Key Our Cars

Bad Moon

They load and lock and pick up a couple of Companions, two guys that do work for Tom’s agency, Craig and Frank (last names not revealed for safety reasons).  With Craig driving the company sedan and Tom bringing his own personal car they head over to Chinatown where the O’Toole’s are hiding out.

They arrive and send John Redman on a scouting mission.  He circles the block and spots four sedans parked in front of the building with a driver in front of each one.  In addition there is someone parked by the back door to the building they’re interested in.

This puts the kaibosh on their thought to hijack a single vehicle filled with hookers and they’re forced to improvise.  Leaving Craig parked in an alley way across from the sedans with orders to disable the cars at an opportune time and otherwise divert the bad guys, they enter a building on the same block and terrorize the owner of the flooring establishment and head up to the roof leaving the poor guy locked up in a closet on the top floor.

They cross the roof and enter the target building heading down to the 10th floor where they’ve been told the gang is hiding out.   Tom tries to stealthily peek down the hall but is spotted by a thug sitting outside a closed set of doors at the far end.

As the guy grabs for the sawed off next to him, Tom puts two .45 calibre slugs through his chest.  The double boom of the heavy pistol tears the quiet evening air and the group makes a break for it as commotion starts up inside the room.

On fleet feet John and Frank hit the double doors at the same time and with barely slowing a beat John yoinked them open and dove inside across the room slamming to a halt on the far wall near a large receptionist desk.  And directly between two thugs.  He unloaded a Colt Peacemaker on the one in the corner hoping someone would take care of the other.

Without much luck as the nearest thug shot him up with another double barreled shotgun.

Helena and Tom showed up as Frank put two barrels into one thug and the room quickly filled with gunsmoke and muzzle flashes.

When the last of the brass tinkled to a stop, John Redman was pretty seriously hurt but the others had emerged victorious.

From ahead a voice was screaming out that he was going to ‘kill the women if you don’t let me go!’ and then the lights went out.

From inside the room the voice died in gurgle and a thud and behind them in the hall came the ding of the elevator as more thugs showed up.

Tom kicked the door in and he and John looked into the darkness, John spotting a shape fleeing by the window and put two rounds into it’s center of mass, blasting it out the window even as a strange dagger flashed past his head to bury itself in the wall behind him.

In the hallway Helena and Frank disposed of two of the three thugs but the third got away fleeing in the elevator.

Using their lighters they discovered a gangster inside the room, his head all but severed and three hysterical women tied up.

Working quickly they freed the girls and as a party swept back up to the roof through the fireescapes, there was no sign of whoever it was that John had shot in the window.   They also learned on the roof that there was a fourth woman in the room with them before the lights went out.

Hearing gunfire from the front of the building Tom lumbered that way and capped two thugs from the rooftop that were engaged in fire with Craig in the alley across the street.

Fleeing to safety back across the roofs and down into the street they went back to their vehicles with the three women in tow back to headquarters in the two cars.  Helena worked on John’s wounds, plucking a couple of pellets of buckshot out of his shoulder and stitching him up.

[On the last possible attempt of 5 tries she finally managed to heal him up.]

Questioning the women they learned that one had overheard that they were going to be delivered to ‘the nuthouse’.

Tom started making calls and arranged for each of the women to be hauled to the train station and put on a train by Craig and shipped off with a couple of bucks and a new dress.

Tom learned from his police contacts that there was a sanitarium about an hour outside of town and the three of them and Frank headed that way.

The sanitarium was off the main road in a secluded forested area and there they found a massive steel gate and stone wall topped with spikes.  The metal all rusted from neglect, the place having been closed for several years.  The big chain and fancy european lock on the gate though was quite shiny.

The sophisticated lock proved no barrier to John and he had it open in a flash and they moved in on foot, leaving their car near the gate.

John, out in front of the group by 30 yards was accosted from the darkness by a thug and forced to lay on the ground as the guy had the drop on him.

Tom though, by some miracle was able to sneak his big ass up and get the drop on the thug and the tables were turned.

They questioned him, learning that he didn’t know much but that there were several more guards and dogs at the asylum and he was local talent.  They left him tied up off the side of the road.

They proceeded on a little closer together this time and a good thing as a pack of silent hounds burst forward from the underbrush and after John.  He was savaged a bit by the dogs and then even worse by the misdirected fire of Frank who was still armed with the shotgun and accidently shot at John during the confusion.  With the same shotgun that he’d been shot with a few hours earlier.

Swearing they advanced swiftly to the sanitarium and up inside where they get attacked by bad guys wearing all black and wielding automatic weapons of an unknown nature.

They downed the guys but not without John getting shot up even more.

A search of the sanitarium found several dead women, all blondes and by all signs pregnant when they were shot, once to the head.  They also found a surgery with the body of a woman on it and the room all bloody.  In the corner a man in scrubs was muttering “What have I done?” over and over.  When approached by John he whispred, “Please forgive me.” then slashed his own throat with a scalpel he’d been holding.

Etched in the floor of the surgery they spotted symbols much like those that had been on the body of the woman they’d seen at the city morgue a few days earlier.

Hearing engines they spotted a large truck fleeing the area around the side of the sanitarium.  Although they shot at it, it escaped although the license plate was noted.

Fleeing in a car parked in front of the sanitarium they made it to the front gate but not in time to see which way the truck had turned.

Their own car had been raked down one side with gun fire leaving both tires flat.  Leaving Frank behind to change the tires they headed back to Chicago.  Once again Helena tended to John’s wounds and got him in a working state again.

[And again she managed to fully recover him with the absolute last roll.]

A little bit later Frank showed up with their car and they split up to get some well deserved rest.

Bad Moon

We’ve tentitively started the Dark Pulp game this last Saturday.  The setting is a ‘romantacized’ version of 1920′s Chicago.  We’ll focus our viewpoint on the Gilhooly Detective Agency, founded by Tom “Fat Tom” Gilhooley (PC) and Stella Proschenko (Allied NPC) who brings contacts with the darker side of the town to the table.  On their payroll is Candance Proschenko (Allied NPC) who acts as the Agency’s Secretary and Girl Friday and Q, a white South African who works as mechanic, inventor, gunsmith and the like.

In addition Tom has John Redman (aka Billy Tiger) a full blood Cherokee from Oklahoma (PC) on full time retainer for when he needs a little backup or some clandestine searching.  John had some troubles in Oklahoma, something about making late night withdrawals from various finanical institutions and is in Chicago enjoying the lack of heat in the great Fall weather. So to speak…  He plays the part of the Sneak.

Helena Chernisova (PC) is a Russian immigrant to Chicago, an ex-nurse and medical researcher she had to leave the business after she was let go to make way for a relative of the hospital administrator.  Her response to the termination has made her less than welcome at other hospitals after the administrator made a few spiteful phone calls.  To make ends meet she’s applying her research skills at Tom’s bequest.  She plays the part of the Thinker.

And of course there’s Tom himself.  An honest cop in a corrupt town he had no future in the Chicago Police Department and left the force days ahead of an ‘accident’ that would have probably proven fatal.  He keeps a ready hand with a $10 in it for those he knows on the force and everyone knows Tom’s both generous and a man of his word.

We join our heroes with Tom at the office…

Tom was kicked back and eating some cake and having coffee when Candace popped in and informed him that someone was downstairs to see her mother Stella and did he want to take it since Stella was currently in New York attending the wedding of a relative.

Tom, having nothing else on his plate other than cake, had the woman sent up.  She turned out to be a street walker by the name of Missy and an old employee of Stella’s back when Stella was in the ‘life’. She had a story about some of her friends disappearing and stories of others.  The cops so far had been of no help, “So a whore has moved on, so what?” and Missy in desperation decided to look up her old boss.

Missy spins a story of overhearing a conversation between a friend of hers and the woman’s boyfriend.  The boyfriend is an O’Toole, an Irish gang that runs girls in a section of town near Chinatown.   The man was scared and from what little she could make out she thinks the O’Toole’s are involved in the missing girls.  The next morning both of them were packed and gone.  It was then that she decided to come see Stella.

Tom hears her out and decides to look into it.  Tom does have a bit of a White Knight complex and women in distress, even prostitutes warrant his concern.

He sends Helena and John out to investigate.  They go and talk to a few of the girls and get not much for their trouble.  [DM's Note: Remember these girls understand money or intimidation and aren't likely to spill their guts to strangers without one or the other...]

They stop off at a diner to grab a cup of coffee and try and squeeze some information out of counter man and waitress and enter separately with John going to the counter for coffee and Helena a booth where she orders coffee and apple pie.

They pick up a description of both of Missy’s missing friends and they’re both tall blondes.  Coincidence or the start of a theme?

While Helena is sitting there a man sits down at her booth and offers to hook her up with some action.  Helena says she’s looking for her boss, not herself and doesn’t get much information from the man.  John notices when he sits that he’s packing heat and keeps an eye on him.

They leave and head back to the office and tell Tom what they found out.

Spending the next few days they investigate the morgue where Helena finds out that there’s a Jane Doe that fits the general Tall Blonde description and manages to see the body claiming her cousin is missing.   She notes that the body seems to have a void in the chest/abdomen area under the sheet.   She arranges to have a date with the Assistant Medical Examiner to try and get more information out of him where she finds out the body is being handled by the senior M.E.  Helena learns the hard way that people don’t like questions and perhaps the honest direct approach might not be the best approach.

