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This weekend we played our first game(s) with SotF. We ran Defend the Manor House and included the Grave Weapons and Unique/Survival Decks to spice it up. We ran into an issue we would like some clarification on...

The zombie players have all 14 zeds on the board at the start of their turn, there is no rolling to see if they spawn because of the auto-spawn rule in effect. Can the zombie player(s) still roll during their 'Zombie Spawning Phase' and use the result to collect grave weapons just as if they had actually been spawning?

Personally my take on this is that the zombie player doesnt have anything in his zombie pool to exchange for the grave weapons. Our zombie players are of the opinion that with auto-spawn the zombie pool always has a combined total of 1d6 zombies in it even if they cant be spawned.

Someone wanna chime in please?

That's a VERY good question.

Personally, I'd actually say that they CAN draw grave weapon cards, yes. You roll to see how many zombies you can place, but you're limited by the pool-size. For example, if you had two zombies in the pool, and rolled to be able to place 6 zombies, you'd be able to place 2 -- but you could place 2 zombies and draw 2 Grave Weapon cards. This example indicates to me that you can always roll to spawn, even if you don't have any models to place on the board -- but you can still use those points to get Grave Weapons. But remember, there's a limit as to how many grave weapons can be on the board at a time, which does balance that out.

Thanks for the input Gavin! I can see your point, your example really drove it home for me and I think Im in agreement now (tho I'd still like official word of course).

The limit on the number of Grave Weapons on the board DOES balance things out mechanically, but with the Defend the Manor House scenario it doesnt FEEL that way for the heroes. In our games so far using this scenario, the zombie team has all of its zeds on the board most of the time meaning that every turn they are able to effectively add the Grave Weapons with no real penalty. Meanwhile no matter what happens to the heroes they must fulfill the die roll requirements to get a Unique/Tactics card.

It just seems that for a scenario that is already skewed toward the Zombies, this adds salt to the wound! Granted, this was the first time we played the Manor House with the added rules...

Maybe next time I will add in the Manor Deck rule for the heroes so they have more hope of drawing some card goodness!