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Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source zombie survival game. Despite its roguelike presentation and roots, its current iteration can best be described as a rigorously immersive simulation. There is no orb of Zot or Amulet of Yendor, just the open world and a million ways to die.
A little over a decade ago, a lone coder named Whales created Cataclysm. The game immediately got some traction thanks to its surprising depth, but Whales ultimately decided to move on to other things. Some diehard fans put together a fork of the project called Dark Days Ahead, and nine years later here we are. The DDA devs have continually iterated on Whales's original vision and today anyone can work on the project, which has recently benefited from a big push to make contributing easier by JSONizing a lot of what was once buried in impenetrable C++. This means you can make stuff for the game even if you didn't understand that sentence.
Cataclysm has always been cumbersome, but the DDA fork is particularly focused on simulationism as a primary design principle. This has led to some criticizing the game for becoming too complex, but I think that complexity is its greatest strength. There are plenty of games that give you simple, satisfying mechanics, there are far fewer games that ask you to pay attention to three different kinds of fatigue, air temperature, pain, morale, windchill, moon phase, posture, and encumbrance while chomping Xanax and jousting robots on a cow-drawn chariot you built out of wood and crabs. The learning curve is possibly worse than even Dwarf Fortress, but wild things can happen when you're standing at the intersection of that many different mechanics.
This will be a roleplay-focused LP and will draw heavily from audience participation. I will address game mechanics as they come up and guide our survivors toward interesting content, but please try not to spoil things before we run into them.