# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 14 - County Road Z :: David Rhodes, Redneck Survivor tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/wargame/county-road-z > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] It's time to shift gears and jump over into another type of game. There are an endless number of RPGs out there, crunchy and not. But there is a weird kind of game that inhabits a liminal space, something that lives between the RPG and the wargame. There are a lot of different terms for them but I particularly like "hybrid." **[[Warrior Heroes - Adventures in Talomir|Warrior Heroes: Adventures in Talomir]]**, **[[Five Parsecs From Home]]** – *this* is the genre of game that I'm thinking about. There is another that has recently seen release in what is effectively a second edition from Modiphus: **[[County Road Z]]**, a game about taking a small group of survivors, carving out a place for yourself in the zombie apocalypse, and growing your opportunities. ![[County Road Z - Rulebook (cover).jpg|400]] Let's go. ## Chargen Before we get started, it's worth pointing out that the setup in CRZ is surprisingly flexible. At the beginning it gives you the option of three different types of zombie apocalypse origin: *Viral Apocalypse*, *Cosmic Horror*, or *Magic Apocalypse*. It's not often that you get cosmic horror as a zombie apocalypse trigger. Each of these have special rules that come up in the course of the game which differentiate one from the next. Viral has actual viral spread which needs to be tracked. Cosmic horror has sanity and making sure none of your characters go off the edge. Magic Apocalypse has magic that your characters can learn and deploy against the intrusion. It's a bold decision, indeed, to allow for that much flexibility. Not surprisingly for the zombie apocalypse, we are *not* just creating a single character. We are creating a community, because that's the only way that you're going to have enough skill, time, and attention to survive the nightmare to come. Reminiscent of the [[Two-Hour Wargames]] lines, characters have different Tiers. Tier 4 are *Heroes* who have the best stats and up to four skills but only one of them can go on any particular mission. Tier 3 are *Leaders* with okay stats and up to three skills. Tier 2 are *Citizens* with – well they have stats and up to two skills (and are probably the people that you're going to recruit the most in the field). Tier 1 are *Rookies* who have one stat at 1 and one skill. It's possible they may be able to be killed by house cat. Thankfully they can work their way up. When you start putting together a community, you have a total of 10 Tier levels to distribute between characters as you like. We are going to go with the classic, one Hero and two Leaders. I'm sure that we'll get plenty of camp followers later on. ### Our Hero: David Rhodes You know that stereotypical redneck who lives in a trailer park and has a muscle car from the 80s up on blocks in front of the house that he keeps swearing he will get fixed but it never happens? You kind of think he might deal meth but he never has enough money to be particularly good at it if he does and he's clearly not using meth because the car's still not fixed and the yard's not raked? Yeah, that's David. He works in 9 to 5 downtown that he drives to in his beat up pickup truck – as a corporate financial advisor. Management and acquisitions. Sure, he has a thick southern accent and a lazy smile – that a lot of people have seen just before he snapped up their company out from under them and threw them out on their asses. Live how you want, is what I'm saying. #### Stats In a structure that we have *definitely* seen before, David's stat array is 4, 3, 2, 1. | Stat | Score | | ---- | ---: | | Strength | 3 | | Dexterity | 2 | | Intelligence | 4 | | Cooperation | 1 | | *Move* | 6 | | *Defense* | 6 | Everybody starts with Move 6 and Defense 6. David's a good ol' boy with a steel trap mind and he's smart enough not to let you see it coming. Intelligence gets top billing. He may look a little bit soft, but bro lifts. He's not above going and doing a little hunting and fishing when he gets the time so manual dexterity is fairly normal. What he isn't is particularly community minded. Cooperation is not his strong point. #### Skills Pretty much exactly what you think, though the list is surprisingly short, which I appreciate immensely. Something you won't see in many other games is each skill has a noise value associated with it. Some things are quiet, like killing a zombie with a bladed weapon and that will only disturb the target of your love. Some things are incredibly noisy, like firing a rifle. It's perfect for the zombie apocalypse. Most skills come with any tools necessary to make them possible, though not in good quality. David's a bright dude and he wouldn't have made it this far in the Apocalypse without knowing a thing or two. He mainly gets by on his brains, using Tactics for re-rolls on bad outcomes, Scavenging to know where to find the good stuff no matter where it's hidden, and Scout – because in order to destroy the enemy, you must see the enemy (and in this case be able to move zombies and resource tokens up