Vox wrote an interesting report on warhammer 40,000 and why it survived so long against leftist invasion. The original post he links to specifies that writing an RPG based in hardcore truths is resistant to woke agendas.
Well, this is precisely why I have made my RPG as it is.
Surviving the Current Zombie Apocalypse (SCZA) is written so as to be both humorous and entertaining yet useful as a learning tool too.
You can get it as a full colour hardcopy from Amazon, or as a PDF from my E-store.
And don’t take my word for it. Here is an Amazon review:
Andy Gryc
2.0 out of 5 stars
Verified Purchase
Fun idea, but ultimately not much usable
Reviewed in Canada on March 24, 2022
The “Inside pages” preview gives you a sense that this is a zombie apocalypse game in a world where all the conspiracy theories are real. Fun sounding premise, right? I thought so, so bought the book, but it wasn’t what I hoped for. For anyone else who’s considering buying this, let me explain my issues with it so you can see if it’s worth it or not for you. The book is in two major pieces – the story of the world, and the role playing system. The first part wasn’t really what I expected, and maybe that’s my fault. Here are my issues with the book. 1) By taking most conspiracy theories as factually true, the world it creates has a definite white nationalist tone. It’s all done tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless, you have an anti-equality, anti-Semitic, transphobic, bigoted world-view that runs throughout. That’s not the kind of campaign I want to run. I play with women and visible minorities, but I wouldn’t want my campaign to be like this even if it was all white men – it just feels a bit gross to my modern sensibilities. Perhaps it’s my bad that I didn’t expect that outcome from the premise, since that seems to be the logical conclusion of most modern conspiracies. It’s a game that’s supposed to be dark, and I understand that – I just don’t want to breathe life into it. 2) The game also veers into pretty distinct religiosity. Again, I know it’s entertainment, but there’s an awful lot of the story dedicated to the Christians, a particular strain of Catholicism that is the “true” religion, good fighting evil, God and Satan, bishops, popes, priests, etc. This is more than just a normal character class or a faction, it seems like it’s the backbone of the new world order. Meh. Just won’t be that interesting to me or my players. 3) I could be wrong on this, but I don’t believe the zombies are intended to be literally zombies. If they are, it’s pretty darn subtle and easy to overlook. While there are a couple bits of colour text that say the “zombies” might even be commanded eat to flesh, it’s really more about how all the vaccinated are under mind control from the evil overlords. In other words, the “sheeple”. Instead of getting World War Z, it feels a bit more like a dysfunctional version of The Office. Again – unique perspective, but not what I was truly after. This is the factor that’s probably the biggest disappointment. 4) Finally, the game system. I give the author kudos for inventing a system that’s simple, uses standard dice, makes the players fragile, and is built on a bell curve. Those are all great attributes, although for me personally that’s only a 50% win. I think the game system is just a bit too simple – specifically character creation. Basically 2 stats and some optional skills. Don’t get me wrong – I hate Pathfinder and feel 5e is burdened with books and books of rules. But I think Chaosium’s Basic Role Playing has it just right. Just enough complexity for the GM and Player to manage easily at the table as well as giving lots of room to grow the character. Also, on the d6 thing – I’m just not a huge fan of d6 only systems. My crew has “invested” in tons of dice, so limiting them to one set only seems almost a bit cruel. Half the fun of an RPG is owning all the platonic solids. In summary, like most anything you’ll get for a real game, it’s a sourcebook. Every GM has their own personal tastes, and some will be able to use more that’s here than others. What I’ll personally be able to salvage from it in terms of good, usable, and playable ideas is less than a single page. I recognize the work that’s gone into it, and I’m not trying to be critical about the result – it just doesn’t match what I need. If you are expecting something more like a playable version of Max Brooks “Zombie Survival Guide” like I was, keep searching. But if you’re more open to taking today’s world and dialling up the dysfunction and conspiracies up to 11, it might be just for you.
All the other reviews are 5 stars, but I am not sure that Andy Gryc’s review is having the effect he intended. I know several people purchased the game as a result of it.
And there is of course a starter set Module for it (E-store PDF)
And for those already willing to experiment with the game system, the game could be easily adapted to play out some of the events found in the recent novella In the Shadows of Monte Castello.
The point is that with much of my fiction writing the baselines are rooted in very solid reality.
The whole Overlords of Mars trilogy as found in one volume (Nazi Moon) is soundly based on The Face on Mars written in 1995 and Systema written in 2011 and the thread of Reclaiming the Catholic Church shadows most things I do today.
So while the route and the road may be flexible, ultimately, if your entertainment is any good, it should reflect recognisable realities, regardless of how fantastic the setting might be.
And real virtues, such as courage, moral fortitude, reason, Justice and so on, are ultimately timeless, no matter how much the woke want to pretend otherwise.
An update on WWIII
As regulars here will know, WWIII fatigue is a thing and the remedy is to simply do the things I keep mentioning on this blog, as well as the linked to post above.
Nevertheless it’s always good to know what is about to happen around you, so an occasional review of the situation is worth doing.
Cocaine Clown and Ukraine are done. It doesn’t matter how much laundering money or cocaine mountains the West sends to Ukraine, Russia has absolutely depleted Ukraine of every armament and even more importantly of fighting men. some 500k escaped the country before the war, and about 100k are reportedly AWOL. So the front line is basically going to be a ghost town soon and the weapons the West is sending are getting trashed by the Russians who are years ahead with electronic warfare tech.
