Boot Hill As Survival Horror

As some of you may recall way back when, I made a blog post dedicated to the early RPG Boot Hill, a Western-themed game published by TSR in the 1970's. The game itself is a cult classic that never caught on like D&D did, but was fondly remembered by those who did play it. It is primarily known for two things, One of those things is a minimalist percentile-based combat system. The other thing it is known for is said combat system being highly lethal to player characters, with the very real chance of your character dying from a single shot.

While intended as a work of the Western genre, I realized that this game's deadly combat mechanics would lend itself well to horror campaigns. Which brings me to my next point....

A while back I proposed an idea for a game inspired by the zombie films of George A. Romero (particularly the original Dawn of the Dead from 1978) called Waifu vs. Zombie and it was to be based on a modified OD&D or Swords & Wizardry, something along those lines,

However, I realize now that it would be easier both mechanically and thematically to use Boot Hill Second Edition for such a game rather than Original Dungeons & Dragons as the only real change would be to cook up some base stats for semi-automatic firearms and maybe a different wound chart for zombies. From there, you'd basically be set to go.

In fact, Boot Hill in general promises a lot of opportunity as a base springboard system for highly lethal survival horror games of different stripes, whether it be zombies, slashers, Lovecraft-inspired horrors, or what have you.

I might be preparing a small-scale IRL zombie campaign based on Boot Hill's rules titled The Campaign of the Dead so expect to see some more on that soon.