The Walking Dead Universe Roleplaying Game

I used to hate moaners and crybabies. In high school we'd target classmates we thought were weak. Pretending to invite them to join our crew, we stuffed them into my old Chevrolet, drove them up to the old water tower, and made them suffer for whatever petty thing was bugging us about them. Later, there were drugs; along with them came more serious beatings and fights. They called me Killer, even though I never murdered anyone. Strange as it may sound, this new world has somehow made me softer. Now I want to protect the kind of people I used to torment. They're family, some of them. But when something threatens us, I become the Killer again.

New diseases always hit the medical staff the hardest. I was right in the middle of it, in the ER at Atlanta's busiest hospital, when people started to turn. I lost so many. Jane, my wife Julia, Harry, and Tom. I don't know a single person who got out of there, except me. Before I ran, I examined one of them, a girl who was strapped to a bed before she died. This is no ordinary sickness. Maybe it really is the end of days, in a biblical sense? My theory is as good as anyone's.

They say cattle are dumb, but it's people who are really stupid. We all knew something was going to hit us, sooner or later: a terrorist attack, global warming, or whatever. Still, no one prepared enough. I've met people who didn't know how to light a fire or skin a rabbit. None of them are alive anymore. When it all started, me and my wife and our kids went down into the basement, as planned. We had supplies enough for us and twenty more that would last for months. A group of assholes blew up the basement door and managed to break in. I offered them a chance to join us. Instead, they killed my family. But the explosion and the gunshots attracted hundreds of stinkers. The house was overrun; the thieves joined the dead. I had to leave the supplies behind and run for my life.

The last time I spoke with my mother, she kept mixing me up with my brother, and it's not like she was even senile or anything. She couldn't recall the name of my first girlfriend or who my friends were at school. It hurt at the time, but now I get it - some days, even I don't remember those things. My life had been a haze of average grades, boring weekends, mediocre sports results, and uninspired dreams. It's hard to make others understand how different my situation is now from back then. For me, the biggest change is not the bombed-out landscape and the walking dead, but how it is between me and the people around me. They see me as important. They confide in me. They depend on me to find food for them. I guess that's why I take stupid risks: I have people worth doing it for.

I am a living cliché. Or I was. Brandon wanted me to stay in the house. At first, I thought it was because he couldn't trust anyone to resist me, being the prom queen and everything. But when the kids came and all I'd done for years was cook food, clean, and wash clothes, I realized he thought he owned me. He didn't beat me. Well, he did, but he told himself he didn't. When the world fell apart, he just disappeared. Maybe he's still out there. I wonder if he would recognize me. I've learned to shoot a gun. I know how to kill with a knife or with my hands. Sometimes I even like it. Not that much of a cliché anymore, right?

You would think that people like me, who've lived most of our lives in this hell and hardly remember the days before, would've come out seriously damaged, or at least weird. That is simply not the case, in my experience. I'd trust another wasteland baby ten times over an adult from another group trying to get close to me. Maybe it was the shock when their whole world fell apart that did it to them. I don't really care. We'll be the ones to build something new. I keep the grown-ups I trust close: mum, dad, and my older brother. The others scare me more than the dead.

There is so much baggage that comes with the job: how people treat you, what they think of you, what everyone supposes you believe in, and think is right, and all those eyes looking at you expectantly whenever there's a crisis. You forget who you really are. At the start of this new world, I kept playing my part, doing right, trying to lead others to safety. After I was ambushed by a group I'd just saved from a herd of biters, I somehow finally realized that this job could get me killed. I still wear the hat and badge; it gives me an edge. But let's just say I've now come to believe in a less equal application of the law.

Who could have guessed that living on the streets for ten years would ever be a more marketable experience than a college degree? I know how to become invisible. Where you can hide, sleep, and stay unseen, day or night. What's unsafe to eat and drink- hell, how to make just about anything edible. How to start fires and keep them burning without being seen from a distance. My years of wandering gave me skin like iron and the ability to read a man at twenty paces. These gifts have kept me alive more times than I can count - even if I still haven't forgiven those who put me outside in the first place.

The shiny white smile of a politician always made some people suspicious, just as the bright colors of a poisonous insect warn of potential danger. The same gene screaming at you when I extend my hand for an uncannily firm shake made us run away from tigers when we were naked, dirty, and lived in caves. Now that the world has fallen apart, I do not mind admitting that sometimes being a politician is the same as being a mob leader or a warlord. It takes a certain type of person. I am one of the tigers. I do not shoot with my own gun, and it won't be me who hacks your body to pieces and hangs it in the trees to scare off your friends. Others will do that for me.

People will believe in all sorts of silly things: stones, energy fields, or spirits jumping from body to body. We even met a group who worshiped walkers. They had a bunch of them holed up in an old boxing gym. A fellow man of the cloth (though what deity may have anointed him I cannot say) stood in the ring and threw flower petals at the corpses below, their arms stretched out for communion. I guess it should make me humble, as it suggests that any belief is as good as the next. But I am not. There is only one God and one true church. Soon, the day of reckoning will be upon us. I will lead my flock to the gate of Heaven.

Of all the things I have studied and all the things I know, people respect me most for my moonshine still- a rudimentary device I could've constructed for a sixth grade science fair. I see their point: Who cares about quantum mechanics when the dead try to eat you and the living want to kill you? But they do need me, not just for the booze. I built these people a water collector, a system for communicating when they're on supply runs, and a sterile room to treat their wounds. I'm always one step ahead of them, not because of the heights I reached in my now- arcane area of research, no! You see, before all that, I took a freshman course in psychology.

We were told that, when it gets bad, nothing matters more than keeping disciplined and sticking together. They said we were the best trained soldiers in the world. Even so, at the start of all this, most of my brothers and sisters in arms either turned tail or turned into monsters. Had to shoot my best friend to keep him away from a little girl, no older than my kid sister! I have dropped so many bodies, but I am no murderer. To me, there are three types out there: the walking dead, the living monsters, and human beings. Only one of them deserves to stay on its feet.