New Scenario: Release the Beast

[thanatos]

Muahaha! I got to roll out the Zombie Lord last night, and the heroes suffered their first loss to a beast. I wanted to double-check a couple of the ZL rules, and I wanted to make sure I used The ZL's Zombie Hero summoning appropriately, though. It seems like I did from reading the rules, but I got some really good rolls, so it became fairly devastating by end-game.

From my understanding of the rolls, the ZL can spawn a NEW Zombie Hero on a roll of 4 or higher every turn, randomly pulling from unused heroes and from "permanently dead" player characters, which means that, given enough good rolls and a nasty end-game, the Zombie Lord can actually spawn more Zombie Heroes than there are heroes on the board, right? The last two surviving heroes died on the same turn, but I had spawned 6 zombie heroes by that turn, including the two permanently dead heroes.

Is that right, or(we didn't play it this way) does the zombie lord's successful zombie hero spawn depend on a successful roll to spawn zombies in general, given that autospawn goes away when the ZL comes to play? Or was what I was doing right, but the number of Zombie Heroes is limited to 4 (given that there are only 4 ZH tokens)?

In spite of the stacked odds, the heroes came within one wound of taking out the zombie lord, but they got swarmed very badly. They were sticking together in teams of two to make the inevitable multi-zombie fights less lethal, but that made it much easier to stalk them with the Zombie Heroes, and I managed to defend the buttons well enough between strategic zombie placement and several locked doors that they only got in 4 presses before the beast appeared, and Living Nightmare was in play by then, which meant that all the zombie heroes rolled 4 fight dice despite losing a fight dice to a button press.

Which brings me to my other rules question. This didn't come up, since they only managed to get 4 button presses, but if the heroes manage to hit all 10 buttons, zombie heroes start with 2 wounds...does this mean that any "Youth" zombie heroes are automatically killed?

And, even though the zombies won, I have to ask just because of the chupacabra and the walking inferno's abilities - have you considered allowing the zombie lord some sort of self-heal power, whether it be from directly killing a hero, from his zombie heroes killing a hero, or from voluntarily sacrificing X zombie heroes - perhaps requiring that the sacrificed hero(es) be on the same space? I kind of wonder if it would make him TOO powerful, but if it required sacrificing zombie heroes (especially if it required sacrificing more than one), that might maintain the balance, since it's the zombie heroes that really become the zombie lord's right hand in hunting down the heroes. Maybe if it only required sacrificing one zombie hero, that hero could be removed from the game to further tamp down the zombie lord's power in exchange for prolonging his life.

We have had a blast with every one of the beasts, and my players are clamoring for a rematch with the zombie lord next time we play.