The combat system for Thrive to Survive is based on the chaos of combat and how enemies react to each other while fighting rather than simple attacks and health pools. As characters get stronger they are able to use more combat maneuvers that manipulate how strikes land in combat and what they do to their enemy, after all in the end you have to destroy the head!

While at some points you may want to build a wall to keep out the dead, other times you may need to break one down to escape a situation. Thrive to Survive gives rules for handling buildings, obstacles and construction so that every player can interact with the world how they see fit.

Part of what makes a zombie apocalypse game so enticing is the realism of how a person would deal with an apocalypse. Keeping a fine balance of simple rules and realism allows for an easygoing and exciting adventure.

There are an infinite number of ways someone can survive the zombie apocalypse. While the most common thoughts about surviving are how can you kill the most undead as possible, you have to think of thriving as well. From farming for your own food, Creating tools and equipment to help others, Medical knowledge to keep people alive, and even computer skills to access old data or create something new! To capture this the character creation gives you access to skills across the board, abilities your survivor possesses, and other features to make your survivor unique.

Each survivor builds from the ground up by picking skills, talents, attributes, disabilities, features, and equipment. These sections are all connected in creating the gameplay of each survivor.

• Increasing your Attributes will make all skills and actions related to those easier.
• Increasing skills will make you an expert in specific areas.
• Talents will give you one of a kind abilities like being able to lead your fellow survivors more efficiently.
• Disabilities will give you negatives to your gameplay but give you additional points to spend in other categories.
• Features show you how the survivor interacts with the world in ways like how much health their body has, or how charismatic they are in their interactions.

While there are a plethora of skills, most of them can be broken into a couple groups, Combat skills that determine your attacks such as the blade skill. Action skills that let you attempt something beyond the mundane such as acrobatics, and Crafting. Crafting allows you to design, build, repair and upgrade any item in Thrive to Survive. The more complex an item is the more time, material and skill is needed to create it. If you want to stick some nails through a baseball bat to cause some extra mayhem, you’ll need some training in weapons crafting. But if you want to hand craft a new design for a 50 caliber machine gun, you’re going to need some specialized skill and a lot of time.


Crafting skills also build on each other, meaning that like in the string map shown here you have to have some skill in the previous crafting level in order to get the next. For example to become skilled in crafting explosives you will need a few levels of engineering first.

Don’t think that all the information in the book is just for survivors! a large section is devoted to the Apocalypse Master(AM). the one who runs the world, builds the apocalypse, and has a story for the survivors to play through.

Everything the AM needs from 12+ zombie types, bandit NPC stat blocks, how to create encounters, example maps, intro storylines, and much more are included in these pages. There are rules for building your zombie infection, how it works, how it affects the world, and how the survivors will interact with it. All of this is to keep rules consistent, fun and create a smooth world for the survivors to thrive in.