With Halloween creeping closer, it is the perfect time for a horror RPG, and Magpie Games offers up a compelling and streamlined experience with Zombie World.
Written by Brendan Conway, this is a card-based roleplaying game that throws players straight into the tense, day-to-day survival of a zombie apocalypse. It is a game less about heroic action and more about the difficult choices, fraying relationships, and fragile hopes of a community holding out against the end of the world.
You can purchase Zombie World in physical form from Magpie, and there’s a Roll20 module, but this review focuses on the free-to-download 36-page PDF, newly available at DriveThruRPG.
System
Zombie World employs a clever card-based system that feels inspired by Powered by the Apocalypse design principles. Instead of rolling dice, when a character takes an action that triggers a “move,” they draw a number of cards from the Survivor Deck equal to one of their four stats: Savagery, Soul, Steel, or Survival. The player then chooses the best card from their hand to determine the outcome. A ‘Triumph’ is a clean success, an ‘Edge’ is a success but with a complication or cost, and a ‘Miss’ means things go poorly, and the Gamemaster gets to make a move. A special ‘Opportunity’ card acts as a Miss unless the player chooses to mark stress, turning it into a full Triumph. This push your luck element, combined with the core mechanic, makes for a wonderfully simple and narrative-focused resolution system that is easy for anyone to pick up and play.
Enclave Creation
A fantastic feature of Zombie World is that play begins not with individual characters, but with the creation of the group’s shared sanctuary, known as an “enclave.” The core rules provide options for a Prison or a Hospital, and the group collaboratively defines its unique nature. By taking turns, players choose and determine the enclave’s advantages, its critical scarcities (like food or privacy), the surrounding areas, and key members of its population. This engaging process ensures every player is invested in their home base from the very beginning, creating a bespoke setting filled with opportunities and immediate problems that drive the story forward.
Character Generation
Creating your survivor is an intuitive and narrative-rich process. Each player is dealt a ‘Past’ card (who they were before Z-Day), two ‘Present’ cards (the role they have taken on, from which they choose one), and a ‘Trauma’ card (a secret coping mechanism). Your Past and Trauma cards begin face down, secret from the other players, which creates instant depth and potential for dramatic reveals during play. After assigning scores to their stats, players use ‘Fate’ cards to establish predefined relationships with the survivors sitting next to them, weaving a web of connections, loyalties, and potential conflicts before the first scene even begins.
Zombies and the Bite Deck
The ever-present threat of the undead is handled with grim elegance, primarily through a simple but terrifying mechanic: the Bite Deck. This is a small, 15-card deck that players must draw from whenever they get too close to zombies or a move instructs them to. The deck contains results like ‘More Zombies’ or ‘Something Breaks’, but crucially, it contains only a single ‘Bite’ card. The deck is not reshuffled until that Bite card is drawn. This is a masterstroke of design, as every card drawn that isn’t the Bite makes its appearance statistically more likely for the next person, ratcheting up the tension to an almost unbearable degree. Drawing the Bite card means your character’s death is inevitable, though the GM has discretion over when it happens, allowing for a final, dramatic scene.
Art Style
The book’s art, led by Mirco Paganessi, perfectly captures the bleak, gritty tone of the game. The style is a stark, black-and-white comic book aesthetic, featuring dynamic line work that depicts desperate survivors and shambling undead. Splashes of visceral red punctuate this, used for emphasis in the layout and in blood spatter graphics that adorn the pages. The visual design is striking and effective, immediately immersing the reader in the game’s world and reinforcing its mature, horror-centric themes.
Quick Links
- DriveThruRPG: Free Download | Deluxe Roll20 module
- Amazon: Zombie World box.
