Friars Walk is a disused shopping mall in central Reading. It has been the venue for several Zombie LARP events.

In real life

The mall is huge and has a lot of cool features: narrow service corridors, a creepy children’s play area, slow-closing fire shutters, loading docks, and a pitch-dark labyrinthine basement.

The main entrances are all closed up, so we get in using the basement entrance on Garrard Street, next to the car park and taxi rank. Garrard Street is right next to Reading Rail Station. The full address is Friars Walk Mall, Garrard Street, Reading, RG1 1NR. The mall is run by First & Only Airsoft.

In our games

At Zombie LARP events, the mall is code-named ‘Station Zero’, and is the location of a zombie-outbreak survival shelter. During an outbreak in late 2011, someone activated Station Zero’s emergency broadcast system, attracting survivors, Bioflex employees and Occult Task Force agents from miles around. Later, Bioflex used the mall to test an experimental holiday, and in early 2012 survivors of yet another zed-incident were caught up in the struggle between Baxter and the Nightmares.

Here are a few of the many reasons that Station Zero is actually much less safe than the streets outside:

• The shelter is in such disrepair that hundreds of zombies can easily get in.
• The basement is the nest of the mysterious Red Leech.
• The main concourse is the hunting-ground of a pack of White Knights.
• The upper level, particularly the children’s play area, is haunted by Nightmares.
• Bioflex uses the area as a test market for its incredibly dangerous products, and secretly carries out unethical experiments on shoppers and local wildlife.
• At least one deranged ex-Bioflex accountant has taken up residence in the wall cavities and is suspicious of intruders.
• The automated Emergency Broadcast System may have become self-aware.
• The mall is built on a geomantic fault, so Vril energy, telluric currents and other supernatural emanations are a thousand times the national average.

Zombaid workers at White Noise

Drone zombies, Nightmares, strange noises, and Baxter‘s mechanical claw: White Noise was a Zombie LARP event at Friars Walk on 24 March 2012.

Event plot

A Bioflex scientist called Baxter was hiding somewhere in the mall. Baxter’s “drones” had malfunctioned and the drone-transmitter’s Vril batteries had been stolen by Nightmares. The players needed to find the batteries, power up the transmitter, and send the drones to be sent to open the exit doors. Naturally this all turned into chaos straight away, as survivors were caught between Baxter, the Nightmares, the White Knights, the Red Leech, the twitchy drones, and, like, a hundred zombies.

Runs

Party – the Nightmares had some of the batteries but wouldn’t give them back unless the survivors went around delivering party invitations for them. Unfortunately the party guests were zombies, White Knights, and the Red Leech (all of whom might try to eat the person delivering the invite) and Baxter (who just didn’t want to go). The Nightmares’ party did happen, but it was lousy. The wandering drones were found but no-one made it to the exit alive.

Safari – to get more batteries for the drone transmitter, the survivors were forced to take the Nightmares on a humiliating, pointless and dangerous guided tour of the mall, and satisfy all of the creatures’ deranged whims along the way.

Jigsaw – the batteries for the transmitter were scattered around the mall, and this time the Nightmares were withholding their own Vril batteries until the players helped them complete a mysterious jigsaw.

Inversion – Baxter had tracked down all of the Vril batteries already, but the Nightmares had stolen the transmitter. This was the last straw for Baxter, who was sick of other survivors hijacking the drones. Equipped with a Stampede and an industrial-strength mechanical mangler arm, and constantly self-rejuvenating by overdosing on Vril energy, Baxter went completely off the deep end and the other survivors had quite a fight on their hands to get the batteries back.

Other stuff

If you attended this event, you might have noticed someone dressed as a member of KISS, someone dressed as Lara Croft, and a guy with a video camera following them around while they fought zombies using guitars and drumsticks. These guys are the members of the band Lux Lisbon and they were filming a music video! So you might even be in it a bit.

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1. Zombie LARP: White Noise – Tickets now on sale
2. Zombie LARP: Station Zero
3. Zombie LARP: You’d Better Watch Out
4. Doctor Baxter
5. White Noise: Report in!

A Nightmare gives a hug to a survivor who really doesn't want a hug

Nightmares are creatures that sometimes appear at Zombie LARP events. They are mischievous supernatural bad dreams.

Nightmares are rare, disturbing, and pretty much impossible to destroy. They first turned up at Zombie LARP: Nightmare (duh), when they haunted the burnt-out ruins of the Bioflex Research Complex. They later materialized again at Station Zero.

