Dead Reign

Overall score:

Written by Kevin Siembieda with Josh Hilden and Joshua Sanford
Published by Palladium Books

Two thoughts ran through my head when I heard that Palladium was doing a zombie game. The first was “awesome!” Palladium is one of my favorite publishers, putting out great action/adventure RPGs with a nearly endless supply of cool stories and ideas. They also tend to specialize in horror and its subgenres, with games like Nightbane, Rifts, Splicers, and Beyond the Supernatural, which is hands down my favorite horror game from any publisher. With that kind of pedigree, how could they not make an incredible zombie apocalypse game? 
 
Then the second thought came: “Of course they can do the zombie right, but what about the apocalypse?” Despite my affection for Palladium, I was hugely disappointed in their last apocalypse game, a Rifts prequel called Chaos Earth. One of the hallmarks of an apocalypse is the sense of hopelessness—the scramble for dwindling resources in which the battle for your next meal is more harrowing than any generic fight with a monster. Apocalypse games are about ordinary people being ground down by overwhelming odds—they’re about Mad Max, wounded and out of ammo, risking his life just to get one diesel truck into a friendly compound before a horde of enemies tear him apart. Chaos Earth went the opposite direction, focusing on larger-than-life heroes fighting huge, bombastic battles with heavy firepower and powerful magic. It was entirely the wrong choice, and I started to think that maybe Palladium just wasn’t cut out for the apocalypse genre. And now here was Dead Reign, staring me in the face. Would it follow in the footsteps of Chaos Earth, or Beyond the Supernatural? Palladium’s worst game, or its best?

I am pleased to report that they got it right. Dead Reign is a fantastic horror game, an excellent apocalypse game, and an absolute gem.

The first thing that will surprise you about Dead Reign is how simple it is. There are no massive sections of character classes, no boundless catalogs of monsters, and no endless lists of magic spells of psychic powers. For a Palladium game, it feels downright sparse: there are only seven classes, all but one of which are simple variations on the basic theme of “ordinary person thrust into dangerous circumstances.” There is no magic, thank goodness—you want to kill a zombie, you’ve got to get your hands dirty and kill it with a stick or a shotgun the way God intended. And there is really only one monster, the zombie, though it comes in seven different (very minor) subsets, with special rules like “this is just like the other zombies, only smarter/faster/smaller, etc.”

Removing the vast suite of super powers typical to most RPGs, and substituting it with an excellent career system adapted from Beyond the Supernatural, forces you to think about who your character really is, not just what he or she can do. In another game you might be a “Barbarian” or a “Mecha Pilot” or a “Ninja;” here you are a construction worker or a student or a florist, trying desperately not to die, and in a horror game that is exactly right. Stephen King once said that “horror is not spectacle. Horror is an unknown actress, maybe the girl next door, hiding in the kitchen clutching a knife you know she’ll never get to use.” Kudos to Palladium for cutting out the spectacle, leaving plenty of room for a bare bones horror story with the potential not only for real scares but for real heroics. Of course a mecha pilot is going to kill a zombie—there’s nothing heroic about that. But when a florist wades into the fray with a baseball bat and a half-empty handgun, trying to save a friend and praying to make it out alive, that’s what true heroism is all about.

The world of the game is just as effectively minimal as the characters: it’s our world, but full of zombies. There are hints of deeper secrets, such as death cults and mysterious drug treatments that may be responsible for the apocalypse, but these are presented quickly and quietly and then the game moves on. Your characters can try to learn more if they want, but the real focus here is on surviving, exploring, and rebuilding. There is a vast section in the middle of the book that provides copious yet general detail on the various locations in the world: what is a supermarket like in zombified America? How about a skyscraper? A highway? A school? Almost anywhere your character would want to visit is discussed, with information on what it’s like, what you can usually find there, how many zombies you’re likely to see there, and so on.

A significant portion of the book is taken up by the zombies themselves—not just the stats for an individual zombie, though those are certainly present, but for the threats and possibilities of the zombie horde as a whole. The true threat of Dead Reign comes not from one zombie, but from the mounting threat of thousands of zombies slowly converging on you. Combat is quick and brutal, because the only other option is long and more brutal, and if you hang around too long you WILL get overwhelmed.

Siembieda and his cowriters have done a great job describing not only what the zombies do but why—why they kill, how they swarm, and so on. Two of the more elegant zombie rules are the “zombie moan” and their ability to hibernate, which make them both flavorful and dangerous. First, the moan: zombies have been moaning in movies forever, but Palladium has actually made it into an ability that functions like a call to arms; when a zombie sees you it starts moaning, and if you can’t shut it up really fast you get more, and then they start moaning, and the zombie horde quickly spirals out of control. The moan is basically just an ability that says “in two rounds, two more zombies show up,” and in many ways the entire setting is built around that one ability. The fact that it’s tied to a moan makes it not only more flavorful but easier to react to, and it works very well.

The second ability, zombie hibernation, is a tidy mechanical way of explaining why zombies show up in the darnedest places. In movies they’re always tearing their way out of closets or corners, or out from under debris, and this is why: they have a limited amount of energy, and when there are no humans around to feed on they “turn off,” conserving energy and waiting for more. This is, of course, tied to their food source, which is the latent psychic energy in each of us. One of the basic principles of the Palladium Megaverse, arguably the core principle upon which many of their games (Rifts and Beyond the Supernatural, two name the biggies) are founded, is the idea that each living thing is a reservoir of psychic energy, and that this energy doubles at the point of death. The zombies in Dead Reign feed on this energy, which solves almost every logistical problem zombies have: it gives them a reason to hunt humans, it gives them a reason not to devour them, and it gives them a source for the power that keeps them active. The concept of hibernation not only fits this system perfectly, it’s a great reflection of the typical zombie tactics we know from countless movies and video games. It’s a very elegant, very impressive system.

Add to all of this a suite of very useful random tables (salvage searches, wilderness encounters, character creation, etc.) and Dead Reign is a fantastic, self-contained roleplaying game.
 
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Written by Fellfrosch on January 12th, 2009