John Redman sneaks into the morgue and steals the last years ledgers to see if there are other mentions of Jane Doe’s that fit this description.  Unfortunately he’s unable to get the current ledger which is kept in the recieving area where there is always someone on duty.   Later he sneaks back into the morgue and steals the case files on Jane Doe and replaces the stolen ledgers.   He also learns through an acquaintance the O’Tooles are selling women overseas or that’s a story that’s circulating about the gang.

They find out information on the O’Tooles through Tom’s contacts and learn they’ve ‘gone to the mattresses’ in an old office building in Chinatown.  THey cruise by in their sedan and find a car full of thugs parked outside.  John reconoiters the back alleys and finds another guy guarding the back door.  Rather than risk a confrontation they retreat to plan their next moves.

Unfortunately all their nosing about has attracted attention and Mick O’Toole the leader of the O’Toole gang shows and tells them in no uncertain terms to back the hell off.   He offers to hire them to take a vacation and when Tom doesn’t go for it makes some fairly (un)veiled threats that bad things might happen if they don’t.  John with uncanny insight picks up that Mick is scared pantsless which might make him a dangerous man, even more so than he might otherwise be.

The doorman to the building, being on Tom’s secret payroll to pass along information, sends up word that two of the O’Toole’s head off down the  street from the sedan loaded with them that Mick arrived in.  Tom calls down to the diner on the corner and finds out they’re holed up there.

He and John go have a talk with them.  A slight altercation takes place and one of them makes his escape after shoving Fat Tom halfway across the room out of the booth and bolting like a rabbit out the door.

The other one isn’t quite so awesome and they learn that the O’Tooles are in fact acquiring women for a buyer and that they missed a delivery and the buyer is very very upset about that and now a bunch of their boys have vanished.   They’re collecting girls now to try and make up their delivery schedule.   He was a little confused about Tom’s insinuations that the same buyer had hired Tom but he was scared enough that he just didn’t quite get it.

After thoroughly scaring the thug more, Tom lets him go and they head back to the office where he deposited the two 38′s they took off the thugs.

Aftermath:

All in all this is the first RPG session in going on 30+ years of playing that I’ve ever had where there wasn’t a fight of any kind.  Not a single punch was thrown or a cartridge fired although guns were brandished at times.  Part of this could I’m sure be laid at the feet that the first part of the session was character building and during the session one of my son’s got sick and spewed all over himself and the couch which neccesitated a time out for clean up.

I’ll get the podcast out as I can this week, I go on call tomorrow for the next week so time might be at a premium for me.

Dennis

Double Barrel Shotgun

Unless of course you have that one player who carries 18 clips for each of the 5 weapons he somehow has stashed on his person like some soldier class from Mass Effect 2.

Anyway, if you have need to keep track of a reasonable amount of clips and bullets in any game using them these could certainly add a bit of bling to your gaming table.  These are crafted by someone who appears to be playing Savage Worlds Deadlands or Deadlands Reloaded primarily so there’s a lack of larger clip sizes that would be appropriate for things like that G3 or MP5 your super spy is carrying but one could make do with multiple smaller clips rubber banded together or something of that nature.

15 Round Clip

As an alternative that’s cheaper, you could just buy some thick foam core, cut it into magazine like shapes and then poke holes in it to stand your bullet casings up in which could be various sized dowels cut off in the appropriate sizes.  But where’s the cool in that?

I’m back from my self imposed exile away from any real computer access except through my phone for the last two weeks.  Will get something up soonest after I get caught back up with life, work and everything.

It started off as one those days that made a man glad to be alive.  Hot water for a change from the shower and fresh coffee and a fat maple bear-claw from Priscilla’s little push cart on the corner of 7th and Vine.  The air was crisp and clean in the early fall, summer’s heat was fading and winter’s bitter chill hadn’t shown up.  Yes it started out the kind of day to make angels weep for joy.

Looking back, I should have known it wouldn’t last.

Even though we’d been in the new digs for three months I still got a bit of a chuckle walking down the hall toward our offices.  The rich walnut paneling and supposed fine art on the walls and the thick soft carpeting under foot was still cause for a little bit of reveling at my good fortune. Or rather our good fortune; it wasn’t a one man show any more.  Hadn’t been for a good long while truth be told although the days of scraping by to make ends meet by myself after getting kicked off the force were still a pretty strong memory.   Standard crap back then, catching errant spouses, tracking down bail jumpers, living hand to mouth.  Not a great period for Mama Gilhooey’s son, too stupid to look the other way in corrupt system, too proud to ask for help.

And then a sea change, a right time right place kind of event that I still had trouble believing.  Edward Durant and his little girl Persephone getting nabbed by that psycho Uri Rasmuzi.  The father a bonus for the killer and the girl just another child in a string of them that last I heard they’re still trying to get a accurate count on.  Pursuing the sick bastard through three states, finding the father or what was left of him in that dirty warehouse in Indianapolis.  I still wake up at times in a cold sweat from what that psychopath left of the man to cool on the stained concrete.

And then the race through Indianapolis and then Ohio, always one step behind the bastard but somehow always catching a break to keep from losing him.  Tracking him to Columbus and then to abandoned row housing.

Then by some freak of chance, fate or maybe just the girl’s guardian angel looking out for her, hearing that single terror filled scream before the bastard got the gag back in place as I walked past a building no different than the rest.  Of that desperate struggle to move fast and quiet through the building before spotting the door with a finger of light coming from under it.  The smells of dankness and mildew mixed with the heavy musk of the candles flickering around the room as the door gave wave under a heavy shoulder and stumbling into the room.

The look of surprise and disbelief in the killer’s eyes as he turned to stare, crazy eyes, soul-less, dead eyes if truth be told.  And then that faint flicker of relief that still puzzled me even as I put two heavy 45’s through his nasal cavities and the back of his head exploded spraying gore across the girl strapped to the heavy wooden table.   Before the black knife in his hand hit the floor I emptied the remaining five rounds into his center of mass, a cluster of holes over his heart you could have covered with a small book.   It was the best shooting I’d ever done in my life, another sign that the Fates really wanted that little girl to live.

The girl was blindfolded and saved from the sight of the almost headless body, yet another small favor I added to my karmic debt.  I gathered her up, reassuring her she was safe now and getting nothing but little whimpers from her that near broke my heart.  I bundled her up in my overcoat, she was such a small little thing that she just disappeared into it, a golden mop of hair the only sign of her.

Leaving the body in a spreading pool of dark crimson I carried her downstairs and placed her in the car, handing her off to Stella where she immediately dove into her arms sobbing.

Stella, my sometimes partner, sometimes breakfast companion met my eyes with a question and I nodded.  She mouthed the word “Good!” to me and continued to stroke the little girl’s hair.  Slipping behind the wheel I pulled the car into the empty dark street, stopping only once at a payphone to let the girl’s mother know we had her safe and sound and would be back as soon as humanely possible.  A second call as a concerned citizen to the Columbus PD to let them know where they could find Uri aka the Pied Piper.  I hung up as the questions started, I had precious cargo to deliver and no time to talk.

The girl had fallen asleep before I got back to the car and slept the entire way back to Chicago in Stella’s arms.  The woman was a trooper, held the child without shifting or complaint during the long ride home. We rode in silence, we’d known each other since the early days when I was just another honest flatfoot on patrol and she was a unwed mother trying to make ends meet. Neither of us the type to need to fill empty spaces for the sake of noise.

Lois Durant was more than happy to get her child back.  And expressed her happiness in ways that had lead me to where I was now.  Walking down this richly appointed hall toward the heavy oak doors with my name in gold lettering on it.  Rescuing the only child of one of the wealthiest families in Chicago from a child killer had had its rewards.  Although I’d have done it for nothing more than the satisfaction of seeing the bastard’s brains paint the wall.

As I stepped through the doors to Gilhooey’s Private Investigations I was nodding in satisfaction at a future that looked rosy indeed.

And then I saw her, a raven haired beauty with skin like white silk and amethyst eyes to get lost in for days.  She rose from one of the heavy leather couches in our outer room as Candace, Stella’s niece, called out from behind the outer desk, “Boss, Sabrina De La Cote would like to talk with you.  She was referred by Mrs. Durant.”

I nodded, trying to keep my jaw from dropping to the floor and only partially succeeding.  That marble was genuine Italian and I’d hate to break it.  The woman was spellbinding, the knee high skirt she wore revealing legs that would have given Michelangelo trouble capturing their perfect curves.  Assuming the sissy had actually like dames.And those curves didn’t stop there but continued all the way up.

She held out her hand and from somewhere I managed to nod, bringing it up to brush my lips, bringing with it a faint musky floral scent I immediately fell in love with.

“Mrs. De La Cote?  Please, my office is this way.” Taking her gently by the elbow I pointed her toward the door marked Boss.

“Thank you Mr. Gilhooey.” she replied in a soft contralto that whispered things that would get a man arrested for.  And then she said something that near threatened to have me babbling like an idiot.  ”And it’s Miss.”

I turned my head to look back and my secretary and having nothing to do with me trying to get some faint grip on composure, “Candace, give Sargent Roberts a call and tell him to come by this afternoon, would you?”

“Sure thing boss.  Remember you have a ten o’clock with Fiduchi.”

“Right, thanks. Get Jocko over in case that conversation turns interesting?”

“Already taken care of, Jocko and Sully both should be here by nine.”

“Good girl.”

Candace had proven to be a life saver, smart way beyond her eighteen years, talented at making the office run smoothly and although I’d never say it in front of Stella, quite a stunner in her own right.  And her ditsy blond act had worked on more than one occasion to pick up information a prospective client perhaps hadn’t intended on telling us.  At least not immediately.

