Wow! It's been a very long while since I've posted anything on this blog at all. I figured it's about time to remedy that right now.
Anywho, real life kept me somewhat busy during the months of June and most of July and I sort of forgot about this blog. But I am now returning to it. And I figured I'd announce a new and ambitious project on my part. A new project that at the very least, would be a nice campaign to run and at the very most, an actual published OSR RPG, albeit one of a different sort.
The game is titled
Waifu vs. Zombies and it is an homage to both old-school anime and old-school zombie fiction. The two main zombie works that this game is inspired by are George A. Romero's
Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Shinji Mikami's
Resident Evil (1996) although I am taking influences from other zombie works as well, including
Night of the Living Dead (1968),
Day of the Dead (1985),
Resident Evil 2 (1998),
High School of the Dead (2010),
DayZ (2013) and the cheap Italian zombie grindhouse flicks of the 1970's and 1980's such as the
Zombi series.
Another major inspiration for the game is the classic Stephen King post-apocalyptic epic
The Stand, as well as the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons.
The premise is that the game is a survival horror sandbox RPG where the PC's are survivors of a slow-moving zombie apocalypse in the United States circa the late 1970's and early 1980's, with a focus on the Eastern United States, specifically the Mid-Atlantic and Central Appalachia, though your campaign could be set anywhere within North America to be honest.
The initial goal of the game is to explore and survive, with an endgame scenario of rebuilding civilization and managing a domain or settlement, similar to the endgame scenario of OD&D.
If I can save up enough money to commission artwork, I would have anime-style artwork. But it would resemble the anime of the 1980's rather than more modern anime franchises. Think along the lines of the general art styles found in stuff like
Saint Seiya,
Vampire Hunter D,
Robotech,
Angel Cop,
Ranma 1/2, and the original
Mobile Suit Gundam,
It would be a very dark and violent game, but also a hopeful one. Because if your characters manage to survive long enough against the zombies, bandits, and the elements of nature, then maybe they can rebuild society and make a fresh start of things, Rebuilding civilization and rescuing civilians would be emphasized heavily alongside survival.
The mechanics are another question. It would be an OSR "clone" system under the OGL, but rather than use an old TSR-era version of D&D, I am thinking of heavily modifying the open-license Anime SRD for this game. For those not in the know, the Anime SRD was released alongside the d20 System version of Big Eyes Small Mouth back in the early 2000's.
Waifu vs. Zombies would be an OSR game of a different sort.
Because when there's no more room in Hell, the weebs will walk the Earth.
