116 Exploring the Zombie Sandbox 'Reanimated' TTRPG

Music. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to this week's episode of Not D&D, which is brought to you by Ian Weld.

As always, I'm your host, Jessica, and this week we have Jed here from Trapped Chest to talk to us about Reanimated. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. So Reanimated is a zombie survival horror RPG, which we'll get into. And I'm really pleased about this because I'm a massive zombie survival horror nerd. I've got my copy of Zombies Survival Card here, which is chewed up correctly as you'd expect it to be.

So I'm really excited to nerd out and chat with you about zombies and tabletop RPGs. We are recording live, so if you have any questions in the chat, please do get involved. Thanks very much for joining us. And we'll be talking about survival horror RPG of reanimated. But Jed, before we dive into the game, I'd love to talk about you as a creator

and your background and history with games. So the classic first question I'll ask you is, do you remember what your first tabletop role-playing game was? My first tabletop role-playing game? That would have been in the early 2000s. A local hobby shop had some backroom space and decided to get role-playing going. And that was right around the time that D&D had moved into third edition. Okay. So a couple of the old school players had brought a couple of us in there.

There were two groups playing. And yeah, the chaos of old school D&D. I do remember how my first character died in vivid detail. Oh no, what happened? If we can have a short version, maybe. So we had been, I was playing a wizard. We had been transported into the Underdark and the group had been split. There was a thin wall between us, just a little passage nobody could get through. Right. And on my side, the GM said, you hear something moving in the darkness.

And at this point we started to panic. The barbarian on the other side using his big mall. I'm going to start breaking a hole in the wall. And, As he's breaking the hole, eventually we get, the GM says, this wet river's coming, he's getting close. I say, I just decide, you know what, I'm going through the hole. And there's a moment of silence at the table with all the veteran players just gasp. And the GM stops and asks, did you tell the barbarian to stop swinging the hammer?

Wizards don't have a lot of hit points. I'm sorry to hear RIP to that wizard. Yeah. I don't mind funny deaths, though. Yeah. Well, I'm guessing you don't mind in character deaths because we're going to be doing survival for our own talking about that. So you started with Dungeons & Dragons, which is the biggest game in the whole. Oh, yeah. So normal for that. Where did you go from there? Where did you go

for exploring other systems? Because it's fair to say that reanimated is very different from D&D. Eventually got into Pathfinder. I became the forever GM. And from Pathfinder, branched off into all kinds of things. Anyone who wants to get away from D&D, The one I would definitely recommend is Savage Worlds. Absolutely bonkers system. And I have played so many that I have lost track of them at this point.

So you had a very varied tabletop RPG diet. You went out and tried lots of different things, which is great. What made you want to go to creating and publishing your own games? Oh, I've wanted to be a game developer my whole life. Since I first played Super Mario Brothers back in the 80s, this is what I want to do with my life. So I tried to get into video games and did a little bit of programming. And I used to paint miniatures, which is literally watching paint dry.

And that is more exciting than programming. So tabletop is way easier to get into. Yeah, that's more your thing. Oh, yes. So how did you start? So you had ideas for games. Because some people watching this might be interested in doing that themselves. So what was your approach into publishing and making your own games?

Uh the big thing is uh looking playing other games and i just keep finding mechanics and thinking i like this but i can do this a lot better if they just change this one little thing.

And most of my games have been like that it's just i want to take this from this game and that from the other game and then give it a little bit of a twist and make it my own thing with reanimated using the key powered system this is actually the second game that uses it the first one was the Nolum project, which I released back in 2023, which is more Star Trek themed game. It's, it was designed to be just very simple.

Something I picked up from Savage Worlds, a lot of the plot point campaigns is they'll give you just a quick plot hook and you get an entire evening of adventure. So the ability to condense a lot of information down into something really small is kind of how I tried to try to design my games. Uh huh. Fab. Well, that segues us in really nicely into Reanimated, actually, because we're kind of talking about the key power system.