Door safely closed behind us I eased her into one of the two armchairs positioned in front of the big teak desk I used, mostly to impress clients if one was being completely honest.  Plopping down into my own seat, looking at the vision of lovliness sitting across from me I couldn’t help but think, “Tom old boy, this day just keeps getting better and better.”

Which just goes to show you, you can always trust Fate to build you up only to kick you in the nuts when you least expect it…

I was curious on real world die roll results with the Savage Worlds dice mechanics.  Just to sum it up, all your stats and skills are based on die sizes that you buy with character points.  For example a stronger character might have a d10 Strength while another might have a d4.  That dictates the dice you roll when doing strength related skills.   Skills are the same way, a sniper level marksman might have a d12 Shooting while someone who’s shot grandpa’s ol’ 12 gauge a few times might have a d4.

Where it gets a little interesting at least on the surface is that in Savage Worlds the dice can ‘explode’ or ‘ace’.  This means that if you roll the maximum on a die, for instance roll a 6 on a d6, you get to roll it again.   And if you roll maximum again then you keep rolling.   This means that smaller dice, d4′s and d6′s explode more often than bigger dice d10′s and d12′s.

One interesting artifact of this mechanic is you can’t roll multiples of the dice you’re rolling.  For instance it’s impossible to roll a 4/8/12 etc on a d4.

And as you might expect the change in average totals means more for lower sized dice as a result but the differences aren’t nearly as significant in the grand scheme of things as one might think.  The entries below marked ex boost: show the upgrade in average damage that you can expect to see from the mechanic versus without it.

Over 10,000,000 rolls these are the numbers I came up with and boy are my arms tired.  Ten million rolls is enough to elminate vagaries in the stats out to a couple of decimal points I would think.

What I find interesting is that rounding the progression with exploding dice is still one point average damage difference just like the progression without explosions you get with rounding without it.    So raising your die size for a skill will yield a 1 point higher average roll.

These numbers indicate that on average with a d6 you should succeed at most tasks barring modifiers since a 4 is the Target Number you need to roll equal to or higher than.   The most important exception of this Melee skill which barring weak opponents has a Target Number of 5 or higher.   In this case you really need to have a d8 to expect some measure of success on average.  NOTE: All players get to roll a d6 on top of whatever dice they may have built their character with which changes the success rate but without that die these are what you can expect on average.

Zombie Run

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This is a little off site topic but I thought I’d post it as I had trouble tracking down the information.   The condenser fan motor on my AC unit went out.  THe sympton was the fan that sits at the top of the outside unit wasn’t spinning but the compressor was on.  With the AC off the fan was hard to spin by hand, or rather a stick, I value my fingers.   These fans should be freely spinning and free of friction under normal off conditions.

Obviously it needed to be replaced.

First a disclaimer for our sue-happy society -

WARNING!!!  This information is for informational purposes only.  Serious harm or death could result if you attempt to perform these repairs without proper training, preperation and equipment.

Okay with that said I didn’t find it all that difficult to replace the motor.  Google was my friend when I ran into situations like the wires were different colors, there were more of them than I started with and the old fan was sharing a capacitor with the compressor.

I undid the sheet metal screws holding the top of the unit, the part that the fan is attached to and lifted it up and checked the data plate on the fan, writing down all the information, horsepower, voltage, amperage, speed, everything.  Going online I found that these fans (mine was 1/4 HP, 1100RPM) typically run $70, the most recommended brand was AO Smith.    Oddly enough the slower speed 850 RPM quieter fans cost considerably more.

Quotes to have a HVAC professional come out and replace it run from $400 to $1000 and research online seemed to bear those prices out based on people asking, “They only replaced a little fan and it took a few minutes, did I get screwed for $500?”

Given that little difference in price this became a no brainer to try myself.  Let me state I have no experience with HVAC equipment at all.

I had my lovely wife pick up a replacement motor from Grainger.  They’re not supposed to sell to the public but the counter man asked her where she worked and as it turns out her employer has an account there so they were able to sell it to her.  There was some *wink wink* going on as in the guy knew he wasn’t really supposed to sell to her but a sale is a sale so he did.

She was also my Tool Monkey and emergency standby to call 911 if I managed to electrocute myself.  Highly recommended to not try these things by yourself in case you accidently brush up against the hot lead on a capacitor with a sweaty arm.

WARNING!!! Remember to pull the fuses!  Mine were located right next to the units and there are also circuit breakers you trip.

Fan in hand along with the necessary capacitor I removed the old fan, clipping the wires to get it out easier.  The old fan had three wires, Black, Yellow and Brown, (Current, Current, Capacitor).   I removed the fan blade, it was easy just loosen a set screw in the hub where the blades attach and slide it off.

Next I disassembled the side of the unit, the big non-finned side, taking out the outer cover piece I was then able to open the actual junction box.

Inside I found the old fan’s black and yellow wires going to the junction bar attached with spade connectors.  I removed those, noting where they were attached.

WARNING!!! Capacitors can hold a charge, in fact that’s what they’re supposed to do.  These things can still shock the everloving crap out of you and even kill you.  I only had the crap shocked out of me obviously as I’m still alive to write this.   Treat this thing with utmost respect, use rubber gloves and don’t touch it if you don’t have to.

The existing capacitor was a big one and handled both the fan and the compressor.  It’s what is called a Split Capacitor I think.  It had one ‘hot’ or yellow lead leading to the power strip (the big junction bar where the live current comes in from the house and gets split up among the various leads).   It had one blue cable leading down to the compressor and a brown wire leading to the fan.

Since the new motor has 5 wires, its own capacitor I pulled the brown wire from the old capacitor and tossed it.   You have to leave the yellow and blue (or whatever colors you might have) attached so your compressor will continue to work.  The one for the fan is actually marked Fan on the capacitor by the way.

Unfortunately the new motor fan leads were too short to reach so I ended up using wire nuts to splice the old fan’s black and yellow power leads to the new fans black and purple power leads.   I then plugged those back to their original locations on the junction bar.

The two brown leads from the new fan went to the new capacitor, one on each side.  It makes no difference apparently which one goes where but remember I’m not a trained HVAC person and maybe I just got lucky, I had a 50/50 shot of getting them right regardless.

I then zip tied the new capacitor into the unit so it couldn’t accidently shift around and short out.   Obviously some metal clamp and screw mount would have been better but I had no such thing.

Next came to mounting the fan.  The replacement fan has screws so that it can be mounted either face up or face down depending on your preference.  I needed it face down and I would bet that most of them do.  These were way too long and I had to use a hacksaw to come them in half so the acorn nuts that hold it to the fan mount would screw all the way down.

The ones on the bottom were also way too long and I used a pair of vice grips to crush them off as near to the motor as I could.  Vice grips were faster than hacksawing and I didn’t need to save the threads at all.

The ground wire that came with the new fan was short and there was only one place that I could see to put it.  Over one of the fan mounting screws so it would be grounded against the unit’s case.  I removed the paint to make sure it had a good solid connection.

I then tested the conditioner to make sure it worked and voila it did.   Except it was running backwards.  But luckily they thought of that and there was a little white plastic plug thing on the motor that you can pull apart, spin 180 degrees and plug back together to reverse the motor.   This accomplished and voila, it was working 100% correctly.

Then I screwed everything back together and it’s worked since.  And I saved a minimum of $340 dollars and spent an hour of my life.

Now that I know what needs to be done I don’t see this taking more than 20-30 minutes.  I had to stop and research the changes in coloring on the wires and sealed it up once and then decided to go ahead and shorten the underside screws as much as possible.  Technically I sealed it up twice and forgot to put the side piece in first which you can’t attach after you put the top back on.  So I wasted a lot of time unnecessarily.

WARNING!!!  Attempting the above yourself may result in you killing yourself.  Please use utmost caution when playing with electricity.

Somewhere my number got fubarred but it’s not a major deal.   Anyway it’s been awhile since I re-released my dice rolling app with more Savage Worlds features so I thought I’d post the current version.

It’s fairly Alpha so there may be bugs (read: probably are).

Out of the box it’s set up to work for Savage Worlds although it provides basic die rolling for any system although it would be pretty clunky for any system that uses a lot of dice.

I’ve added some basic client server functions in that you can run the client and set it up as a listen server (technically that’s an incorrect term but it sounds cool) and it’ll function like normal for anything keypads connected to the console and it’ll allow other instances of the app to connect to it from other machines and when a roll is generated on those other instances they’ll be mirrored/echoed on the master client.

The basic premise there is that remote users could enjoy the same ease of use of the app and the GM for those remote users can enjoy the knowledge that there is no fudging going on on the dice that he can’t see.

I’ve also had to split the keybinds up into basic attacks (the ones I needed the most) and damage (again the ones that came up most often for me).   To access the second set of keybinds just press Enter.  The word Damage is spoken to acknowledge the shift and the keys are ‘hot’ for a single press and then it reverts back to the primary set. That seems more covienent to me.  YMMV.

Here’s the read me -

This is a Savage Worlds version (version 3) of my die roller app
aimed at helping the blind be able to roll their own
dice without losing them or having to resort to
braille dice or having someone else read them for
them.

It also makes cool ‘splody sounds when a dice aces or
‘explodes’.

