Our second release was a modern military horror game written by Jerry Blakemore. It was a zombie fest and I think was lots of fun.
One weekend a month and two weeks out of the year. That’s what they say– but with the need for troops in the middle east, you’ve been called up for active duty stateside. Well, it could be worse, right? After all, what could possibly go wrong while guarding a remote military research installation in the New Mexico desert?
In this one, we provided pre-generated characters, a detailed map of an entire military base with lots of extras. Jerry created a great adventure that surprised the players and turned into a zombie fest. And just when you think your done by being killed, you return to life as a smart zombie leading the hordes of others against the players!
One of my favorite con memories involves a character being killed by zombies on a .50 caliber machine gun. It was early in the game and Jerry was running it. I took the player aside, gave him the sheet explaining who he was now and what he could do. He got that evil grin and returned to the table. The heroes were in a car being chased by the zombies in a hummer and trying to avoid the .50’s fire. Suddenly, Jerry pointed to the player of the dead hero, who looked at the player next to him and said, “I’m gonna eat your brains first!”
LOL! Great stuff!
After Jerry had written the adventure, we turned it over to Craig Largent who generated all the many, many maps of the base. Every location on base is mapped! EVERY…..SINGLE…..ONE.
Then Mark Ramsey came up with the idea of having an icon that a mouse could hover over that would bring up maps, character sheets, and more so the Game Master wouldn’t have to flip pages or lose their place in the PDF. As far as I know we were the first to do this and while it was over 20 years ago, I’m disappointed that more PDF companies don’t provide this.
We were running this at an early Aggiecon in College Station, Texas before Last Rites was completed and it was there that we met Preston Dubose. He played the game and was quiet and reserved (he always has been). After the game he said, “I really had fun. If you ever need any layout help here is my card.” Jokes on him. We made him a partner and he did lots of the heavy lifting of layout and finding art for all of our products as well as becoming my writing partner, and a man I consider a brother.
We also provided a printer-friendly version of the adventure. We produced Weekend Warriors for both d20 Modern and Savage Worlds.
This was before Pinnacle began the Licensee program, so I guess we were the first Licensee.
Sales were good and one reviewer in 2009 said:
Weekend Warriors is a good zombiefest. It keeps the players of the dead characters at the table through the chance of playing on as a zombie. That’s just perfect for a convention game. Weekend Warriors doesn’t have to be played at a convention but it certainly works best as a one off game. I think one of the main reasons for buying a pre-written adventure is to deal with the “I need a game quickly!” problem (downloadable PDFs are superb for this) and surely the best sort of game in that situation is a one off, easy to start and easy to finish adventure. Roll in Weekend Warriors.
It was about this time (2004?) that Wizards announced that the OGL did not apply to miniatures games, so our original idea to publish a D&D mass wargame was done. But we were on our way with modern horror adventures.
