After reading through Zombie Cinema, I started getting ideas. I’d like to put one of them up here, because I really want to get it down on paper (so to speak), and I’d like to try it out sometime. If any of you wind up trying it, I’d like to hear about your experience.

The premise of this hack is to create a Zombie Cinema game that is similar in tone and feel to the movie The Thing, by John Carpenter. The Thing has themes of isolation and paranoia; you don’t know who you can trust, and you’re trapped in a secluded location with a dangerous creature that can look like any of your allies. Because Zombie Cinema focuses on intra-party conflict, it’s perfect for this kind of game.

It does need one or two small tweaks to get it working, though. In terms of physical items, you’ll need the following:

• A copy of Zombie Cinema (naturally)
• One copy of the game board for each player, plus the one that comes in the box. Photocopies would work just fine.
• A screen for each player, to keep each player’s private game board secret from the others.

To set up the game, put the main game board (the one that came with Zombie Cinema) in the middle of the table, and put the zombie pawn on it as per the normal rules. Instead of representing the pervasiveness of the zombie threat, this represents the threat of the Thing; how powerful it is, and how many people it’s infected. Then, each player puts his or her own pawn on his or her own copy of the game board, and keeps it secret behind his or her own screen. Optionally, you can also hide all but one of your player cards, making only the most obvious one visible.

Then, play the game as normal, with the flavor of The Thing (or something similar) rather than the flavor of a standard zombie movie. Keep your position on the board secret, and keep track of where you are in relation to the zombie pawn. If it catches you, it eats you as normal. When this happens, you have been infected by the Thing. Don’t tell anyone this. Continue to play as normal, but now it’s your job to subvert the group and try to make sure that other people get infected, too. This’ll be a bit of a guessing game, as you don’t know where they are on the board, but if you use the conflict system to keep pushing people back on the board, eventually they’ll be infected, too.

Something you can do with conflicts is call for blood tests. Doing so is like any other conflict, but if you successfully convince someone to take a blood test, they must reveal whether or not they are infected.

Finally, even after you are infected, you should keep track of your position on the board. Once infected, you cannot become uninfected again; however, you can still escape (the Thing wants to escape, to infect more people). The game ends when everyone escapes.

Today I’d like to talk about some awesome things, all of which (for me, to some extent or another) originated at GenCon this year.

Thing the first: The Awesome Die. The core of this idea was originally posited to me by frequent commenter mbeacom. I’m simplifying it a little bit here. I bought an Awesome Die (a d30) at GenCon, specifically so I could use this trick. The idea is, whenever a player does something really awesome at your table, that player can roll the Awesome Die instead of a plain old d20. Obviously, this works best with games that use a d20, like D&D. A couple of implications go along with using a d30 rather than a d20. First, success is considerably more probable; this is the intent. You want to encourage awesome things at your table, and making those awesome things more likely to succeed will do that. Another implication is that, if it’s an awesome attack, it’s much more likely to crit, since you can roll a natural 20-30 on this die. Assuming 4e D&D, your crit chance jumps from 5% to around 30% for that attack. That’s significant. As a result, you might want to limit how often you hand out the Awesome Die. This, in turn, will have the effect of players trying harder to get it, in all likelihood, provided you make it clear that it’s available and hand it out at least once early in the session.

Thing the second: How to Host a Dungeon is a fantastic game to read; I haven’t even played it yet, but I totally want to. On its own, it seems like a lot of fun to simulate the life cycle of a dungeon. But wait, there’s more! You can use that dungeon in a game if you want to. In a game like D&D, this can be a lot of work. That’s fine, if you don’t mind the prep, and it’s a great way to get a convincing dungeon with a lot of backstory for your game. But if you want to dive right into the dungeon with little to no prep, there’s another game you can use . . .

Thing the third: Old School Hack. I heard about this game at GenCon (it won an ENnie, even), and it is indeed awesome. OSH is an indie game inspired by the original D&D Red Box, but with much simpler and more modern rules that encourage a lot of crazy, off-the-wall actions and cool character concepts. It’s also free. And elf is a class. Awesome. At any rate, it goes with How to Host a Dungeon extremely well, so much so that I’m going to print it out on card stock and drop it in the same folder as HTHAD, and basically treat them as two linked games. I can’t wait to make a dungeon, then run some unsuspecting party through it. It’s going to rock.