This is aimed to have all the controls located on
a standard numeric keypad. The following keys are
active:

4 = Roll a d4
6 = Roll a d6
8 = Roll a d8
1 = Roll a d10
2 = Roll a d12
0 = Roll a d20
3 = Roll Full Auto d6 (automatic -2 for Full Auto)
5 = Roll Full Auto d8 (automatic -2 for Full Auto)
7 = Roll Full Auto d10 (automatic -2 for Full Auto)
9 = Roll Full Auto d12 (automatic -2 for Full Auto)

Press Enter to Roll Damage dice –
0 = Roll 2d4
2 = Roll 2d6
3 = Roll 2d6+1d6
5 = Roll 2d8
6 = Roll 2d8+1d6
8 = Roll 2d10
9 = Roll 2d10+1d6

. = Toggle Roll Wild Die
* = Toggle Use Exploding Dice
/ = Toggle Display Totals or Each Die roll

You can also turn the toggles on and off through
the Preferences menu.

By default the preferences are aimed at supporting
typical dice rolls in Savage Worlds but can be
used in any game that needs to roll dice by turning
the toggles off.

This version adds rudimentary support for connecting
multiple instances of the application so that
rolls made on one client are sent to the master
client.

The primary need for this is so that remote users
can use the same app (for ease of dice rolls) and
the GM can be assured that there is no fudging
going on.

To start a master client use the menu:

Connect – Start Listen Server
This currently starts a listen server and is hard
wired to port 8000.  You’ll have to port forward
or have UPNP for this to work. If that makes no
sense to you then Google is next stop.

To connect a client to the server use the menu:

Connect – Connect To Server and give it the IP
and port number (currently 8000) of the server.

It's a gas gas gas....

We open this session with the group recovering after getting the power plant shutdown and everyone giving Bubba the big eye or at least the teeth marks on his shoulder from his being bitten by one of the undead they ran into in the cooling tower of the plant.

Everyone’s a little twitchy, keeping an eye on Bubba as Melissa heals his wounds when two mil-spec humvees come roaring into the compound both with a M249 MG blazing away on the top.   As 7.62 rounds chew up their own hummers and the walls of the cooling tower building the group dives into cover behind and under the cars with Sonny sprinting off to the side toward the edge of another building.

Roj pops up from behind cover and sprays full auto mini-uzi’s into the raiders bailing out of the two hum vees and sends them diving for their cover and the leadstorm of bullets catch three of the raiders in vital parts sending them crashing to the ground to bleed out.  He drops back down as the rain of brass tinkles across the concrete parking lot.

Bubba unlimbers his modified Remington 700 sniper rifle and one of the gunners on the humvees head explodes in a spray of red and pinkish gray.   Sonny opens up from the cover of his wall and puts a three round burst into the other gunner.  The sharp bark of the raider’s M-16′s echoes from the walls as they fill the air with messenger’s of copper jacketed death and although they graze our heroes at times they’re unable to zero in as the group continues to keep them back behind their cover.

The firefight while intense is over very quickly as the group riddles the raiders with slugs and take little to no damage other than to their own vehicles.  But they now possess two military hummers to replace them complete with mounted machine guns.

Bubba looks down at the two rounds he had to fire, two shots, two kills and then at the flood of brass scattered around Roj and shakes his dead, “Wasteful…”

WIth guns casually aimed at Bubba they head back to Phoenix to report their success at getting the plant shut down.  Bubba is quarantined for 24 hours in a cargo container but once it appears he’s not going to turn he’s let free.

They move back into the Phoenix society for a couple of weeks.  Over this time the number of refugees fleeing from Flagstaff picks up and these newcomers are debriefed and engaged into the workings of the city…

One of them has a chilling story, that the Flags have uncovered something in an abandoned military base, something that gives them evil chuckles.

Our group is dispatched along with four combat grade citizens of Phoenix to intercept and destroy the raiders that are reported to be at the military base and acquire whatever they’ve found.

The trip is a long one and takes them almost to the former border between Arizona and Mexico before they come to the base.  Melissa spots tracks that several vehicles have recently moved along the road into the base and they do a little recon spying on the base from the top of a nearby rise.  They spot 4 or 5 raiders moving boxes onto a flatbed truck, the numbers far too few for the vehicles they can see, two jeeps and two flatbeds.   In the distance behind the base smoke starts to spew up and they’re not sure what to make of that.

They enter base, the raider vehicles they’re driving, the same military hummers they captured at the nuclear power plant,  they figure will give them the time they need to unload on the raiders in the camp.   With Bubba and Roj manning the MG’s they unload on the raiders they can see easily getting the drop on them and blast them into the next life, Roj taking one out with a leg shot from his MG that amputates the raider’s leg from the knee down.

As it turns out that raider is the only survivor and they slap a tourniquit on him to keep him from bleeding out while they question him.  They learn the raiders have uncovered a cache of nerve gas and have loaded it on a train.  The same train that they see leaving in the distance by the smoke from its locomotive.

A sharp knife takes care of the survivor and they roar off in pursuit of the train.

Catching up to it they send one of their allies over who misjudges the jump and goes down in a tangle of broken legs and arms to be left behind…  A second ally is sent across who makes it, their plan to be to turn on the brakes on the caboose of the train to slow it down.   Then they crest a rise to see a canyon sprawled out in front of them and the train will cross over it on a narrow trestle.

With little time to consider they start to bail out and cross over to the train, our heroes making, Bubba even able to detach his MG and toss it over to Roj who catches it handily.    Leaving two of the Phoenix allies at the wheel.  One of them tries to follow the train across the trestle bridge only to lurch off it and go crashing down into the jagged rocks below.

With our four heroes and one ally they move through the caboose finding no one.  Ahead lies a flatbed loaded with military cargo and beyond that a sealed passenger car.  They continue to move forward and Bubba snatches open the door and heaves a grenade through as Roj smashes down on the trigger of his MG.    Chaos ensues as they blast their way through the occupants of the passenger car using grenades and automatic fire to kill the raiders who were enjoying a nice sandwich and glasses of lemonade after a hard day of loading nerve gas on a train.

Our heroes didn’t get off scott free this time with Roj and Bubba getting chewed up a bit from the raider’s fire.  As they stood in the aftermath the far door on the passenger car opened and another raider enters and unloads on them with an MP5 and they hear footsteps on top of the car heading to the back door.

The Sarge although tough is killed in time for Sonny to race out of the forward door and up a ladder to see four more raiders, one stretched flat about to throw a grenade inside.   The grenade goes awry and does little damage as Sonny peppers the guy.  Roj limps outside and up and joins Sonny spraying the others with machine gun fire and again proving that his heavy training on the gun range is paying off and suppresses or kills most of them.   As the last raider falls down to tumble onto the flatbed below they both turn and see the tunnel about to sweep them off the top of the train and drop down.  Sonny spots the milling throngs of undead using the tunnel to escape the heat of the sun and screams over the radio to the others who immediately slam the doors to the passenger car closed.

With the gushy crackling noise of the undead being battered by the roaring locomotive they hunch down on top of the car hoping there’s no low hanging sign about to sweep them off.

The train exits the tunnel and ahead lies a small community, it’s purpose unknown but the throngs of undead surrounding a train station by the tracks and the muzzle flashes coming from people atop the station tell yet another chapter in the undead’s burgeoning dominance in this scary new world.

Grenades arch out from the top of the station, one of them blowing apart the tracks ahead.   Sonny and Roj bail off the train, trying to tuck and roll in the sands along the tracks, SOnny taking the time to use his walkie talking to warn the others who also bail off the train, tucking and rolling as best they can.   Surprisingly all of the emerge unscathed even as the locomotive hits the warped tracks and derails.  The noise is amazing as the 9 cars of the train tumble and crash about.  One of the tanker cars slams into the edge of the station sending the room collapsing forming a ramp as the undead that survive impact with the smashing cars use to swarm up and over the figures on the roof.

Battered, bruised and limping our group swings wide of the wreckage for the far side of the area hoping for vehicles that they can use to get away.  As the seconds tick by, more and more of the undead catch wind of them and start to shamble their way.  Soon they have 10′s of them then 50 of them stumbling after our living heroes.

As they round the wreckage they spot raider vehicles and they sprint toward them, diving into a humvee mere seconds ahead of the hordes after them.  As Roj presses the start button the first meaty impacts of fists on the window occur and then the engine kicks over and the vehicle starts to move.

On the way back to phoenix they run into a phoenix patrol heading toward them as support.  They explain about the gas and the leader of the convey, the security leader of the town Sasha Green, her eyes light up and she determines to recover the gas.

As our heroes trade glances they all without discussion decided that perhaps somewhere else might be better suited for them.  They head back to town and load up their supplies, a few checking their former allies to see if they want to go and then quietly slip out of town, leaving the two towns of Phoenix and Flagstaff to sort out their differences without them.

And thus ends our view into the lives of several strangers of New York thrown together by the unlikely event of the end of the world as we know it.

Perhaps we’ll pick up their story at a later time and see how well they fared in their trip across this once great country but now the home to atomic craters and shambling dead.

Aftermath –

All in all the module as decent.  A little railroady but sometimes that’s necessary for a canned module like this to keep things moving toward the conclusion.   The great train robbery was something I threw in there ad libbed as I thought it would be a cool fight sequence and it was I believe pretty enjoyable.   Rather than continue the main storyline where the characters become arbitrators in the upcoming confrontation between the two cities they made the obvoius decision and headed out.  Who wants to be anywhere near a malfunctioning nuclear plant between two warring cities armed with nerve gas, nuclear mines and nuclear warheads (something they didn’t uncover but were in the module to be found).

Due to life’s obligations we’re going to taking roughly a month hiatus from RP’ing before we reconvene and see how the 1920′s work out for our group in a dark pulp noir kind of setting.

Hope to see you there, at least vicariously.

