I'm into the Walking Dead right now and it has sparked some questions that some more qualified members here are sure to know.

• How long would it take for the flesh to rot off a zombie and, in effect, end it's life?
• Would the global environment be changed, either permanently or temporarily (geological scale), by literally millions of rotting corpses?  If so, how would it be altered?
• If all the zombies were killed or died off, then would the disease die out or would it mutate and start to affect animals?
• How long could survivors realistically live off prepackaged food given access?  In other words, what packaged food items would last the longest after the apocalypse?

These musing are specifically for the Walking Dead premise, but more generally on any type of zombie apocalypse so don't feel constrained because I mentioned that show specifically.

Specifically for the walking dead

- never, there are zombies wandering around with injuries that would immediately end the existence of anything working on a biological basis
- Not very much other than a Chernobyl-like resurgance in wildlife, the dead aren't really rotting
- The disease affects all humans, so it won't fade out, anyone who dies comes back
- Depends, I have five year lifeboat rations which will probably realistically last 25 years. If you wanted to live off the contents of your local walmart, corned beef is good for five years, and the rest will get you there. You're talking about a five year horizon max for anyone who hasn't specifically prepared for a long term disaster, probably more like two years.

Quote from: The Traveller;631171Specifically for the walking dead

- never, there are zombies wandering around with injuries that would immediately end the existence of anything working on a biological basis
- Not very much other than a Chernobyl-like resurgance in wildlife, the dead aren't really rotting
- The disease affects all humans, so it won't fade out, anyone who dies comes back
- Depends, I have five year lifeboat rations which will probably realistically last 25 years. If you wanted to live off the contents of your local walmart, corned beef is good for five years, and the rest will get you there. You're talking about a five year horizon max for anyone who hasn't specifically prepared for a long term disaster, probably more like two years.

Thanks!  Food for thought.  

You might find this article from Cracked interesting/ amusing if you haven't read it.

Specifically you might want to come up with a good reason animals don't eat the zombies, and by animals that includes flies, without the zombie virus affecting animals, unless you want the zombie apocalypse to be spread by flies.

Nobody smells good during a Zombie Apocalypse.

JG

...while I'm on the animal tack, an interesting second-order zombie apocalypse (a sort of 28 months later scenario) might involve most all of the zombies having being eaten by whatever animals would do that, but you'd have almost every land predator from feral dogs on up with a taste for human flesh and little to no fear of anything on two legs. Also crows.

Imp, great stuff!  Thank you.

Quote from: James Gillen;631230Nobody smells good during a Zombie Apocalypse.

JG

Everyone will smell great to me, because I am ghouling up.

Quote from: Drohem;629619I'm into the Walking Dead right now and it has sparked some questions that some more qualified members here are sure to know.

• How long would it take for the flesh to rot off a zombie and, in effect, end it's life?

Realistically bodies exposed to the elements (especially ambulatory ones) would rot very quickly.  Also their bodies wouldn't even work without a circulatory system, and ignoring that a few key muscles would similarly cripple them.  You basically have to ignore this for a ZA though.  Like look at Michone's leashed zombies without arms in TWD.  It would take a lot of PT for a real person to learn to walk well without their arms for balance but she can yank them around by the necks in the woods and they never fall in their shambling gait.  

If you are willing to suspend your disbelief that far, it's said in TWD the show by the Woodbury (sp?) researcher that the walkers are starving to death and it's been about a year since the ZA started, so you are probably looking at some non-rot oriented lifespan of a zombie that doesn't get to eat.

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• Would the global environment be changed, either permanently or temporarily (geological scale), by literally millions of rotting corpses?  If so, how would it be altered?

You might see some new fungal 'infections' on the zombies like cordyceps for humans, which could result in fungal colonies on human scale instead of insect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8

I'm thinking about working on a ZA game and using a cordyceps/parasite as a partial explanation for zombies.

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• If all the zombies were killed or died off, then would the disease die out or would it mutate and start to affect animals?

In TWD everyone is already infected so it would in theory never die out unless there was some people totally immune and over time were selected for.

In general I don't see how zombie animals isn't a good idea for a game (and I think doesn't happen more in movies for budget reasons more than anything).  
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Believe it or not, I'd recommend buying (or at least reading) Palladium's Dead Reign to explain a lot of this.  If one buys into Palladium physics, and it's concept of P.P.E. ('Potential Psychic Energy') apparently that both keeps zombies up in the first place and fuels them by forestalling their rot.  They maintain it by eating living humans, who have a lot more of it.  This also explains why zombies seem to have a limited ability to track people; in this game they sense PPE.

JG

On the 'logic' of a Zombie Apocalypse Dead Reign is solid.  They sense PPE, killing things with PPE restores their HP/SDC and can even reverse their level of decay.  They go dormant, like hibernation which halts their decay and restores their HP/SDC.  

The ZA was preceded by a global pandemic that flooded infrastructure with sick and dying people, getting around the usual ZA caveat that the ZA is only unstoppable after it's already succeeded.  It's not a 1 zombie makes 2 makes 4 scenario that is implausible, but a there are tens of millions of sick and dying today and tens and millions of zombies tomorrow scenario.

The down sides of the game overall is that without the plethora of equipment add-ons (powered armor, magic items, cybernetics) that OCCs tend to be based around in Paladium games, and the lack of RCCs, magicians, psychics, et cetera than the classes aren't very well distinguished outside of the fluff, which is general problem of system not matching game.  They really stretch some of the concepts unnecessarily thin to make more classes than are needed, especially with the supplemental OCCs; but that's the nature of Paladium.

The monster list, especially with the supplements really doesn't stick within the scope of ZA either.  Stretches that concept thin as well, although that's somewhat less obnoxious from a GMs perspective, since you can just not use whatever you find outside the boundaries of the genre.