Zombies work quite well as an antagonist that permeates the setting and keeps the pc's consistently at risk

Zombies work quite well as an antagonist that permeates the setting and keeps the pc's consistently at risk.

Which types of zombies create the best atmosphere for you? Romero style shamblers, Modern raged rabids, mutated abominations maybe?
Should they be mindless swarms, calculating pack hunters, or solitary creatures who go berserk if disturbed.

Post settings, tactics, art, means of transmission, anything you appreciate in a well done horror setting.

>Zombies work quite well as an antagonist

Your conclusion and entire thread hinges on an assumption that is not true.

My mistake, should have written it as "Can work quite well"

I'm aiming to find some way around the usual bullshit that comes with using zombies in a setting, see if I can dredge at least one interesting campaign out of a tired concept.

There are so many god damn types of zombies, and as a zombie fan I honestly love all of them.

Cordyceps zombies are really cool, and the additionally risk of just inhaling spores to get infected is very stressful and great.

Classic slow zombies are a bit lame just from over exposure, but if something else really important is going on it might be ok to have them as background fluff.

Body horror style necromorphs are also awesome. They're great specifically because it keeps zombies threatening; most zombies could be defeated with simple firearms and basic tactics, and when people die to them it sometimes strains disbelief. Things that grow forearm sized claws and acid spit are always a huge threat.

One idea I've thought about before but always wondered why it's never been done, at least as I can tell, is a kind of supernatural zombie? More vengeful spirit that spreads and destroys the world more or less? It could be like evil edgy ghosts that torture people and when they die they become more edgy ghosts, if you understand my drift. Obviously they could only be temporarily defeated with weapons if they were partially material, or could only be stopped by religion or magic.

Depends on the setting, is it fantasy? Modern day military? Civilian? Space?

You need some intelligence to make it interesting otherwise it just feels like playing a video game with aI.

Fast zombies are a hell of a lot scarier than slow ones and don't need to have that much intelligence to be scary as long as the transmission isn't simply bites but airborne or something.

I feel like last of us or 28 days would make for a good zombie game, they have more depth than walking dead zombies

My best zombie campaign I have ever been in was a Savage World game, custom setting. The zombies had an evil, demonic hive mind controlling them, that evolved over time.

The game involved trying to snuff out the queens of each zombie hive, as every day they exsited, the zombies would mutate from shambling hordes to ungodly killing machines.

What about mutant zombies?

A setting where the genes of human and random shit has been blended creating hybrid monsters.

>One idea I've thought about before but always wondered why it's never been done, at least as I can tell, is a kind of supernatural zombie? More vengeful spirit that spreads and destroys the world more or less? It could be like evil edgy ghosts that torture people and when they die they become more edgy ghosts, if you understand my drift. Obviously they could only be temporarily defeated with weapons if they were partially material, or could only be stopped by religion or magic.

The shitty movie Ghosts of Mars is exactly what you're describing.

>Which types of zombies create the best atmosphere for you
Dangerous ones.

>Zombies work quite well as an antagonist that permeates the setting and keeps the pc's consistently at risk
This is both disproven and simultaneously proven by The Wanking Dead. Really sad that show turned to shit so fast.

I generally find that post modern settings work fantastically. A "zombies won generations ago" situation.

What are your thoughts on technology and weaponry that should be made availiable? Is it more stressful to manage ammo carefully, fight with melee primarily, or blast away at large scale threats with little worry about running low on gear.

In my opinion zombies stop working well as a threat once the players are not forced to keep moving. Walking dead often had them holing up in some fort, which quickly got super stale and stupid.

>Not even 10 posts in
>Danposting already

I had no idea there was this much overlap before now.

Depends on how much maintenance and inventory management headache the table is willing to put up with.

in a modern setting, shamblers are no threat at all
they have to be fast to be threatening, otherwise anybody with a .22 and a backpack full of ammo can just go around at a leisurely pace, wiping them all out

maybe a few elite zombies with "calculating pack hunter" status, but not the vast majority

This. Zombies aren't antagonists, they're obstacles.

Storytelling-wise, you can often replace zombies with like a flood or bees or something because that's the narrative purpose that they serve, as an unintelligent source of adversity to test the heroes' bravery and skill.

I mean it had zombie in the OP post, what do you expect?

Branching off of this, what would be a threatening driving force then?

If the zombies are the obstacle, what are the PC's running from?

Fable's hollow men.
The corpses are not animated all the time, just when you show up and threaten the overzealous wisps in the area into corpse-possesing blitzkrieg mode. Additional points for having more intelligent wisps that can command others.