Image Credits

I wanted to make a comparison about MMOG’s and Pen and Paper gaming and the conclusions that I draw from that.

Back in the day, I played Ultima Online.  If you’re not familiar with it, it was one of the first MMOG’s in the U.S. and is still around today.  UO was very much a sandbox, there were no classes, no levels, no game directed direction to your play.  And in the first year or two of the game there wasn’t a whole lot of content.  Back then content was pretty easy to categorize.  It was random spawn that you go and kill.  No quests, no story lines, no ‘phat lewt’.   But back then programmers and servers alike weren’t all that good and the amount of spawn that was available was way under what was needed to keep players entertained because the apps and hardware couldn’t support it.   We even coined a phrase “Connecticut Online” because the countryside was completely empty of things that might prove dangerous to you.

The combats were pretty simple too, you either hit something with a hard object, shot something with a ranged weapon or hit them with the same spell over and over again *Corp por corp por corp por*.

As a result of being a combat light game, light in that there weren’t a lot of options to choose from and pretty static and infrequent things to use those few options on, players become role players.  Sitting around taverns and talking, hanging out in their crafting shops selling things to their customers, and having pretend wars with groups of ‘orcs’ or ‘elves’ and generally playing a persona rather than playing the game.

Then came EQ which had levels and lots of things to kill.  And introduced to the masses the concepts of tanking, crowd control, healing, buffers and debuffers, getting behind someone for the back stab.  Combat went from going into combat mode and trying to stay next to your target so you could ‘swing’ the sword when your timer ran out in UO to having a toolbar filled with icons of various things you could do and combinations and interactions with other players in EQ.

And roleplaying disappeared completely.  Combat was interesting and going after that next carrot on the treadmill became the most important thing.   Killing 10 of this for a NPC who had one line when you clicked it “Bring me 10 of this” was the extent of game play.  And it was good, or at least enough for 99% of the gamers.

Which brings me to an observation and the basis for this post.  Many people decry 4th Edition as the death of roleplaying because the books don’t have any rules for it, that the books are all about combat.  And in that I think they’re right but for the wrong reasons that they claim and not that it kills roleplaying but that it impacts it.  In an aside, “Seriously people?  You need rules to roleplay?”

I believe a direct correlation can be made, at least by me, as to why this might indeed be the case taking the MMOG’s impact on gaming and applying it to our tables.

It’s because combat in 4th Edition or Hero Systems or Mutants & Masterminds  is interesting, much like combat in EQ was.  It’s entertaining and really isn’t that why we’re playing these games?  To be entertained?

In these types of systems players have a huge ‘toolbar’ filled with various things they can try during combat, powers that let them buff and de-buff, crowd control, heal and hurt, single target and masses of targets.    The sheer number of cool things that a character can do is enough to make one giddy.  The GM has way cool monsters and bad guys to run and pit against the players.   Very little is cookie cutter which his bad guys, he has access to sugar cookies, oreos, gingersnaps, all kinds of tasty variety for the players to consume and enjoy.

Then there are systems like Savage Worlds or Fudge or Spirit of the Century or to kick it old school Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  These are combat mechanic light much like UO was.  Your toolbar of tricks is very limited, you either turn on auto combat and try and stay near your target so you can ‘swing’ your sword at them when the timer (your turn) goes off or you shoot them with your ranged weapon or you cast the same basic spell over and over again to kill the target.   The GM has the same issue, all his bad guys do tend to be cookie cutter with minor mechanical differences, all sugar cookies but some with white sprinkles instead of blue ones instead of powdered sugar.

As a result the amount of roleplay in my experience both online in a MMOG or offline at the table with your friends can be affected in direct inverse ratio to how interesting and involved the combat system is with the added bonus/penalty of how many new toys (carrots) you gain along the way.   Players act differently when there is a new toy to pick up, a new power to be gained, all just dangling out of their reach waiting for the next block of experience than there is when the prize is simply the doing.   Some game systems promote the journey’s end, while others promote the journey itself.

And I’m not saying you can’t roleplay with any system or that you can’t have fun and entertaining combats in any system.  Obviously you can.  We’ve had periods where roleplaying that lasted for a couple of hours straight without any combat in 4th Edition and had vastly entertaining fights in Savage Worlds.

What I am trying to say is that the system you choose to play can have a direct impact on the results at your table and these impacts can be obvious and sometimes subtle.

So what’s the end game of all this?  Not much to be honest other than perhaps if you want a game that’s heavier in roleplay then perhaps choosing a lighter system might promote that while a group that might be more interested in combat might choose a heavier system.

Zombie Run

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In running Savage Worlds which is a very stats light game in comparison to GMing 4th Edition Dungeons or Dragons (or worse 3rd Edition DnD or Hero System/Champions) it’s become interesting to see the differences as they play out.

Savage Worlds lets you as the GM come up with on the fly encounters that are as interesting as any pre-planned encounter simply because it is so stats light.   This isn’t necessarily a rousing endorsement as the variety of attacks, barring magic, psi or super powered settings is pretty limited.  With the ability to shoot, hit or throw something at someone it’s not hard to make a creature on the fly.   This is definitely a pro and a con both.  It’s a pro because it makes it extremely easy for a DM to sandbox a session and to accommodate the players when they bypass his carefully crafted plotlines.   It’s a con in that the bad guys can tend to blur together mechanically.  This puts more creative pressure on the GM to make the bad guys distinct based on something other than their game mechanics.  Which is a pro and con both depending on your players needs and your own creative abilities.

With systems like 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons or Hero Systems, on the fly encounters requires more pre-prepping, you have to have already created some generic stand-ins to haul out when the players go off the track as in both cases making reasonable balanced creatures on the fly is a hit or miss procedure and requires a fairly deep familiarity with the systems.

In Savage Worlds even after only a couple of sessions it’s pretty easy to just go with ad hoc encounters.

Another thing I’m finding is that much like the original Dungeons and Dragons maps aren’t necessary for a lot of encounters and when they are, they’re much alike, simple line drawings on an erasable map that take seconds to knock out.  4th Edition battles, because of the strength of impact of movement powers/effects and the like really need ‘good’ maps to take full advantage of the system.   Places of difficult terrain, obstacles, pits, shadows, braziers full of flaming oil, patches of ice etc. that the players and NPC’s can use to make use of their abilities.   I have a huge roll of maps that I pre-drew out every Saturday morning for the upcoming battles during my 4th Edition campaign.   Which typically meant the players would encounter those battles and led to a more focused non-sandbox campaign.

Encounters being necessary to play out is another factor.  With 4th Edition the system by RAW requires a lot of battles that are really pretty pointless because they’re designed as resource drains.  To burn off the player’s daily allotment of resources.  It’s a practical guarantee that the players are going to win and the chances of someone dying in the first few battles is pretty nil given a typical setup.   I deviated from this with mine in that I just didn’t have the pointless battles, each battle was typically rated as Hard and required the players to burn a lot of resources to win it.   And then there would typically be enough downtime to recover.  Occasionally I would have the chained battle sequence where the intent was to wear them down but for the most part it was boss battles.

With Savage Worlds when you though add in the wild card factor of any attack by any creature has the chance to kill any other creature with one attack it means that every creature is a force that can’t be ignored and even what would be a pointless battle in 4th Edition becomes something that could have major impact.

As an example in our last Zombie Run session, three of the party escorted a engineer into a nuclear reactor so he could fix a problem.  They ran in to four undead.  In 4th Edition this would be a hand wave at best, there’s just no way 4 minions could possibly cause a problem for even a single dnd character assuming the minions were of appropriate level.   To make the disparity worse in this instance in the first round three of the undead were killed leaving a single undead for the three of them to fight.   And yet this single undead almost killed one of the players and perhaps has due to possible infection.

In our last session which lasted our typical 5 hours roughly, the group had an encounter with Zombear (boss battle), a band of raiders (boss plus horde), an ambush by snipers, another band of raiders (horde) and a group of undead that were played out tactically.  That’s 5 tactical encounters in 5 hours something we never managed with 4th edition and the actual tactical dice rolling portions of the session took perhaps 2 hours of the session total.

In many systems like 4th Edition or Champions or whatever, such encounters would have been unnecessary to tactically play out simply because they wouldn’t, couldn’t  have any impact barring astronomically screwed die rolling.  The player characters would simply have been in no danger from any of it and personally I’d of hand waved it with dialogue, “About 10 minutes outside the base you take fire from ambush positions on the road and…” made up something about what might have happened.  Rather than playing it out as we did.

There’s also a subtle issue with 4th Edition in that since the participants in combat are so diverse that combat becomes a joy in and of itself and with the players and GM’s knowing or unknown influence the combat can overshadow the story simply because there are so many cool things everyone can do in combat.

With Champions, like many of universal systems (GURPs, Mutants and Masterminds) the games can end up where building unique and cool characters and then having them fight other unique and cool characters can end up being the primary source of entertainment simply because it is fun and entertaining to take a pile of build points and see what you can come up, taking a character concept, “I ran over Death in my truck and now I have to take his place.” and then building powers around that.  In our heyday we played a lot of champions and a lot of it was character building and set piece fighting with just enough storyline to let us make more cool characters to use.   This isn’t a bad thing, just another area where the game mechanics influence the game play in a significant fashion.

Anyway as I continue to bounce between the game systems it’s interesting to see the effects the mechanics has on the game play.   If you could somehow manage it, it would be extremely intriguing to me to see how the same group would play through the same storyline but with different systems. But that would require me to break out my time machine and after the last time I’m not doing that again barring dire emergency.

Zombear

[Sonny had an Action Card called Stool Pigeon that let him get all the information that an extra has.]

