Flesh, Don't Fail Me Now! is my entry into the Lean Green Zine! jam!
FDFMN is a splatstick, body-part-based narrative / journalling TTRPG. Players take the role of decomposing Zombies, seeking the mysterious Sanctuary. Dead as you are, a tiny glimmer of humanity still burns within.
Designed for 1-5 players and 1+ hours, FDFMN is about survival, memory, and FLESHING OUT the details. FDFMN can be played with a Gore Master (GM) who adjudicates the world, GM-Less or Solo.
You can get it now on itch, Pay What you Want!
Brainy Thoughts, Bodily Thoughts
The key unique feature of FDFMN is its body-part based mechanics. Your body parts are your hit points and your stats, rather than a character's avatar and the statistics operating in different abstracted spaces.
I stuck on the zombie idea pretty early on, the process of writing was really just me stripping down RPG assumptions until I was left with what you see.
The game is designed to be printed, cut up and ripped apart. Especially the character sheets!
The rest of this I'm going to write in a Q&A format, based on questions I imagine someone might ask about the game, but really I'm just adding details I couldn't end up fitting into the pamphlet.
You can survive without a brain?
You can survive if you're nothing more than a rotten old leg, hopping along! These aren't sci-fi/Romero zombies, they're more like mythic zombies, or whatever Thing from Addam's family is.
Okay but, you can have MEMORIES without a brain?
Sure! Think of it like muscle memory.
Why are brains and guts collapsed into one stat?
Initially I did have a separate "brain" or "intelligence" stat but it just didn't feel right. When you design a game's mechanics, you're communicating, however implicitly, the way you're supposed to play. And having a stat for intellect implies thinking is a big part of the game.
By combining both features into "guts" I think it communicates better the type of creature you have become. You're driven by instinct to consume, not higher-order thought. The brain serves to direct the guts... to flesh!
But can the Zombies communicate with each other?
An interesting question for sure. For the sake of roleplay, I would say it's more interesting if they can. But it's also important that they can't communicate with humans. The game works on the assumption that there isn't any chance of peace between the two groups. So how do they talk?
Perhaps they talk through untranslateable groaning. Maybe there's a pheremonal aspect to it. I also like the idea that there's perhaps some preternatural way that they can communicate their intentions to each other, some kind of latent zombie telepathy. Its always felt like zombies in films have this. How do they horde up so well? How do they know not to attack their fellows?
What were your inspirations?
Wow thanks for the great question, hypothetical person. Various old-school horror films with splattery sfx, but especially Braindead by Peter Jackson. As a kid I also had this weird zombie love-story comic, Fragile by Stefano Raffaele. Finally, one of my favourite games from childhood was PS1's Medievil, in which you play a skeleton whose body is falling apart. You could do things like rip off your own arm to use as a club. In the sequel you could put your head on a disembodied hand to have it walk around like a scout.
If you like the comedy-gore-horror themes, I also wrote HEAD GAMES, a D&D 5e adventure about losing your head and becoming a pumpkinhead:
No comments:
Post a Comment