The Dead Walk: George A. Romero and OD&D

I'll admit it in public, I was a fan of zombies before zombies were cool. Even as a little kid, I was a huge fan of stuff like the classic Resident Evil games for the original Sony Playstation, as well as the zombie films of the late great George A. Romero, and I even like some of the Italian grindhouse knock-off zombie films released in the late 1970's and 1980's (think stuff like Zombi 2 and Hell of The Living Dead) although I do not like the fast zombies that were popular in the early 2000's such as the ones in Left 4 Dead or the disgraceful 2004 Zack Snyder remake of Dawn of the Dead.

And oddly enough, I don't really care for AMC's The Walking Dead. It's not a bad show but I just didn't really follow it all that much. But I do love the original films that started it all, and those are the Living Dead Films of the late great George A. Romero.

Romero basically invented the zombie genre as we know it today. Before him, zombies were a solitary monster largely tied to the voodoo folktales of Haiti and Louisiana, and were nothing at all like we imagine them today. But George Romero changed all of that with 1968's Night of the Living Dead and its two dynamic apocalyptic sequels Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)

In many ways, George Romero did to zombies what Bram Stoker did to vampires. He codified the modern image of the monster in pop culture. It's only natural that I want to help carry on his legacy in the world of old-school gaming. So I have decided to revive a little project of mine.

A few months back on the Original Dungeons & Dragons ProBoards forum, I made a post talking about the potential of Dawn of the Dead as a setting for OD&D, specifically in the context of the core "White Box" rules and using only the core three booklets and some homebrew to account for guns and modern armor. It was not perfect, but it had a good reception and some good ideas, including using the Monroeville Mall as a mega-dungeon.

So, now I am bringing the idea back and in greater detail.

For the sake of clarity, this fan supplement is presented as a fifth supplement to the main four official OD&D supplements from the 1970's, which were Greyhawk (1975), Blackmoor (1975), Eldritch Wizardry (1976), and Gods Demigods & Heroes (1976) and I am not counting Swords & Spells as a supplement as it is not numbered and is more of a reprint of the miniature wargaming rules from Chainmail, but with D&D's trade dress.


Dungeons & Dragons

Supplement V: The Living Dead

Based on the universe of George A. Romero's three films Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) with the bulk of the material and inspiration taken from Dawn of the Dead

Supplement V draws mostly from the three core booklets from 1974: Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures and does not need to incorporate any extra rules from the four supplements to function.

In a Living Dead campaign, it is assumed that the PC's are all Fighting Men and that the game does not contain Magic-Users, Clerics, or any of the supplementary classes. That being said, the Referee can choose to include Magic-Users, Clerics, and any other material from the game if they wish.

All Hit Dice are measured in d6's as is all weapon damage, just like in the core rules. A lot of weapons and armor have been re-skinned to fit the setting and tone of Romero's films.

Weapons, Armor, Equipment, & Wealth

The coinage system of OD&D is replaced with American dollars

Armor is functionally the same, but re-skinned to fit the modern context of Romero's world. These would be the types of armor available, with their mechanical OD&D equivalents listed in parentheses

Leather Jacket (Leather Armor)
Police Vest (Chain Mail)
Military Flak Jacket (Full Plate Mail)
Motorcycle Helmet (Small Shield)
Army Helmet (Large Shield)

Weapons would also be re-skinned. Guns function the same as bows and crossbows, and do not have any extra special mechanics in regards to armor class or proficiency.

These are the Living Dead weapons, with their OD&D equivalent in parentheses. All the firearms are actual firearms depicted in Romero's original zombie movies.

Melee Weapons
Baseball Bat (Club)
Hunting Knife (Dagger)
Pool Cue (Quarterstaff)
Nunchaku (Sap)
Machete (Short Sword)
Katana (Sword)
Pitchfork (Spear)
Hammer (Mace)
Hatchet (Hand Axe)
Firefighter's Axe (Battle Axe)

Guns
Revolver (Rohm RG-38)
Semi-Automatic Pistol (Colt M1911)
Magnum Revolver (Smith & Wesson Model 629)
Hunting Rifle (Winchester 94)
Assault Rifle (Colt M16A1)
Pump-Action Shotgun (Ithaca Model 37)
Sub-Machine Gun (IMI Uzi)

Monsters & Enemies

A lot of the basic enemies in Original Dungeons & Dragons can be re-skinned for a Living Dead campaign.

