What about turning zombies on their head? What if you made a single zombie in the spirit of Jason Voorhees?

Getting hit bypasses all accrued hitpoints and is an opposed roll based on base HD die.

So a fighter might roll a d8 plus Con vs. a d8 rolled by Jason. You might survive one hit, but likely not two. Cannot be killed by normal means. Etc.

Downed zombies rot and putrefy at an alarming rate.  If you don't actually get your hazmat gear and clean them up, things get worse.  They ooze and drip their way into the groundwater.  The mold that would grow on them and spread may be more infectious than the bites.

Oh, don't forget the bugs.  Especially mosquitoes.

I generally agree that the classic zombie needs a little extra spice on it to be a credible threat in an RPG, especially in a fantasy RPG. The basic truth is that a Romero-style zombie wouldn't be much of a threat to a man in full armor, especially if it comes down to just trading blows.

I like the way zombie hordes are handled in Berserk. In that, a "zombie" is just a corpse possessed by a demon, and they're indifferent to all physical damage. The only thing that dispels them is daylight. so from sunset to to sunrise they will just keep coming no matter what you do. And when night falls again they will come right back. That could be adapted into an RPG to put the characters under a timed siege, or force them to fight an all-night running battle.

I do think you can make even the traditional zombie a threat to PCs, but you need a few tools: good mob rules, good grappling rules, and the right environment. Picture it this way: The PCs are traveling along, waist deep in a fetid swamp, when dozens of zombies surge up out of the water. They're inside the PCs' formation already, and they're impervious to pain. They don't punch or claw; they don't even bite. They just pile onto the PCs and try to drag them down by sheer weight of numbers. Maybe the PCs cut a few of them down, but soon there's no room to swing a sword, no room to aim a gun. Either you're strong enough to keep your head above water or you aren't.

Quote from: GhostNinja on May 03, 2023, 02:15:12 PM
how about Zombies with leather jackets and switchblades? 

Now that's threating.

oooh dance fighting West Side Story zombies....brrrrrr....

Quote from: jhkim on May 02, 2023, 05:22:52 PM
There are plenty of solutions, I'm think. I've got some ideas of how I might deal with this if I wanted to do zombie horror, but I'll leave it as an open question at first.

#1. Anyone bitten becomes a zombie after X time. There is no "save". You take at least one hit point of damage, you're infected. Fighting zombies becomes a huge game of russian roulette. It only takes one lucky bite attack... It's like how players pay attention to undead that drain levels. The consequences of getting hit are severe, and so they wake the fuck up. This is for the typical "2D6 Zombies" encounter. But carry it over to a zombie infestation scenario...

#2. The players may be smart, but all the NPCs, who are reacting as if they are real people, not a relativley disposable RPG character, fucking panic. They try to save their infected friends and family. They try to hide their bites and find sanctuary with other people. Civilization breaks down. There are no safe harbors, just panicked people and zombies chomping on them. There is no more supplies, no arrows, no blacksmiths to fix your armor, no food or water except what you can gather for yourself. Clerics and others with the magical ability to "cure zombie infection" are mobbed by desperate people. There's no way they can cure them all before they turn.

World War Z (The book) is a great example of how people acting like people will quickly spread a zombie infection until it's way out of control. And once it's out of control, it becomes very difficult to engineer solutions. Your murder hole example, would quickly fill up with zombies until they're walking on top of it, while more are pouring around the corners.
And you'd better not expose yourself to zombie attack while building your traps and tricks...

Thanks for all the suggestions. There are a lot of good ideas. Here's my general thoughts:

Zombies as minions

The zombies get tactics in being directed by a boss of some sort. I think this is fine. It's the typical way that I've seen zombies used in fantasy games. For example, the original Ravenloft module had variant "Strahd zombies" which made slightly grosser by having limbs keep fighting after they are hacked off. Plus they ambushed characters from under shallow water.

In general, I think my initial issues are with the zombie movie genre where zombies are the primary enemy. They can work fine as occasional threats in a fantasy game, especially with some of the suggested spices.

New powers

Some cool ideas here - though some are arguably substituting a different monster instead of zombies. New and/or different monsters instead of zombies can be cool, but something like the aliens in Carpenter's The Thing are really a different category.

Smart zombies that work as pack hunters are more dangerous, and they sidestep the problem of walking into a trap over and over. I am currently reading "I am Legend", which I saw both movies of but never read the story. The vampires there are a bit of a puzzle. They can talk and seem intelligent in some ways. The story has women vampires often taking off their clothes to try to lure Neville out of his house, for example, and one talks to him. But physically they never try anything beyond throwing stones or hitting things with their fists, and they're unable to break into a boarded-up house.

