A zombie bit your arm. You managed to escape but now your friend wants to amputate it...

Yeah, of course.
You don't want to be that guy who says he is fine in zombie stories, do you?

Nah, you will just be that guy who dies during operation/from complications, reanimates and tries to kill MC/major supporting character. Better go and blow your brains out to so that you can be sure that you won't become one of them.

You don't say you're fine, but at the same time you don't just chop your arm off as if that'll make a difference.

That's just asking for your friends to find out (after you die) that the infection doesn't spread via bites, like in Unitil Dawn where if you fuck up and shoot the bitchy asian chick just because she got hurt.

If there was some sort of real life zombie-like incident idiots who are going off movie lore are going to end up killing so many people by jumping to conclusions.

Find a police station and get a comfy cell, be the first people to figure out if it spreads by bites or not.

I've always wanted to write a story about a bunch of zombie obsessives, who go all the way to organising bug-out bags and escape plans for the "inevitable" zombie apocalypse. When the apocalypse does actually arrive, the crew think they're ready. They've got all their gear, they've got a plan of action, and they've got the zombies' behaviour all figured out.

Then they blow a zombie's head clean off, and it doesn't die. It chases after them, headless, still bent on murdering them.

Shit like this happens constantly. The zombies not only don't follow any of the movie rules - they don't seem to follow any rules at all. The crew sees a bus driving along, only for it to stop and disgorge a horde of zombies, wielding baseball bats and knives. They see an enormous flesh-golem flatten a military checkpoint, sucking living soldiers into its mass. They're pursued through a building by a zombie that can turn into smoke and seep through barricades. They see corpses floating through the sky, blasting fire from their faces. They wake up one morning, and one of the party is just dead for no clear reason, maggots already eating him hollow. They see strange lights on the horizon at night, pulsing and flashing.

And all the while the main character re-assures his friends, with increasing desperation, that "there's a scientific explanation for all of this."

>Then they blow a zombie's head clean off, and it doesn't die. It chases after them, headless, still bent on murdering them.
So we are on Return of The Living Dead instead of Dawn of The Dead?

Cut it off

Even if I'm not infected, a fucking walking corpse just bit me, at the bar minimum I' going to get some sort of gangrenous infection

Weirdly enough, the first arc of Crossed: Badlands by Garth Ennis does something like this. The protagonist is highly pragmatic, has no personality defects, attaches himself to a smart group, and ultimately dies anyway.

Crossed is a shit shambling zombie of a comicbook franchise.

But unlike Walking Dead its violating the corpse of a infant mid-pace while shitting all over itself.

You do know there's better ways to deal with a potential infection than lopping off your limb in an amateurish fashion right? Losing an arm comes with a much more pressing chance of death.

Nah, you're in "dark magic is the most logical and rational explanation".

Knowing what the fuck is actually going on is a priviledge, that most people would not have access to.

No, specifically BECAUSE there is no evidence.

I'm not saying I won't turn into a zombie. Its a real possibility. And god knows I don't want that...

But we need information. Are bites how it spreads? How long does it take to kill you, and how long does it take to come back? How do you kill a zombie? All sorts of useful stuff.

Tie me up. Quarantine me as best you can. This was going to happen to someone, and it sucks it had to be me, but now that we are here we need to learn as much as we can about what we are dealing with. And by we, I mean you, because unless this turns out to be no big deal... I'm not exactly going to be around to ue that information.

That actually sounds like it'd be a pretty fun one-shot to run, the potential for comedy is endless.

No. Amputation wouldn't work. Any virus that propagates through saliva would already have spread to the point where cutting off the damaged limb would be useless as a countermeasure. At this point there'd be nothing I could do save hope that the zombie effect doesn't spread that way.

If I start to feel like I'm dying, my friend can shoot me.

This.

And when it's all over, you'll know.

How long do you actually have to cut your arm if you are bitten at ; lets say forearm ?

This.

