The Tipping Point of the Zombie Craze

The zombie genre, like all trends, waxes and wanes as excellent titles by talented people are drowned out by the cascading wave of others merely attempting to capitalize on the trend. It isn’t exactly difficult to understand why the undead find themselves coming and going through our collective consciousness, the themes and moods lend themselves to horrors and fears that have become all but ingrained into our very being. From the panic of diseases to the mutually assured annihilation of the species, the premise plays on the primal fears of the human experience.

The Cavaliers of Mars Kickstarter is hurtling toward its final hours and we had the chance to catch up with developer Rose Bailey for a few quick questions about this new project as part of Onyx Path Publishing’s Many Worlds. One Path. line-up of excellent RPGs.

Cavaliers of Mars Kickstarter is a swashbuckling adventure setting from Rose Bailey, longtime developer of Vampire: The Requiem and other World of Darkness titles. Cavaliers draws inspiration from pulp fantasy and historical fiction, adding a modern edge and an exotic setting.

As we (that is, Michelle Lyons-McFarland, co-owner of Growling Door Games, and I) started to plan out our proposed sourcebooks for Chill 3rd Edition, I noticed that one thing the 2nd Edition had promised but never produced was a book called The Living Dead. We started thinking about how that might work with our vision of Chill, and we realized that, if you’ll pardon a bit of metaphor, grave dirt is fertile soil for horror.

In planning out the book, though, I realized a couple of very important things, and they both stemmed from the same thought: the undead are ghosts with bodies. Before I get to the two epiphanies I had about outlining and writing the book, let’s unpack that thought a little.

Written in 1967 by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock is a historical fiction novel and ghost story set in a girls’ boarding school located in Australia. A critically-acclaimed movie based on the book was made in 1975 by Peter Weir. Now, this literary classic slated to be a reimagining of Picnic at Hanging Rock. In 2018, it will be released as an Amazon mini-series starring Natalie Dormer from HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Penguin Classics has just released a new edition of Picnic at Hanging Rock, with an introduction by novelist Maile Meloy. The story was Joan Lindsay’s debut as a novelist at age 70, and is considered to be one of Australia’s greatest literary works. Set in a Victorian 1900, the plot circles around the disappearance of three girls who attended Appleyard College for Young Ladies. The mystery, deftly told, is only the beginning of the story behind this book, however. Lindsay, who wrote the novel in less than two weeks, blurs the line between fantasy and reality, never revealing whether or not these young ladies were real people who disappeared or if they were figments of her imagination.

Return now to dying Mars in its last age of glory. A planet of flashing swords and choking sands, of winking courtesans and lantern-lit canal cities.

Mars, where fortune and heartbreak are two sides of the same obsidian chit, where lost cities and dry oceans stretch between the last bastions of civilization. Where the First Martians, the monument-builders, are but a haunted memory. Where the Red Martians become decadent and reckless in their last days. Where the Pale Martians rule the wastes, remembering a history whose weight would crush a lesser people.