Zombie Apocalypse

ok considering that 2 out of the 3 boards i regularly visit have a huge thread on this subject i guess i'll infect this one as well. *chomp*

now discuss...

what are your zombie survival plans? Where will you run when they come to un-life? How often do you have hordes of undead zombies rampaging through cities in your campaign?

"No where to hide. No place to run. Your village will BURN like the heart of the SUN!" - Richard, Head warlock of the Brotherhood of Darkness, Lord of the 13 Hells, Master of the Bones, Emperor of the Black, Lord of the Undead, Lord of the Dance.

How often? Well, Tuesday night is Zombie Night. At all of the nightclubs zombies get in for a $10 cover charge then can have all they can eat. The clubs advertise on all of the suicide and depression message boards.

I figure on getting bit and joining the group and watching TV for eternity.

Honestly, in Marvel I've yet to run a zombie campaign. I've played in "All Flesh Must Be Eaten" and that was loads of fun.

A few thoughts on zombies...

1) The only horror movies I like, nay love, to watch are werewolf and zombie movies. That changed recently after watching Romero's "Land of the Dead", where (imho) the master of zombies failed terribly.

2) What in hades is up with all the zombie comic books out lately? And the rising popularity of zombie stuff in general? It's always been there, so why is it suddenly so much more popular?

3) I have not (yet) tried a zombie influenced thing in any gaming situation, but it does raise some very intriguing possibilities...

4) For personal zombie survival plans, I prefer my swords to guns (no reloading, no jamming), and I own a full suit of chainmail and leather armor (try biting through that, I dare ye!).

Available at Amazon!

WHU-RAH!

the one book no gamer should be without.


y'know it would really surprise me if the pentagon has come up with a zombie plan and scrapped it in favor of just asking Gamers what to do.

"No where to hide. No place to run. Your village will BURN like the heart of the SUN!" - Richard, Head warlock of the Brotherhood of Darkness, Lord of the 13 Hells, Master of the Bones, Emperor of the Black, Lord of the Undead, Lord of the Dance.

The first Mutants & Masterminds gave I ever ran was like a cross between Night of the Living Dead and Smallville. Big meteor comes to Earth, nukes are sent up and it breaks up, meteorites fall "harmlessly" to Earth. Most burn to dust in Earth's atmosphere, and wind currents carried this dust to every corner of the globe. The dust settled on everything, in the water, in the ground, into buildings through the air vents... and, about 24 hours later, the dead began to rise.

They were the "slow" Zombies seen in Romero's flicks, not the fast one seen in Russo's or Snyder's films. Still, when tens of millions of them rise at once, and no one's expecting it....

A few of the meteorites did survive the heat/friction of re-entry, and these bigger pieces, with their higher concentration of cosmic energy, granted superpowers to folks. Each one had enough energy to grant 1d10 folks powers, based on the size of the meteorite and other random factors. I had great plans for the campaign....

Now, the tricky thing I did to my players was not tell them it was going to be a Zombie Apocalypse game -- they just knew they'd be playing folks who all gained powers from some shared accident/event. Unfortunately, my players talked me into letting them play as themselves... and they all turned out very nasty when they had powers. One chose mind control and kept mind-zapping gang members into killing each other; most would only save "hot chicks" from the zombie hordes, and then the mentalist would mind-zap them into being our love-slaves; one with transmutation & teleportation powers tried to kill every other Super he came across, b/c he thought by doing so he'd gain more power, a la Highlander or Rising Stars... it was horrid.

Sounds like it's time for new players. *LOL* Just kidding.

My Marvel campaign, I tried to make it a straight up super hero campaign. My players played like it was The Tick. I couldn't even get them to cross a street. It was like on looooong drawn out episode of Seinfeld.

They loved it. I just got frustrated.

Well, like I told my son... if you're ever confronted by a group of blood-hungry zombies..........grab the biggest one, take-em down and eat *his* brains. The rest of the bunch won't mess with you after that. ;-)

A little more seriously, if there was somekind of zombie outbreak I would obviously want to get out of the city. Too many people in the cities, too tightly packed, too anti-social and disconnected. And I would, at all costs, stay away from hospitals and old folks homes. Graveyards not so much, as it would take one helluva an effort to dig your way out of coffin and grave.