And its very fucking likely that I die from bleeding out or a nasty infection after the amputation.

Isn't it basically you need a lightsaber to slice your arm off as the zombie is gnawing at your limb?

I mean once its in the blood its going to be getting pumped through at the speed of a beating heart.

Yeah no I'm dead.
There are two ways we can do this:
>I'm already turning
Blow my brains out or hand me a paperweight/large club and point me at the horde.
>It'll take a bit for me to turn
Congrats, I'm a scientific marvel. Hand me over to the military/local scientists.

The virus isn't necessarily spreading through a bite you know ?

The Left4Dead comics had an unfortunate version of this.

In her backstory Zoey's mother turned and bit her father a bunch, and since they were horror movie buffs he assumed he would turn because of it and had to be put down.
But then later on Zoey finds out the "immunity" she and the other playable characters have is passed down through the father genetically so it was actually entirely pointless...

Pure gold.

Honestly the main point to amputating is to make the zombie version of me easier to destroy later.

The big takeaway I'm getting here is to come up with consistent rules for my zombies that do NOT follow movie conventions.

Chicks dig dangerous guys. And I'll wear a jimmy hat.

I am already dead. They're not going to stop at amputation.

Of course, if this is a "zombie virus as metaphor for depression" universe, they might not notice anything's wrong even if I turn.

If I'm REALLY lucky, this'll be one of those universes where the infected can still talk, they just lose their inhibitions - but those are pretty rare, so I'm not gonna count on it.

Would you survive a Romero Zombie apocalypse in real life?

easy mode : You know a week in advance. Only a few other people know.

hard mode: You know it when a Z knocks on your door.

I would honestly try dark magic in such a situation. Finding zome obscure rituals on google or in a libary. Despite being a zombie nut. My bug out bag is shit though.

I mean, I have a big honking wound on my arm that came from being bitten by a walking corpse when I presumably have no real medical supplies. That shit doesn't need to be infected SPECIFICALLY by a zombie plague to come off.

No in both modes, because we're talking "anything that dies for any reason becomes a zombie" and my dead skin cells have already infected me.

Romero FILM rules. Not the logical conclusion

Oh well, that means the moment you are bitten you are screwed. Classic cut your arm to stop being a zombie trope is debunked.

Put myself in isolation in a place where I can't hurt anyone and keep myself under observation for a few days.

I always wanted to do kind of the opposite. A bunch of survivalist after some kind of disaster end up on a Haitian plantation somehow, and run into some shambling zombies. So they immediately think "movie zombies" and start slaughtering like half the island. But as the story goes on, it turns out they're just Haitian voodoo zombies and they've commited like 800 murders on a bunch of drugged slaves.

Its not murder if its Haitians

No. As other anons have said, this is a prime time to gain information if the situation is safe enough. If not, since disease, zombie or otherwise, has most likely compromised my life I get to be the front line. Give me the bat, George.

Unless you happen to be resistant to the zombie whoozits like sometimes happens.

This is some good shit. The thing that popped into my mind is that this apocalyptic scenario is the result of a necromancer remaining in obscurity until civilisation had forgotten about magic completely, then unleashed the apocalypse when there's no demigod heroes to fight him and no magical means of resisting the invasion. It would be an insane plan and would require centuries of planning and waiting, but it would definitely succeed by the time it happened.

Lets change the question.
A zombie bit your dick

Don't kinkshame me brah

> Fuck it.

That wasn't an option but I suppose we could try.

Cutting off a limb goes beyond useless.
If they don't know what they are doing, you have greater odds of dying then the sun raising in the east.

Hell yeah! How else am I supposed to replace my hand with a chainsaw?

Groovy.

That was a great movie.

