We’ve developed some basic rules that cover all our zombie games, including safety rules that we adapt between venues. We have two main types of game these days – the Run System, which was our original concept for Zombie LARP, and the Outbreak System, which is an attempt to scale the game up to bigger venues.
The aim of Zombie LARP, always – for both survivors and zombies – is to make good stories happen. It doesn’t matter if you get out alive or die in the first few minutes, as long as you have fun and you get a good yarn out of it.
We can tailor events to specific styles, objectives and stories – if you want to hire us to run a PR event, a team-building exercise or a party of some kind, please get in touch by emailing gms@zombielarp.co.uk.
The Run System
A few people form a team and try to survive the zombie apocalypse. They have to complete a simple objective – go here, fetch this – in order to get out of a building overrun with the living dead. Each run is tailored to the team that’s playing, so we can run a wide variety of different scenarios.
All the other players pretend to be zombies and try to eat their faces off. Once the team of survivors are dead – or they manage to get out alive – it’s another team’s turn to try and survive. Runs generally last a very short time – a few minutes – but they feel much longer when you’re running for your life.
The Run System scales down very small – our smallest game at Shunt involved 3 rooms, a staircase, 12 zombies and teams of 3 or 4 survivors – but our most successful games so far involve teams of 6-8 people against about 50 zombies in a university building.
The Outbreak System
Still in development, the Outbreak System is a larger-scale game than the Run System, requiring more players and more space. Games are longer – around an hour, sometimes longer – and we start with many more humans than zombies. Once again, players must complete a simple mission in order to get out of a zombie-infested complex. The missions involve multiple objectives and may be more complex than in the Run System, requiring teams of players to work together. Survival rate for the Outbreak System so far has been about 6%, with most survivors turning to zombies progressively as the games progress. As with the Run System, we ask players to play zombies at least once – but in this system players will get several chances to try to survive.
We’ve only run one full-scale event using the system so far, so the details are still being ironed out, but we hope to introduce more branching story options within Outbreak games, test more interesting creatures, and branch out to more awesome places to play, as the system should let us be much more flexible with larger venues.
NERF wars
Occasionally, on a whim, we run NERF wars. Turn up in a park or friendly office building, bring as many NERF weapons as you can carry, and have a good fun afternoon playing traditional team games like Capture the Flag, Battle Royale and massively simplified Zombie. These games are much shorter, much more free-form and much more suitable for folks who don’t really do horror or fake blood.
Using our rules
We love it when people use our rules systems to run their own games. So far we’ve had spin-offs in New Zealand, Kansas, San Antonio and Cornwall, and there are more tentative plans in a few other locations too. If you decide to use our systems for non-commercial (ie non-profit) games, either as they are or as a basis for modification, we ask that you do the following:
- Drop us a line at gms@zombielarp.co.uk to let us know you’re thinking of using the system;
- Credit us as an inspiration for / the source of your game system, both online and in any materials you give out.
That’s it! We’re always happy to help with suggestions and tips for running the game, and we’ll gladly help out with promoting your game on our site and through our social media feeds. And we’d love to see pictures/video of your events.
If you decide to use our rules without crediting us, we reserve the right to ridicule you in public for stealing something that’s available for free and passing it off as your own work. Especially if you ignore requests for credit. Zombie LARP of Hunstville, Alabama, we’re looking at you here.
If you want to license our rules for a commercial enterprise, please get in touch by emailing gms@zombielarp.co.uk to let us know what you’re thinking of doing, and we’ll discuss things from there.