I'll finish the story maybe tomorrow and have more comments.

New transmission and Fast zombies

If the zombies are still mindless and the core enemies, I think this still runs into the same problem of tactics. 28 Days Later (2002) and Dawn of the Dead (2004) both featured fast zombies, but I thought both demonstrated the stupid tactics problem.

Making zombies mindless but more dangerous could force the players more into only building zombie traps, and never facing them up close. Which could be an interesting puzzle game, but it's very different than the genre and lacks a certain excitement.

Quote from: jhkim on May 02, 2023, 05:22:52 PM
There are plenty of solutions, I'm think. I've got some ideas of how I might deal with this if I wanted to do zombie horror, but I'll leave it as an open question at first.

Mostly the solutions come to: make the zombies living. Living things want to reproduce, and continue living. Living things have a variety of strategies for this.

I've thought a bit about how I'd treat the zombies presented in The Last of Us. In that story, a fungus takes over people's nervous system and makes them aggressive, and eventually turns them into giant fungal blobs. Like most zombie stories the various details ignore basic laws of physics, and is not even internally consistent, eg if they can survive in a basement for decades without eating, why are they predatory at all? Other stories like The Walking Dead say you must destroy their brain, but why? Because it's sending signals to the body? But if the body has rotted, so have the nerves, so by what means are they transmitting the signals? etc. There's also the issue of transmission speed: in reality, a communicable disease which passes between people very quickly can be contained in one spot, like ebola. The more dangerous (to the general population) ones are those which have an incubation period of at least a week.

A better zombie fungus would have them working like this. The fungus invades their body, gradually taking over the nervous system, with the aim of producing as many fungal spores as possible before the expiration of the host. It's 1-4 weeks before symptoms. Both the host and the spores, then, require energy from food. Meat is higher-energy than any naturally-occurring food, and in particular fatty tissue. So the zombies will happily eat fruit and so on, and animals - but in the modern world, humans are the most commonly-occurring meat, and they have large fatty brains.

The zombies are mindless in the sense of no consciousness, but they're not stupid - more like a bunch of not-very-bright feral dogs. They won't co-ordinate with each-other, but they won't simply walk off cliffs etc.

Humans and their brains to eat may not be immediately available, so the zombies will wander. They can eat other zombies, but have an aversion to the fungus - if the fungus won't reproduce well if the hosts keep killing and eating other hosts. The zombies also instinctively form small packs, since it's easier for them to take animals and people in a group of several than if they're on their own.

Still, food will be limited at times, and the zombies being mindless won't be able to store it by refrigeration, smoking etc. And so they can go into hibernation. Just as normal humans get an insulin surge after a big meal and feel sleepy, so too the fungal zombies. They kill, gorge themselves, then lie down in a corner nearby. Once they're fattened up, they stay in that corner and hibernate. As we see on TV shows like Alone, a starving person loses about a pound a day. So if the zombies are in the healthy or slightly overweight (for humans) bodyweight range, they can spend 1-7 days absolutely gorging themselves and then rest for 1-4 weeks, so long as they get some water.

The major obstacle for a human doing a gorge-and-rest cycle would be boredom and loneliness; as seen on Alone, the average time before people are pulled for medical reasons (almost always starvation) is 58 days, but the average time for them to quit is 27 days. A zombie being relatively mindless (its brain being taken over by a fungus) is indifferent to loneliness or boredom, so it can just lie around until it needs to feed again.

Over time more of the zombie's body would become fungus until it's unable to move, the host starves to death and then the body is mostly covered with fungus and explodes spores on anyone wandering by. People can be infected by being wounded by a zombie, but that more often leads to being torn apart and eaten, anyway, so...

And so we'd get zombies lying around waiting to wake up when adventurers come by and attack them, zombies in smallish packs, and apparently dead zombies still being a danger. People get hit by spores and have to wait some weeks to find out... which makes people paranoid about anyone who shows any bad temper or aggression, which of course makes them react aggressively, which... and thus society breaks down.

Quote from: jhkim on May 04, 2023, 12:52:04 AM
I am currently reading "I am Legend", which I saw both movies of but never read the story. The vampires there are a bit of a puzzle. They can talk and seem intelligent in some ways. The story has women vampires often taking off their clothes to try to lure Neville out of his house, for example, and one talks to him. But physically they never try anything beyond throwing stones or hitting things with their fists, and they're unable to break into a boarded-up house.