I live in the middle of nowhere, it's on the outside of an unincorporated community on a lakeside. Google says 49 people per square mile, but I live on the outskirts, so its fewer people than that. We have a shotgun (but little ammo), golf club, and baseball bat there. Lots of wood and tools. Electricity comes from a hydroelectric dam, so probably some electricity for a few weeks afterwards, plus a handcrank radio and like 100 batteries for everything. Only one way into the building, plus a single entrance to get upstairs (stairs behind a doorway, plus another doorway at the top of the stairs. Upstairs has a kitchen and bathroom. Not much food up there right now, but we live on a lake, so lots of fish and waterfowl (we do have a fishing rod). Lots of books to pass the time. If easy mode, then I have about $1200 available to just buy ammo for the 20 gauge shotgun there, along with canned food and bottled water & charcoal/lighter fluid for the grill there.
Hard mode is pretty inconceivable, there's like 50 people living around me in a mile in each direction.

Rate my chances.

was meant for this one

I've played in a few games like this.

There was a throwaway oneshot I played in, we all KNEW it was going to be a zombie outbreak, everyone made some grizzled survivalists, I made the world's most competent clown because I felt like it.

When the zombies showed up, they spread the contagion through their moans, and I should add, their moans were capable of corroding through wood and metal by a mysterious process. They were highly resilient to firearms, bludgeoning, and blade weapons, but small electric shocks killed them instantly.

A much more long term campaign I was in, the zombie apocalypse happened very slowly, over the course of 2 or 3 years, with us being situated about 2 years after that. At first, anyone who died came back as a zombie. Then, starting from the most elderly and gradually lowering in age, people just abruptly became zombies regardless of whether they died. Society had plenty of time to prepare, and to know what was happening. All sorts of contingencies like arcologies, and increasingly advanced drone weapons were brought in to control an outbreak that was increasingly less localised after the first few months.

The problem was, the zombies didn't just not care about bullets, they were literally bulletproof. Tank shells deflected harmlessly off of their skulls. Rare instances also had weird fucking powers like you suggest, we saw one with extendable limbs, and one that could control animals. But most of them, the horror was mainly in a shambling, stronger-than-human corpse that simply cannot be put down.

Our characters were a bunch of teens from surviving groups who lived constantly on the run. If your hideout is found by zombies, there's literally nothing you can do to turn back the clock, the only question is how much stuff you leave with. Adults (IE people over the age of about 19) were looked on with suspicion and either exiled from groups or executed because they could randomly turn into zombies for no reason.

Nah, trap me in a room for a few days, give me the barest minimum of food and water and a bucket for shitting and pissing. If I don't turn in a week, well now he have *some* information on the virus

No in both modes, I'm shitting a fuckton right now. I'm not gonna make it, and if I try to force myself to go Dying Light all over town, the entire place is gonna be covered in blood and shit.

What if it spreads through the lymphatic system?

I think with a full week of warning before society is disrupted I could arrange just enough to keep me alive for a few years at least, even if I'm not going to be the centre of the new society or whatever. Honestly I think most people with a passable amount of savings could easily acquire enough equipment that they have time to catch up on their lack of survival experience, and get somewhere isolated, survivable, and defensible fortified. Really it's the quality of the company that would be make or break stuff.

Should also mention that my only neighbor is a family friend and well-off business man who owns guns; I haven't seen all of his, but I know he has a 12 gauge shotgun that he shoots snakes with, as well as a 9mm makarov that he's told me he has 1500 rounds of ammo for. If I'm able to convince him in Easy Mode that the zombie apoc will happen, then we could do some intense preparation because he has lots of tools and machinery (construction business), and lots of ammo/guns and money to buy more ammo/guns/food, etc.

Just make a Cataclysm:DDA story. They have all that shit and pretty much EVERY monster going as well as other shit.

Which arm is it? If its my left, yeah, go ahead and lop that sucker off. My right arm though, na, we'll wait and see.

Pretty good.

Easy mode:
First few weeks: Somwhere in the ballpark of 90%+ survival chance. If you don't freak out (kill yourself, play the hero etc.)