While this was going on the other leaders of the group were arranging for inventory of the gear and damage assessment to be performed.   The unknown help from higher on the mountain remains a mystery.  As Bubba is talking with two others of the group there’s a sudden susseration of snow falling and a loud meaty thud as 1000 pounds of undead brown bear lands on the road way next to him falling from above.  The bear stands leaving chunks of itself on the roadway and swipes at Bubba as Bubba turns and runs away screaming like a girl.   It rips three furrows through his ass cheeks as he flees but the damage is minimal.

Sonny, Roj and Melissa open up on the beast at close range, choosing to stand their ground even as the putrefied creature of darkness roars the sound broken by the holes in its throat and charges after Roj after he puts two loads of buckshot into it from his sawed off 12 gauge.

[My son Ryan was running the bear and chose to go after the players rather than the closer NPC's... ]

Roj narrowly avoids taking a huge smash from the bear’s foul claws and stumbles back reloading his shotgun.  Bubba after doing a baseball slide under the bus rolls around and opens fire with his hunting rifle nailing the beast in the skull the hard thick bone causing the bullet to ricochet.

Bubba continues to nail the beast again and again as it keeps it’s attention focused on Roj who jukes and jives narrowly avoiding damage again and again.

[Just some notes about this combat.  I had to burn no less than 4 Bennies, Zombear's 2 for being a wild card and 2 of my GP bennies just to keep the thing alive for the first two rounds alone.  The thing had a toughness of FOURTEEN and the player's kept acing their damage rolls forcing me to soak wounds like a mother.  This costs me later during another fight burning so many here.  I was a little concerned with the bear's high toughness value going into this fight but the opening shotgun blast, both barrels each doing 14 or more damage had me leaving it alone.   The bear did manage to hit a few times with his claws d12+4 damage but the players were able to soak out of them each time.  I was kind of hoping its infected ridden claws might nail someone for 2 wounds and kick off the paranoia as they wait to see if the damaged person turns but alas it wasn't to be.  But the session does end on a high note, see further down...]

Finally Bubba puts the a round through the beasts eye socket blowing the creatures brains to mush and it falls motionless.  Bubba and Roj compared the rents in their clothing, roj’s on the front from where he faced the beast, Bubba’s on his ass as he ran away.  The sikh is walking around a little puff chested now.

Continuing their talks with the prisoners they find out that two cities, Flagstaff and Phoenix have power supplied by a nuclear reactor.  From their talking with the guy who’s trying to save his life by supplying everything he knows, futilely as it turns out, they decide Phoenix is the place they want to go.   Flagstaff sounds a little lawless and the whole they confiscate your goods when you enter leaves a bad taste in their mouth.  Not to mention that’s where the raiders are from so showing up in their vehicles with their goods might not be the best impression to make.

They load up the working vehicles, one of the humvees and the bus are toast, no way to get them working again without a full garage and spare parts supply.  They decide to tow the busted hummer with the working one to keep everyone inside a vehicle as they descend the cold mountains.  With the truck breaking a path, loaded down with supplies they leave the site of the battle.  Though not before stripping both the captured raiders and then tossing them down the cliff side alive to fall flailing to their probably immediate deaths.

[When the thin veneer of civilization breaks revealing the ME ME ME beast we're born with underneath you can expect to see such scenes played out over and over.  Make sure you have friends near by when it happens.]

They make their way down out of the mountains without further issue and the warmth is welcome for awhile.  Spotting lights as they slowly maneuver the highways over the arid lands of Arizona they pull up and send Sonny ahead to scout.   Luckily for Sonny the people with the lights, coleman lanterns, are a little toasted from a cache of liquor they’d found.

They discover another set of Flagstaff raiders holed up in two of the motel rooms.  They maneuver into position and Bubba tosses in a flashbang that Melissa’s been carrying since New York into the room holding the bulk of the raiders and succeeds in shaking them all leaving them dizzy and disoriented.  Bubba and Sonny proceed to lay waste to these raiders as they stumble about.

The other pair, Melissa and Roj don’t have it as easy running into the raider’s leaders.  Both Roj and Melissa catch a lot of buckshot of their own as the raider leader blasts away at the pair.

As the two watchers on the roof wake up from the gunfire and rush over and drop down behind Sonny and Bubba they unload full auto on our two heroes and somehow manage to miss completely. Bubba and Sonny both look at each other and then they and the two gunmen share a glance of incredulous disbelief that they’re untouched.   Bubba swivels at the hip and sprays his autofire across both, killing one and rattling the other and Sonny rushes forward to help the other two heroes as the shot gun blasts are a bit worrying especially when Melissa staggers backwards through the door, blood streaming from pellet holes over her torso and Roj is in there screaming “Holy Cow this hurts!”.

He arrives in time to finish off the leader and Bubba takes out the last guy on the stairs.  Inside the rooms they find three more woman captured but unlike the earlier ones they managed to kill these raiders without collateral damage and they’re all still alive.

They recover quite a bit of gear, they’ve amassed quite a collection of weapons by now and continue on to Phoenix.

They go through the interrogation process and are then allowed to join the city and are allowed to keep all their gear, a bit surprising.  They integrate themselves into the city, electing to join the guards on the walls as their daily duties.

A few weeks later they’re brought to a meeting and are given a mission to escort an engineer from the Palo Verde power plant to the plant to shut it down.  Even though the plant is fully automated they really don’t want it going Chernobyl and have decided to shut it down gracefully.

The next morning they head out and are ambushed by two snipers on the road.  They kill one and drive off the other but not before Joesph is wounded.

They continue on to the power plant to find undead all over the compound.  They whip and attract the undead and then lead them off down the road for several minutes and then return.  As they’re leaving they spot several flagstaff vehicles parked next to the control room.

They roll out and Roj moves up to the building to disable their vehicles.  Someone meanders out of the control room, drops his doughnut as he sees the group and runs back in and slams the door.  The group has a few seconds to get into position when all three doors to the control room open up and raiders show up.  Two are immediately blasted back into the room and the third seeing the way the wind’s blowing ducks back inside and closes the door.

The group moves up to the two open doors and proceeds to destroy the raiders inside in spite of their cover and grenade throwing.  The raiders are slaughtered to a man and the group isn’t even scratched.

Joseph moves forward as the room is cleared and starts the shutdown procedures noting that one of the coolant towers is showing an alarm.  They’re going to have to open the coolant flow using bypass procedures.  Using the security cams they spot four undead technicians wandering in the cooling tower.  There are only four protective suits and Sonny is elected to stand guard outside as Melissa, Bubba, Roj escort Joseph inside to open the coolant.

They open the doors and move deeper inside and encounter the undead.  Three shots ring out and three undead go down but the last latches on to Bubba and rips through his suit and deep into his shoulder, its infection laden bite going deep into his flesh.

Outside the sniper that fled the ambush shows up and misses Sonny who turns and rips a three round burst through the snipers chest killing him instantly.

As they rush Bubba out of the coolant tower while Joseph starts the coolant procedures the blood running out of the deep bite marks is on everyone’s mind.

[Aftermath - You never saw such a bunch of acing, exploding dice rolling in your life on the part of the players.  My poor NPC's never stood a chance in any of it.  Even when I did manage to wound them they soaked the damage away or healed it all right up in the after battle procedures.  They've essentially at this point got an unlimited supply of guns and ammo with everything they've recovered from their attackers.  There's perhaps one more session's worth of adventures left in this module.  It might be eked out to two but I'm going to make it one.  I'm interested in starting the Roaring 20's Supernatural Detective Noir Black Comedy campaign and I think the players have a good enough grasp of the basics of Savage Worlds that they can now make a semi-informed decision as to their characters when they build them. ]

Zombie Run

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That's a lot of math.

Given Savage World’s age someone else has probably already done all this and better than I have but I couldn’t find it with a quick google and the math intrigued me after someone asked about something on post I made about damage and I thought well why not just program up a little routine to simulate it.

Real mathematicians could probably give you a real statistical formula to figure all this out, me I’m a brute force kind of person and went with the Monte Carlo simulation approach.

Called Shot Head/Vitals -4 attack/+4 damage –
This is only a valid option against a creature with a toughness greater than 8 (and then it’s still a slight penalty) or a creature that can only be damaged by head shots or if by calling a shot you bypass armour of 2 points or more.  At 2 points of armour it’s slightly better than not doing it, about 2-5%.  At 3 points it’s roughly 5-10% better than not calling the shot.

Aimed Shot +2 attack, once every round without additional edges, cannot move in the same round. –
This is only a valid option if you’ve got the Marksman Edge which allows you to take an Aimed shot every round.  Otherwise attacking every round is a much better option (between 5% and 30% better) than attacking every other round at +2.   It’s always a valid opening shot if you have the time to burn.

Wild Attack Melee only – -2 Parry, +2 Attack/+2 Damage –
This is a very valid option if you’re fighting one target, always wild attack.  If you’re fighting two targets, it becomes roughly 50/50 as to being a minor good thing or a minor bad thing and comes down to the luck of the draw for initiative on the second round.   Don’t use a Wild Attack when you’re getting attacked by three or more creatures unless you’re feeling lucky.    This goes out the window if you have the Sweep edge which lets you attack everything around you.  Then it’s back to a no-brainer long term.

Agility/Smarts Trick +2 on your next action versus the target, the target is shaken on a raise –
Never a good idea for you on the pure math of it.  The benefit is if you are near the top of the initiative order and other people have a chance to attack your target.  Then it’s a very good idea because if you get a raise it’s like giving every one else a +4 damage bonus that attacks that target.   This is always a good option if you have a high agility or smarts and no combat skills.