Zombies can be represented as written, with ghouls standing in for tougher zombies (think Bub in Day of the Dead or Big Daddy in Land of the Dead)

Bandits can be used for ordinary looters and common criminals such as the gang members at the beginning of Dawn of the Dead or the redneck posse at the end of Night of the Living Dead 

Brigands can be used for more hardcore survivalist enemies such as the biker gang in Dawn of the Dead

Men-At-Arms can represent military and law enforcement personnel, such as the soldiers in Day of the Dead or the SWAT officers in Dawn of the Dead 

The Campaign Itself

This type of OD&D game would lend itself well to open-world sandbox games where the goal is mainly to explore, survive, and plunder for more supplies as long as possible. If you level up enough, you could establish a small compound of fellow survivors, similar to the strongholds in OD&D.

The mall from Dawn of the Dead and the military facilities from Day of the Dead would both be excellent examples of in-game dungeons.

In my next post, I will be posting write-ups for several characters from the Living Dead Trilogy.

Cavalier Hearts: An RPG Campaign Setting

So, I have recently begun work on what will be a dream setting for my role-playing game campaigns and my fan fiction stories, a historical fiction/historical fantasy setting that I like to call Cavalier Hearts and it is an open-world anime-inspired setting that combines two of my newfound passions.

Those two passions are The American Civil War and yaoi manga so this should make for one hell of a ride. Imagine if Ken Burns directed a fujoshi-bait anime like Free! or Ouran Host Club (I'm a huge fan of Ouran, BTW) or if Shelby Foote wrote yaoi manga, and you would sort of be in the same ballpark as Cavalier Roses.

Basically it's the American Civil War except everyone in both the Union and Confederate forces are beautiful and handsome bishonen anime guys.

Because even the most absolute straightest of guys out there will agree that when anime guys kiss, it is adorable and beautiful, even if they don't want to admit it. It's a scientific fact!

But no, this is not just some weird trip into my "Magical Realm" either...

Cavalier Hearts is a campaign setting that can be adapted for multiple systems out there (I'm currently planning to use it with Big Eyes Small Mouth) and can be used as a straight-up historical Civil War combat and tactics simulator, or it can be a setting for sentimentalism, beauty, melodrama, tragic romances, and other tropes of the yaoi genre.

There would be five character archetypes in Cavalier Hearts, each with their own starting equipment and objectives. The archetypes are Private, NCO, Officer, Medic, and Flag Bearer

The main focus of Cavalier Hearts is the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War, spanning from the beginning of the war in 1861 to the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Some of the battles I would love to include in Cavalier Hearts would be the following....

The Battle of Bull Run
The Battle of Hampton Roads
The Battle of Seven Pines
The Seven Days Battles
The Shenandoah Valley Campaign
The Battle of Second Manassas
The Battle of Antietam
The Battle of Fredericksburg
The Battle of Chancellorsville
The Battle of Gettysburg
The Battle of The Wilderness
The Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse
The Battle of Cold Harbor
The Petersburg Campaign
The Battle of Five Forks
The Battle of Sailor's Creek
The Surrender at Appomattox Courthouse

Other features of Cavalier Hearts would include the following...

1. A wide variety of weapons and uniforms from the era of the American Civil War
2. The ability for players to form their own companies (adventuring parties) at GM discretion
3. The ability of characters to form romances at GM's discretion
4. A wide depth of setting details, taken from both Civil War combat manuals and yaoi manga
5. An open-world campaign map covering the areas of Virginia, Maryland, DC, and Pennsylvania
6. Encampments and Fortifications
7. Characters can buy extra goods from the Commissary at their camp or fort
8. A full table of ranks ranging from Private to Colonel
9. Whiskey, tobacco, candy, flowers, stuffed animals, plushies, and dakimakura at the Commissary
10. More prestigious and famous soldiers can get a following of fujoshi to help and defend them
11. Characters can be either Seme or Uke, Union or Confederate, the sky is the limit!