We are fast approaching a point where Russia taking its time and letting the USA and Europe self-rain their very economies and military hardware will have reached peak efficiency. If NATO is allowed to survive in some fashion, then they will eventually re-arm and come at Russia again. The extremely patient way in which Russia (and China) are prosecuting their war efforts is strategically extremely sound. Their hope must be that with impending, or even actual economic collapse, the parasites running the USA and by extension NATO, will have all their control structures begin to disintegrate. Taking Italy or Greece, or Spain as examples, as the people become further pissed off and more violent immigrants are important, eventually, something will give. Riots, breakdown of civil society and the formation of separatist movements, in short, what the Americans have tried to produce from Egypt to Kazakhstan and are currently trying in Moldavia, Romania and other places, will begin to happen in reverse, but probably without any or much of a push from foreign powers. People are really starting to have enough now. And when that dam breaks, it is very likely that “Yankee go home” will become a slogan again throughout Europe.
Historically Italy has never had an issue with Russia. But Italy has some 150 Yankee military bases on our territory and our political class are all appendages of Biden’s impending colostomy bag. But daily assaults on women and a few on minor girls too are starting to get the people riled up. As are the continually rising food prices. Unfortunately, there is still a rather latent fear in the people, mostly driven by the women of this country who have nevertheless been a little more resistant to the generic feminism fostered on the Anglos, but in this case, while many Anglo women are starting to realise that feminism has absolutely wrecked women’s lives far more than any possible patriarchy ever did, the eye-ties women are still stuck on something agin to second-wave feminism. The shift to third wave rabid and fourth wave utterly insane feminism/transgender/globohomo -ism is a step too far though and one can begin to see the confusion in their eyes. Some double-down while rejecting the more insane aspects. Others begin to realise that if they want out of the nightmare they need a man with his own set of balls and prepared to fight for his family, and when they look around and see the mostly emasculated fields of metrosexuals they helped create, they begin to despair.
I was talking to a colleague a few days ago, and he told me how in his work, all the reliable people are over 50. GenX are the only ones that are still capable of producing excellent work on time and in budget, and who will go the extra mile late at night when needed. I find that some of the Anglo boomers are actually very reliable for their age and can be counted on, but I tend to agree that overall the millennials have always been mostly useless, and the zoomers are the hope, but I am not sure on their numbers yet. Some are full blown zealots that make one proud and I certainly have met several of those and they are loyal and helpful as well as reliable, so my hope is with them. The lazy or weaker ones I think mostly just lack a teacher. It brings back the memory of a post I wrote several years ago to a friend, who has since passed away (God rest your soul Ian), who lamented the lack of leaders. I explained then that it was not that GenX wasn’t capable. It was that we are a small cohort of survivors who are still not in power in any meaningful way. Zoomers who are willing to listen to GenXers who still have a fire burning inside, can gain a lot from such interactions. And given the emails I get, perhaps I should put together a short book in the spirit of St. Bernard, a kind of small guidebook to navigating globohomo as a man in the wastelands.
A survival guide of sorts for our times. I did a humorous version of this with the RPG, but a more serious work might be in order. Let me know what you think of it.
But I digress. The fact is if Russia does not secure its position, the parasites running the USA (and by extension NATO) will eventually attack again. Europe needs a Pax Russiana. And this cannot happen while Europe is littered with American military bases. So the economy of Europe and the USA needs to collapse first. the chaos that ensues will allow for a very small period during which a certain level of independence can be achieved by various European nations or even forming of new ones. I for one have not yet given up on the idea of having a proper resurgence of the Most Serene Republic of Venice.
Russia invading Europe militarily is not viable, reasonable or tenable, so that will not happen, but the puppet-masters of the USA and NATO know that if they do not drag Russia into a perennial war, they are doomed.
So what to do? I think they will try their damnedest to have European boots on the ground in Ukraine. But I don’t think the actual soldiers will go for it. And this begins to threaten things like military coups. Not really, because the higher ups in the military are all well-selected for arse-licking and boot kissing, but all it takes is a popular captain or colonel and things can change rapidly. Also, at least in Italy, the chances of one Italian soldier shooting on another Italian soldier are close to nil in the greater scheme of things.
So, if you are in Europe, prepare for very harsh economic realities, and concomitant rise in crime of all kinds. If you survive this period, which can last several years, your nation state may have changed considerably.
Any politician that wants to survive will have to make a calculated risk on where and when to “flip” and the first order of business will have to be to stop and indeed reverse immigration of illegals with absolute enforcement and not mere words. Whoever does that will have the popular vote even if they wanted to hang him from a lamppost a week earlier.
The difficulty of that will be to survive the economic backlash. But the reality is that if a politician did that and asked for it, he would get economic help from Russia, China and Iran, almost immediately I think. The main issue with such a move is timing, and being able to survive the personal media onslaught, which would be relentless and possibly also the kind of “accident” that happens to inconvenient people. That said, I believe there are ways that an astute survivor could go about this. primarily by canvassing quietly among the armed forces as to who is willing to support him, because as we have seen by now, words mean nothing when compared to force.
So, we are definitely about to enter interesting times even if we don’t have another bio-engineered pandemic, activation of all the injected zombies by 5G capable lamp-posts and possible fake alien invasions.
Stock up on foodstuff and ammunition boys and girls, it’s going to be a wild ride.
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By G | 25 April 2024 | Posted in Russia and GAE, Social Commentary, StCZA - Module 0, StCZA - Q.O.R.G.