Appearance / behaviour

Humanoid, wearing some sort of boiler suit, and with a smiling blood-scratched doll-mask instead of a face. Nightmares scamper about, dance, sing songs, clap their hands with glee, and poke people for no good reason.

Nightmares are capable of extreme violence, but don’t usually bother; instead they prefer to follow pitiful humans around and torment them. Shooting and hitting a Nightmare have little effect, except that it may cause the Nightmare to sulk. Zombies have no interest in Nightmares, and White Knights seem to regard them as an annoyance.

Nightmares often seem to be making an effort to be friendly, but they have no idea what friendship is. They probably think it involves cannibalism, singing the same song for a thousand years, mutual irradiation, or bleeding to death in unison. Watching a human engage in a life-or-death struggle for survival is just hilarious to a Nightmare.

Backstory

Don't worry, it's only a Nightmare

At the end of Zombie VII: Payday, the Occult Task Force blew up the Bioflex Research Complex with a miniature nuclear bomb. The complex was sealed up and no-one went in for months. Then, one night, a bunch of former Bioflex employees mysteriously woke up inside the facility with no memory of how they got there, and the Nightmares were already scampering around, playing practical jokes that were either instantly lethal or just deeply unfunny.

So, who the hell knows what they are? They’re probably some kind of ghost, or naturally-occurring psychic manifestation, caused by all the horribleness that follows any zombie outbreak. Your guess is as good as ours.

Playing as a Nightmare

Right now, this creature is “on the shelf” until we come up with a good reason to use it again. Nightmares have usually been played by crew members, but it’s always possible that refs will ask for volunteers to play Nightmares during a future event. Being a  Nightmare is a lot of fun if you have the right sort of twisted mind. It requires improvisational skill: you need to be able to continually taunt, annoy, confuse, disturb and scare the humans, often while also filling an important role in a plot, puzzle or mission. But if the adorable little scamps do appear again, it will be in limited numbers. Of course, if you just want to act like a lunatic, you can pretty much do that as a normal player.

Liam finally gets eaten. Pic by James Taylor

Ladies and gentlemen – thank you. Thank you very much. As we’re sure you’re all aware, White Noise was rather good.

What follows is a bullet-point list of things we remember happening. We’re sure there were far, far more than this, but we can’t be everywhere until Mary finally perfects her Nightmare Science Zombie Hivemind Matrix. So please, please tell us what we missed – leave a comment here, blog about it and send us a link, or email us if you’d like. We’ll collect them up and post them here for posterity.

What happened at White Noise

What happens next?

As always, if you have photos, videos or other media you’ve taken during the day, or if you blog about it afterwards, please do let us know in the comments or send us a link so we can share it far and wide. There are already a few pictures floating around on Facebook – we’ll collect the public ones on our page.

Enormous thanks to the crew, without whom we wouldn’t have been able to run the game. Seriously, those guys in the orange T-shirts – and Leech masks, and White Knight costumes, and flashing drone head torch affairs – they made the game run smoothly and kept all the tedious admin in order, as well as scaring the crap out of the delicious players on a regular basis. We can’t thank them enough.

And finally: we don’t know for certain yet where or when the next game will be. It’s unlikely to be in the Mall for a little while, but we have a couple of other potential venues in mind. As soon as we know more, you guys will be the first to know.

Related posts:

1. Zombie LARP: White Noise – Tickets now on sale
2. WHiTE NOiSE

This is probably Baxter, with self-grafted prototype giant pneumatic mangler-hand.

Doctor Baxter was a character at Zombie LARP: White Noise. Baxter was a Bioflex scientist, but definite information – including about appearance, gender and temperament – is patchy. (Because, um, the character was played by a different person on each run.)

Story

At the start of White Noise, Baxter had apparently been stuck in the mall for ages, fending off the local zombies. There were one or two hints that Baxter might have been an old friend of Harvey Smith, the scientist whose experiments were somehow connected with the mysterious Red Leech that lives in the mall basement.

The Station Zero Emergency Broadcast System (a sort of security system with a bit too much imagination) wouldn’t open the mall exits for anyone unless they were transmitting the right access code, so Baxter somehow got hold of a few freshly-zombified OTF soldiers, hollowed them out, stuffed them with radio transmitters, and sent them scouting around in the hope they might be able to open the doors.

