Zombies

Shamblers but also not feral or wicked looking. The undead are broken, yearning for life again. Their faces show despair, their moaning are throes of sadness. They don't grasp at you, but follow with arms out to embrace rather than ensnare.

Skeletons however are cruel, always grinning at some sick joke at the expense of the living.

I've broken "zombies" into catagories before, but I had forgot a lot of them.

Undead: Risen dead with a hunger for human flesh, when you die from a zombie or in a certain area with zombies, you become one, no known reason, example is the night of the living dead.
Infected: This zombie can have different traits along the spectrum, but the biggest factor is that they did not die and revive, these people went from a normal human into a ravenous/raging monster, normally through some sort of disease, space disease, water pollution, or super rabies, doesn't matter, they got sick and turned, can be spread through many vectors example is the 28 days later zombie or l4d zombie.
Serum zombie; a zombie that mocks the infected, but a key difference is that the person must die to turn, this is made easy as often a bite will cause the death and reanimation, examples are the walking dead and resident evil

This is just a small bit of the huge list I made, I don't remember a lot of them, take note that I focused on key features of reanimation to define what is what, rather than speed, mutation, intelligence.

They're fine when they're one threat among many, and not the worst one because they're just a sea of rotting carcasses.

You okay, user?

I'm always split between fast infected 'zombies' that are still technically alive, and slow, shambling zombies that will just devour everything in their path.

I was never a fan of magic zombies though, or zombies that would moan 'braaiiiiinnnzzzzz' as they walked. That's ridiculous, and it's probably better if we just pretended those movies never existed.

Also not a fan of 'special infected'. Nope, just hordes and hordes of zombies, slowly destroying the world in their wake.

I like my zombies to have the capability of that person when they were alive and then lose capability as the get injured/rot away but never actually die they just become immobilized.

I also like the Walking Dead's (and other's) all dead people come back as zombies and it only takes a tiny exposure to slowly kill you.

Honestly for me zombies alone don't work. They simply can't be in a setting a strong enough threat. Since anyone can be intelligent enough to figure out firing lines and collapseing retreats will anihilate them. However when you mix in opportunistic madmen, banking upon the fear of other to exploit and violate their fellow humans. Rather than band together against the common and easily defeated (Albeit numerous) threat.

Plus most deaths in these scenarios will be caused by the destruction of infastructure. And starvevation and poverty will kill the most. Making functioning antibiotics, working factories, and farms highly contested resources. I won't even bring up the petroleum crisis this will create.

Your biggest fear in terms of warlords will be at first loose gang members capitalizing on the anarchy before breaking apart. And then military remnants trying to carve out their own piece of the pie. With individual settlements either trying to hold onto sovereignty or be assimilated. At this point the undead will be reduced to a threat barely worth consideration. Since they relied upon the short term shock and disaray brought about by the apocalypse.

>What flavor of zombies do you perfer? Shamblers? 28 days later zombies? Magically animated types?

I don't really have a preferred 'type' of zombie. As the other user said - they're more a force of nature. And I personally see their roles in a zombie RPG would be to make the players / PCs constantly feel insecure. They become a constant threat of sudden and horrific / terrifying death at the hands of a relentless foe that doesn't know fear, reason, or remorse. They are the 'Black Plague' made large and given our own faces. I'm also not adverse to the idea of mutant zombies (more cunning, stronger, etc) as a way of keeping the PCs from becoming jaded / complacent. Then add in the human panic / society collapse element and it's now a contest to see which 'high-risk' element scares the PCs more - the living or the dead.

As for the 'cause / source' of the Zombies, I suppose that depends on the type of Zombie Apocalypse the GM wants to run for the players. I'm looking at running a Zombie Apoc campaign and I still can't decide what I want to use as the origin or if it even matters. I'm not really wanting to do magic / supernatural elements. That said I've come up with:

1. Natural Biological (viral / bacterial)
2. Man-made Biological (viral / bacterial - military weapon - medical research accident, etc.)
3. Extra-terrestrial Origin (viral / bacterial - via meteors or cosmic dust.)
4. Unknown / Supernatural (no one ever figures it out definitively)

>I've broken "zombies" into catagories before, but I had forgot a lot of them.

Like the list - I'd love to see more.

>Since anyone can be intelligent enough to figure out firing lines and collapsing retreats will annihilate them.

This makes a whole lot of assumptions - namely sufficient time to plan, materials / tools of any sort (much less proper tools & materials), necessary skills, sufficient weapons, ammo, and training, and most importantly of all 'a safe area' to fall back to in the first place. In a Zombie Apocalypse, none of these are a given, and the most important one - a safe zone - is going to be all but impossible to find. Particularly when the campaign includes a mechanic where anyone who dies for any reason comes back as a zombie. In a setting where even your most trusted ally or loved one could become the enemy, the paranoia factor definitely gets ratcheted up.

