The Walking Dead - A tale of boot camps and laughter

I finally got around to using the character creation rules from the Days Gone Bye expansion. This was so much fun to do.

The dice that you award to each attribute, the traits, the nerve value etc. all carry a point cost to help you create your totals. My version of Daryl Dixon weighs in at 50 points. Being as i think bows or cross bows cost around the 22 points mark, this will be a costly mini to take in a 150 point game, but worth a punt in a bigger game. That said, I wouldn’t want such an important (if you’re a TV version fan that is) and influential character to be a 20 point mini. The blue dice for shooting and the high nerve bumped his score up quite a bit. The made-up trait that i gave Daryl I scored at 5 points. This seemed fair, because a couple of the game’s official re-roll related traits came in at 5 points as well. The fact that it is only applicable if you take a bow and only if you fail an ammo check roll makes me think that perhaps i’ll tweek this to 3 or 4 points at some point in the future. All but one other trait were all strait from the official game traits in the expansion.

I used the blank character cards Pdf shared on line by Mantic games, scanned it and used it on a PowerPoint as a Jpeg. Then it was just a case of using text boxes and cube symbols to populate the card. The pictures were either taken from google images or were black and white effect close-ups of my painted minis.

My hobo with a shot gun is Mike Watts. This is a corruption of Mike Watt from the UK sitcom Spaced (Nick Frost was the actor that played Mike). Beyond the name there is little to tie the two characters. My Mike was a US reservist who saw action in the 1st Gulf War, got injured in action and sadly went off the rails with pain killer and alcohol addiction on his return to Atlanta. He’s the tramp everyone walked past and rarely offered money to in pre-apocalypse times. Now his skills with a gun and combat training have made him a reluctant hero. He’s still bitter and the wounds still hurt. I took 2 points off of his total score because of the made up trait i gave him. ‘War wound’ reduces his running speed by an inch, once injured, unless he is healed to full strength again. This could hamper him quite badly, but until i play with the character I won’t know whether a 2 point reduction is enough.

Juan Lopez is a runner for a gang. The Lopez gang in fact. The tattoos show he has been inside prison. Juan has a spider tattoo on his left elbow, three dots on his right wrist, a tear on his cheek and roman numerals XII. The 12th letter of the alphabet is L, L is for Lopez, using numbers to represent letters seems to be popular in some gang tattoo art. The tear means that he is mourning or set to avenge the passing of friend or loved one. Lopez is a Spanish word for wolf. I have a Wolf emblem on the back of his jacket (from a 40K space wolf transfer sheet i had).

Sam Jones is a Fireman (Yes, Fireman Sam). I gave him the Strong trait because, if I want to field him with the weapons as per the model, I would give him an axe and pistol. The axe in the equipment deck i had in mind was a ‘bulky’ classed Felling Axe. I haven’t built and painted him yet, but I hope this will spur me on.

Once I had messed around on PowerPoint i printed and scanned the completed cards. With some trial and error i hope I can get the scale right compared with my other character cards in the box.

I will probably be using these guys more in Last Days Zombie Apocalypse, but this has helped flesh out their character a bit in my mind and has been more fun to do than i expected.