RPG Review: All Flesh Must Be Eaten (Revised Edition)

All Flesh Must Be Eaten
The Zombie Suvival Roleplaying Game - Revised Edition

All Flesh Must Be Eaten (AFMBE) is a Zombie Survival Roleplaying Game. It has a great range of options for bother zombie creation and characters. The system is simple but can be made more complicated for those who want more combat related stuff.

Characters are built with points based on what they are; Norm, Survivor and Inspired. Norms are your bog standard person of the street, Survivor’s are tougher with more points and the inspired a like norms but have some points to spend on mystic stuff. I don’t think you really need the Inspired for your good old fashioned Dawn of the Dead style game, but they give you options for some supernatural stuff. Dice rolling is taken down to one mechanic roll a d10 add your skill to the roll if your get a 9 or above you succeed. Modifiers are added to show difficultly and penalties are added when taking more than one action. So if you’re dodging more than 4 zombies and fighting you're brainmeat.

Building your zombie is the most fun section for GMs. What does it eat, how fast and how does it move, where do little zombies come from and how smart are they. Most importantly you can choose your zombie’s weak spot (if it has one); I personally have to go with the classic headshot. At the end of the process it’s gauged how dangerous your zombie is to players.

Deadworlds are the sample campaign settings given to you in 4 or so pages. They give you what happened to cause the dead to rise and your sample zombie for that setting. Detailed is to what extent humans have dealt with things and a nice bit of fiction to give a flavour for that setting.

There is also at the back a conversion guide and rules for the game in D20 modern. Nice that it is added but unnecessary. The layout is clear and easy to read. The art translates well as black, white and shapes of gray. The book itself is a nice hard back slight smaller than most RPG books and a bit lighter (a big plus).

On the whole All Flesh Must Be Eaten is a solid survival zombie game. It could do with more ideas for defences and the like for players (but I hear the player’s handbook is more or less that). With just this and the suggested reading of the Zombie Survival Guide a good campaign of a Zombie Apocalypse could be run quite successfully.