Humans generally.

I've been toying around with the idea of running a zombie survival game based on the MTG setting of Grixis. It's essentially a lifeless hellscape where life energy itself is fought over and constantly dwindling.

Granted, that focuses less specifically on zombies, since there are also liches and demons flying around trying to amass power, but I feel that sort of fantasy aspect helps zombies out a lot, since it gives you a ton of variety to work with when you can have zombies of magical creatures or other effects to make them threatening.

My favorite zombies have and always will be the Chryssalid's brand of zombification; sure they're tough to kill and dangerous on their own, but its the fact that you /have/ to kill them before their gestation period is over that made them such a stressful thing to deal with.

I've only run a few one-offs here and there, and it may be newb DM'ing but everytime the players came across romero-style Zombie hordes they'd either run circles around them and avoid them or I would have to force the confrontation by shoving them in a pit with said zombies.

Chryssalid's force you to fight them, because otherwise they'll overrun any town they come across, and it takes a lot of resources to destroy them fully, which is good for adding tension to a campaign; could you imagine having a kind of doomsday clock ticking in the background, the BBEG's plans are advancing, but you have to take a few days to completely burn out an infection of Chryssalids.

I've been thinking about using them in a fantasy setting, as they'd be even more terrifying; considering that in X-Com Enemy Within it was shown they could do the same corpse-incubation trick with animals (There3 was a fishing village that goes dark int eh campaign, you go there and all the shark and really large fish bodies are full of Chryssalids, with a huge whale carcass crammed with them), I mean could you imagine a single Chryssalid getting a hold of a herd of buffalo? Literally an apocalypse right there.

I've been a fan of mutated variety. Different types keeps players on their toes since that nice little barricade they just set up can be taken down by at least 3 different zombie breeds.
In my setting though most forms of undead (zombies, skellies, vamps) are a naturally occurring phenomenon though they can also be created and controlled via magic. The ones created or controlled are mindless but if free from control they become sentient with no memories of their past self.

Can we just kill the Apocalypse part of any Zombie setting?

I would kill to see a Zombie Outbreak scenario, no Walking Dead bullshit where it is "EBUL HOOMANS oh yeah also some undead n shiet", just good ol' Resident Evil escape from zombie [location] before you get overwhelmed.

I would say Romero style shamblers in mindless swarms, because they carry with them a kind of inevitability. Like yeah, they're slow and if you're not a total idiot you can kill them, but there's always more. No matter how many you kill they will never go away. They'll just keep up with that slow, inexorable shuffle until you slip up and they get you. And you WILL slip up. It's only a matter of time.

But I would also say it would be a good thing to have aberrants, zombies that run and chase and have a kind of savage animal cunning with the ability to coordinate the swarms to do things like set up traps and cut off escapes. These kinds should hit that sweet spot between rare and common, so that it's always uncertain as to whether or not you'll have to deal with one. Keep survivors from getting complacent.

They can still be a threat because you're presumably trying to live in one place, but the zombies are constantly moving in and making it impossible. Yes, you could get a gun and start mowing them down, but if they're coming in as herds that's never going to last very long. They'll mass against your walls till you're forced to leave, every time.

Scarcity?
Their own need to settle/rest?

>Which types of zombies create the best atmosphere for you?
The ones that aren't just "humans without all the things that make humans a treath".

Zombie campaigns are fun because you get PvP drama, PvE obstacles with resource tracking (ammo, food, etc), base-building, and awesome swarmfighting where you can break out a bag of those plastic zombies and just have at it with tactical combat. Use a system without hit points like Savage Worlds or MiniSix, make ammo fairly rare and make one bite kill so zombies are a challenge and players like to avoid them.

My biggest issue with a zombie campaign, though, is how exactly it works as a disease. Like in Walking Dead, everyone is "infected" yet only die from a bite, which appears to be poisonous. That said it seems odd the entire world was wiped out by zombies, without a lot of people being infected initially. Hence why I think making the disease blood-borne, but contaminating a widespread vaccine that a lot of people get, would make sense. But then (1) zombies would mostly be children, and (2) they would probably stop giving the vaccine after a couple of days once they found the link. This really wouldn't be a large enough % of the population to kickstart things. I mean you would need about 50% of the population infected right off the bat (i.e. 1 zombie per human) and then a chain reaction of fuck-ups, to get the population reduced to 0.1% of what it is today.

