The Walking Dead / Fear Itself - A Gumshoe Hack

You can run a fully functional, highly dramatic game based on AMC's The Walking Dead using the Fear Itself RPG with no system adjustments.

It's true. Look.

The Walking Dead is a dramatic, character driven show that focuses on characterisation and interaction. It also has zombies. This is often a secondary concern, as the real drama comes from the interaction between the characters and the conflict caused by their different motivations, desires and decisions. The characters move from location to location, looking for signs of life, food, shelter, tools, weapons and signs of walker infestation. They often suffer from severe stress, fatigued, emotional trauma and exhaustion, and their mental health ebbs and flows as a result

Fear Itself is a horror game that creates a disparate group and engineers conflicts between them. It allows you to pull together characters from all walks of life, give them lines to ally along or fall out over and then throw into a stressful scenario.

Within Fear Itself a characters mental health is recorded through the Stability ability. As this drains away and falls below 0, characters start to experience stress disorders - phobias, paranoia, irrational behaviour, hallucinations.

Rick Grimes suffers a massive Stability loss after Lori dies, and succumbs to paranoia and hallucinations as the stress of leading the group alone and the guilt of not being able to protect his wife finally overcome him. 

Fear Itself covers this off nicely.

Talking of Stability, Fear Itself allows characters to define a number of Sources of Stability - People, Activities or Innate Traits that give you some comfort and allow you to retain your sanity in trying times. 

Lori and Carl were Rick's Sources of Stability. Darryl and Carol found support in each other, Glynn and Maggie found they could give each other solace in another way.

Darryl also maintains a badass facade to keep himself on an even keel, Carl tries to maintain his independence and Rick became a leader. Shane makes Lori and Carl his Sources of Stability, then when Rick returns and Lori and Carl are denied to him, Shane begins his descent into madness.

Losing one of your Sources of Stability - either through death, being disproved or betrayed - is a crushing experience. 

We can also look at The Governor - He tried to re-establish some Sources of Stability; Lilly and Meghan and becoming leader of a new band of survivors. When this falls apart,when he sees that Meghan is bitten, he takes a massive hit  to his Stability and attacks the prison recklessly and mercilessly. This leads to his death.

We can also look at the character defining moment in Fear Itself - The Worst Thing I have ever Done. 

Shane regrets leaving Rick behind in the hospital to die. Michonne feels instrumental in the death of her child, partner and friend. Rick looked for every other way out other than killing Shane.

As an example, let's stat up Darryl as a starting character

Darryl Dixon

Concept: Badass biker

Sources of Stability: Carol, Being a Badass, 

Risk Factor: Gung Ho

The Worst Thing I Ever Did: Kill my brother, Merle

Academic Abilities: Natural History 1

Interpersonal Abilities: Bullshit Detector 2, Interrogation 2, Intimidation 2, Reassurance 1, Streetwise 2

General Abilities: Athletics 8, Driving 4, Filch 2, Health 8, Infiltration 4, Mechanics 4, Sense Trouble 6, Preparedness 4, Scuffling 6, Shooting 8, Stability 8

Hit Threshold: 4

By Season 2 Darryl is a General Abilities badass, with extra points in Sense Trouble, Preparedness and Stability (he does suffer a considerable Stability loss during the second season and hallucinates a conversation with Merle). The skills that Darryl Dixon really stockpiles are Shooting and Scuffling, both of which he has in spades by the attack on Woodbury.

Rule Amendments

Simple, really. Walkers are the only supernatural creatures in this setting, and are both common and familiar. 

As such, I would reduce the potential Stability loss of exposure to Walkers by 1 point, and only apply it if the character is taken by surprise or if the Walker is someone that the character was close to whilst alive

Walker

Also, you need Walker stats to run a Walking Dead game

Hit Threshold 3

Perception modifier 0

Health 15

Scuffling 6 (Fist -2, Bite -1)

Tireless. Walkers will doggedly pursue prey until they are destroyed. If the prey is no longer visible, a Walker will continue walking in the direction the prey was last spotted in until they find new prey to distract them

Biter Fever. A bite from a Walker means blood poisoning, septic shock and a painful death, unless the bitten limb is amputated within a number of minutes equal to the characters Health rating. If the limb is not removed before this time has elapsed, then the victim is infected and will perish within [12+ Health Rating] hours.

Headshot. Walkers can only be 'killed' by severing their head or destroying their brain. Targeting a head adds +2 to the targets Hit Threshold, whereas aiming for the neck or eye adds +3 to the Hit Threshold.

Horror tropes / Cabin in the Woods and Fear Itself

Once again I'm late to the party - I watched Cabin in the Woods for the first time last night.

The thing that makes it an enjoyable film, in my opinion, is the clear love of standard horror movie tropes throughout. My wife and I were both delighted by the gas station in the beginning and it's treasure trove of creepy genre signposts: fish hooks, bear traps, animal skins, pickled creatures, hunting goods etc. I wondered aloud if they'd modeled the cabin on the one from Evil Dead. The scene where the victims choose the transgression for which they'll be punished is wonderful, as is Fran Krantz' line "I'm drawing a line in the sand, no one is reading any fucking Latin!"

The part that tied the film up to Fear Itself, for me, is the statement of specific roles within the genre:
The Whore / slut
The Scholar / egghead
The Warrior / jock
The Fool / burnout
The Virgin / good girl

Fear Itself uses these stereotypes to define character roles within the game with much the same effect as in Cabin...

The overall plot of Cabin is a nice fit with the classic Fear Itself Ocean Game setting: a mysterious and incredibly powerful consciousness horrifically manipulates reality around unsuspecting stereotypes for their own amusement and benefit / a mysterious and technologically advanced organisation manipulates unsuspecting teens into falling into stereotypical roles and controls the environment around them for their own amusement and benefit.

You could run a straight Cabin in the Woods game using Fear Itself with zero effort or adaptation, and you could overlay the Mystery Men and their Ocean Game onto Cabin with only a few tweaks.

Horror you can relate to / Changeling: the Lost

I flicked through my copy of Changeling: the Lost a couple of nights ago. It's still the best game that White Wolf have ever produced.

Unlike most of their games, it's a proper horror game. Ok, you're not playing / hunting a Vampire, Werewolf, reanimated abomination or channeling unknowable power. The horror in Changeling is subtle, rather than overt. There's none of the "I am a monster, and I must fight my unnatural urges lest I become nought but a callous soulless killer" angst.
Instead it is replaced with a more human horror, one that regrettably exists in the real world; the horror of abduction, separation, loss of self/identity, loss of family and friends.

It is much easier to imagine and empathise with this type of horror, much easier to imagine and to react to.
Many White Wolf games rely on the players reacting to the game line's driving horror - Vampires clinging onto their Humanity as they hunt humans for food, Werewolves struggling to balance their bestial rage with their conscious mind, Mages fighting the temptation to use magic for everything and anything no matter the cost - yet these horrors are conceptual stretches. These are things that we cannot experience, that are completely outside the frame of human experience.
Changeling, however, centers on a horror that people have experienced. Child abduction stories are unfortunately regular news stories. Tourists are abducted on holiday with alarming frequency. Home invasions happen. I've been held at gunpoint during a bank robbery. It's scary shit, and I can imagine what it's like. I can also imagine what it's like to live in fear of it happening again. Hell, I know what it's like. For weeks after my experience I was afraid that they'd come back, that they'd come to my house because they'd threatened me they would if I talked to the Police.

That's a real horror game. I really want to run it