New THE WALKING DEAD Tabletop RPG Announced For 2023

AMC Networks, Free League Publishing, and Genuine Entertainment have partnered together to bring us a new official tabletop RPG for The Walking Dead Universe. The game will debut on Kickstarter in Spring 2023 that will give you a chance to get early access to the core rulebook, a starter set, and other premium accessories and limited run exclusives before its Fall 2023 retail release. Not sure why they need to run all that through Kickstarter rather than just having a special pre order period that could offer those same goodies though. Regardless, the game sounds like it will be a lot of fun for fans of the series and survival games. As Chief Content Officer of The Walking Dead Universe, Scott M. Gimple, puts it:

The Walking Dead has always been about characters – and audiences, by extension – facing impossible life and death choices… …Now, fans can face these choices head on, putting themselves in the world of the Walking Dead – at any time in the timeline, encountering familiar faces and places and brand-new ones and, within our apocalypse, making the biggest choice: Who are you going to be? We’ve seen a lot of stories in the Walking Dead Universe, now it’s time to see yours.

The game will put a new spin on the Year Zero engine and will make players not only hone their physical skills but deeply explore what makes them tick. The game is more about the human choices you make in the face of the apocalypse and how you decide to survive than it is about killing walkers, though I’m sure there is plenty of that if you want. You can choose to spend a ton of time fortifying your  strongholds and figuring out the details of surviving, or you can put that in the background and focus on the human drama. The goal is to make each game session feel like an episode of The Walking Dead. 

If you’re not sold on it though, you can check out the limited Liveplay series that will be released. The actual play will feature original events pulled from the series writers room as it follows new characters who intersect with core story elements and cross paths with a familiar face or two. 

You can keep up to date with news and previews on the official site or follow Free League Publishing on Twitter and Facebook.