That Time I Played Maid RPG in My Zombie RPG Campaign And Completely Changed The Story

For the next session of my zombie survival campaign, I focused on the social table and figured I would change the system to better reflect that. Enter Maid RPG, the first Japanese RPG to be translated into English. This also marked the first time I’ve done a cross-game stat change, where I take characters from one game and restat them up in another game. The only other time I tried that was when I took multiple OSR characters and plopped them into Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The game is practically a treasure trove of new content to discover and so, at one point, I’ll have to return to this game. But for now, I should get to the basics of what happened with this gameplay shift.

For one, it’s similar to Ghostbusters in that an attribute determines a D6 result. However, whereas Ghostbusters determines the number of dice you roll by the attribute you have, Maid RPG only multiplies the single dice roll you make by the attribute you have. There’s two more attributes for this, but I managed to do the exchange rather easily. Unfortunately, I lost the sheets I made, so… Yeah.

Onto the story! The group enter the mansion of Dante, an eccentric billionaire who prefers to be called the Exterminator of Demons. My character tries to kill him, but is stopped by Brenda, Dante’s butler. Before Dante can explain who he is and what he wants, a demon busts out and the group has to fight him using the Maid RPG rules… There’s even a meta joke where Dante insists that the group use his rules.

After the demon’s taken care of, Dante tells the group to get dressed as maids. This leads to a split party scene where each of the characters interacts with the people in the mansion. My character gets Brenda’s suit while she puts on a maid’s outfit despite her muscular stature. Ken comes across a sickly maid as a UFO lands in the backyard, Hinako gets into conflict with a woman named Hajiko, and the Doctor is talking with Dante over working on the Ghost Trap, only to notice not only aliens but also that a phantom thief has been warning Dante about a machine.

The group head outside, their newly made friends coming with them, and fight the aliens that came down. However, the Proton Pack could only hurt negatively charged beings like zombies, and so they don’t work on the aliens. The Doctor is quick to realize that these bug-like aliens are known as Ghuls, cybernetic aliens who absorb and assimilate stuff. Basically, discount Borg. They’ve invaded the simulation because they want Mythic back and they’re going the gentle route rather than straight up unplugging it and killing everyone inside it.

They ask me to hand Mythic over, only to find that it’s Malareth who owns Mythic. Not only that, but he’s also the guy who handed Dante his house and maids, which might explain how he’s able to alter reality so that all the skill rolls are done via Maid RPG rather than Ghostbusters RPG. However, Malareth realizes he’s up shit’s creek without a paddle and the Ghul leader and I team up to attack him. Meanwhile, Malareth slips that he’s the one responsible for the zombies and Dante, upset at this due to how much chaos the zombies caused, opts to kill him.

Though, it’s merely a distraction to get the others onto the ship, as the group can’t kill Malareth as he is. On the ship, the sickly maid, Tsukasa, faints and the group, much to my character’s chagrin, insist on saving her and so go find (read: create) an island with shrubs that could cure her. Unfortunately for them, Mythic doesn’t want to play that way and tries to blow them up.

The Doctor, however, quickly recognizes this and gets the others off the ship before it blows up. He explains that Mythic has been nothing more than a Dalek AI. Bane, leader of the Ghuls, explained that they used Mythic for war until someone took it and turned it into a storytelling AI. In other words, this whole time, Mythic was a literal Killer GM. Making matters worse, the Ghuls have deemed the Go-Busters to be failures and try to kill them as they’re being saved by Maliss.

Overall, this one session is the game changer for the entire campaign. Even more than I realized. Not only did it introduce aliens into a zombie-themed game, but also revealed that Mythic was a Dalek and that, after this, the campaign would ride fast into the endgame. Though that will be discussed another time.

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