The month before the wedding, we went on a Stag Do organised by my brother (He who finds awesome things), and in a change from regular Stag protocol (go around a hundred pubs and drink them dry), we decided to travel a hundred miles south to Worcester and engage in a day of beating and shooting things...
This is Zombie Boot Camp...
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| Before... |
The day started with weapons training and orientation, first how to hold a shield and baton and how to lock the shields together to resist charges, easy enough if you're already trained in the doing of it, but problematic if you have no prior.
Our group had several with prior...
The other group sadly had no such experience.
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| After... |
and as we ended up going up against each other, that really wasn't too fair, but the rules were simple, if you got hit, hand in the air and walk back to the other side, easy way to get most of your people through it play it like bulldog, throw the biggest buggers in the middle and let the fast movers run around the side. Easy enough stuff, but the shields were designed for people with smaller arms than most of our gang, so we ended up with a variety of friction burns where the shield was rubbing against it.
Then we're on to rifle training, grabbed a rifle and went out into the training area, ran through a few drills to get used to the weapon and work on firing positions and movement tactics.
Again, simple enough stuff, just enough to get people into the spirit of not shooting each other in the ass (or indeed, shooting themselves in the foot..) although the rifles all had splitters in the end of the barrel so the paintball came out as a shower of paint rather than anything that was going to leave a mark.
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| Somebody wake up Hicks... |
Then to the meat of the day, two live exercises where we took a van ride to a deserted area not far from the training camp, there to put the new skills to the test, not so much 28 days later as 28 minutes later, but it's all good.
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| Before... |
So, the idea in the first place was to wander around an industrial estate, watch out for civilians or scientists to recover, beat the s*** out of zombies, and then pull out of there. Easy enough, but here's where the problem occurred for me...
I don't LARP these days, but I have done, so I'm familiar with hit protocol, don't target certain areas, if you get hit, acknowledge the hit, and make sure you're not hitting too hard in return. We'd had the briefing at the beginning of the day, we knew we were going to get pulled around, pushed over, specific rules like not being able to grapple with the zombies, don't hit in the head, and don't use the shield as a weapon.
Fine with that...
Unfortunately the zombies didn't have the same rules...
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| After... |
Now I have to say that I understand that you can't have the zombies going down in seconds or every fight is going to be a real short one, and I understand that for most people, they're going to be too busy hacking away at things to think about what's going on. However, after the fourth time the zombies had pulled the shields sideways to disengage them, then started making one-two hits against the shields (the first to knock the shield back, the second to hit
you because your shield is now against your head), a few of us were starting to get a little frayed. I got ragged to the ground at least once, and that was because I was keeping to protocol and not grappling, but the fact that the zombie in question was specifically pulling against the shield and ignoring the hits going in at ground level was more than a little irritating
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| Damage Immunity: Blue plastic batons... |
When the zombies didn't go down under a few hundred hits, then just fell over when it was time to move on to the next area, it was difficult for many of our group to stay enthused, it didn't
feel like we were winning at anything, just staying in one place long enough to set up the next area, then moving on.
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| Nothing like a few hundred rounds a minute to make you feel safer... |
The shooting went better, zombies go down when you shoot them, and it's far less physically demanding than getting ragged around and hitting something a few hundred times, sensible to do the more physical stuff first and move to the easier stuff to finish. We also got the sense that what we were doing was having an effect, mainly because the zombies didn't want to get any closer when we were scoring hits, even with the splitter in the barrel, so we got the sense we were actually succeeding at what we were supposed to be doing.
Overall, not a bad day. If I'm honest, I probably wouldn't do it again, although they have an alternate event that runs at night that I would find more interesting, and sadly they stopped doing the werewolf version, which I think we'd have got into a lot more, because everyone loves Dog Soldiers...
The problem for me was that when we were mashing the zombies, they were ignoring the hits, and while I understand why they were doing that, it's a problem when you're wanting to make some effect and everything you do is being ignored. It's also a problem when your rules of engagement are different to theirs, and again, I understand why that's the case, but it's very frustrating when you're trying to keep to those rules and the other side is ignoring them. In at least one case, I know one of our side smashed a zombie into some tyres after it ragged one of us over and then kept coming, we got the warning for it, and we kept to the rules after that where we could, but it wasn't easy.
I think that it's an excellent day out for those with no experience of LARP, certainly the other groups had a lot of fun, and it's run by a good group, they're offering a very specific experience and they deliver, just don't go expecting full contact LARP, because it really isn't.
More details can be found at zombiebootcamp.co.uk
