Cheers to the persistent world Arelith for having a little April fools fun.  I logged in Epistemi and found myself just outside of Bendir.  Before long a group of zombies - the Bendir guards themselves - came ambling at me, moaning “Brainssss” all the way. Everyone - the caravan master, the hin guards, the merchants - had turned into a zombie and were hellbent on destroying the living.

Then some PC zombies attacked, I fought as hard as I could, but in truth I  succumbed fairly quickly - only to be turned into a zombie myself!

I played as a zombie for a while, but a 9 strength Wizard with no spells, completely encumbered and walking at a snail’s pace is not much of a monster. It’s really pretty pathetic.

At first, I was a bit thrown by the prank.  I mean, I had really just wanted to play as normal, and the change was a bit irritating.  But then I came around to the idea and had fun in the little bit of time that I did play. 

Thinking about the possibilities of such events as the Arelith April Fools is intriguing - large scale events scripted to fundamentally change play.  The novelty of such play is learning the rules of the game all over again.  Of course the zombie apocalypse scenario didn’t ‘really’ happen in the milieu of Arelith, it was a just a joke (one that I can imagine took some serious scripting effort). In a sense, this is much like the ‘unreliable narrator’ device in fiction writing, adapted to gaming.  Very cool and creative on the part of the developers.