Taunt/Intimidate – Target is -2 Parry until it can go again –
This is only of minor penalty to you if you get to go twice before the target due to initiative.  Of great benefit to your team if you’re near the top of the initiative order because a raise shakes the target and that’s like giving a +4 damage to everyone else who attacks it.

Double Tap / 3 Round Burst / Full Auto - +1 damage/attack – +2 damage/attack – 3 attack rolls at -2.
These are always better options than single shot without considering any other factors such as ammo supply.

After two ‘real’ sessions using Savage Worlds and several play tests, the critical hit system in Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition is still bugging me as a GM based on the impact it has on the PC’s… enthusiasm I guess might be a good word to describe it.

In SWEX if you achieve your to-hit roll by 4 over what you needed to roll to achieve success you get to add an extra 1d6 damage to your damage roll. You then take your total damage output and compare that to the target’s defenses. If you meet or exceed the defense you can start applying damage to the target.

What this can result in, is that a player might roll really well on a to-hit roll and then roll not so well on damage and have the end result that they do zero damage to the target. No effect what-so-ever. This can be aggravated on the player’s side if they roll REALLY well. Although the developers recommend you stop rolling exploding dice once you’ve achieved 4 over your target number on to-hit rolls, since I use an App that does give you totals, rolling a 22 to hit versus a target number of 4 can really have a “That suxx0r’s” moment for the player if they don’t get decent damage.

This is worse, in my opinion, than rolling well in DnD and then rolling low damage. At least in DnD you feel you’re having ‘some’ effect even if it’s minor if you roll low damage. Also because of the flat adds in other systems the die roll isn’t the only source of damage, you’re guaranteed a minimum value of the lowest die result possible + the additional damage. In part to eliminate the ‘lows’ of combat this is why I implemented using average damage for our 4th edition game and I do believe it helped significantly in many ways and making suck rolls impossible is one of them.

But with Savage Worlds you can’t really use average dice or you might as well throw away the entire dice based system or at least the exploding die part. And that exploding die part is in many cases what makes the system work where anyone can in theory damage anyone with any given attack. And of course exploding dice are fun.

In thinking about this I’ve come up with some possible options that I’m going to consider further.

Option A – Average Joes – Use average damage as a minimum value for every attack. So if you roll 2d6 damage the least amount of damage you can roll is 7, 3d6 is 11, d4+d6 would be 6 and so on.

Basing the chance to hit and the chance to do damage IF you hit on random rolls is a little… random and creates situations where too many possible outcomes yield no combat effect. Making a change like this long term will have the effect of shifting the average upwards and reducing the ‘spread’. To be fair it would have to be applied to both sides equally. This is the most ‘equal’ option of the possible options I’ve come up with I believe although it does favor the PC’s but less so than the others. This would remove the high to-hit roll, crap damage roll turn a hit into a miss syndrome although it doesn’t guarantee that the hit is going to have an effect on the wrong end of the bell curve where something is trying to get through a really high toughness factor.

Option B – Always Shaken – Any critical hit has the minimum effect that the target is shaken if it’s not shaken or inflicts one wound if it is. In essence the minimum damage becomes the target’s toughness.

This means that every critical effect has an ingame impact rather than just a chance to actually have the attack have any effect. Never a bad thing. This is going have a broader and wider spread impact as a result It means that a child armed with a pen knife could in theory roll two critical hits in a row and kill an Extra simply by Shaking it with one hit, and Wounding it with the second regardless of damage output. This one is going to favor the Wild Cards significantly more than Extra’s since they’re much more likely to get critical hits. It could also have absurd situations where a guy with a toothpick can kill someone as easily as guy with a sword although GM fiat could fix that.

Option C – Critical Joes - This would work the same as Option A but only apply on a critical hit. i.e. only if a creature’s T0-Hit roll is 4+ what they need would they get to use average damage on their die rolls as the minimum value.

Again this one is going to favor WC’s more due to the increased crit chance they get and it would have less game impact since it would apply is a lot fewer attack rolls.

Option D – To the Max - This option would let the character choose to either roll their dice as normal including the bonus 1d6 OR simply take the maximum amount on their normal dice pool for a regular attack. In other words if they roll a critical hit and they normally do 2d6 on a regular hit, they could either roll 2d6+1d6 or take the max of the base damage, in this case 2d6 = 12 damage.

This in many cases is going to be close to taking average damage but it does eliminate the math. Not sure it’s variable enough to keep for consideration but there you go.

Option E – Edgy – Just give every creature the No Mercy edge which lets them re-roll damage with a Benny.

This gives everyone a chance to recover from a bad roll but it adds yet another thing to spend Bennies on and could disrupt the Benny mechanic. A Benny spent to re-roll damage is a Benny lost to try and soak damage. Also this yet again favors the players over the NPC’s due to the fact that PC’s have a lot more Bennies than the GM does.

I think they’re all viable, some have a greater impact than others in different ways so I’ll probably just put them all out there for my players to peruse and get their input since they’re the ones that are impacted the most by this.

And just so you know, I don’t think every person who enters a contest should get a blue ribbon, but every person who enters a contest with a really great entry should at least get an honorable mention.

Road Trip

The highway runs through the middle of the town if town you can call it.  There’s a mall filled with the usual suspects, Starbucks, Orange Julius, Starbucks (yes coffee is just that popular among the highway trade) a Cinn-A-Bonn and various clothing and shoe stores.  A few dash and grab style grocery stores, a bakery and a slew of souvenir shops line the sides of the highway.  Off the south side of the highway is a sprawled collection of houses and a large stone church.

Our heroes looking for a place to hole up as nightfall approaches and with it the infected will start stirring again as the heat of the day fades spot the church and pull the bus around and head that way.   The roads are far from straight once they leave the highway and it takes a few minutes to wind through them to reach the church.

There they find it surrounded by rings of cars, barricaded as best as is possible under the circumstances.  Bodies all containing bullet holes are sprawled everywhere and the windows and doors are barricaded tightly.  Leaving Bubba with Roj’s binoculars and a walkie talkie atop the bus the others, Alice, Melissa, Roj and Sonny inspect the church.  There are no sounds even when they knock, the sounds oddly loud in the still quiet air.  Everyone’s a little spooked by just how quiet things are in the world now with the absence of traffic, tv’s, radios, the almost imperceptible background hum of electrical and gasoline devices and the electricity itself that has denoted humanity for the entirety of their lives up till now.

They find the back door of the church open, obviously smashed in from the outside and of course more bodies.  Inside the church it’s a grisly scene, blood, bullets and bits and pieces of bodies scattered everywhere along with hundreds of empty shell cases.  It was obvious what had happened, a group of survivors had tried to hold up in the church, much like our group had decided to do and had been swarmed and then overwhelmed.  Images of the desperate defenders blasting the infected as they clustered around the church windows and doors, the fear as their supply of ammo steadily dwindled.  They could almost here the echoes of “Reloading!” and “I’m out!” still, picturing the men and women who’s bodies they could see rushing from one location to another trying to push back the inevitable ending with anything they could.

Keeping in touch with Bubba via walkie talkie they, with stomachs churning and minds trying to avoid thinking of their own fates, searched the building uncovering several weapons, all empty, slides locked back, most with blood on them where the defenders in the end tried to use them as clubs in futile effort to stay alive.

Downstairs in a basement under the church they found water along with several melee weapons where the last few survivors had fled the upstairs apparently.  As they worked their way through the… best to think of it simply as debris… they could piece together the events that must have happened.  Here lay a man, possibly a trucker one might think, a broken fire axe next to him, his throat almost gone and his legs missing large chunks of flesh.  Here a woman lay next to a fallen bookcase, the book case itself fallen over in the struggle, her ribs now visible and a empty void where her organs once lay.

The fallen bookcase, containing hymn books and sheet music had fallen in such a way that it blocked another door marked storage.   Roj after listening and hearing nothing muscled the bookcase up away from the door and then yelled in fear as it the door slammed open stopping against the bookcase he held, the opening only a scant few inches.  Through the gap he saw savage faces, mouths twisted in hunger and eyes lit by fury, faces smaller than they should be was his first thought before panic crashed down on him. Screaming in inarticulate fear and emotion he slammed the bookcase back down against the door hearing the snap of small fragile bone and high pitched howls as the creatures, once children, now merely snarling beasts after his flesh yanked their arms back through the gap.

With a thud the door slammed shut and Roj lunged forward to press against it, breath rasping harshly through his mouth as he shouted for the others to help him hold it closed.  Melissa rushed forward to help him hold the door shut shouting for the other two to grab anything they could find to put in front of the door.   A mad scramble ensued as tiny fists beat on the door, each blow echoing through the stone basement.

Gallon containers of water were swiftly piled high on the bookcase weighing it down, the four not stopping until the pile was too high to allow any more to be placed without rolling down and across the floor.

Roj went back upstairs to radio Bubba after the walkie talkies failed to work in the basement. To his relief they worked fine once he’d left the basement.   Bubba, glasses sweeping over the mall in the distance, eyed the sinking sun.  It wouldn’t be long before the Infected rose and started moving.  He swung down after telling Roj to get the others and meet him in back of the church.

The survivors under the leadership of the others worked feverishly to hook up the bus to some of the cars in the ring and pull them out of the way while others hauled bodies outside.  The ghastly sounds from the locked storage compartment were ignored for the moment although Melissa  stood guard in the basement while Tony and Chuk stood ready in case the door started to move.  It was better to think of them merely as creatures, as Infected or monsters rather than children.  It made it easier to deal with the scratching noises coming from the other side of the heavy oak door.

