Fleshmongers is a supplement for UKG’s Year of the Zombie (YotZ) RPG, which uses the D20 Modern rules under the Open Gaming License. YotZ is a game of the “classic” zombie apocalypse, in that the recently deceased have begun reanimating as cannibalistic ghouls that prey on the living. Mankind quickly loses the battle against the undead, and the total breakdown of civilization takes place fairly soon after the Rising.

With the loss of law and order the very dregs of humanity are left free to unleash their bestial nature and manmade terror and depravity soon rivals the mayhem of the Risers for sheer horror. The worst of these become Fleshmongers (slavers), despised and liable to be shot on sight by any right-thinking people. This is their book.

Due to the mature subject matter, the whole YotZ line is intended only for mature players, and this book in particular is NOT for the younger or more fainthearted reader. You have been warned.

Before going into detail about the book, I should issue a mild disclaimer about my background. I am not an enthusiast of any permutation of the D20 rules, so I can’t really offer an evaluation of the crunch of the book. Nearly all of the system-specific bits are confined to the stat blocks of example characters, making the book a good resource for any GM running a zombie game, regardless of system or setting.

Presentation

Fleshmongers is a 50-page full-color PDF, and thoughtfully includes a printer-friendly version to save precious ink if one wishes to produce a hard copy. Curiously, it also comes wrapped with a strange and utterly pointless html frontend whose only function is to offer you the choice of viewing either the color or print-friendly version of the book. I just don’t understand why this is better than simply having the two files in a folder and allowing the user to pick one from Explorer as every other PDF publisher does.

Things improve quite a bit once inside the PDF itself. The text is well-organized into eight chapters and an appendix, decently illustrated with sketch-style artwork. As with the other YotZ, Fleshmongers is presented in a narrative “wrapper” in the form of extensive excerpts from the “Diaries of Becka,” the journals of a survivor introduced in the main rulebook. The diary sections are very well written and really help set the tone and atmosphere of the game’s gritty world.

The artwork is a bit rough, no doubt intended to evoke Becka’s own sketches of the people and places she encounters in her journey through the world of the Rising. Most of the art succeeds fairly well in this aim, being a cut above the other art of this style seen in some of UKG’s other YotZ products.

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