The actual screen part of this product is fairly standard, a four-panel screen with a fairly gory and dramatic painting on the player side and a whole bunch of useful charts for the Zombie Master. This has an Outcome Table supporting levels of success (or failure) in task resolution, fear effects, explosive damage charts, how much protection body armour or other cover gives you, damge tables, a chart showing turn progression during combat and other useful stuff that it's far easier to have right in front of you than have to look up.

There is also an adventure, Coffee Break of the Living Dead. Opening with a piece of fiction that sets the scene - and the nature of this particular scenario's zombies - the adventure is set in the opening hours of a zombie outbreak with the party trapped in a high-rise office building. The background is yet another reason for having zombies over and above the range of suggestions in the core rulebook, but if you've already started a campaign using one of them it's reasonably easy to adapt this to fit in.

Although it will be quite difficult to pull off, especially if the players know they are playing All Flesh Must Be Eaten, the adventure begins with the characters trundling off to a normal day at work. They don't know each other, but all work in the same building which they shortly will discover is just outside the containment zone set up around a suspected terrorist incident at a research laboratory. After a typically boring start to the day at the office, everyone just coincidentally decides it's time for a coffee break and goes down to the lobby coffee shop... and that's when the lift breaks down. By the time they emerge, the place is crawling with zombies, and things go downhill from there.

The adventure is well-supported with floor plans and descriptions of the chaos in various parts of the building. Eventually, surviving party members may try to leave the building. That's when they meet the authorities outside, who are expecting zombies to come out and are armed and waiting...

The booklet also contains notes on using the Zombie Master's Screen to good effect, pre-generated characters to use with the adventure (these are honed to the adventure, but you could use other characters although some modification might be necessary), some new rules and a discussion of zombie and other survival horror as portrayed in film. Excellent for inspiration and for helping you create the right atmosphere in your games.

The adventure is a solid horror-survival scenario, which works well as an introduction to the game and the beginning (if you wish) of a whole campaign. The essay on horror is good, too, starting with the need to ascertain what scares your particular group... and throw it at them combined with the loss of control of your surroundings inherent in a zombie game. Loads of ideas and concepts to play with as you develop your own adventures.

Return to Zombie Master Screen page.

Reviewed: 5 June 2017