Unusual settings with zombies

>Propose campaign about a zombie apocalypse happening during the early 1800s.
>"But that isn't a realistic time when a zombie apocalypse would happen"

Can anyone think of any time period where zombies/undead would not make appropriate enemies? Or any instances where zombies are set in non modern settings?

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>"But that isn't a realistic time when a zombie apocalypse would happen"

The fuck?

Zombie apocalypses are invariably catalyzed by modern man's hubris in his drive to unlock the fundamental secrets of the universe.

The fact that the Living Dead movie which popularized the modern incarnation of the zombie never specified the cause of the outbreak is irrelevant.

There's hundreds of myths and stories about the restless dead throughout history.

Frankenstiens monster could be the inspiration for an early 1800's undead outbreak.

The age of exploration could lead to an explorer bringing back voodoo curses from some tribal kingom.

get an imagination and take Romeros dick out of your mouth.

You can put zombies in literally any time you just need to come up with a reason, for the early 1800s it could be:
>God
>Voodoo curse brought back from colonies
>Virus from rats
>A doctor creating it trying to create vaccine

etc

>Zombie apocalypses are invariably catalyzed by modern man's hubris in his drive to unlock the fundamental secrets of the universe

Which is why no progress was made until 1999 and nothing of any significance was discovered prior to the last 20 years.

Fucking idiot.

I would love to do a steampunk zombie apocalypse.

The first voodoo zombies were living people whose souls had been stolen by a bokor and was a horror story about the loss of identity and enslavement.

Movie zombies (the undead kind) are diseased creatures that bite you and make you into one of them. They're a plague analogue embodied by something contaminating and unclean. That's the basic vampire archetype.

And before you start, sexy vampires like Carmilla and Dracula are a cross between sirens and vampires. And werewolves turning people with their bite is historically recent, the core of the werewolf idea is the dual nature of man (social behaviour vs instinctive urges, Jekyll/Hyde is a werewolf) that in time overlapped with vampire mythology.

A monster representing hubris would be an embodiment of chaos (dragon-type) or abomination (thing that should not be-type, like frankenstien's monster). You can mix the dragon and should-not-be into one monster and get something similar to Lovecraft's monsters. Or aliens, which us what Lovecraft's monsters are anyway.

If you had a hubris zombie it would either be frankenstien slaves or plague aliens or something out of Brave New World or Ideocracy. Or maybe the Thing or They Live.

tl:dr
zombies are slaves and sometimes vampires
vampires are plague monsters
hubris monsters are dragons, frankenstiens, cthluhus or aylmaos
hubris zombies are socialists

>hubris zombies are socialists

Always starving too. Makes sense.

>zombies appear in the dark ages
>no one has a full set of teeth
>infection doesn't spread, eventually the corpses rot away and disappear

zombies easily flood the cities but the scattered villages and towns of dark age england don't find out about the infection for months, until a swarm reaches them.

trader ships heading up the thames see empty docks or swarms of motionless dead.
the infection spreads to mainland Europe.

>zombie apocalypse in the 14th century
>a bunch of young adventurers barricade themselves in an estate not far from Florence
>jest relax and tell each other lewd stories
>every evening they go to the barricades to shoot zombies
>while dancing, singing and drinking wine

A slave ship unknowingly brings a voodoo priest back to Holland.
During the journey and out of desperation, He turns his fellow slaves to zombies. They rise up and the ship is found adrift off the coast of old london.

Dragged back to port, the zombies over run the docks and the priest goes into hiding underground in the sewers and catacombs of the medival city.

The church hears that the city is full of the living dead and sends priests and witch hunters into the sewers and tunnels to try and stem the tide of sorcery.

>Can anyone think of any time period where zombies/undead would not make appropriate enemies?
Unless you're talking about BS like Alucard or Nazgul,any year after 1849.Minié ball allows soldiers to kill even fast zombies before they can get too close.

Now I'm imagining something like a Plague Village, but with zombies

Tbh I can see what they might be getting at. If they're more like plague zombies, they might not be as devastating to an 1800s society than it is to modern day. Incidentally, this is why the Europeans brought a ton of plagues to America, but didn't get any from the Native Americans. When a plague hit a tribe in old America, it'll kill them all off, sure. But it also kills off it's transport to more victims. In old Europe, the population is more able to move around the country and spread it before they die. People conglomerate. A plague zombie wouldn't really work in a medieval setting, but 1800s Europe would work pretty well.

You could fix this by changing the type of zombies. Maybe a vodou priest got mad at the slaves in a recently settled America, or the invaders, so set up an army of vodou zombies that accidentally spread throughout old America, each zombie acting as its own transport.

Gilgamesh, the oldest story we have on record, has its main character threatened with all the dead invading the world of the living

'Zombie apocalypse’ might be a modern term, but the fear has existed forever

I'd say you're right for the upper classes.

For the lower classes living in the slums, the whores of whitechapel or the jewish migrants of france, movement between cities and towns wasn't possible without becoming homeless, which was a crime.
Look at how typhus used to spread through the slums and imagine that ,with feet.
dirty water sources, open sewers, bodies on the road, that's alot of places for a disease to fester.

the rich, the lords and the nobles would hold up in their hosues, go to their country homes , But pretty soon the infection would spread up ,through the factories and the workhouses.

You could have a masque of the red death scenario where a house servant turns zombie during a masquerade party.
Or a paris revolution in which the barricades of the revolutionaries quickly become the last refuge for both parties.

It would be cool, but you'd have fewer zombies due to lower population density. You'd also have to answer what kinda zombies they are and how long they last.
Disease or magic. Do they last one season or forever? At most, you'd get a 200-1000 zombie strong group pillaging the country side, or an entire city filled with the fuckers.

This is really cool.

You're wrong about Europeans not bringing back any plagues, they brought back Syphilis, and it spread like wildfire.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis

In the late stages of infection many people go insane, and have rotting flesh, so essentially a massive zombie outbreak like OP suggested happened IRL.

Plus syphilis spread through the upper classes like wildfire and unlike those in the lower classes who would died or be ostracised quicker, The upper classes would hide it or use all kinds of quakery to try and cure it. I could easily imagine the court of some prince having a cellar full of their undead blistered family members ,and they feed them young courtesans and keep it all hush hush.

Could be a very cool campaign to have a court doctor come to your group and say he's seen things, seen people dragged off the streets and seen the royal coachmen rounding up hordes of rotting nobles after being let loose for an evening of gorging in the slums.

You could even tie in the themes from The Masque of Red Death, with a bloodbath during a masquerade ball. Peasants being tossed into sea of undead nobles resulting in horrible geysers of blood as they're being ripped apart and devoured. It could be used as an allegory for the depraved decadence of the noble class during the Renaissance.