The 12 Days of Rifts-mas: Day 7, Dead Reign

The idea of Palladium Books putting out a zombie RPG is a fascinating one. This one I have never played, but I love this game and its punk, street, grunge-infused, almost street-art style. The art in here is beautiful and hovers on the edge of counter-culture, mixed with the classic Palladium line art.

Where other zombie RPGs tend go with boring zombies, Dead Reign treats zombies as a world of possibilities, offering a variety of walking, crawling, running, and talking dead that amazes me. These are the best zombie designs in gaming: imaginative, fresh, cool, and you never know what to expect next.

This is also not a "zombie virus," so there is no infection mechanic for getting wounded. This is also not a "chemical zombie," so exposure to a toxin does not create them. The zombies seek life force, draining PPE and giving them a metaphysical element. This is another fresh take on the genre I like, and it makes zombies less dangerous as infectious agents and more harmful, since they are now semi-magical beings capable of many forms and subtypes.

The zombies in this game could possibly resemble the monsters in the classic John Carpenter movie The Thing, with snakes on spines, crawling heads, blobs of many zombies stuck together, and all sorts of freakish monstrosities. Zombies could be "half living" and pretend to be human. The fact that life force powers them does give them a semi-magical quantity, and you can have all sorts of freakish creations to terrify players.

Infection and exposure mechanics can turn off some players, who feel that one wound will doom their character. Dead Reign gets rid of that mechanic, and it opens the game up to more options for combat and fighting the zombie hordes. Just don't get killed, and you will be fine. So, in some ways, this is a more player-friendly zombie game without the "one bite, and I am dead" shtick, which makes it more playable and approachable.

And the game has nine books in the series! This makes it one of the largest zombie games on the market, and it goes as in-depth into the post-ruin world as the Palladium Fantasy RPG goes into its world, which is just insane. You can run games set anywhere in the world and find support, charts, and lore for that area. You get enough solid information to get started, and from there, it is all yours.

Survivors can be as dangerous as zombies, so that element of the genre is also strong here and well-represented. This game also has one of the best "random civilian generators" in all of the Palladium books, so that is useful even for games like Rifts or Beyond the Supernatural. There is also an impressive equipment list here, something missing in a few games, and it is appreciated. The game fills many holes in the Palladium toolbox.

While you could play in the default setting, nothing is stopping you from playing a more "fall of civilization" setting in the first days, where the world is still mostly everyday. You could play scientists or investigators tracking down the mysterious disturbances, and the campaign could slowly progress into more chaos as time goes on.

You could also play in a further-future era where most of the dead are gone, remote memories that rarely appear, and the world is more like a 200 years after the end Aftermath campaign, and mostly ignore zombies and focus on survival, feudal life, and scrounging, along with the relations between survivor communities. This could concentrate more on warfare, the building of new communities, conflicts, disasters, survivor politics, and resource scarcity or acquisition.

The "zombie dial" can be turned anywhere from 0 to 11 in this game, and that is helpful to keep in mind. You could play a "city scronger" game where the dial is at a 2, where zombies are rare, and other gangs of survivors are the bigger threat. Or you could turn it all the way to 11, and have seas of zombies in the streets daily, and you need to live on rooftops to survive.

This game, like Beyond the Supernatural, is darker in the Megaverse. Insanity in BtS is from seeing monsters, while in Dead Reign it comes from the horrors of surviving in a world gone mad. This is one of the darkest games in the Megaverse and one of the best horror games on the market, flying under everyone's radar because many dismiss it as another Palladium game.

This game is brilliant and fantastic.

The zombie genre has run its course, like some pop-culture infection that spread like wildfire and died out, and you don't hear much in the genre these days. As a result, the genre does not get enough love, nor is it as hot as it once was. But this is still a strong game, and it tosses away the "pandemic chic" in favor of a more metaphysical plague, less like The Walking Dead, and more like The Thing.

As a result, the game has more staying power than you might expect and remains a solid horror game to this day. Highly recommended, and one of the most different and unique games in the Palladium library.