War Against the Walking Dead by Sean T. Page

War Against the Walking Dead by Sean T. Page is the sequel to The Official Zombie Handbook (UK). Sean's first book was very much a survival guide, which hopefully will help you to live through the first three months of a global zombie apocalypse. The sequel is a very different beast indeed. It not only teaches you and your fellow survivors how to fight back against the zombie hordes but actively encourages such a strategy. Put simply, sitting back and hoping for the best is not an option. At least not if you want to survive in the long term.
This brings me to the question I posed at the end of my last post - how do you expect your zombie apocalypse campaign to end? I don't expect many of you will have given it much thought. To be honest, neither had I. Plus, you can envisage as many endings as you have for reasons why the apocalypse began. I envisaged my campaign going in one of two directions. First, there was the happy ending. Team Vampifan helps find a cure for the zombie disease and slowly the world returns to normal. That was my original planned ending when I first started playing ATZ. After all, a zombie cure was part of the original ATZ rules, prior to Better Dead Than Zed being published. However, I have since decided that there is no cure for the zombie disease. Secondly, there was the uncertain but deadly future. All Things Zombie segues into an After The Horsemen campaign. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and all kinds of supernatural creatures rise and threaten the world. Vampifan meets the woman of his dreams, Vampirella, and together they kick supernatural ass.
Well, I can tell you now that neither of those will happen. If I do play ATH, it will be a separate campaign from my ATZ campaign. My ATZ campaign will feature nothing but humans and zombies. Fortunately, I now have a long term goal for Team Vampifan and it is this - amass as many followers as possible and take the war to the zombies. I have set my campaign in the fictional Mayhem City, U.S.A. Vampifan wants to rid Mayhem City of every last zombie and reclaim it for humanity. Looking even further afield, he wants to destroy as many zombies in the U.S.A. as possible in as short a time as possible. Thanks to War Against the Walking Dead I have seen how the zombie apocalypse will end and the future is very bleak for humanity unless urgent action is taken.

Vampifan is chased by part of a meta-horde

Sean T. Page presents one possible, very plausible, outcome to the zombie apocalypse that I have to admit, really captured my imagination. It is the frightening concept of zombie meta-hordes. What is a meta-horde? It is when large hordes of zombies group together to form one gigantic horde numbering in the millions. Such a concept is not new. It was mentioned in World War Z by Max Brooks. The concept is also mentioned in The Walking Dead comics. Rick encounters part of one and promptly runs away from it as fast as possible. The novel Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne ends with the heroes fleeing a very large meta-horde and are saved by the U.S. Navy. Even attacks by helicopter gunships and a naval bombardment do little to thin the numbers of the meta-horde in Bourne's novel. Sean speculates that unless left unchecked, meta-hordes of 100 million zombies will form in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. In addition, about a dozen smaller meta-hordes, numbering more than five million zombies, will also emerge across the globe, including one in the U.K. They are described as "a tsunami of the dead, huge meta-hordes, which will at some point, extinguish human life from virtually every part of the globe."
Frankly, that scares the life out of me! All of which begs the question, how do you defeat a meta-horde? War Against the Walking Dead offers some solutions but they all come at a great price. Nuking the meta-horde is the favoured tactic but do you really want to create a large radio-active wasteland, assuming you can find a nuclear warhead in the first place? No, the best tactic is to stop the meta-horde forming in the first place. This is why Sean advises taking the war to the zombies as soon as possible. Left unchecked they will eventually form into a meta-horde. It may not happen for a few years but it will happen and when it does you are well and truly screwed.
Fortunately, War Against the Walking Dead offers loads of practical advice and tactics to deal with the zombie menace before it grows into a meta-horde. This is where the book really excels and these sections were the ones I enjoyed reading the most. The book is not without its faults. Again, it is marred by typo errors that should have been caught by a competent proof-reader. The sections on zombie outbreaks throughout history should be taken with a large dose of salt. Sean does labour the point about meta-hordes and he does have a worrying fascination with the pop group Culture Club. However, I am  prepared to overlook these flaws and award this book a 10 out of 10 rating. The main reason for such a high score is because this a book that made me think. It made me re-evaluate my thoughts on how a zombie apocalypse will end, and more specifically, how I envisage my own ATZ campaign will end. It has given me a long-term goal for Team Vampifan, which they didn't have before. And it validates my decision to collect as many zombie miniatures as I can. I now have an excuse to use my complete horde in a single scenario, although I'm going to have to come up with some new rules for using that amount of zombies. Team Vampifan versus 1,000+ zombies won't constitute an attack on a meta-horde but at some point my heroes are going to have to enter the centre of Mayhem City and deal with the horde that has gathered there. That's not going to be easy but it will be one hell of a scenario.