As the sun continued its descent the church was cleaned up and the barricades reinforced as best as they could.  The bus was backed up against the broken door and the bus’s doors were locked and tied down preventing opening from the outside.

As the shadows grew longer outside they retreated to the basement hoping the earth and stone would shelter them from the Infected’s uncanny ability to sense them.

Finally though there was no putting it off any longer and the infected in the store room had to be dealt with.  Roj, pouring a little gasoline from a molotov into a chainsaw that was lying upstairs, got it started and then carved a small hole in the top of the door.  The noise inside sound more like a pack of wild dogs haring after prey and for most that was what they pretended it was as Roj threw in a molotov and after hearing it break inside lit a second one and tossed it after the first.   A gout of flame blasted through the opening and under the door and the sounds from inside grew even more frantic but within less than a minute a ghastly silence broken only by the heavy breathing of those watching was all that filled the room.  The scent of cooked meats sent more than one of the survivors stumbling upstairs where they lost what little food they’d consumed over the day.

The hole and gaps were stuffed with spare cloth and the survivors huddle together near the front of the basement, as far from the storage room as they could get as outside the sun fell and the Infected rose from their torpor.

The group huddled together, sparing a precious half gallon for each person to wash as best as they could from the supply they’d found in the basement as the night passed slowly but uneventfully.  The looming threat of the radio broadcast, telling them to get as far as possible from the city before it was cleansed in a bath of nuclear fire shrouded the dawning of the new day in fear.

As the morning hours crept ever so slowly they passed the time as best as they could until at 11:34 by Bubba’s watch a tremor started to run through the building shaking it as the ground wave reached outwards.  Minutes later another tremor shook the building even as the first was dying out.

“There goes New York and Philly.” Roj said as the rumbling earth subsided and everyone looked around at each other eyes wide.

They remain in the basement throughout the remainder of the day taking inventory and stock, handing out weapons to each survivor even if they don’t have ammo to give them yet.   They find a journal that indicates one of the previous occupants was in radio contact with a group out of Phoenix that was setting up a safe haven for survivors.   Later that night they  are forced to go upstairs as Infected start banging on the buildings.  There they find to their utter horror that the infected now running around the building already bear wounds that should have killed them and in fact appear to be true undead as a light gray radioactive ash lays upon everything.

Alice, a long time Romero fan, steps up and explains the proper way to kill a true zombie and the group uses makeshift spears and crowbars, hammered out through the gaps in the boards over the windows to plunge them into the eyes and heads of the zombies outside after other wounds fail to do any significant damage.

[Dennis: I wanted to ramp up the scary bits here.  Now they have both Infected (still living creatures) and true Undead to worry about.  Like all Undead the cause is pretty much way out there but in this case the Infected were caused by a fungal virus that ate away their rational thought centers leaving only the beast like monkey/lizard brain which created the raging creatures known as Infected.   But when subjected to radiation this mutates the fungus and gives it the ability to stimulate nerve pulses and the body resumes motion and activity and continues its last imprinted activity.  Which unfortunately for the living is to seek out and destroy those creatures that it senses are not part of its hive mind.  In essence the government did what it always seems to do, screw things up more. ]

The group defeats the risen undead around the church, all the bodies they’d pulled out that didn’t have head wounds rose up and sought out the church again.  Luckily for the survivors they’d emptied the church of the bodies and for the most part the last defenders had killed most of the infected with head wounds.

As the day dawned and the Infected went back to their torpor state, a state the Undead were not subject to, they devised a plan.  They need to refuel the bus. To do that they needed a way to pump diesel out of the tanks below the truck stop.  Bubba, while standing watch the day before made note of the stores listed on the Mall marquees and one of them was a hardware store.

Our heroes elect to try to sneak through town to the mall, not wanting to risk the bus running out of fuel in an attempt to get it there.  They reach the mall only to find it filled with infected or undead or both.  They move around to the back side and break into a receiving room next to the loading docks.   Bubba heads up a ladder to the front to drop a concussion grenade to draw the creatures toward the front while the rest try to get into the building.  Melissa is almost grabbed as she pries the door open Roj is there to blow the creature away that’s reaching through it.

The room inside is empty of other creatures even as the concussion grenade goes off out front blowing out the glass and attracting creatures.  Bubba high tails it across the roof to the back and spots undead moving across the parking lot toward him.  He slides down the ladder and hammers on the door to get in, making it inside seconds ahead of the infected after him.  They bar the door on the inside, now that the lock is broken its not going to be much deterrent to the creatures although luck is on their side and the door opens outwards and the creatures aren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree and primarily are pushing against it.

The receiving room opens into the loading dock and after Sonny hears movement inside, his years of living on the streets have honed his survival senses and give him an edge in this scary new world.   A cheap desk is carefully lifted and placed in front of the door blocking it.  When everyone is set, Sonny yanks open the door and the rest start firing, killing the infected creatures that swarm toward them, blocked by the desk.  Bubba is forced to drop down and brace it from being pressed in while the rest kill the creatures.   Everything is going well when the side door is open as one of the creatures outside finally, accidentally pulls the knob sharply and a creature reaches through and tries to grab Sonny.  Bubba shoves a hand through Sonny’s legs, MP5 in hand and unleashes a burst that rips up the creature’s body shoving it back into the others.  Sonny turns and unloads his shotgun on the other two while Roj and Alice finish off the ones in the loading room.

They slam the door to the outside shut and refasten it and check out the loading dock finding a miscellaneous of items, including a H&K G3 still in its shipping create.   Sadly no ammo though.

Using a map on the wall they discover the hardware store shares a wall with the receiving room office.  A fire axe takes care of that and they bust a hole into the hardware store and start moving precious items into the office.  A hand pump, duct tape, flashlights, tools, everything they think they can use is grabbed in swift silence.

Piling their booty near the exit they discuss the gun shop which is across and just down the main hallway outside the loading dock area.  Roj is for retreating outside and then slowly but safely hammering through the roof to drop down into the shop.

Unfortunately fate steps in as Vlad radios in and informs them the bus is getting swarmed with undead, screams echo over the walkie talkie.  Vlad is ordered to head the bus to the mall and the group gets ready and charges into the hall, guns and bolt cutters ready.  They slide to a halt in front of the gun store and snap the lock off the sliding security gate and slam it down behind them even as undead swarm toward them.

They find a treasure trove of guns and ammo inside and load up, ignoring the undead trying to reach through the gate after them.  As Vlad reaches the mall he drives in a huge circle around it in the parking lot as the ones inside carefully kill the 40+ creatures outside.  With those dead they struggle to get the gate back up and their loot outside.   As the bus swings in to pick them up they throw their gear on board even as a huge swarm of undead come around the corner.  The bus pulls away just ahead of the creature’s grasping hands.

They head down the highway trying to cut line of sight with the creatures and apparently it worked as they reach the truck stop and after a few minutes of anxious waiting there are no undead in sight.   Roj and Alice step outside, Roj to pump and Alice to stand guard and the diesel starts to slowly flow into the bus.  The seconds tick away, each minute allowing more precious fuel to enter the bus.  As the tank reaches half full though zombies start to appear from a new direction, drawn by the feel of the bus full of people and they have to abandon the pump and flee down the highway away from the huge swarm and the new swarm.

About this time they realize a bus makes a pretty good weapon and after stringing out the 20 or so new infected they reverse course and smash them flat and return to finish fueling.

They leave the town, taking a bypass route around it and head south west toward Phoenix and this city of safety they’d read about.  Their route is convoluted as they try to steer clear of all major cities for fear of radiation and the light gray dust laying everywhere is an ever present reminder that perhaps it might be too late.

In a small strip town they run into two other survivors, Elijah and Mary, who offer to trade them fresh foods for any canned goods they have and invite them to their homestead.  Paranoid our group declines and gets back on their bus, guns ready and continue on their trip.

[Dennis: This was a canned encounter in the Zombie Run module and it went about like I figured it would knowing my players.  Although I think it would have been a pretty fun encounter to play out.]

After days of driving, siphoning fuel from abandoned semis and the like and many many  detours they reach the Rockies and head up them, running into snowfall on the narrow winding roads through the mountains.  With a cliff on both sides, one up and one down, they slowly navigate the roads and as they near the top they spot a convoy on the road behind them.  Suspicious as one might expect they try to increase their speed but after almost losing the bus over the edge are forced to slow down and the convoy catches up with them.

Gun fire erupts from the vehicles and one of the rear tires is blown out.  Realizing they’re not going to be able to get away  Bubba slams the bus to a halt angled across the road and they return fire.

The fight is intense as fully automatic weapons rip the back of the bus to shreds.  Vlad is downed, bullets smashing through his head as he leans out to fire his pistol back at the attackers and Susan dies a little later, bleeding out as a bullet pierces the veins in her neck.

With few long guns among them things look bleak but slowly the survivors whittle away their attackers in spite of the many automatic weapons they’re facing and unexpectedly shots ring out from the hillside above them creating confusion among the enemy.

As the raiders are down to two men they try to bargain their way out of their predicament and the group yells back that they’re free to go.  As the two men get back on their dirt bikes and head back the way they came, our survivors nail them both with grazing wounds.  Trapped away from the cover of their larger vehicles, taking fire from two directions the two men throw up their hands and kneel in the snow.

Stay tuned to find out what happens next….

Zombie Run

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I’ve upgraded to WP 3.0.  If you spot anything odd let me know.