Any other ideas for how a blood-borne disease could be transmitted to a huge part of the population? I thought Left 4 Dead had a pretty plausible explanation for why those 4 were the only ones left, but I hate the characters being immune because it takes away half the danger of zombies in my mind.

like 1/10000 people carry the "zombie gene" recessively from some long forgotten magical spell. Whenever a living human dies there is a chance that they will turn into a strong as fuck flesh hungry madman. They specifically crave the flesh of other people with the "zombie gene". As a result every person is taught in kindergarten to quickly destroy the brain if someone dies. This makes warfare a true task to carry out as a few are invariably created on each battlefield. As a result most soldiers wear locking full face helmets that cant be removed without releasing a clasp on the rear. Some areas have attempted to pursue cleansing themselves of the gene with laughably witch-hunt-esqe tests, if the person is killed and reanimates they were a carrier, if they stay dead , oops.

government chem trails gone wrong, chemical warfare, genetically modified corn gets some kind of zombie fungus, the cats switch on that parasite thing and assume control of humanity

I like the ones that climb on top of each other to create a giant flesh tower.

Just thinking this up now, but, why not have the zombies controlled by some eusocial insectoid parasite eith a caste system? Shamblers zombies could be like workers, runners could be hunters/soldiers, and there could be "breeders/queens" that produce more of the parasites. When they bite, they could have some of their young borrow in if they can hold on long enough. Trying to think of how it started, currently going with alien meteor landing near a factory farm, infecting the live stock, and being distributed that way, and the pcs not being infected because they're vegatarians... but don't want to look like I'm being preachy or on a soapbox.

That said, imagine the players' shock when they kill a zombie, and something like a giant maggot starts crawling out.

I had this in a D&D game I ran. I basically ripped off the Flood and had giant blobs of green shit that manufactured more plague creatures. I'm still running that game, actually.

My favorite one was the "russian nesting dolls" monster where if a pregnant woman got infected some weird shit would happen. It was a bit like the Left 4 Dead witch, but after you killed it, a new one would rip itself out from inside, then after you killed that one, a new one would rip it's way out of that one. each with half as many hit dice (the original had 16 HD) until you killed the last tiny 1 HD one, and it was finally dead. But the spawn were controlled by these huge plague-brain things that the characters could find and kill, since they were immobile.

Personally, for modern-day zombie apocalypse I like the idea of the zombies just being mindless shamblers and having the focus be gun autism and collecting food and editing your base. But for sci-fi or fantasy, mixing it up would be preferable.

Bumping while I read the thread.

I think a good counter to forting up might be the zombies just don't leave. Every time you go out you've got a chance of more zombies following you back. So either you've got to move on or run the zombie marathon every now and again to lure some away.

I ran a WoD game once that heavily featured zombies at the request of the players. They all played human in this, and I ended up using a mix of shamblers and rabids.

The difference between them was the fun part. The shamblers were 'dead', where as rabids were technically infected, but alive. Meaning if you put down a rabid with a shot to the chest, it may get up at a later time and try to gnaw you slowly. Sadly I lost two PC's to that when they originally discovered it, but it certainly was a high-spot of risk for the characters.

In campaigns where they aren't the main antag though they start to lose weight pretty quickly. They might be good as a horde that a necromancer throws up to buy time, but they're tiring pretty quickly like that.

I had a low level campaign where zombies were hollow shamblers reacting violently to movement/agression but a bit later some started acting much smarter and actually fighting. Eventually one of my players realized the smart zombie always had a green eye glow and stopped working when it's head got popped off after which the body would continue working like a normal shambler and another zombie would become the smart one.
They investigated and learned the BBEG lich can puppet any dead body he can "see through" from afar and we started a game within the game where the lich will design new kinds of frankenstein monster zombie bodies to fight against them for the lulz.

Instead of watching the disappointing TV version, try the original comic series.

The zombie origin should just be mystical or totally unexplained. The players shouldn't be able to solve it anyway, so it doesn't matter. In fact, have different groups have different theories so the players are left wondering.

Zombies will just not die. Headshots are useless. No matter how much you damage a zombie's body, the bits will keep trying to attack. Even if you shoved a zombie in a woodchipper, the tiny fragments would crawl sluglike after you.

I stick with Slow Zombies, but mix it up with Zombie Raptors, Zombie Gelatinous Cubes, Zombie Treants, Zombie Giant Spiders.

Once they become aware of the characters, they will follow them relentlessly until one or the other is killed/"killed".

I'm pretty good at spooking my players through descriptions and vocalizations, so they'll often flee (or try to) from a decidedly-inferior foe, which means shambling grotesqueries will hound them til they turn and fight.

Send. More. Paramedics.

disgusting taste

Under rated film