Games Design - [Hell 4 Leather] Hell 4 Dead - zombies, brains & tarot oh my!
Posted by: Joe Prince On: Sep 27th 2010 edited
Hell 4 Dead / (Left 4 Hell)?
OK, since game hacks are the best thing a person can do outside of child birth and the purest form of self expression I've gone and written one.
It's a zombie survival horror fest for H4L!
(The Hamlet one was giving me a headache)
Brainstorm a setting or wing it – you decide.
Leathers become survivors. The Fool might also become a survivor. Survivors all know each other in some context.
Prologue is done slightly differently.
Deal out The Fool, Death and The Devil as usual.
The Fool is the unwitting soul who accidentally triggers the zombie brain buffet deathfest. The Fool describes his character and delivers a monologue, going about his business.
At some point Death is flipped, that player then narrates how the Fool accidentally unleashes the forces of zombie hell.
Then the player with The Devil hints at or describes who or what is really the malevolent force behind the undead. The devil culminates his narration with a threat to the life of The Fool – The Fool is marked for Death.
Devil, Fool and Death are shuffled by The Fool and laid out. The Devil makes his pick – Death slays the Fool, The Fool means a life saving change, The Devil means the Fool survives – but corrupted by The Devil's influence.
Set The Devil to one side, add Death to the survivor stack, if The Fool lives also add him to the survivor stack.
Deal a Boon to every player, put the remainder under The Devil.
When starting a scene, deal out all survivor cards. Players may end up holding multiple survivors and can choose which of them to play during a scene. Players can only hold onto the survivor they played in a scene though.
Whoever was killed in the previous scene, or the last player to play the Fool if there was no death, frames the scene.
Marking for death – when a scene starts to lose impetus, whoever holds Death flips it over and marks one of the survivors.
Death always returns to the survivor stack at the end of each scene.
Guilt boons. Guilt in this version means being linked to the Devil somehow – i.e the root of the outbreak.
As The Sun rises, there’s hope of escape from this zombie nightmare – but who will make it...
Whaddya think?
Posted by: Gregor Hutton On: Oct 1st 2010
That's very interesting. It's sort of "playing the table". Nice.
I fancy giving this a go.
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