Humanity Is Not Doomed...Yet...

Last night, instead of playing Spud's Rise of the Runelords Pathfinder game, we took a break and decided to play a one-shot discovered by Andy, entitled All Flesh Must Be Eaten. At first, I was slightly apprehensive about not playing Spud's game this week - I mean, Spud's game has been run (if I recall correctly) at least once a week since about May or June this year - and, as you may or may not be aware I am slightly averse to change.


Bu~~~t Spud is running his rogue game tonight, and he just needed a bit of time to prepare, and not worry about running his "big big" game, so Andy offered to run AFMBE instead. And, as it turns out, I'm glad he did. If you couldn't tell from the title of the game, AFMBE is a zombie survival horror game where you're trapped in an office building trying to make your way to the building's roof, in order to be rescued by a police helicopter.

Instead of creating a character from scratch with this game, like you do with most D&D-esque games, you play one of many-many archetypes. Lydia chose to play as an Ex-Goth Girl, Elmo was the Professional Student, Spud picked the Hacker, and I played as the Tortured Grade School Student. Basically, I was a kid whose parents, teachers, and class-mates didn't love him. Go me. Woo (and so forth.)

We started out in an elevator, traveling down to the ground floor of the building to purchase some snacks (we all wanted snacks at the same time...suspicious...) when suddenly there is a power outage, the lift stops, and all of the lights go out. My character (oddly enough named Tiger) decides to try the emergency phone, only to hear the sounds of gunshots and bloodcurdling screams coming from the other end. Sufficiently terrified by this, our situation was only worsened when the cable of the lift snapped, sending us hurtling about one and a half floors to the basement level.

So we then proceeded to make our way to the fire-stairs in the basement, in order to climb to the roof. This was an arduous process which I shall summarise thusly: we got into the corridor, only to be ambushed by the zombies. During this combat, Spud got bitten several times, I managed to shoot myself through the side with a .38 pistol, and Lydia smacked a zombie's head in with a toilet cistern lid. Following this, we cleared a couple of rooms of zombies (which led to Elmo getting bitten), and decided to lock some undead hoards in the rooms we found them in (because, let's face it, they're not going to be able to work door handles.)

Eventually, we got into the stairwell and proceeded to climb to the ceiling. Here, we managed to rescue a lady covered in dead bodies, gape in horror as Lydia goes crazy and runs into a floor filled with zombies, and I watched without remorse as Spud killed my mother. I then kicked her, and called her a bitch.

So, finally we reached the top of the roof, and signaled to a helicopter that "Hey, we aren't horrible undead." They promise to come back and get us (which they actually do!) and we get ready for the wave of horrible undead to surge out from the building to attempt to eat us. Before this happens, however, both Spud and Elmo succumb to the horrible zombie plague, and attempt to eat the lady we rescued earlier.

Following this turn of events, I proceed to kill Elmo, and narrowly miss Spud - and suddenly the helicopter arrives! I run through the hoard of zombies, only to be bitten on the leg by Spud. Still, I get in the chopper, and manage to convince the general at the camp that I'm not hideously infected *cough cough splutter splutter*. After a little while, my conscious gets the best of me, and I fess up that "Yes, um...mister military man...sir...I was bitten and I have a zombie thingy and please help me...please?" Suddenly, bang, I've been shot and am dead.


So, that's the end of the story - the moral of which is that it's not always best to confess to something, even if you know it's putting a whole bunch of people at risk. I mean, come on, if I hadn't had told the general that I was bitten by a horrid plague carrying zombie, I would have taken out the rest of the survivors and potentially doomed humanity. But instead, I just crapped out and took the moral high road - now I'm dead, and humanity goes on...For now at least...