First Month: 80%+ assuming there are no large migratory movements of refugees in your area and you stockpiled food n ammo.

2-6months: 50% Refugees and bandits are going to pour into isolated areas. Electricity is very likely dead at this point. Your nice house might become a big fat target. If you and your neighbour preare though it is entirely possible to defend your home.

6 months- 1 year: 20-30%: Stock piles are going to go down, you might have to fight infections from scratches etc.

Hard mode:

First Month:40-50%

2-6 Months: 30% Due to no preparations.

Not if its bacterial. The infection needs to set up before it becomes systemic. Even with a viral infection you may need to wait a few cycles until you statistically have enough virus for it to go anywhere.

If I can't convince anyone to stock up with me, my chances of defense against bandits would probably be pretty slim, since it would just be my neighbor and I with very little preparation. However, if I can convince lots of people I know, then the little neighborhood we have is four houses (my family's my neighbor's, and vacation homes for two businessmen and their families); there's also a giant shed that could store lots of food. If I could convince all of those people, the preparation could be god-tier, especially if they convince their families, because then it would be like 9 men age 16-60, plus a bunch of women, and, like I said, on easy-mode, because everyone up there is really well-off, preparations in terms of arms, food, and other misc. stuff would be incredible.

Both cool scenarios tbqh. Especially the long term one.

I would really love a Z-Scenario that has a more "realistic" feel. Players don't know whats exactly happening, they only know shit is going to hit the fan.

You start of as complete normal characters. Depending on personal preferences maybe police officers or maybe a bunch of suburban moms.

You actually play a while in normo land building relations etc. Just stockpiling weapons and food is problematic. Your family is worried, maybe cops start pestering you etc. (maybe this works better in a state/country where gun ownership is restricted)

Then weird things start happening. Neighbours go missing, police and National Guard shows up sometimes etc. Life goes on as normal but there is a sense of danger in the air.

At some point a curfew comes into effect, the PCs hear shoots and fires in the night etc. "Murder Rates" are absolutely through the roof and even a lot of normies don't buy the story of a crimewave. Prices become sky high due to people stock piling, guns shops are confiscated by the army etc.

Then at some points the authorities have to tell the people about the Z-wave. Maybe it behaves a little like the rage zombies from 28 days later or the Zs start of with most of their old skills intact but slowly degrade over time (this would make fresh infected people REALLY dangerous). The Zombies should deviate considerably from the standard Romero Zombie in my book.

After that civilization slowly goes down the drain in a civil war type situation.

And at some point you land the typical Z-scenario. But know you actually play a survivor with a real story.

>No in both modes, I'm shitting a fuckton right now. I'm not gonna make it, and if I try to force myself to go Dying Light all over town, the entire place is gonna be covered in blood and shit.

Keksel. dying on the loo is quite literally shitty.

>All these faggots talking about the virus
>Not realizing the bite of a corpse is actually going to cause your arm to go septic as fuck and you should amputate immediately assuming there's no modern medicine / antibiotics.

I thought the goal was to run away, Kevlar up, attach blades everywhere, and come back as a midboss zombie

>The Zombies should deviate considerably from the standard Romero Zombie in my book.
I agree. The new Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and WWZ(movie) present much more dangerous zombies than Night of the Living Dead ever did. I think Romero was right with the original that a plague of slow-moving zombies would be put down pretty much overnight by any decently-gathered local militia.

What if the party is a bunch of Leukocytes fending off cancer zombies?
Hell, a cell campaign would be interesting. There’s a great manga called Cells at Work! You’d have courier red blood cells, Hunter neutrophils, berserkergang killer T cells, fighting against bacteria, viruses, cancer. final campaign is a rogue band of neutrophils and T-Cells staging a coup under the HIV banner

Because amputation of a limb is such an easy task... are you fucking retarded?

