Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: F1 – Zombie Curse

F1 –  Zombie Curse is a free role playing game supplement published by Adventures in Filbar. The supplement is intended for use with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and AD&D 2nd Edition games. Zombie Curse is an adventure, the first in the original F series. This is intended to be the first adventure played by a party.

This is a 26 page PDF which lacks bookmarks. One page is the cover, which has the Adventures in Filbar logo, two pages have three maps between them and one page has two stock photographs which are intended to illustrate parts of the adventure.

Just under two pages are the Players and DM Background, with the majority of it being taken up by that of the DM. The players have to try and stop something that is turning people into zombies when they die; a sort of zombie apocalypse situation, but the illness itself isn’t spread by the zombies.

The first section covers the village of Crystal Shores. This has a labelled map, which would appear to have been generated by RPG Citymap Generator, at the back of the PDF. The various important locations are described and details are given on various NPCs, with some stats for zombies that could be encountered. This takes up around eight pages, with each location having details for both the players and the DM.

Section two takes up slightly less than a page and deals with the players discovering the zombie curse and making their way to the next location, with a random encounter table.

Section three covers the settlement of Mont Du Plat, where the curse originated and whose inhabitants have turned into zombies. This is slightly over five pages in length, and the village again has a labelled map at the rear, which also appears to have been created using RPG Citymap Generator. There are twelve locations described, again for both players and DM, but no NPCs as they are all zombies.

Section four is Christo’s Dungeon which is a dungeon complex under Mont Du Plat. This has a simple square map to the rear. There are a bit over five pages in this section, describing eight locations in the dungeon with various monsters that can be encountered. Again, there are players and DMs descriptions of each location.

The final section is around half a page and covers winding up the adventure with a couple of hooks for spin-off adventures, although one of these is effectively covered in F2 – Crypt of Kendall Furfoot.

The PDF lacks bookmarks, which would have been nice but which are not essential. The text maintains a single column format and a few minor errors were noted. The only illustrations are stock and they, and the maps, serve their intended purpose.

The adventure may be intended for AD&D but the only stats given are for the monsters; the various non-player characters lack any. Converting the adventure to another system, especially those of the Old School Revival, should not be too difficult. More modern systems such as Pathfinder may require a bit more work.

The locations themselves should be easy enough to drop into another setting, as the connections to Filbar are quite minor; there is a brief mention of the Caravan Masters, a notable organisation in that setting, but that’s it. Crystal Shores does not even need to be used with the adventure; the village could be used as-is. Mont Du Plat could also be used as a village, with a bit more work, as the NPCs need creating.

The adventure itself is a decent one for starting players. There are options for them to make more money by trying to capture the zombies in order that they be cured, rather than kill them. F1 –  Zombie Curse is a good, well detailed adventure and it’s free, so click here to get it.