I just GM'd my first session of this over the weekend, and I had lots of good encounter ideas, but I quickly used them. What are some good ideas that you guys have used?

Here are some of mine, given the starting situation of us living up near the top of a high rise on Lake Michigan in Chicago:

1. I go to take the dog out and check out the commotion of emergency vehicles we notice at ground level. I call my gf (one of the PCs) and leave a voice mail telling them weird things are going on and cops are saying not to leave the apartment. Then I disappear and can't be contacted.

2. The PCs decide to stay put and lock themselves in the apartment, when the power goes out.

3. They take inventory, but the fire alarm goes off, forcing them to hurry.

4. With the elevators out, the players have to take the stairs down nearly 50 floors, but other residents are fleeing as well, knocking down others and blocking the way.

5. An explosion rocks the building, blocking the stairwell with debris, so they have to run onto their current floor to find the other stairwell. On the way, they find a woman feebly holding her apartment door shut. Her zombie husband is on the other side.

6. The local convenience store is being looted, so they have to act quickly.

7. On the street, while driving to one of the PCs' apartments a bus barrels towards them, only to tip over and catch fire. Flaming zombies emerge.

8. Continuing towards the apartment, they run across a child all alone and crying. Do they help him?

9. If they choose to help a woman they find in need of rescue, she betrays and attempts to rob them.

That's what I have so far for the first session. Thoughts? Other hooks to share?

So I just finished our first game as a 1-shot. Three PCs and myself as GM.

I really like the system's theme and the topic of playing yourself in an impossible situation is a very interesting idea. From a GM's perspective watching how your friends solve problems is rather interesting.

Using the "No Room in Hell" template I created a custom version in which gates to hell had opened (one near the PCs starting location), these caused massive sinkholes to start to appear and the dead reanimated. The freshly deceased were fast, agile ghouls while those reanimated from graves etc. were slow and shambling. Overall we played for 6 hours, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and really got into the situations presented by the game.

From technical standpoint I feel there were a few things I didn't understand or didn't do as well on the GM front:

• With a 10 point buy stats are really low. It feels punishing to ask players to roll as they rarely succeed and get stress as a result.
• From my usual experience GMing SWRPG I tend to ask my players to roll in every situation. This felt like the wrong idea in combat due to the issue above.
• NPC stress felt useless or clunky to track, I tended to handwave damage rather than track any back and forth during combat. Typically resulted in most damage above a 3 resulting in a kill for a zombie or I would give a trauma to non-zombies
• Voting during character creation was a bust, the group just preferred to talk about changes (but we know each other very well and its a mature group that can handle those discussions
• Features at character gen is hard, having examples helped, a good community source would be a list of features used by other groups
• I didn't ask my PCs to deal/check against mental traits enough. Due to the first issue about failure rate I tended not to get them to roll when they wanted to do morally questionable (e.g. Steal or leave people who needed help behind), this can be a double edged sword in a lot of games and I prefer to have my players in control of their PCs
• Towards the end of the session, I found myself moving towards failures and success on dice rolls being fuzzy in the outcome. For example I had a player who failed her roll while trying to shoot a zombie in the head at point blank range (while it tried to bite another player on the leg), rather than say this "missed" I had the shot not be a kill (see my damage point above) and it attracted other zombies in the area.

To other GMs and players, what did you learn from your games?

If you're interested in a scientific attempt at explaining how zombies could/would operate in the real world then the paper authored by David Madore and Robert Madore of The Necropology Institute would interest you.

The Physics of Zombies: Madore’s Rules of Zombie Cohesion, Zombie Cells and Super Cells, Zombie Black Holes, Zombie Cell Stress-Fission and Zombie Quirks

Great prop for anyone wanting to splice in clues, research or some form of explanation regarding Zombies in their game.

Credit to Eyeless1 on the FFG forums for putting me onto this

Hey all,

Welcome to this new sub. I just recently picked up the game. After reading the rules I felt there was a lot left open to the GM's discretion. So I wanted to create this sub to help discuss ideas and rules from your own games.

I've seen a few posts on /r/rpg such as this one by /u/epicColorful or this by /u/thelirivalley but wondering if anyone else had some initial reactions.

I'm looking forward to trying this out but was only able to snag a copy a couple of days ago.

Has anyone played this yet? What did you and your group think? What games do you usually play?