>I think with a full week of warning before society is disrupted I could arrange just enough to keep me alive for a few years at least, even if I'm not going to be the centre of the new society or whatever. Honestly I think most people with a passable amount of savings could easily acquire enough equipment that they have time to catch up on their lack of survival experience, and get somewhere isolated, survivable, and defensible fortified. Really it's the quality of the company that would be make or break stuff.

I think most people don't have the kind of money to just buy the stuff you need for long term survival. Shure if you know it a month or three in advance maybe but taking a mortage onn your house, buying a house located in a remote area, fortifying it and buying tons of supplies really takes longer than a week.

And in my country its really hard to find a remote location. Most areas here are densly populated.

So in my case (assuming I have convincing proof) would be forced to convince my uncles and my Dad first and foremost. Organization would take at least a day (raiding bank accounts, setting up a planning meeting etc.). Then (beeing really generous here) we manage to find a remote vacation home that we can quickly rent and fortify.

My uncle (a doctor) would stock up on medical supplies, my dad (with a few constructor friends he might recruit) would be tasked with buying a a gun from the black market (20 % chance) and after that he would fortify our new home. Meanwhile my other uncle would raid food stores and buy stuff from hardware shops. I would raid self defense stores and buy a ton of legal weapons and survivalist stuff.

After all that we have maybe 2 days left. My dad is busy building the whole time. One uncle would spend a day buying a massive ammount of gasoline for cars and a generator. We would spend a day picking up entertainment, maps and useful books. The last day we would probably buy more water and inform people.

With thta kind of preparation we are still fucked in month 2. We have little to defend against serious looters and our remote area would be still overrun by refugees from the cities.

Or instead of planning maybe he just was super ostracized by society so he goes out into the middle of Siberia and just doesn't know about anything that happened. Like that family they found in the 60s who didn't know about either world war or the Russian revolution. Necromancer decides "eh, 2000 years are good enough, hopefully those Romans are dead by now."

Yeah. A scenario like this where outbreaks happen occassionally might be interesting aswell though.

Don't cut the arm off, I'm test subject 1 now. Lock me up so I can't hurt anyone, then I'll describe any symptoms I have until I either change or recover. If we don't have time/are on the move and can't lock me up, I'll voluntarily leave the party, lock myself up and write notes on my condition until I die.

I think you would need something besides bites for Zombies to spread.
Maybe an STD that is dormant for a while so that a lot of people are infected when the first people are turning. Bites could still work and you avoid the "everybody barricades home and the Police ends the plague" Problem.

>actually getting bitten by a zombie
lmao just wear some thick clothing nigga what are you doing have you ever tried chewing through a thick jacket

Guys, I'm writing a z-story about 3 friends finding themselves in the middle of a infected outbreak; they are some zombies entusiast and thanks to the fact they created a couple of years earlier a list of things to do in that scenario, they gain considerable advantage in the first hours of the outbreak.
They plan consists in reaching an isolated house and live there (with food and everything they took following the plan in the first hours) for a few months and after that return to the city since they suppose the infected have to be all rotten by that time because...dead flesh.

Excluding any magical stuff which scenarios do you think can twist the story from "all calculated" to "almost impossible to survive"?

A mosquito bit your head. You managed to escape but now your friend wants to amputate it. There's no evidence that the virus spread by bites. Would you let him do it?

Depends on the zombies.

Zombies that are fast are obviously much more dangerous than zombies that are slow. Zombies that only die with the brain destroyed are more dangerous than zombies that can die with enough damage.

If you really want to have almost impossible zombies, just do this: zombies know how to use weapons.

I have to add they are zombies entusiast but they know about the outbreak almoat nothing nor they know the caracteristics of said outbreak; for now the zombies act like Dawn of the Dead and l4d, dangerous in numbers but slow, extremely reactive to strong sounds, but all they know is what they observed from certain events they took part to or assisted to

youtube.com/watch?v=u3Qxa8ne5LA

I always wanted to put roller blades and a motorcycle helmet onto a person who is about to turn into a zombie.

