldy.
When I started to work on Vampire I already knew that I had one HUGE goal and that was to bring in new players into the hobby. I loved roleplaying, I believed in it completely and though of it as a rebirth of the ancient art of storytelling around the fire, and I wanted my favorite thing to survive and grow. I knew Vampire was the way I could help to do that. D&D was in serious decline at the time, and all the other RPGs were in cruise control, just repeating the same old tropes, I knew that I had to go back to the source (storytelling) and make entirely new.
A few months in on the project I knew I had done it – even though all playtesters quit on me ("We hate the dots") and no one in the company, except Stewart, liked or understood where I was going – I knew that I had somehow captured fire.
At this moment, I feel exactly the same today in regards to I AM ZOMBIE.
This one has been a long time coming. It is a radical new preconception of what a RPG can and should be. A game without character sheets, without having to write anything down, without complex math, but with a modern board game style rules, not dark age rules which rely on charts, lists and pages of rules.
Two months of solid, full time effort, and you know what, it works! It fucking works. It ain't done but already I can see very clearly that is the new thing. The dead simple, easy to learn, new thing.
So this is it, the seminal moment. Either gaming, our kind, changes and innovates, AND becomes simpler and easier to pick up and learn ("Pick 8 Cards") or we accept terminal decline.
All this is not to say the IAZ doesn't have rules, it does, but they will be about as long a medium weight board game like Power Grid. In case some of you don't play board game the hobby have grown immensely over the last 15 years, since Catan demonstrated that modern, innovative rules that are simple and give players something to on every players are way more fun than board games that require you to look up stuff. Over the same period of time RPG's have been in terminal decline, not artistically, at least in terms of Narrativist indie movement, but certainly in terms of being a business.
In terms of of the I must say I don't buy the whole simulationist idea, almost nobody think you can simulate reality in a RPG, what they want is not a simulation but a GAME, they want to manipulate rules, try out new strategies and tactics, and have a relationship with rules that is fun. They want something to do beyond "story masturbation" as guy guy put it. This system gives them that, its simple, but you have a lot to do.
In any case, here are the cards, with art. Please try to print and make a character. We printed out at a photolab because it makes nice cards, but you can use regular paper. Just make an 8 card human character at first (most games start with the players as human). Then later try a 10 card beginner Zombie character. Players get one experience point per game session, so they can buy a new 2pt card every two times. You can also trade in card to get new one, which I think is great, Lateral change is a big part of great storytelling.
Keep in mind that you need to keep cards stacked into three piles (its a game thing mostly but also based on the science of Attention). So getting to 10 card is a big deal, suddenly you will have 4 cards in one pile. Almost all actions require combining an Attribute (underlined words) with an Ability (not underlined). If you have 5 or more on something its pretty good. If you are aiming a rifle Perceive + Rifle is what you need. If you are trying to break into a banks computer systems roll Wits + Tech. You can roll Physical, Mental, Social or Mayhem dice, but you can't use more successes than you have cards in that color. Purple is mind, Green is Social, Blue is Physical and Red is... Mental successes can be saved up to to take away ones (which get rid of success).Social successes let you take away ones on other playes roll). Mayhem does damage and Physical lets you do stunts.
Players can rearrange cards freely between scenes, or can switch two cards during a scene by spending a mental success.
I realize some of you are a bit lost on the game system, and others of you have said you just don't like it. Its easy for me to understand your trepidations, I've been through this before, change is scary, simplicity often comes across as simplistic at first glance. However after playing with these playtest cards, with art, I am completely convinced this is the right way to go. Its like the difference between Ticket to Ride and Advanced Squad Leader, both games are great, but only one sells millions and brings new people into the hobby, the other is old technology that no one uses anymore."
