Morts! (Setup, Chargen, Session 0)

Today I (Michelle) am guest starring on Matt’s blog as I’m running a new game for us, and I don’t have a journal of my own anymore that isn’t for work! It’s been a super hot minute since I’ve run a game, but I’ve gotten the itch to take on a GM role again and so here we are. 

Trial and error has shown that I work best with games that don’t have too many GMing moving parts, so I’m going to stick with FATE Core – I also like Accelerated, but I want a little more granularity than Accelerated provides for genre emulation. That probably seems funny given that we’re talking about FATE, but no judgment, plz.

My players are Amanda, Gus, Cael, and Matt. Amanda and Gus are old veterans at the table. Matt’s going to get to take on a player role, so Cael and Matt actually get to be players at the same time for once! Gus and Matt were both players the last time I GM'd, while Cael and Amanda haven’t been in one of my games before, so overall it’s a pretty balanced table. 

I decided that I’d take a gander at the published settings. I really like to do emulation games – specific IP/settings – but those work best when everyone knows at least a little about the setting. I went from there to looking through the FATE Core Published settings, and presented a list of six – half properties I like, half published materials. The group ended up choosing Morts, a setting published by Evil Hat in 2016 and written by Lara Turner.

The elevator pitch behind Morts is basically take one part Empire Records and one part Zombieland, and swirl in a pinch of Community and a dash of The Office, and there you are. All the characters, dead or alive, are morticians, responsible for keeping Zombies out of the outskirts of Eugene, OR (or Cascadia, as the people in charge reshuffled a bit after zombies came to live and took a huge bite out of all the densely populated areas). Morticians get free room and board and keep the zombies at arm’s length from the city they're attached to. There are no qualifications and very few questions – it’s like the Peace Corps, but involves zombie killing and is open to sentient dead who manage not to try to eat people and can get through a short interview. 

Of our group of Morticians, we have the following characters: 

• Bonesey O’ Sullivan, a Black Market Lich who doesn’t remember anything prior to his time as a skeleton and isn’t entirely sure how he got this way, except that he clearly doesn’t know enough necromancy to do it himself. He is fond of taking off his arm and using it as a club with his other arm (I Am My Own Weapon). 
• River McNannis, who’s been a mortician forever and kinda likes it. She uses a Spiked Baseball Bat and generally directs the newbies in how to do their job in an unofficial sort of way, seeing as how she's (Not) The Boss.
• Oscar Blair, who’s the ghost of a florist who unwisely went to visit his sister and got jumped by zombies. He uses a G-g-arden Weasel of the cultivator variety ( https://www.gardenweasel.com/") as his weapon of choice. 
• Edison Poe, a Temporarily Inconvenienced Movie Star who wants to make it big in the entertainment industry and is just waiting for his big break. He has a Badass Pump Shotgun Like in T2 that he’s not at all good with, but it makes a great sound and he looks very impressive holding it.

We played last night, so you get the write-up later today!