Baxter never explained exactly how these “drones” had been created or how they functioned, but the plan itself did seem to work once or twice. Unfortunately, exposure to Vril energy, the taunts of the Nightmares, and other survivors hijacking the drones, eventually drove Baxter round the bend, and he/she went on a homicidal rampage. Baxter was last seen being run through with a chainsaw, but much worse attacks had already failed earlier, so his/her fate remains uncertain.

Baxterization

One of Baxter’s inventions was an industrial-strength mechanical claw that could be used to mangle zombies. The prototype was grafted directly on to its inventor’s arm using a process now called ‘baxterization’, and similar but cruder techniques may have allowed the creation of drone zombies as well. Bioflex has since hired a part-time unpaid intern to replicate Baxter’s research, so partially-baxterized Bioflex employees may be deployed during future outbreaks.

Character concept

We don’t really design ‘characters’ for Zombie LARP, there’s no money in the budget to hire a shrill, lispy acting coach to give those people their motivation. We usually only find out what the character was like after the event has happened. NPCs are ‘capsule identities’ which anyone can drop into; usually with some unique prop or costume item so that people can tell it’s the same character.

Baxter was a pretty successful NPC, in that a lot of players at White Noise seemed to learn the character’s name and role quite fast. The only reason the character is called Baxter is because the big map on the player room wall (which was drawn before Station Zero) has a note on which says ‘Don’t trust Baxter!’ so we figured we might as well explain who that actually is. This was a totally illogical choice because players actually did need to trust Baxter in order to escape! But Baxter also seemed like a good name for a mad scientist anyway. Possibly because there’s one called that in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

One thing which went slightly wrong was that we switched Baxter’s gender for the last run (Baxter was played by a man three times, then once by a woman) and this confused at least one team of players.  But we do have a clever explanation which shows why this wasn’t a screw-up: technically each run at an event like White Noise takes place in a slightly different parallel universe. So if you try to use in-character knowledge from one run during a subsequent one, and it turns out to no longer apply, it’s your own damned problem.

Drones are not much more of a threat to humans than normal zombies – unless they’ve been “activated”  remotely, in which case they are probably capable of just about anything, depending on their programming.

Appearance

Drones look like normal zombies, but they have flashing lamps on their heads and make strange electronic noises.  The first drones spotted, at White Noise, seemed to be re-animated OTF soldiers with some electronic equipment sticking out of ‘em, but no-one knows where Baxter got five fresh OTF corpses from.

Behaviour

Drones act like normal zombies most of the time, but may occasionally behave very strangely, ‘glitching’ or making robotic movements. Usually, when a drone is damaged or attacked, it will “switch off” for a while rather than dying, and will later wake up again unexpectedly. Drones are programmed to follow instructions of various types, but programming zombies is a pretty new science so there’s no way to be sure whether drones will respond better to a) 512-bit-encrypted data packets transmitted by ultra-high-frequency radio, or b) shouting.

Playing as a drone

Drones had their debut at White Noise but will probably return at some future event. Being a drone is pretty easy and we might need quite a few of them, so you can always volunteer to play one. The downside is that it’s often not all that different from being a zombie, except you do have the perk of having a blinking light affixed to your head and other noisy equipment strapped to any spare space on your body. And you get to do The Robot whilst eating survivors, too.

Can you hear it? The choirs of angels? The rumbling underfoot, as the hot blood of the earth reaches for the surface? The rolling blasts of thunder that peal forth as lightning cracks the skies asunder? This can only mean one thing – Zombie LARP is coming!

Brace yourselves.

Make ready your wits. Make sharp your axe. Make… loaded your NERF gun. On Saturday 24th March – TOMORROW – YOU will need to fight your way out of the apocalyptic nightmare of Friar’s Walk Mall in Reading, and we’re making it harder.

Remember safe zones? GONE. Melee weapons? RARER THAN HEN’S TEETH. The red leech? IT’S BACK. Breathing room? A sense of peace and understanding? A clear path to the exit, with all your friends around you? PRETTY MUCH GONE. (Unless you all turn out to be MEGA BADASS ZOMBIE KILLERS of the sort we just can’t plan for, of course.)

Here is the Survivor’s Handbook for the day – a lovingly designed PDF that should tell you everything you need to know in order to die horribly, screaming, mauled by the friends you loved and trusted back before the outbreak. If there’s anything it hasn’t covered, get in touch and we’ll do our best to help you out.

If we get any more excited, we might pop.

