This is a group of zombie players that travel from venue to venue performing for human audiences. Take, for instance, The Shamblin’ Crooners. Most fascinating, however, are the groups that have repurposed the mechanics of Urban Dead to play a game so completely their own such that it resonates both in-game and out. Of course, death is a temporary state in Malton, so the circle of life and undeath ebbs and flows like a bloody river flowing to an eternal sea. To combat these “player killers,” an unofficial character class has evolved, and bounty hunters seek out and kill the player killers. Then there are those who play as survivors, but instead of helping their fellow humans fight the zombie hordes, they load up on shotguns and rampage around shopping malls, capping innocent bystanders and generally spreading chaos. There are players who devote their entire daily ration of action points to reviving their fallen comrades, and who may never actually fight zombies at all. For instance, those who prefer to play as survivors and log in to find that they have been chewed on during the night can move their shambling corpses to one of several dozen designated revive points - usually cemeteries - and stand in a queue to be brought back to life. This has created a number of conventions invented from whole cloth by the players on both sides of the grave, which in many ways is more interesting than the game itself. Urban Dead has its own mythology, much of which is documented in its dedicated wiki, and which includes the ability of certain individuals with the requisite training to revive those who have been infected with the strange zombie virus and restore the undead to the, ahem, sunny side of life. The rationing of action points is not an entirely new system - Kingdom of Loathing has been running a similar system since 2003 - but unlike life in the Kingdom, which mainly pits player characters against NPCs, running out of action points in Urban Dead can cause your survivor character to be dismembered and devoured by undead minions hungry for the bloody flavor of harman hambargars (that’s zombish for human hamburgers), or your zombie might end up getting a fire axe to the back of the skull and staying down for the count (requiring ten additional action points to stand up after a head shot). I’m not sure what they’re putting in the water in Malton, but it sure as heck isn’t caffeine. In an abandoned bar, in the street, wherever - you just pass out. When your action points are used up, you fall asleep. These action points are rationed to about fifty per day - they replenish at a rate of one per half hour, give or take. The game I’ve described, Urban Dead, is grid-based, and each movement on the map, use of an item, or search conducted uses one action point.
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