Today’s post is something quite different to the norm – instead of sharing painted models, I’m sharing some Character Cards for Zombicide 2nd Edition importing the survivors from Flying Frog’s Last Night On Earth.

Some time ago, I found Zombicide character sheets for the LNOE core box characters and Marouda and I have been using those for a year or so, but I’ve personally just never been completely satisfied with them. Some of the skills seemed a little more random, and the character descriptions have also been subtly changed in several cases. To be fair, the “official” Zombicide “promo” characters have skills that are all over the place – Not-Angela Lansbury starts with a flamethrower and has the option for Bloodlust: Combat on orange for example – but we still wanted skills that overall made sense for the characters thematically.

Marouda and I used the little capsule Bios in the LNOE rulebooks as well as the descriptions on tvtropes as our general inspiration guide. TVtropes actually being pretty useful as it often describes a character’s skill/ability in LNOE as the basis for the trope they were attatching, which gave us a decent basis for the Zombicide skills without having to refer to the LNOE character cards which are away-away in the LNOE box on top of a shelf in the shed, far away from our computers. I also changed a couple of their names and descriptions, some to fit the card space and some that just work better than the ones we had printed, I think.

Our “Design Ethos” was to make skill selections that basically made sense for the characters without falling into the “overpowered” trap that a lot of homebrew characters often fall into. While I’ve tried to make all of the characters still viable, I like giving players (us!) difficult choices and interesting characters more than a series of superhero ninja assassins. Even with that, some of the characters lean heavily into some “specialisations”, though…

Sheriff Anderson – Cop Driver made obvious sense. Since he’s been preparing for an eventuality he hoped would never come while living in a small rural town, I figured he’d be a shot with firearms including a rifle, hence sniper and the lean-in to him being a ranged character with pretty effective shooting skills. As a small-town cop, we also gave him Born Leader so as to better boss others around.

Billy – Sheriff Anderson’s son. A troubled youth and track star. We loaded him up on movement skills to represent both speed and cardio with a token amount of ranged skills as I’m sure his father would have trained him in firearms use from a young age. Taunt took care of the troubled youth aspect so he could be obnoxious and call the zombies towards him. Add in the once-per-turn use of Slippery from the “Youth” tag and he’s a highly mobile character who could be good for getting past zombies and grabbing objectives. Just don’t get caught…

Father Joseph. Another Born Leader due to his position with his parish, Joseph’s background suggests that he does not use firearms. Since this isn’t really a rule option for Zombicide, we leant his combat skills towards melee which just natirally encourages that sort of build ingame. Shove repesents essentially “turn undead” via the power of his faith, while Lifesaver represents inspiration allowing fellow survivors to break away from zombies to escape to him. This means that Father Joseph can either be played as a straightforward melee character or as a more nuanced leader/crowd controller.

Nurse Becky is the first character that I did some naming shenanigans with. In case you missed my original LNOE post back in 2020, this picture should provide a lot of people with the reference. 

We obviously gave her the Medic skill, and Low Profile & Lifesaver also fit the healer role. The confident shotgun pose of the figure indicated that she should also have combat skills, and so we went with “go melee, ranged, or support” choices rather than specialising her down the support role.

Jake Cartwright is a resourceful drifter who in LNOE actually has a skill that translates directly to “Destiny” in Zombicide. We had already used that skill once or twice in our homebrew Survivor cards before we got to Jake, and so while we did give him Destiny initially, we swapped it out for “Hold Your Nose” which allows him a free search action upon killing a zombie, indoors or outdoors. This still fit him being very resourceful as well as the drifter aspect of being able to forage in places others would perhapos avoid. Rotten and Toxic Immunity fit with his assumed hygiene levels and ..enhanced immune system, and looking at the model suggests a melee focus, so we went with that as well.

In LNOE, Sally’s description is “The High School Sweetheart” – which is fine but we wanted her to stand on her own a bit more and so we changed her description to something also accurate that takes into account that she’s rarely going to be in our games alongside her paramour, Billy. We do draw our survivors randomly, after all. Her description says she’s Billy’s sweetheart, she’s also a troubled youth, and not much else. So a bit of a clean slate. We gave her pretty much an all-rounder set of skills that should make her interesting to play without being overly powerful.

Johnny is “The Highschool Quarteback”, but given that I do like to often slightly de-Americanise my games for something a bit more local or at least generic. We changed it to “Football Hero” instead which is still as trope-riffic and allows us to tell him he played a great game and tell him we liked his article in the newspaper. His description lists him as a bit of a beast and a tank despite still being a high schooler, so we didn’t desigate him as a “Youth” and went with some appropriate-feeling Melee and Movement skills as he’s obviously in his final year.

Jenny the Farmer’s Daughter is also a bit of a blank slate. She’s works on the farm and can beat up the boys when they get too fresh. Her model also wields a chainsaw, so we went with making her a Melee Specialist. In LNOE she’s also apparently a “teen” character, but… look at the model. Yeah. so we made her an adult woman instead of a Zombicide “Youth” for obvious reasons.

That’s it for this post. We also made a few others and are still in the process of working out cards to add other appropriate models (Berkeley!) to the Zombicide Roster as well as a bunch of the Marvel Zombies “Bystanders” so that they’re not so much of a waste of nice sculpts and painting time (they could just as easily be the cards you draw anyway, simple counters or meeples given the value of the way they play in MZ). As I said up top, it’s something pretty different to the usual, and not a painted model showcase, but it still kinda fits in with Dave Stone’s Apocalypse Me challenge this month. 

These cards were all made thanks to Wuxyteo’s website (not linked due to not secure – google it and you’ll be good). He’s had a downloadable version available for quite some time, but as I have an aversion to downloading .exe files from insecure websites (weirdly!) it wasn’t until I revisited it this weekend and found a web-based version had been added that we finally got to create these character cards!