So for people that haven't heard of Reanimated before, would you like to introduce the game? Just give us a little introduction and spiel about what the game is.

So usually my sales pitch zombies then we go on to yeah reanimated is a sandbox rpg so it's not based on a specific setting it's obviously inspired by things like romero or 28 days later video games like left for dead or seven days to die but one of the big things was seeing a gap in the market the main competitor that i'm going after is all flesh must be eaten which came out in 1999.

And boy, if you've ever played an RPG that was written in the 90s, it has a distinct formatting that is really hard to read. And where all flesh must be eaten, I believe it's about 260 pages. And I feel that I've done a fairly good job of condensing that down to 20.

So it's with the modern audience where attention spans are a little shorter, people don't want to read through a two to three hundred page book this is a much more accessible game absolutely so it's a when i was reading through it it was very rules light uh there's a quick reference guide that is just like one page long and as you mentioned it's not a specific setting it's very much a toolkit rpg so it's like hey this is stuff you'll need to run your game because you

know people if you say it's a zombie game people have ideas about stories and things they want to run, so it's very much very open, which is really nice to look about that. So you mentioned it uses the key-powered system. Could you give a quick overview of how that works if people aren't familiar with that system? So it is a simple D8-based system. It's...

For people who have played D&D, it's really you roll your dice, add your stat plus your skill and get a final number and you're trying to hit a target number, kind of like any kind of check you do in D&D. Sure. I wanted to just avoid the D20 system and a lot of games use D6, so even though that would have worked, I wanted to get away from that. The key-powered system actually started with a game I built when I first started

my company in 2019 called Business Card Adventures. I decided to challenge myself and build an entire RPG that fit on my business card. It is still up on my website.

It's technically a playing card, but you can play the whole thing. It's very, very simple. It's designed to be as quick as possible. The quick reference on the inside of the cover, that's an idea I got from Ben Milton from Questing Beast. He's always talking about using every inch of paper in the book. So there is nothing that is unused in here.

Yeah fab the with the key power system so you mentioned you wanted to avoid the d20s and d6 and and use the d8s for the game what is it about d8s that you like as a games designer, it's just something that nobody else has used if you look at something like world of darkness they have the d10 yes pool i have another much larger rpg i've been working on that uses d12 so i didn't want to do that and i d4s do not roll so d8s were the only one left yeah i find the d20 is

a little swingy and d6 it's just a little too normal i want to make something a bit different and of course you're familiar with the system because you've used it for other things so it made perfect sense oh for sure reanimated so looking into reanimated let's talk a little bit about the characters so who will we be playing when we're in this game and what does character creation look like? So character creation is, You basically start with a pool of points that you can spend on your stats.

I've never really liked the rolling for stats thing that D&D gets. It's great if you roll all 18s across the board, but you roll really low and you just feel like you've made a bad character. Occasionally you get players that they're playing the game and they just think, okay, when's the next time I can kill this character off so I can make another one? So you went for point buy instead then, yeah? Yeah, I definitely prefer point

buy. And then for skills, for each of your skills, you'll get a number of skill points to spend equal to the number of points you have in each of the associated stats, plus a couple extras to play with. And then hit points, obviously, are based on your strength. You start with 10 plus, I believe I have it set to three times your strength. Other than that, it's just you purchase your weapons, get your inventory.

Or in the case of when I'm running a one shot, I usually have the players start off with nothing and have to scavenge for things because that's way more fun to have to run away. Absolutely. And so in terms of character creation, it feels like it's quite a quick and easy system to get set up with. How long does creating a character usually take? As the creator, I'm kind of used to it, so I can have a character knocked out in about two or three minutes.

For someone that's new to it, I would expect you to be able to make it five to ten minutes should be enough to make a new character. Okay, great. So it does sound like it's very one-shot friendly. And of course, zombie survival games are great for a one-session sort of situation as well. One thing I noticed is the game has advancement and XP in it. So is the game designed more for campaigns or more for one-shots? Or what was your intention?

