We tend to imagine the hardest part of surviving a zombie apocalypse would be, well, the zombies. But as properties like The Last Of Us, The Walking Dead, and Navaar Jackson’s tabletop role-playing game The Corrupted show us, it’s actually other people.
While there are other games that tackle the zombie trope, like Free League’s licensed RPG for The Walking Dead and D&D’s Domains of Dread, the scale of the problems in The Corrupted are brought down to an interpersonal level — making them arguably more devastating. An intimate game about a small group of survivors, The Corrupted uses a familiar base d20 system and adds in mechanics that highlight the difficulties of adjusting to the new normal of a post-fall world with people you don’t even know.
While there are combat mechanics for high intensity moments, the main thrust of the game is the emotional toll the apocalypse takes on this small group. Resource management heightens the survival element of The Corrupted, as food, water, and other tools like bullets are tracked over time.
The base abilities for the game include Empathy, Intellect, Judgement, Brawn, Agility, and Vitality — with nearly all of those featured during out-of-combat play. Failed rolls don’t simply prevent players from achieving their goals, they also actively cause Stress and a unique “compromised” condition which elevates the stakes of any conflict. Unresolved Stress then compiles into conflicts.
The conflict system mechanically represents tensions that arise from the literal stress and trauma of not only survival, but of existing alongside other people. Those mechanics impact how player characters relate to each other as well as themselves, providing opportunities for conflict to arise between players as the outside world throws an unending series of obstacles at them.
For those interested in seeing just how emotionally devastating this game can be, Jackson produced Ties That Bind. A slice-of-life zombie apocalypse actual play of The Corrupted, Ties That Bind features Jackson alongside award-winning actual play performers Hamnah Shahid and Josephine Kim. The stunningly edited audio AP weaves between the day to day life of three survivors as they deal with the interpersonal and ethical complications of figuring out what comes after the apocalypse, with the lives they led before the pathogen tore through the United States.