Pretty much this.
All those guys who are making plans of wearing chainmail etc are a joke.
Unless you have the jaw and teeth of a dog you arenyt going to do anything to thick clothes.

I don't really like the idea. I'd like to be the story ruled by some kind of plausibility. Gun use its pretty hard to insert without changing completely the story, first of all because the zombies would have aome kind of human intellingence left and I don't really like that

The house is burned down.

The Zombies (or at least some of the ma re smarter than anticipated).

The military starts attacking "looters".

A nuclear plant gets seriously damaged and the players have to get away quickly.

Aerial bomabrdment.

>All those guys who are making plans of wearing chainmail etc are a joke.
Lo! Do not mock the lord of the manor! He has kept us safe for many years from the horrors of norsemen, saracens, and heretics. No corpse can best our landlord. He will defeat this necromancy even more quickly than he put down the civil strife caused by infidelity among the serfs.

Tapestry related, it is the man to whom our levies of grain are given.

The Zombies could stay intelligent for a while. You need some mumbojumbo for a Z-apocalypse to work. But for my suspension of disbelief/feel of realism its okay if they retian most of their intelligence for a few days.

That makes fresh zombies VERY dangerous and might explain why the infection spreads in the first place.

Imho plausibility is much lower if a few shambling corpses turn into a global pandemic.

It doesn't sound nearly as threatening as Exmortis or the Japanese Super zombies (I am a Hero/Apocalypse no Toride)

Fuck yeah!

A little benzene and some cottinballs should fix it up just fine.

That would imply said zombie either aimed for my crotch or was still somehow attractive enough for me to not notice she was a zombie.

If the former, looks like it's castration time. If the latter, I'm clearly in Monster Musume or something and it's really nothing to worry about.

Seems legit.

And just barricading somwhere is hard. People might be infected for a long time without being bitten.

I like the smarter zombies think, like an alpha of the pack coordidating the horde, could work pretty well. Like the brain is in some way still capable to retain its proper cognitive functions for a day or two and the other recognise that condition by following its lead

Military attacks on survivors is actually my actual ending scenario, like the trio reaching a military outpost near the port of the city to evacuate by sea, and being shot down by mistake in their last run from a colossal horde.

Aerial bombardment might work when they return to the city, more like some visual point than actually influencing the story since I doubt a bombardment would occur in a house lost in the woods

Aaand for the location where the story is set nuclear plants wont be aviable

Thanks for sharing your ideas!
Anyone else has any other idea? Everything could work I'm just collecting opionions and suggestions

Pfft, never done a battlefield amputation? It's way easier than busting into any abandoned pharmacy and grabbing some generic antibiotics to take care of potential infection.

I ran an AFMBE game just this weekend. I love when players attempt the 'hasty amputation'. It never works, they only ever manage to torture and near kill someone, who later died from blood loss and turned from infection. Then bit someone else.

In my current game the players are in the town and mountains the infection was released from by a terrorist attack on the containment for the bioweapon. They fought hordes of zombies and a few geneticly engineered monsters. It's resident evil esq.

Well I have some more stuff.

>The lost house is occupied. A bunch of junkies/other refugees/survivalists.

tell us a little more fo the initial phase you have in mind maybe. Whats the characters plan?

So maybe as soon as the virus hits the brain they start getting increasingly aggressive but also decreasingly intelligent. So within the first hour they might be basically looking to start a fist fight, after a day they are roaming around with a gun looking to kill people but don't remember how to do complex tasks (such as reload quickly or really even aim properly) and are relying on muscle memory they built up in life, after a few more days they are grabbing blunt and pointed objects to try to bash people's heads in but don't remember how to speak, a few days after that they're World War Z (movie) zombies and a few weeks after that they're the slow shambling monster we all know and love

D....d....de-us vult.

Feudalism is not a scam! All you must do is transfer all of your crops to your landlord's treasury to receive all the benefits of benevolent rule!