I don’t have time to think about this right now so this is a brain dump.
Basic idea: a zombie survival game using the V-Commandos engine. Because there aren’t enough zombie survival games already. Well, there aren’t enough that are interesting to play…
The basic stealth mechanic should work well.
Obvious changes: zombies replace Nazis. Zombies don’t have ranged weapons, so they need to be powered up in some other way.
This is a mission-based game rather than just “try to survive”, so it’s probably happening a few days or weeks after the initial uprising and everyone still alive has some fighting capacity. Still, we might remove the hand-to-hand kill unless a character has an appropriate melee weapon.
One might build the mission structure into a more flexible campaign than VC’s operations: given a roster of characters and equipment, decide who goes where for each day’s mission, and what they bring back you can add to the equipment pool.
Equipment:
- The usual pistols and SMGs
- Crossbow (1-2 dice,
, no 
)
Zombie Nazis, Roger. Zombie. Nazis.
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That’s for the other version I had in mind, the version that’s based on my occult WWII game…
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That’s more of a political thriller.
I, for one, salute this excellent idea. Happy to brainstorm.
Things that would be needed:
- player cards (at least 5 of, double sided)
- equipment (crowbar and first aid can stay, as can grenade, TNT and spotted; enemy uniform becomes zombie camouflage; bombardment probably goes)
- terrains (map layout with player count and goal)
- event cards
- operations or other campaign system
Does the “trapdoor” model for entrances and exits still work?
Zombies probably won’t drop weapons.
I think trapdoor works fine; alternatively it could be a vehicle? Zombies won’t steal but best not to lose keys; could also double as a store for items in some campaigns?
Infection/risen from the grave mechanic may be slightly interesting rather than just a dead character - always fun to blow away your old self with a shotgun. Zombie disguises are traditionally made by covering the protagonists with entrails, so might be fun to require a stealth kill or at least any kill to get one.
Don’t want to make things too complex or less fun, but could consider variants with individual wins as well as team wins with potential betrayal to make things a bit more Romero. Probably shouldn’t be the default though.
Tougher zombies could include faster ones, screamers/clowns which increase zombies arriving every round, tougher to kill (SWAT or armoured types?).
Weapons would likely be mission or map rewards rather than zombie drops.
Well, just as uniform is a random drop from killing enemies in the base game, entrails can be a random drop from killing a zombie.
In the campaign mode infection would be easy: any wound you get from a zombie causes an infection, which takes that character out of play at the end of that terrain. But that doesn’t have much effect if you’re only playing a single terrain.
Elites from the source game:
- three points of combat strength rather than 1-2
- automatically reveal any survivors on their tile
- combat 1, but move two squares, taking with them any zombies who start on their tile
- combat 3 and a reroll
- blows up (but exploding zombies are obviously silly, who’d play that game?)