Ideally, if Cavalier Hearts were a video game, it would have a kickass soundtrack of songs appropriate to the setting of the game. These would be the songs in such an ideal soundtrack.

1. Ashokan Farewell
2. The Battle Cry of Freedom
3. The Battle Hymn of the Republic
4. Dixie
5. When Johnny Comes Marching Home
6. The Bonnie Blue Flag
7. Lorena
8. Kingdom Coming
9. Marching Through Georgia
10. The New York Volunteer
11. Rose of Alabama
12. Cumberland Gap
13. Lincoln and Liberty
14. I'm A Good Old Rebel
15. It's Raining Men

That being said, I understand that Cavalier Hearts is a very niche setting concept and it will probably only attract three groups of players....

1. Elderly history buffs and other senile out-of-touch Boomer types who have probably never played an RPG in their lives before

2. Fujoshi (yaoi fangirls), mostly either teens or college girls, fawning over their characters, making kissing faces at the gaming table, and engaging in really awkward erotic role-playing in online play

3. Edgy thirteen-year old boys who always play Confederate characters and spend the game swearing in-character, killing random PC's and NPC's alike, randomly spewing ethnic slurs and other various obscenities, and generally just being "That Guy"

And if any normie or even your average gamer plays a game of Cavalier Hearts and asks any of these three groups how the game is played and what the game is about, they'll probably just call him a griefer and kick him out of the gaming table.

The American Civil War Is My Favorite War

"It is good that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it."
-Robert E. Lee

Okay, I'm just going to go ahead and outright say it...

In my honest and humble opinion, I think that the American Civil War is probably my favorite war.

There, I said it.

In many ways, the American Civil War was a crossroads in military history, both in terms of the tactics and in military technology. It was the intersection of both the old style of warfare that had been dominant from the advent of firearms up through the Napoelonic Era and what would become the newer warfare of the 20th Century that in many ways continues to still shape the nature of even our modern warfare in the early 21st Century.

It is also a cool setting in terms of its aesthetics. Victorian fashions, steam locomotives, and wearied bloodied soldiers in snazzy blue and ragged gray uniforms horribly killing each other across the green hills and valleys of the quaint Virginia countryside.

Not to mention the fact that the music from the Civil War also seriously kicked ass too.

Only the rock songs of the Vietnam War can come anywhere as close to being as awesome as this....

I honestly think that the American Civil War would make for a very good setting both in gaming and fan fiction. It has a small yet significant and devoted presence in miniature tabletop war gaming, but not much in role-playing games, and nearly no presence at all in video games.

Basically, the only video games set in the Civil War were a few strategy games in the 1990's and early 2000's, a couple of low-budget FPS games that the History Channel put out for the Playstation 2 and Xbox 360 in the late 2000's (back when History Channel still actually at least pretended to care about history) and an online multiplayer game on the PC called War of Rights that is still in an open early access development but can be purchased on Steam.

However, as an American, and as someone who lives in Virginia where a large portion of the war's major battles were fought, I have a deep passion and interest for the American Civil War.

To paraphrase the late great author and historian Shelby Foote, any understanding and I mean true understanding of the history of the United States begins with an understanding of the Civil War. It defined us as a nation. The Revolutionary War set us free and the World Wars made us a superpower, but the Civil War was the crossroads of our being. It defined us as a nation and what kind of character we would have as a nation, both in good and bad ways.

And I have to agree with Shelby Foote on that. The American Civil War was the crossroads of American history and it was a hell of a crossroads.

To get back to the topic of gaming, I personally think that the setting of the American Civil War would make for an excellent source of drama, storytelling, role-playing, and conflict. And I may or may not have an open-world sandbox RP campaign based on the American Civil War, most likely using Boot Hill 2E or d20 Past as a rules set.