I think the actually-dead vampires at least only have (some) memories of things they did and experienced while alive; they're not conscious and have no original or creative thought. So they'll keep on doing the same things repeatedly. They'll also do weird stuff like try to turn into a bat and fly, if they saw Dracula doing that at the movies. But they don't coordinate together to eg make & use a battering ram. Being slightly intelligent is even arguably a downside, compared to World War Z type zombies - they will avoid a trap pit, not repeatedly fall in & fill it up. They won't form mashed-together body pyramids that let them overcome obstacles.

Quote from: David Johansen on May 03, 2023, 11:31:43 PM
oooh dance fighting West Side Story zombies....brrrrrr....

Scary indeed

Quote from: jhkim on May 03, 2023, 12:23:16 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 03, 2023, 11:43:48 AM

Quote from: rgalex on May 03, 2023, 09:54:31 AM
One of the most unique takes I saw a GM use was transmission via sexual intercourse.  The virus took 1 year to take hold and change the person.  Procreation was a death sentence but humanity had to do it to survive.

So, two people fuck, get infected and become zombies one year latter... Leaving a 3 month old infant orphan. How come the infant didn't get the virus?

But never mind the baby not getting it. For humanity to survive you need 1.5 births per death, in that scenario you have 1 birth for every 2 deaths. Yeah, there's no hope.

I think I'm missing something in the premise. If the virus is 100% lethal in 1 year, then if someone hasn't had sex in a year, then you know they're not infected. It makes it pretty easy to tell who is infected and who isn't.

This is why highly lethal diseases generally don't spread effectively, at least with human transmission.

The game used a variant of the Legacy - Life Among the Ruins rules.  Generally the game takes place in 2 phases that go back and forth.  Phase 1 is a macro-setting level where each player is deciding the actions of entire factions and dealing with things like resources, alliances, cultural shifts, etc. 

The other phase zooms in to focus on a particular event that is of significance to the setting.  Something like the emergence of a new type of zombie, a power-plant being overrun, a new medical breakthrough could all be examples in this case.  For these instances everyone jumps down to individual characters to play it out and see what actually happens.

The game is specifically set up so that it's possible to skip large chunks of time between macro phases.  In some of the setting it may be generations going by.  In this one the GM had it move by seasons.  The threat from the zombie infection was that, yes, you will be losing population.  How do you handle that?  Do you let your only mechanic do what he wants or do you lock him up because you can't risk losing him? Who do you trust to raise your kid because you are going to have to hand it off? It goes back to the threat of the zombies is that it makes other people a threat.

Quote from: S'mon on May 04, 2023, 06:04:14 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 04, 2023, 12:52:04 AM
I am currently reading "I am Legend", which I saw both movies of but never read the story. The vampires there are a bit of a puzzle. They can talk and seem intelligent in some ways. The story has women vampires often taking off their clothes to try to lure Neville out of his house, for example, and one talks to him. But physically they never try anything beyond throwing stones or hitting things with their fists, and they're unable to break into a boarded-up house.

I think the actually-dead vampires at least only have (some) memories of things they did and experienced while alive; they're not conscious and have no original or creative thought. So they'll keep on doing the same things repeatedly. They'll also do weird stuff like try to turn into a bat and fly, if they saw Dracula doing that at the movies. But they don't coordinate together to eg make & use a battering ram. Being slightly intelligent is even arguably a downside, compared to World War Z type zombies - they will avoid a trap pit, not repeatedly fall in & fill it up. They won't form mashed-together body pyramids that let them overcome obstacles.

OK, I finished the story.

SPOILER WARNINGS













I'd class the vampires in the same non-threatening class as the OP -- less so than the movie adaptations or most zombie movies. More than once, Neville goes on a drunken binge and charges out into a group of them at night, and then stumbles back inside with no serious damage. His biggest danger seems to be loneliness and possible suicide. Among the vampires few strategies is women vampires taking off their clothes outside his house to tempt him.

Neville does well in research considering he is a not a doctor or scientist, but he has virtually no tactics. He is completely safe just by boarding up his windows and hanging garlic. And he kills hundreds of them because they are helpless during the day and most make no effort to protect themselves during that time. But over months of hunting, he fails to track and find Cortman who hides in the house across the street from him.

To break up the vampires into their types:

Dead vampires: These seem to have high animal intelligence. His dead coworker Cortman can only speak one repeated phrase, but he does reason some things, like understanding when he tests the superstition of running water. Cortman seens exceptional though - as he hides effectively, which even most living vampires do not. Still, the most the dead do is punch with their fists and throw stones, and they are unable to break into a house.

