I have always admired women with the strength of steel in their backbones and the courage of their convictions held fiercely in their hearts.
So it makes sense that I wrote a roleplaying game about them.
A game where you can play women and their children who fight against authoritarianism. A game where the zombies who roam the streets are mostly men. A game where Joseph McCarthy is President and you have to stop him from destroying America while you rebuild your suburban communities.
And I never knew that while I sat and constructed an alternate history for the United States that we’d be facing a scary administration when it released.
I never imagined that people might be using this game as a potential catharsis. Because I don’t have the ability to see the future, I’d never imagined.
Dead Scare is, in the context of this release date, even more a game about women who fight. This is a game that is meant to inspire you to resist, to fight back. This game is about more than zombies – it’s about the darkest parts of our history that we should never let rise up again. This game is about women who build community, children who fight for what they believe is right, and yes, it’s also about dropping zombies into a Leave it to Beaver episode.
You can play Dead Scare a lot of ways. I hope, most of all, that you’ll use it as a way to tell stories about resistance, that you’ll tell stories about survival.
I hope you’ll tell stories about the burlesque dancers at the Old Howard (like in Lauren Roy’s postcard), you can use stage props as weapons. I hope you explore how Southern Hospitality and the zombie apocalypse intertwine like in Delilah S. Dawson’s. I hope you consider the issues of scarcity in the midwest, as Nora Last wrote about it. I hope you think hard about racism, and how it might look during an apocalypse.
I hope you enjoy the idea that little girls with white canes, and adults with wheelchairs can fight the apocalypse too.
I hope you enjoy the 1950s and their terrifying implications when the zeds walk the streets of the United States.
Happy valentines day, to the women who fight.
We need you.
Dead Scare is HERE on drivethru RPG!
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