The advancement is something that carried over from the Nullum project. It's designed for short campaigns. And I kept it in here because there is the chance that you could survive. I assume that most people who are thinking zombies nowadays, they're probably thinking of The Walking Dead, which has been going on for, what, 14, 15 seasons. So, you got, I think there's two characters that are still alive. Yeah. There's always that chance that you could get a couple XP and you could

build up a few things. Mm-hmm. So how does the XP kind of work and the character advancement work? So instead of doing levels like you'd have in D&D, XP is just used as a currency to purchase things. So at the end of a session, the GM would hand out a certain number of XP, usually two or three based on how bad things went or how well you did.

And then you would use that to purchase advancements, like one XP for a hit point, or if you wanted to save up to eight XP, you can get an extra stat point. So you really have to kind of decide, do I just want to get something really quick right now, or do I want to hold off for a couple of sessions and hopefully not die and see if I can buy something big? Fantastic. And obviously, when you're saying hopefully not die, zombie survival horror, infection.

Oh, yes. You've got an infection mechanic. We need to discuss that. So how have you approached infection and how that works mechanically in the game? So I have gone for very high lethality. So at the end of combat, if a zombie has made an attack that has drawn blood, you'll roll a D8. And if you roll high, you're okay. But if you roll four or lower, you are infected and you'll be losing a hit point every hour until you eventually go down and come back as a zombie.

So there is effectively a 50-50 chance that you get bit by a zombie, you're screwed. But it does still offer the opportunity to sort of fix that. Inspiration was taken from one episode of the walking dead where herschel gets bit in the leg and rick just goes hey hold on this is going to hurt and hacks his leg off so you can absolutely do that if you you want to weigh the odds so how is this gonna can i handle with one leg.

Well i guess that's up to the players and the stories that they're telling in that so speaking about like the infection mechanics and things that you played for were there any changes in the game when you were playtesting or things that changed or what I did in or out that you didn't expect? Not really. I've been doing these games for a long time. It's a little discouraging when I do a playtest and everything just kind of works and I have to go back and think, okay, what?

They're just being nice, but yeah, there wasn't a lot that I had to swap out for this one. It was a lot more, less mechanical and more setting things up. People would say, I don't quite understand how this is written. Can you clarify things? Mm-hmm. So it's more just that sort of process opposed to it being like there's any major swings in the system. So it was pretty locked down from the beginning, it sounds like. I'm very good at doing the math. So I once built a Magic the Gathering cube.

It took me three years to do it all spreadsheets. So I've become very good at just mathing out everything ahead of time. Oh, that's good. So that means that mechanically the system will be kind of in place. It's just if the story survives the players, which is the real test. Oh, yes. Well, we've had a question. about how did the zombie apocalypse start? So do you want to take this question as in how you envision that in Reanimated?

So that all depends on the game you're playing. I have done a couple of one-shots recently. I should just did one this past Saturday. And the way the apocalypse started on that one, I've been avoiding the modern settings in my one-shots. This one took place in New York City in 1925. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had been hosting an Egyptian exhibit for a mummy that had recently been unearthed. It had a large black stone in its chest.

And when they removed that, the mummy came back to life and started raising the dead.

And I went with a very Indiana Jones or Brendan Fraser, the mummy style, where the players had to run around the city, retrieve this amulet, and then jam it back into the mummy's chest and the last convention i went to i ran another adventure that was set in the old west a priest had tried to resurrect his wife and did a horrible job and ended up bringing back the whole cemetery and prior to that i had one set in america in the 1950s and i never really explained to the players how the apocalypse

started it just kind of showed up one day and they had to scramble and try to escape so it's yeah how it starts is really going to be for each gm to decide on their own if they want the like we know things like 28 days later we know the monkey started it but in something like dawn of the dead they never really go into where it came from we don't know so the game doesn't specifically prescribe a setting it's very much just toolkit,

a framework for running whatever stories that you want as the GM, I guess.

