• Yes, this makes three active hacks for me.
• Yes, I’m trying to conjure Vincent Baker level multitasking.
• Yes, I know zombie hacks already exist. I reinvent wheels. It's what I do.
• I don’t normally enjoy games that emulate a movie or TV show.
• I’m not even actually much of a zombie fanboy.

I… just had a few ideas in my head, and this seemed like the best way to combine them. This hack will likely look the least like Apocalypse World (of my hacks) when complete. I kinda dig that. Here are some early concepts.

NO PLAYBOOKS
I don’t feel like playbooks are the way to go here. I considered roles, but I’m already doing that in a hack so I’d rather not duplicate the effort. Characters will all be drawn up using the same character generation rules.

Moves will be broken up into something resembling skill trees, with dependencies like D&D Feats, and a number of trees will be available. The depth you go into skill trees will allow you to develop the niche of your character further.

Everyone gets to claim one skill tree for their character. That tree is locked to everyone else. Nobody else gets to take skills from that tree; even with improvements. So if you take the Leadership tree, your character is THE leader. If nobody claims the leadership tree then maybe several characters exhibit leadership potential. So..

• If you take the crossbow skill tree, then you are “the dude with the crossbow.”
• If you take the sword skill tree, then you are “the chick with the katana.”

NO STATS

• All moves will be made at a base +0.
• Characters will have access to individual pools (currently being called Hope). Characters may declare they will spend 0 to 3 points of Hope on any move they are going to make, and add the spent points as a modifier to the roll.
• Running out of Hope, leaves you Hopeless.
• Hope will regenerate between sessions in some way. It will likely regenerate faster with comfort, safety, and good health. Don’t expect much of those things.
• You can also lose Hope as the result of moves. Attacks that don’t actually leave you hurt, will often sap you of hope instead.

I haven’t decided how big a Hope pool needs to be yet, or how it will be generated exactly… but I want to incorporate Trust (this game’s version of Hx). The idea is that you have Trust with every character in your “group” (PC and NPC alike), and the score on your sheet indicates how much they trust you. The more trust you have (deserved or not), the higher your maximum Hope pool will be.

• For this reason, Trust will NOT reset like Hx does (that would be a penalty). It will still cap at +3. The plan is to incorporate Trust into the dice mechanic and/or moves so that you are constantly doing things to earn or decrease trust.
• I’ve considered using the advanced basic move mechanic here, allowing you to gain trust with someone when you roll a 12+.
• An end of session move will likely allow players to designate who their character has gained and lost trust in as well.

NO HARM
Harm will be replaced with 4 conditions.
Fatigued — Caught — Hurt — Dead

• Fatigued, Caught, and Hurt each incur a -1 Ongoing to rolls (so that base +0 you roll on all moves could drop to as much as base -3 in the worst situations).
• If you are Hopeless (your Hope pool is at 0), you are automatically Fatigued.
• If you are killed (dead). you may become Maimed instead (a permanent Hurt condition) to save yourself from death. This can only happen once.
• Zombies will be immune to fatigue.
• The natural progression for zombies is to run you down (fatigued), corner you (caught), claw and bite at you (hurt), and eat you (dead).
• Human opponents won’t necessarily stick to that script. They might corner you by surprise, or attack you from afar. It really depends on their motivations and whether they want to take you alive.

NOISE
Weapons won’t have harm tags. The move you make determines which status you apply to your target. Instead, I’m considering a Noise stat on weapons, that determines how much attention you might draw with it. When there is a chance that using the weapon will draw attention you would make a reverse roll (like the harm move) to figure out if you did.

RESOURCES
I’ve put the least thought into resources, but they will play a huge part in the game. Part of the reason I liked eliminating stats was because some sort of resource tracking will be necessary, and I didn’t want to bog down the game with multiple sets of numbers.

One idea I had was to give guns and vehicles “stats” for ammo and fuel. So one of the tags on a gun might be “3-Ammo”. Attack moves would decrease the stat. Certain moves would allow you to avoid the stat decrease (your skill allowed you to conserve ammo).

ZOMBIES
Not much work done here yet, but gangs provide a great base for zombie herds.

This effort was (obviously) inspired by Vincent's excellent previews for Apocalypse World 2nd Edition. I thought I knew what my playbooks were going to look like, so I actually wrote several other sections of my hack in advance of the playbooks only to find a whole lot of my plans flew out the window once I started to flesh these out. Now, thanks to that burst of creative energy, I'm going to have to rewrite a bunch of other stuff.

These have not been play tested. Quite a few of the terms used on these point to systems that haven't even actually been written yet. I'm far too close to this project to objectively tell if I'm actually onto anything here, so I'm hoping some knowledgeable eyes will grace my pages and offer me some constructive feedback on what I've done here.

• Download Link - PDF file on Google Drive.

Thank you for your consideration,
Hildy.