Related posts:

1. Zombie LARP: White Noise – Tickets now on sale

ZOMBIE LARP: WHITE NOISE

Saturday 24 MARCH 2012 | 10.30am – 9.00pm | Friar’s Walk Mall, Reading

To purchase your extremely limited-edition ticket, get over to ZombieShop.co.uk!

At White Noise, you’ll take part in four massive, strange and scary games of Zombie LARP. It’s an all-action game of survival in a shopping mall filled with zombies. You’ll be armed with the very best in NERF firepower and foam-rubber bashing-weapons to smite the undead. You start out as a tasty, tasty human in three of the games, and as a hungry, hungry zombie in the other. Think fast and shoot straight and you might turn out to be the hero. Slow down or slip up and you’ll join the shambling wall of corpses.

The venue – Friar’s Walk Mall – is a four-storey labyrinth of twisting corridors, pitch-black tunnels, vast storerooms, derelict shops and eerie arcades echoing with the moans of the damned! And it’s right next to Reading train station and has a big carpark. So it’s ideal for a zombie outbreak.

If you can think of a better way to spend your Saturday – well – you can’t! It’s impossible! We don’t believe you! Of all possible things, ZombieLARP is best! Fighting running screaming horror action!

What are you still doing reading this? Go! Get over to ZombieShop.co.uk and buy a ticket before they’re all gone!

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1. Zombie LARP: You’d Better Watch Out – tickets now on sale

Joyous welcomes and ///mandatory/// smiles are yours to enjoy and reciprocate with this congratulatory FLEXMAS ELECTRONIC GREETING>>>>>

“]”]”]

From: PR human [NAME:REDACTED

We are pleased to pronounce our FLEXMAS testing a SUCCESS although malicious vandalism of company test equipment and ambulatory cadavers with small arms fire and blunt instruments throughout test period has lead to>>>>>> COSTLY REPLACEMENT GAS filtration procedures being undertaken in local schools rest homes government buildings and rival malls to generate fresh test equipment and ambulatory cadavers. Full report on the costly but doubtlessly//festive event can be viewed HERE//don’t.look.it’s.scary

As such the ENFORCED GIFTING REGIEME gloriously envisioned for FLEXMAS 2011 in which occluded science agents revisit all escaped ERROR ERROR revisit all //SUCCESSFUL// test subjects with mandatory.wellness.injections administered by bearded avuncular character with ATTENDANT SINISTER ELVES has been CANCELLED due to lack of funding it’s.all.stopped.no.more.don’t//look//out//flexmas.is.dead.
again.he.ate.the.bad.tinsel.the.girl.with.
the.green.hair.
saved.you

Bioflex wishes to draw attention of employees to ATTENDANT PICTORIAL EVIDENCE of test proceedings captured on sub-permeable vril lenses specially implanted into the.eyes.of.he.who.is.known.as OLIVER FACEY/// ErrOR ErroR they.took.his.eyes>>>>>>>These images have been meticulously concentrated and reconstituted from BRAIN LEAVINGS of the OLIVER FACEY and placed in their original electrionic format online at INTERACT MOUSE WITH PHRASE TO SEE PICTURES over.three.hundred.pictures.you’re.all.there.pray.for.us

the.girl>>>>saved.you.all

If you or any other willing test subjects have gathered pictorial information through analysis of vril-energised grey matter or other more esoteric means such as CAMERAS then please post links to any such compendiums of HARMLESS EVIDENCE to our/// LAIR on the black of the moon ERROR ERROR MOON UNFOUND>>> post to our lair in the Book of Faces///>> err?metaitemref:BookofFaces lost with Kramer expedition to otherland:ABOVE, confirm?///or send us an ELECTRONIC-GREETING with details so our team of HAPPINESS LAWYERS can inspect it for correct levels of corporate jolity

FINAL MISSIVE PORTION designation SAVETHEDATE indicates occluded science vatscryers show MARCH 31ST 2012 as possible date of future “ZOMBIE” outbreak in STATION ZERO READING MALL why.do.they.keep.getting.up.you.have.to.stop.them.help.us>>>>escape

Expect future communications at>>> seemingly random intervals that DO NOT ///repeat.do.not/// relate to grand geomantic ritual scheme to overthrow EU government and are definitely random

Jolly FLEXMAS to all infants, adults and beasts
Sleep safely until.they.come>>>>they’re///coming//GET.OUT

MESSAGE END ALL TEST SUBJECTS ATTENTION REVERT

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