So how did the zombie apocalypse start? I guess that's a question for you, the listener, to answer more than for Jed. You gave some great examples of stories there, Jed. So one thing is some people, I mean, I'm a huge fan of zombie survival horror, but some people are like, oh, it's a little bit tired. I've seen a lot of things like that. What kind of guidance do you have for zombie horror storytelling and how to keep it fresh and interesting when doing tabletop games?

Oh, it's basically what I did with my Mummy Up version is it technically had zombies, but it's definitely leaning more, that was one more pulp adventure, definitely looking into older media. You don't always have to stick with The same old Walking Dead thing. When I did that adventure on the weekend, I was actually choosing between two adventures.

That one won out because the other one I was going to do that I ended up choosing against was to set the adventure in feudal Japan a few months after it had set up and to have the players all as a clan of ninjas. They had discovered that the Shogun was a smart zombie was leading them and they were supposed to infiltrate Edo and take him out. And i will probably be running that for people at some point but it's yeah the big thing to get away from the classic zombie tropes is.

Definitely change the setting because if you ran a zombie thing and like the zombies are the reason that rome fell then it's going to be drastically different from we're running away from zombies oh no no i like that and i love the examples you gave again just just taking a different point of history and a different thing will will totally definitely change it up so another question i had was about the new players so we mentioned the good thing about zombie survival horror is that

it's a genre that people know and are familiar with so i wonder if that makes it more accessible for people that have never tried role playing before do you think this system is a good one to kind of welcome people into the hobby oh absolutely fantasy can definitely be something that is very intimidating for a lot of people new players don't understand it the adventure i ran on the weekend we actually had two players that had never played an rpg before and it's

just zombies brought them in i've tried running other things and with varying degrees of success but every time i run this one it's i have a full table it's just it's a very accessible thing and like you said everybody knows what a zombie is occasionally you get the really hardcore players when i played the one set in the 1950s we had someone who was a huge zombie fan and he started off with okay guys we have to shoot them in the head and i said.

You know, actually, you don't know that this takes place in 1955. Romero didn't make the movie until 1968. He got really excited, like, oh, my God, we get to figure this out the hard way. That's nice. So, yeah, that nice moment of like, yeah, you know that as the player, but does your character know that? Well, that can be part of the fun of it.

We've been talking about zombies, obviously, because it's zombie survival horror, but you did some interesting things with some of the options for different zombies in the rulebook as well.

And obviously it's a toolkit RPG so people can take what they want but could you talk us through some of the zombie variants and different options that you've got in the book oh yeah so the odd I was taking a lot of inspiration from all flesh must be eaten with this which is one of the reasons it's so popular is it gives you a lot of options something that surprisingly not many of the other zombie games have done and it's it starts

with your basic like how fast are the zombies do you have like your classic shamblers or do you have those 28 days later nightmare fuel olympic sprinters.

And you you get into like maybe the zombies are intelligent some of them can be dumb as a brick but some of them might be capable of strategizing or commanding other zombies and then there's some of the variants that anyone who's played left for dead is going to immediately spot spot things like the boomer and the tank and the smoker and, those just add another layer which you have the slow zombies and then you hear the bellowing of the tank and the ground starts shaking and people go

oh quick you know what maybe we're just going to run away well we mentioned the system being friendly for players but i just occurred to me about for gm so how accessible do you think the game would be for somebody who's never run a game before and is considering running it oh uh so it is designed for people who have at least played something it is assumed that the gm will have played some rpgs before i am basing it a lot on my own gming style which

is just kind of wing it and i don't use stat blocks i just kind of build them on the fly so there is a little bit in there to help it right at the back of the book some advice on building stat blocks and a couple of samples but for yeah for someone who has never played an RPG before, you probably shouldn't start off GMing if you haven't done that. I would recommend going to a convention game first.

But even for people who have only played a couple sessions of D&D, it's close enough to D&D that it should be fairly familiar.