So watch this space!

Grand Theft Auto

We gotta hold on to what we got
It doesn't make a difference if we make it or not
We got each other and that's a lot for love
We'll give it a shot

Whoa! We're halfway there!
Oh, whoa! Living on a prayer!
Take my hand. We'll make it, I swear!
Whoa! Living on a prayer!
-Bon Jovi

So it's no secret that I love tabletop role-playing games. That's sort of the whole point of this blog. But I also am a huge fan of video games and when it comes to video gaming, I am a massive fan of open world sandbox games. Of course, when it comes to open world video games, you can't get much better than the series that codified open world game play in the modern era....

Of course, I am talking about my favorite video game franchise of all time, Rockstar Games' violent and well-written series of gangster video games, the one and only Grand Theft Auto.

GTA has been imitated many times, but never truly surpassed. I love it and I have ever since I first played Grand Theft Auto III on my Playstation 2 back in 2001.

The games are perfection themselves. You play in a modern-day open world environment (although some of the PS2-era games were period pieces explicitly set in the 1980's and 1990's) and you can get involved in street races, pull off drug deals, do hits for the Mob, get in gunfights with street gangs, and even pick up hookers (and by the way, you can get your money back!) and it all takes place in a fake city set to a kickass soundtrack of licensed 80's hits (and other genres of music too!)

I recently signed up for GTA Forums, the largest fully dedicated online forum for Grand Theft Auto fans that I know of, and so far I really like the community there. I even joined their official Discord channel as well, so I might as well give a shout-out to GTA Forums and post a link below in the blog post. You should check it out for yourself if you're a fan of GTA.

GTA Forums

So yeah, I've been thinking of doing some fan works for Grand Theft Auto, I already am working on a fan concept for a hypothetical GTA game over at GTA Forums, which I have titled Grand Theft Auto VI: The Family Secrets and I am also in the process of writing some cool GTA fan fiction and even an online GTA role-playing campaign. Both the fan fiction stuff and the role-plays will be detailed further on this blog, so watch this space!

TL;DR I love Grand Theft Auto and I'm going to be posting a lot of GTA fan works to my blog and elsewhere. Also, check out GTA Forums if you want. It's cool.

My Favorite Role-Playing Games

Alright, this is just a quick little blog post where I list off my top ten favorite RPG's.

1. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition (TSR, 1978)

2. Vampire: The Masquerade, First Edition (White Wolf, 1991)

3. D20 System/Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition (Wizards of the Coast, 2000)

4. Sailor Moon Role-Playing Game and Resource Book (Guardians of Order, 1999)

5. Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game (White Wolf, 1994)

6. Boot Hill, Second Edition (TSR, 1979)

7. GURPS, Third Edition (Steve Jackson Games, 1989)

8. Pathfinder, First Edition (Paizo Publishing, 2009)

9. Mage: The Ascension, Second Edition (White Wolf, 1995)

10. Lion & Dragon, First Edition (DOM Publishing, 2017)

Honorable Mentions: Changeling: The Lost, Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, Vampire: The Requiem, Cyberpunk 2020, Big Eyes Small Mouth, RECON, Werewolf: The Apocalypse. WHFRP, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu

Dishonorable Mentions: FATAL, Beast: The Primordial, Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition, Black Tokyo, Zweihander, Phoenix Command, MYFAROG, and anything that is "Powered by the Apocalypse"

The Introduction

Ladies and Gentlemen...Rock & Roll!

Hey guys, I'm Big Fat Paulie and this is Big Fat Paulie's big fat blog dedicated to my favorite hobby and that is tabletop role-playing games, or RPG's for short.

In addition to rambling on about RPG's such as Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, World of Darkness, Shadowrun, Big Eyes Small Mouth, GURPS, or whatever else, I will also be discussing the concepts in tabletop gaming and roleplaying in general, as well as posting all sorts of fiction and fan fiction that I write from time to time, and occasionally even discussing stuff like video games and anime.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy my blog!