The End of the World: No Room in Hell: Session 2

For this session, there are some changes in the current player roster:
1) JM won't be joining us anymore since RPGs are not really his cup of tea while
2) Gino (a very verbose friend) and DJ (a very cerebral friend) have decided to join Wilbert (who likes killing zombies, a lot!), JR (the team smooth talker) and ME (whose plans never go my way) for another session of The End of The World.

For this article, I've decided to narrate it from my POV instead of the survivor's diary format to cut down on the words and so that I could interject my thoughts more directly.


Part I: Freezer Meet and Greet

The session starts with the Wilbert and Jose accompanied by other NPC survivors (me, JM, Majah and Jae) locked inside the freezer room of the Hotel Intercon with no way of opening the door and a horde of zombies outside. The guys meet Gino and DJ who have been squatting inside the freezer long before looks like. After a quick chat on who's who, the new comers have been put up to speed on what has been happening outside since they decided to bunker in the freezer when all this started.

Soon everyone realizes that they are trapped inside with no way out. Everyone talks this over and gathers what supplies (food and meat hooks as weapons, etc) they could. Wilbert gives some chocolate to Jae as a peace offering, hoping that he won't get stabbed/shot in the back for having kicked the kid's face in the first place. Hmm.. We'll see...

To speed things along my character smoothly blurts out "How about the ventilation shafts?". Everyone mulls this over and follows my subtle cue! (Smooth) Being the pragmatic bastards that they are, they unanimously decide to send the 13-yr kid first as a disposable scout despite Maja's protests. Jeezus, talk about protecting the innocent.

Part II: Security Office

They follow the shaft through which eventually leads to a crossroads in the system. A lot of noises can be heard from both the left and right paths so the team decides that forwards is the safest course of action. They reach the ventilation grill at the end, in which they see two bodies with their brains blown out. The room appears to be the security office of the hotel. The team drops down and starts investigating the room. They start looting the office and they find additional radios, night sticks, batteries and the service pistols of the two security personnel who seem to have had a suicide pact together. However, all that noise has alerted a nearby horde of zombies to the barricaded door of the office which is the only exit they have. They looked through the port hole and there appears to be only about 10 or so zombies. Everyone gears up for their first horde fight.

With Gino's suggestion, the plan is to hold the door slightly open using the nearby locker cabinets as anchors behind the door against the push of the horde. This will create a natural choke point where the group only has to fight the zombies one at a time. Hopefully. Gino and DJ prepare to hold the door against the horde while Wilbert and Jose will attack those who get through using their spears. The team has refrained from using firearms since the noise could lure additional zombies into the fight.

Gino and DJ open the door and brace inevitable. The zombies trickle into the room in groups of 2 to 3 at a time. This forces Gino to help Wilbert and Jose fend-off their attackers. Which leaves DJ all alone in holding the door. Wilbert shows surprising skill with the use of the spear as starts scything through zombie heads one after the other. Gino and Jose guard his flanks to prevent the horde from spilling over into the helpless NPCs.

While the sixth zombie was being disposed of inside the room, DJ feels the the increased pressure of the horde which was unexpected since it should be decreasing by now. He holds onto dear life as more zombies appear inside the room, way more than they expected. The group manages to scrape through the new surge and starts mopping up the rest of the stragglers as they enter the room. Apart from a few cuts and bruises, everyone seems to be ok. They check for bite wounds and fine none. As they start cleaning up, the group hears some garbled chatter over the radio. The only words they we're able to understand were: "Disaster... Evacuate... Laguna.. I repeat, Bulacan... What? Corregidor?" before the transmission was abruptly cut again. They talk it over but are unable to decide. For now, they need supplies and a safe house where they can think things through.

After a short rest, the group sneaks out of the hotel through the lobby. As they leave the hotel, they are bombarded by corpses. It seems that the zombies from the upper floor are following them directly and now it literally is raining men. Unnerved, the group decides to press on into B&B, hoping to find some friendly faces and supplies. At this point Jose announces that he has decided to strike out on his own to look for his dog back in Manila and then make a journey to Palawan to search for Irene. The group tries to reason with him but they are unable to change his mind. For now, Jose will still be with them until Makati Square, where they now have to go in separate directions for their own objectives.

As they pass by the intersection between Park Square, SM and Glorietta, they hear a loud scream and the sound of gunfire. The group decides to skirt through the commotion by passing through Pasay Road but Wilbert stays to investigate. He peeks around the corner, where he sees a police officer and a woman cornered. Wilbert shouts for the officer to shoot them in the head instead which creates a distraction for the zombies, giving the couple enough time to slip through. However they are ambushed by more zombies from a nearby store as they run towards Wilbert. Seeing the hopelessness of their situation he leaves them with a heavy heart and runs back towards the rest of the group where he gets chastised for trying to save everyone, which based the contemporary zombie culture, was incredibly unrealistic. He takes this into heart and is silent for the rest of the journey.

Part III: Makati B&B

The group arrives in front of the Pamana Building which seems to be empty at this point. They turn on their flash lights as they make their way through the ground floor. They find a couple of bodies near the elevator which Gino immediately double taps on the head with his night stick to ensure that they're dead. As they walk to the second floor hallway, they hear some noises and see lights through the door of B&B. Gino peeks and is surprised to find Errol, Raymz and Matt already in the room looting for supplies. (They we're happily chatting away at the table beside us in real life. :p) Since both groups have known each other, they start bartering weapons for food as the players are in short supply of water. The group decides to hole up in the room during daylight and to move again at sundown to better avoid any other hostiles.



Thoughts for this session:
I got cocky with how I handled my last session on the fly and decided to play this session by ear as well. I made minimal preparations which was a really bad idea because the critical scenarios that I planned out did not materialize completely according to plan. I needed to stick to the script so that I could kill off the one-shot players (Me, JM and Jose) to make the narrative less confusing. Since that didn't work out as I hoped, it affected my mood for the rest of the game. I need to adjust better to the flow of the story and not try to railroad it as it just kills the fun for everyone.

This is also my first time where my players would really talk everything though. I tried giving everyone enough time to say their piece but at some point the discussion gets repetitive. I need to wrap these jaw sessions faster by being more forceful as a GM. I was able to control this during the fight scenes by counting down from five which kept everyone on their toes. The fight scene felt repetitive at some point but there's only so far I could have gotten with very generic zombies. I'm seriously considering wrapping this story line soon so that I can introduce other scenarios with more varied and interesting enemies.

Overall I was nnot very happy with how I handled things. The good that came out of it is that I was able to see a lot of the things that I need to work on in one session so hopefully I can address them earlier. It looked like the guys had fun but since we tried waiting for another player, we ended up playing quite late. Should have set a better timeline for everyone. Oh well, learn and learn.