And I would recommend just looking up resources, something like Sly Flourishes, the Lazy GM is a great way to get into that or there are tons of youtube channels and podcasts that can give people advice it's an obviously critical role you can pick up stuff from that as much as people complain about the mass mass mass effect it is actually very valuable to have that there absolutely so it's definitely a more rules-like kind of system so for somebody

that's comfortable that gm style definitely yeah, it's fantastic thank you so much for going through kind of all the details of the game If people are interested and want to pick up a copy, how's the best way that they can read more about the game or pick up a copy? So, if you check my website, trapchest.com, you can find the page for it under games. It is available as a free PDF from DriveThruRPG and itch.io. One of my company policies is that my digital versions are always free.

I work with a lot of people who live in poverty, so that $15 for a game may not seem like a lot for some of us, but for some people, that's just, okay, I guess I'm not playing a game. And then if people do want to purchase a physical copy, I've recently signed a contract with Compose Dream Games, so they distribute physical copies to... They can sell direct or they can actually sell wholesale to stores. And they are on their way to the UK. I shipped out a box of them to their UK

location just last week. So they should be showing eventually. And I will mention to people, I do make more money if you buy direct from Composed Dream. But if you pester your local game store to get it in wholesale, that is actually way better advertising because then I actually show up on the shelf. There's some great ways to support that. So yeah, you can grab the PDF on DriveThru or Itch. There is a free version, or you can get a copy.

You can choose how much you pay, all those physical versions by Compose Dream Games. Link is in the show notes of the podcast or up on the screen and the comments if you are listening. We have had a question about the system, and it's about how friendly is the system to homebrew and the like. Oh, the system is actually very friendly to homebrew. Right inside the front cover, I do have an open license, so anyone can take the key-powered system and use it.

And on my website, I actually have an SRD. So if you wanted to get really lazy, the SRD actually allows you to literally just copy and paste. Great. It's something that I've seen Paizo and Hasbro do, and it's definitely something that helps because we all know you can't copyright mechanics. So I can't hold up a brick wall and say, hey, no, no, you don't do this. So I may as well just jump all and say, you want it? Here it is. Take it.

And then if people put the key powered system on their book, it helps their customers because if they played my games, they'll go, okay, I already know these mechanics. But then if they haven't played my games and they find it, they go, okay, where did this come from? And then they might find my games. Open gaming, I think, yeah, rising tide lifts all sails and all that. Absolutely. Fantastic. Well, Jed, thanks so much for coming on and talking about Reanimated.

It ticks a lot of the boxes for what I look for in zombie survival horror, which is kind of more rules-like narrative system that's a framework for me to build my own story. So when I got your message through about it, I was like, yeah, this ticks every box of what I'm looking for in this sort of game. So thanks for coming on and indulging me in talking about it.

Before you go, I would like to ask you the last question I ask, everyone which is do you have any recommendations for other tabletop rpgs i have two recommendations both of which are from people that i work with i'm actually part of a here in manitoba called the manikotoba game designers we're a group that helps small designers with resources and advice, and two i'm working on the first one is called arcane dominion the develop is a d20 based high fantasy game the developer just his pitch is

it's dnd with rocket launchers that's nice okay if you want it doesn't really need much more introduction than that so i get the vibe yeah yeah you can just type arcane dominion ttrpg into google and it'll be the first one on the list and the other one is called the hearth rpg another d20 high fantasy game and the concept behind this one is large player groups and the developers of this they've been running it at cons and they're running with tables of like eight or nine people no

problem doing that which is way more than i'm usually used to working with i would that would intimidate me both of these games though they are d20 so they're not too far detached from dnd so it is a good transition point as opposed to here's shadow run have fun sure well that's two great recommendations there jed thank you so much thanks for sharing them with us and thanks for your time and coming on to talk to us today.

Thank you for having me of course and thank you to everyone that's watched and listened if you're at all interested in this you know please do share or even go and buy a copy of the game because the best way to support indie tabletop rpg creators is to buy their stuff that's all from this this week though we'll be back next week with another game share with you so for now i'll say goodbye. Music.