Monthly Archives: September 2011

ZombieTown: A Free GURPS Adventure

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For Christmas last year, one of the gifts I gave Liam was the opportunity to have a custom-made GURPS game, with pizza and a sleepover included, for him and a few of his friends. After a brief dalliance with the idea of a ninja setting, he settled a zombie-themed play session. So I got to writing, and he rounded up some of his usual RPG compatriots. When the designated day arrived, we all came together and had a rip-roaring good time, careering through a Colorado town, shooting up zombies, invading secret labs, and curing the zombie outbreak.

Since I invested a fair bit of time in writing the adventure, and there seems to be a dearth of free material out there for GURPS, I decided to go ahead and release it for other people to use. While it’s designed with GURPS in mind, should be able to be adapted for other RPG systems pretty easily. And while it’s fairly fleshed out, I haven’t spent the time to format and polish it up to a professional level. Thus, gamemasters should be sure to spend a bit of time with it before trying to run it to make sure they know how they’re going to handle various situations when they arise.

The adventure is released under a Creative Commons license. You can use it and adapt it, but not make money off of it or fail to credit me if you create derivative works. It also comes with many of the NPCs already fleshed out in the excellent GURPS Character Sheet software, and the documents available in Pages and PDF formats.

Without further ado, here it is:

ZombieTown

 

If you take a look at it, please drop me a note and let me know what you liked or didn’t like about it. I’d sure love the feedback, and would be especially tickled to know how it’s received if someone else runs it with players. Have fun!

Extracts

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One of my graduate school advisers, poet Richard Kenney, describes poetry as “the mongrel art — speech on song,” an art he likens to lichen: that organism which is actually not an organism at all but a cooperation between fungi and algae so common that the cooperation itself seemed a species. When, in 1867, the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener first proposed the idea that lichen was in fact two organisms, Europe’s leading lichenologists ridiculed him — including Finnish botanist William Nylander, who had taken making allusions to “stultitia Schwendeneriana,” fake botanist-Latin for “Schwendener the simpleton.” Of course, Schwendener happened to be completely right. The lichen is an odd “species” to feel kinship with, but there’s something fitting about it.

What appeals to me about this notion — the mongrel art, the lichen, the monkey and robot holding hands — is that it seems to describe the human condition too. Our very essence is a kind of mongrelism. It strikes me that some of the best and most human emotions come from this lichen state of computer/creature interface, the admixture, the estuary of desire and reason in a system aware enough to apprehend its own limits, and to push at them: curiosity, intrigue, enlightenment, wonder, awe.

– Brian Christian, The Most Human Human, p72