Out in the country, and especially up north, smaller and less dense population centres make for small concentrations of zombies. Not to mention, countryfolk are alot more self-sufficient, social and cooperative... with each other anyway. It would be worth the effort to get in good with them.

Not being a gunsmith, or much of a shot last I checked, ie. 20+ years ago, and being good with my hands and light on my feet, I would go for the more personal and primitive weapons.

If I somehow got surrounded by a few, I would knee-cap'em first... and then tidy up once they were all down.

As for zombie campaigns; I haven'y GM'ed one using Marvel rules, but I have GM'ed a few in both ADnD, and other rules. I found that the Champions system, with it's segmented rounds, et al., was great for representing human vs. zombie combat.

I'd have to say that the BIG ADnD zombie game was my fav. It was set in the Forgotten Realms and centred around a wizard named Hector from southern Cormyr, peaceful land of the good king. Anyway, in Hector's pursuit of the money and power to be a grat and heroic wizard, a la Elminster, he became, first, the dupe of a foreign cult seeking to resurrect a long dead mage of great power named Sammaster (founder of the Cult of the Dragon) and then bring the CothD back into line with it's true mistress, Tiamat the Chaos-Queen.

To make a long tory short, the Cult of Tiamat used the Necronomicon (delivered to the cult by Hector) to raise, control, and empower a horde of undead (mostly zombies and skeletons) from an area of an ancient and vast battle named the Battle of the Bones. This enormous horde was then sent flooding into the Sunset and Tunland Vales. They destroyed all of the small towns and barbarian communites in their path, not discriminating between good and evil, with the more powerful wights empowered to create more undead from the fallen and their graveyards.

Nasssssssty, ssssstuff. And that is to say nothing of what has gone on with all of the Cultist and various demons, dragons and dragon-kin that have rallied to Tiamat and Sammy's side. Poor Cormyr.

Having dabbled in the martial arts I'd prefer sword to guns but I'd carry both were such a fiction to be made reality.

I've always had vampires in my MSH games throughout the years. Periodically my Zombie Master/Necromancer would assemble a legion of dead and march on some city for reasons I can't remember. I was a teenager when I ran such tales as "The Undead Wars", they were messy and simple. Good for venting and not much else.

Dr. A, yer campaign sounds like a load of fun though. I might steal it for my troop some day. (Givin your aka credit of course)

CWR

Well, i have never given much thought to what i would do in a zombie apocalypse, but i would probably hole up in a military complex preferably underground. On a gaming note i am developing a campaign something along the lines of the movies in which the PC's must survive and thrive amongst the undead. I plan to use the slow moving ones and the fast ones a la the new Dawn of the Dead. I, like another here, was VERY disappointed with Land of the Dead, zombies evolving? Please.

The idea of zombies, ahem, "evolving" I can deal with, but Land of the Dead?! What crap. And I'm as easy as the neighbourhood @#$%&, ahem, I mean "vertically challenged individual", when it comes to zombie movies!

Romero's zombies were evolving in Day of the Dead, dudes. Big Daddy's just Bud with a point or two more of Reason.

And couldn't Big Daddy also command/direct the other zombies?

At any rate, like I said, the "evolution" of zombies isn't a big deal to me, be the casue scientific or supernatural.

The evolution of a prototype viral weapon on the ultimate example of evolution, ie. Homo Sapiens Sapiens, within in uncontrolled environemnt was the basic premise behind the "Grendel's Dam", ie. zombie lords, in my old Champions campaign.

In that campaign an alien vessel crash landed in North America in the 50's. The military moved in to take possession, and one of the alien bodies recovered from the crash ened up killing and consuming a very high number of soldiers. It was thus code-named "Grendel" after the ravenous bog-spirit from the poem Beowulf.

Ultmiately, the military managed to concoct the "Grendel Virus" or G-Virus (I know, very original) using this alien's DNA....or whatever. The effect of this virus was to casue a "gradual" collapse of the victim's high faculties of reason (w/in 24 hours, give or take). This was accompanied by a corresponding increase in homicidal tendancies, and ultimately homicidal rages....not to mention a taste for human flesh, inheritted from the alien.

Once the faculties of reason, et al. collapsed entirely, the victim would die. However, within a variable amount of time following death an unexpected side-effect arose.... as a result of one or many "flies in the ointment" so to speak. This side-effect enabled the dead to rise as what the military continued to codename "grendels".

