Super Dead: The Blog

A brief history of Super Dead

I first wrote an adventure in the Super Dead world in 2023, based on a supers-meets-zombies Savage Worlds game I had been playing with some friends. The base Savage Worlds rules, plus the Savage Supers rules, plus some homebrew zombies were good enough for a pretty meaningful campaign, but it felt like something was missing. And there was a lot that wasn't needed.

This led to the first iteration of Super Dead.

Super Dead v0.1

The first release of Super Dead as an ascending dice system, based off the elegant Savage World's system. It took a constant approach to powers (powers always worked), and introduced an idea that would later become stress. It's chief change from Savage Worlds was to reduce the crunchiness. Coming in at only 7 pages, it achieved this in spades.

In retrospect, the game had some good ideas, but lacked any real depth or insight. It would have been better published as piece of short fiction, some brief rules for an FKR, and an appendix N of inspiration media. Honestly, this still might be worth writing.

What the game got wrong?

Ultimately, though, I knew this was a first attempt, and it felt good to get something out there.

Super Dead v0.2

The second edition of Super Dead improved on this in a number of ways. Namely...

The second edition felt totally different as well. The system was all d10-based. Normal human things that players did were 1d10 roll under, an homage to All Flesh Must Be Eaten(DriveThru link). While using your powers asked for a d10 dice pool roll. This felt cool – because rolling more dice when using your powers made you feel powerful. I've kept this and I like it a lot. 1d10 roll under also feels very mortal. And the allusion to All Flesh meant something to me.

I also paid a lot more attention to what I wanted the game to be about. How it should feel to play a character in Super Dead. And how to make as much of the game mechanics diegetic as possible. Diegetic supremacy, etc., etc.

This led to adding stress and soaking (powers as health) – which are two signature mechanics in Super Dead now.

Stress is an obvious choice in retrospect. The entire zombie thing is how everyone handles the insanity of it all, who goes crazy, and what that means. What do you do to blow off steam. Are you Woody Harrelson's Tallahassee in search of a Hostess Twinkie? Are you Sam carrying around a bit of salt that reminds you of home?

And making stress touch everything is great. Because it naturally creates a whole gameplay loop that extends through sessions, and gives players an imperative to care about the world. If they lose access to this thing that necessarily is not a button on their character sheet, their character begins to spiral out of control. Just like you would if you were in a zombie apocalypse and you didn't have access to the one thing that you found brought you solace.

Soaking damage with powers was also a great idea. It balanced a few things at once:

I think soaking damage with powers is one of the most comic-book logic things I have done in Super Dead. And bringing that feel, in a consistent way, achieved a lot of my design goals.

For the second release, I also began to take a lot of inspiration from modern skirmish wargames about what modern combat should feel like. I knew there was something wrong with the D&D engagement pattern when it came to combat that included firearms, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

With the second release, I moved to the existing phased combat approach that Super Dead uses: fight, shoot, move; with an endless amount of opportunity fire. This makes positioning and lines of sight really important. It's a bit crunchy in a game that I mostly run theatre of the mind, but it feels right. I find that the things people are thinking about in Super Dead combats is largely what they should be thinking about slash would be thinking about if it was a real combat.

Super Dead

For the third release of Super Dead, the major change was moving from a d10-based system in favor of a d6-based system. This was done for a number of reasons, but first and foremost it was because people seem to like d6s better, and they are more accessible and less intimidating (meaning it's easier to teach to new players).

The "human" mechanic was changed to a 2d6 PbtA roll: 10+ is a success; 7-9 is success with cost; and 6 or less is a failure.

The power mechanic was changed to a success-based d6 dice pool, a stripped back version of the DC Universe Roleplaying game system.

Like the previous release, this had some nice gaming allusions. Using a combination of the "Apocalypse World" system plus the system from a licensed superhero game felt right for what I was trying to accomplish. And the tactile dice feel matches what you're doing at the table. Rolling 2d6 feels pedestrian. Like you're playing a game of monopoly. In contrast, rolling 6d6 feels like you're about to do something impressive. And if you roll two 6s and get to reroll them? Even more super.

Introducing the Apocalypse World mechanic had the advantage of making it easier to leverage stress in the game. Stress and noise both became potential consequences of standard checks. This makes them come up more. Like they should.

The 2d6 Apocalypse World roll also makes it easy to provide GM support. You just need two lists: one of modifiers and one of outcomes. I did this for talking with NPCs, traveling, scavenging... common zombie stuff. And it makes the GM's life pretty easy, if they'd like to use them. If not, they're entirely GM facing, so the GM is free to skip them and use prep or another means of randomization.

The d6 dice pool mechanic also feels great with supers. I cannot emphasize enough how much rolling 10d6, and then getting four sixes to reroll feels like you have a super power. There's no magic here. This mechanic has been around for 20+ years. It's just a really good one that fell out of fashion for some reason.

The last thing I'll say is that I really toned back advancement. There are still mechanical ways to improve your powers, but they are tied directly into usage and happen randomly. They don't happen through XP accumulation or through meeting story milestones or anything like that. There's a certain logic and poetry to this. And I think it fits nicely with the world.

We definitely took some inspiration from Cairn here. Having another game in rotation that had minimal leveling made it easier to put minimal leveling into this game. But I found that players still enjoy getting better at the things they're doing. There's a certain symmetry between player mastery of the world and character mastery over their powers.

What next?

Hopefully, Super Dead will be stable for a while. The game is eminently playable in its current form. With some minor tweaking and addendum, I'd love to just write adventures, play the game with my friends and at cons.

Hopefully others will enjoy it too.