Unorganized living vampires: In principle, these have human intelligence. It is implied they are the same mentally as Ruth and her people. However, Neville theorizes that they are insane, which is why they try things like jumping off a lamp post and flapping their arms. This prevents them from any effective action.

Organized living vampires: i.e. Ruth and her people. These instantly overwhelm Neville as soon as they decide to attack him. They use cars, axes, guns, and pikes.

I am rather partial to the real world zombie, the "Serpent & the Rainbow" blowfish toxin paralytic torpor & judgment soporific mixed with cultural cosmology. The zombies are people who are still alive but put through a multiday torpor nightmare, then traumatized by the funeral and subsequent grave robbery, and finally stuck in a crippling "afterlife" nightmare of sodium-deprived pre-frontal cortex damage (affecting speech and suggestion resistance) & redosing cognitive soporific. Obedience is more resignation, though brief moments of resistance can occur if the deed asked is grossly against values, though such resistance can be eroded by further conditioning.

It makes you NOT WANT to wander blithely in and mow down zombies. There IS a chance to save them if you can sneak salt (like NaCl) in their food, which is just regular food WITHOUT salt PLUS occasional mild redosing of other hallucinogens and depressants. The earlier you can rescue and treat them the more of their pre-frontal cortex you can save.

Part of the fun would be the potential "dialogue" one can have with zombie servants. They could answer with hand gestures, possibly be negotiated with or outright left alone if it is not relevant to their orders, even have moments of humanity as they pause in a rare moment of moral resistance. It turns the experience more into a stealth mission deep into enemy territory surrounded by reluctant, mostly mute, dominated victims.

Creepy and more challenging that hack 'n slash.

I think you're running into the problem that something that is horrific is not necessarily threatening.  It is not hard, mechanically, to inflict enough harm on an unarmored human body that the body, regardless of its animating intelligence, can't walk, crawl, or work its jaw; it's much harder when you're outnumbered and lacking proper equipment, but still not a significant problem.  Fighting a horde of shambling zombies with a polearm and some decent terrain is high-risk if you mess up, but so is any fight where you're outnumbered; a dagger blow can kill you just as well as a magic illness.  A survivalist with a thousand rounds of .308, a good bolt-action hunting rifle, and the ability to keep moving and get in and out of his fortification, and facing TV Walking Dead style slow-walkers, should be absolutely able to clear his town of a hundred or so zombies.

So, the answer is clear; you recognize that certain character types don't play well with zombie horror, and both engineers and prepared survivalists are not it.  If you want a traditional zombie horror story, then you will need to exclude certain elements that neutralize the scenario.

Mind you, my own preferred answer is to lean into the engineering solutions when I get them, and just reflect them.  Once you've got PCs in the mindset of designing the most efficient kill-traps for zombies, then you start introducing other dangerous, panicking people, who keep acting not like engineers and threatening everyone around them (including themselves), and wait to see how long it takes for that efficient, problem-solving mindset to solve the problem.  Then iterate and repeat with just a little less-dumb survivors, until the PCs are safe and secure in the little corner of the apocalypse they've carved out for themselves, and then reflect on who they had to carve through to get there.

  I ran a setting using GURPS where the characters were all 50 point characters.  The characters being "normal people" in an abnormal situation made the whole thing dangerous.  I loosely based the setting off of the xbox game State of Decay, where there are lots of shambling zombies, some running zombies, a few "feral zombies " (which are fast moving berserkers with strength far beyond an average human can who can run down slower moving cars), and a few Juggernauts, which are extremely hard to kill, destroy cars that run into them and are about as strong as an enraged grizzly bear.   

     I think a party of experienced adventurer types are hero level people and are unlikely to be threatened by zombies unless there is a veritable army and the group is in terrain not of their choosing.  Having mundane people who need to go out and find canned food and anti biotics and who are in no ways assured of hitting a moving target in the head be the party....well the tone and nature of the game becomes much different.

Quote from: FingerRod on May 03, 2023, 07:08:18 PM
What about turning zombies on their head? What if you made a single zombie in the spirit of Jason Voorhees?

Getting hit bypasses all accrued hitpoints and is an opposed roll based on base HD die.

So a fighter might roll a d8 plus Con vs. a d8 rolled by Jason. You might survive one hit, but likely not two. Cannot be killed by normal means. Etc.

A zombie with regeneration powers...

COOL!

You could use the Juju Zombies from Monster Manual 2, but give them faster movement. A mob of those would be pretty tough on almost any group, save high-level clerics.

Another idea is the undead tsunami like Wights in Game Of Thrones. A horde of thousands of them are accompanied by a blizzard or dust storm that makes it almost impossible to see them until they're almost on top of you.