Now, as this virus passed from human to human with their varying degrees of "evoluitionary" potential (perhaps), the odd one would not only come back to life, but would also somehow regain some monstrous aspect of it's former intellect. These are called "Grendel's Dam". They can think, plan, restrain themselves, and command it's lesser counterparts.

After a few military units fell to well coordinated attacks ochastrated by Grendel's Dam, the Beowulf unit began to evolve.

While the campaign didn't progress far enough, I was ultimately planning to have some type of Evil Ernie type guy emerge... another evolution/reaction of the virus with actual genius, capable of controlling legions of zombies and using them to effect long-term and far reaching plans.

So, the evolition from a scientific standpoint is relatively easy, depending on the cause to some degree. Supernatural causes might be even easier, like, your basic animated husk might be highly suspectible to possession from unholy spirits. And if one figures it out, and then he tells two friends, and then they tell two friends, and so on, well, boom, evolved reanimated human corpses.

Man, I love hating zombies. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over.

Higher Power, Space Virus, Unholy Swarm, call it what you will but i just dont buy zombies, reanimated corpses, or the walking dead (with the exception of vampires) evolving into beings with intelligence past natural instinct, if they even have that. I mean, the whole zombie movie thing was first introduced to us as an army of the dead wanting to eat us all up and then......well, running out of food. LOL. Giving us one thing and then changing it years later cause it sounds scary is crap, i mean come on haven't we put up with enough of this Rob Leifeld-ish stuff to begin with. LOL. Sorry Rob, he's such an easy target i can't help myself. The ending of Land of the Dead was bad enough "They're just looking for a place of their own....like us." WTF!!!! Did that guy really think that given a turn of events that the zombies wouldn't eat him cause he was looking for food just like them. Thats my opinion and i'm sticking to it.

Allright, you primitive screwheads, listen up. See this? THIS is my BOOMSTICK!

In ADnD games, zombies and other forms of the undead are wonderful fodder whenever you need a few XP's. In Marvel, I've only done it a couple of times, and the zombies were under the control of some mutant with an undead-control power. Be interested to try a mass zombie uprising to see what happens, but I don't wish to #*@% up my campaigns right now. Oh, well, we get bored sometimes...

As far as a real zombie uprising, I say, let 'em come! They'll probably get their fill eating the surplus population (i.e. telemarketers, department store make-up counter workers, etc.) long before they get here, and I've been stockpiling! Doesn't look like the Rooskies are coming anytime soon, anyway.

Sorry, buoys and gulls, does that seem a bit caustic? Handy safety tip: *Don't drink and post messages!*

No Surge, thats cool, there should be enough lawyers and telemarketers around to keep the zombies eating well for decades....provided the indigestion doesnt get to them first....hey wait, that would kill all the zombies off, feeding them all of the excess fat (so to speak) of socities wastes-of-flesh. LOL.

they maybe the living dead but... damn even i'm not cold hearted enough to do that to zombies.

"No where to hide. No place to run. Your village will BURN like the heart of the SUN!" - Richard, Head warlock of the Brotherhood of Darkness, Lord of the 13 Hells, Master of the Bones, Emperor of the Black, Lord of the Undead, Lord of the Dance.

I think I'd find a motorhome and head for the countryside. The refugees in INDEPENDENCE DAY had the right idea-- head out to the salt flats. The less local population the less zombies that have been created.

Here in Milwaukee, home of the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake, the option of lakeside escape is also available. In the movie, I was puzzled why, once the survivors had blown a gap between themselves and the zombies, they did not take the time to check out other boats for supplies. One BIG flaw in their plan though-- until you get to the far northern end of Lake Michigan, there are not any islands. Frankly, if the same crew had started out in Cleveland, they'd have survived. Lake Erie has a lot of islands.

Back to DAWN again-- an entire mall to scavenge and no one could find a radio-conrolled car or airplane? They waited way to long to find a way to get food to the one resource they desperately needed, namely the guy with the hundreds of guns. And if it would take a while to kill evey zombie in the parking lot one by one or via firebomb.... well, did anyone have anything better to do that week? On the other hand, as these folks apparently attracted a major portion of the formerly-breathing populace, it must have made life easier for survivors scattered elsewhere in Milwaukee.