to 3 inches before you even hit the map). Surveillance is the secret sauce. It does no good to know where the dead are lurking if you can't do anything about it, so while you were thinking about dating girls, David was mastering the blade – and takes Bladed Weapon. This gives him a shoddy (-1) bladed weapon which for the sake of this discussion will be a Chinese cleaver in somewhat abused condition. | Skill | Level | Stat | Item | Score | | ---- | :--: | :--: | :--: | :--: | | Tactics | 0 | 4 | | 4 | | Scavenging | 0 | 4 | | 4 | | Scout | 0 | 4 | | 4 | | Bladed Weapons <\<T>> | 0 | 3 | -1 | 2 | **Items:** Shoddy (-1) Chinese cleaver **Health:** 4 **Inventory Slots:** 4 That's it for David. We'll just throw the other two together without the walk-through. ### Our - Sister: Lula-Mae Jenkins (Widowed) | Stat | Score | | ---- | :--: | | Strength | 1 | | Dexterity | 2 | | Intelligence | 0 | | Cooperation | 3 | | *Move* | 6 | | *Defense* | 6 | | Skill | Level | Stat | Item | Score | | ---- | :--: | :--: | :--: | :--: | | Mechanics | 0 | 3 | | 3 | | Utilities | 0 | 3 | | 3 | | Enter <<0>> | 0 | 2 | | 2 | **Items:** **Health:** 3 **Inventory Slots:** 3 It's not that David *wanted* to bring his sister along on the zombie post-apocalyptic road trip, but Lula-Mae can be very persistent in the way that only older sisters can be. She's too young to be a spinster or even a crazy cat lady – but she is definitely cat lady-adjacent. Her husband, Leroy, was one of their first losses on the trip. Truthfully, she's not all that broke up over it. She's always been community-minded, volunteering whenever she could and spending time with the old folks. That included her father, for whom she held the flashlight and got the wrench on a regular basis. She even has a little bit of a flair for it. Leroy used to work down at the power plant and Lula-Mae ended up working in accounting on and off when they needed a few extra dollars. While she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, she's attentive and learns pretty well. She's got nervous fingers and if pinball was still a thing, she'd play that silver ball but as it stands it's mostly useful for sliding through narrow areas and accidentally picking locks. ### The Kid | Stat | Score | | ---- | :--: | | Strength | 1 | | Dexterity | 3 | | Intelligence | 0 | | Cooperation | 2 | | *Move* | 6 | | *Defense* | 6 | | Skill | Level | Stat | Item | Score | | ---- | :--: | :--: | :--: | :--: | | Carry | 0 | 1 | | 1 | | Stealth | 0 | 3 | | 3 | | Long Guns <<12>> | 0 | 3 | -1 | 2 | **Items:** Shoddy (-1) Winchester **Health:** 3 **Inventory Slots:** 6 David ran into the Kid somewhere on the outskirts of Abilene. He's big, real big. Probably in his mid-20s – but he also doesn't talk. Or write. He listens well enough and does what he's told; follows David around like a lost puppy. A big, hulking puppy who somehow is always behind you without you noticing how he got there and who carries a rifle that seen better days but might just need some cleaning and tender loving care. The Kid, he says nothing. ### Community Action ![[David Rhodes, Redneck Survivor.jpg|200]] ![[Lula-Mae Jenkins, Mechanic.jpg|200]] ![[The Kid, Stealthy Shooter.jpg|200]] That's it. That's character generation. Three for the price of one today. From here on out you would jump to the community layer and start running missions which drive the rest of the experience. ![[CRZ Community Layerr.jpg]] Your first mission is always to lay claim to a small house so you have some place to hole up, lay your head, store your goods, and deal with the situation. If you don't do a mission, you can send out somebody to scavenge because you will be doing resource management for your little homestead. You'll be building add-ons, expanding things, making sure everybody's fed, trying to keep everyone sane in certain situations, making gear, maintaining your vehicles… It's the post-apocalyptic zombie nightmare wasteland. You know how this goes. When you choose to do missions, there are standard missions of course – but there are also missions specific to each zombie origin. For example, the *Viral Apocalypse* missions have a sequence which are all about trying to find the source of and possibly a cure for the zombie virus. The *Cosmic Horror* missions involve trying to save as many people as possible from the aquatic threat. In the *Magic Apocalypse*, you have to deal with the local source of evil. It's cool to have these story-oriented bits mixed in with the rest. There's a certain style. The book also has advanced rules for pretty much everything, including more zombies, survivor traits, advanced vehicles, an entirely different way to play called *Road Trip* (just in case you ever wanted to play [Cormac McCarthy's **The Road**](https://www.threepennyreview.com/thinking-about-the-road/), except not as upbeat).  The game is explicitly solo and co-op; you don't *need* other people to play with but you certainly *can* play with other people. The best kind of zombie apocalypse. Overall, I really like this. It fits neatly into the same sort of space that I have with **[[All Things Zombie]]** and **[[After the Horsemen]]** from THW which I like just fine. I hear something scratching at the door. Out.