Simple. We are fighting against a monster that is even less intelligent than predatory animals.

First, secure a location. Then build a perimeter fence. Shoot every zombie you can see from inside. Once its clear, sally out and build a bigger perimeter fence around your current fence. Once its up, dismantle the inner fence and repeat as needed.

Then, once you get big enough, you build fences to corral the zombies. Trap them in kill zones. Then you lob napalm and watch them burn. Repeat until infestation is eradicated.

Zombies as depicted in media, are only dangerous during the initial shock. Once you calm down and don't act like the characters from the walking pleb et al., then you will easily create your own kingdom to rule.

t. schmuck who will die first during a zombieapocalypse

>having only one layer of defense

Enjoy losing everything to a single breakthrough

Comical skeleton mooks making puns while kicking in your shit > Zombies

You know, a few thousands zombies pushing against a fence will win everytime.

I've always been a fan of the technically alive 28 days later\last of us style zombies because you can actually find irl examples of parasites and pathogens that do that sort of thing.
To get around the issue of how they become a threat in the face of modern militaries I like the started out as a pandemic scenario.
even with regular plagues If enough people start dying from a highly infectious disease society begins to stop functioning, throw in the 'dead' turning into monsters and tha5 chaos is only going to be amplified.
Hard to have an organised response when the issue is literally everywhere , your supply lines are crumbling, and you probably have soldiers deserting in order to try and save their own famies.

To me, zombie survival goes like this: The beginning, the first town/towns/cities are infected and being overrun. Sometimes stories like to skip this part with a coma or whatever but this is when it's all starting, there's mass panic, evacuations, all that lot.

Then there's the next part, the initial survival. There's remnants of society, people trying to cling to what's left, trying to deal with the new world they're in. Wandering, sometimes looting, trying to find other survivors to band together with. Main threat at this point is still zombies.

Eventually the survivors get used to fighting zombies, those who don't have mostly already been killed. Zombies stop being a threat, and are more of an environment. The real threat is the aftermath of the apocalypse, the other groups and bandits who want all of your stuff, and isn't afraid to use force to get it.

Zombies mostly take a back seat from here on. Groups will usually set up their little settlements and maybe try farming, fence off areas and try to become sustainable. They scavenge the general area, have a stockpile of resources and hopefully firearms. After a while they'll probably discover other groups who are wiling to talk/trade peacefully, set up territory agreements, that sort of thing.

But you know. Most people don't want to see the whole settlements thing. They want to see unstoppable zombie hordes.

Also... why doesn't anyone really wear armour? And why are there still huge hordes of zombies months/years down the line after survivors have been killing and killing, even when they're out in the middle of nowhere.

fuck off

Depends entirely on the situation, in films I can take Shamblers or runners, both are fun and fine and good at their own thing.
In a fantasy setting I prefer magically animated, in a modern or sci fi viral shit is usually best.
Games obviously a nice mix of zombies for varied enemies, dying light did this well without making them all too crazy mutant

>You okay, user?

I wouldn't worry about it. It's not like I've been through that much. Just gotta wait for my skin to finish hardening and everything will be okay.

Like a lot of other people here, I like the concept of zombies as a natural disaster or force of nature that transforms society. I think it's usually more interesting when the focus is on the human characters and how they cope with their environment, usually being forced to resort to murder and depravity a la The Walking Dead.

But some time ago I also watched a weeb show called School Live, which had a cast of little girls and that I really enjoyed. The zombies in it seem to retain more of their original selves than one would expect from a normal zombie show. And though the main characters got something of a lucky handicap in where they ended up when the outbreak started, I appreciate how focused their group was on trying to retain the happiness in their lives even in the middle of an apocalypse. Their naivety in the face of destruction is pretty endearing.

C O M P L E T E
G L O B A L
S A T U R A T I O N

>apocalypse
Unless it was a Class A Romero Situation then they're fine as long as they hold up long enough for the undead fuckers to decompose properly.

If it is a Class A then god hates you and the only recourse is sucking on a shotgun barrel as you pull the trigger. Class A is everything, No More Room In Hell. Everyone, absolutely everyone who dies turns into a zombie regardless of whether they were bit or not. Someone was buried weeks before the event? Comes back as a zombie. Someone dies of a heart attack? Raises as a zombie. Infected hangnail kills them? Zombie. Your wife dies peacefully in her sleep next to you? You wake up with her taking care of your morning wood the hard way. Your pregnant and the baby dies due to complications after mostly developing? It eats its way out of your stomach.

The world is fucked and you might as well end it all in way that negates you coming back.

>expand it even further
>all remains of everything to ever die reanimate so long as they are not currently incorporated into a living thing
>THE GAS IN YOUR CAR IS ITS OWN ZOMBIE
>THE MUSEUMS ARE SWARMING WITH ZOMBIES
>YOUR CHICKEN DINNER IS THE WALKING DEAD
>ONLY THE ROBOTS ARE SAFE