As you may know (or not) I'm working on a Pulp-ish game, I don't want to just copy paste the exact same monsters so I've been doing some changes and creating some new ones (will share some of those soonish).

Just like there's different types of Vampires from around the world I wanted to include different types of Zombies:

Bug: As in the worm that turns Snails into zombies so the birds eat them to keep propagating.
Fungal: As in a "recent" video game, a fungus infection makes zombies
Viral: Like in the Resident Evil
Voodoo: Magic zombies

Not sure if necromantic zombies are different enough from the voodoo ones to include them.

So the idea is to have them be different in origin, aesthetics (maybe some aren't decomposing?) and mechanics.

Meaning not only one type might not be decomposing but one is faster, other is smarter (or can/must follow orders), etc.

Have any of you done something like it or seen it somewhere else?

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PM
As you may know (or not) I'm working on a Pulp-ish game, I don't want to just copy paste the exact same monsters so I've been doing some changes and creating some new ones (will share some of those soonish).

Just like there's different types of Vampires from around the world I wanted to include different types of Zombies:

Bug: As in the worm that turns Snails into zombies so the birds eat them to keep propagating.
Fungal: As in a "recent" video game, a fungus infection makes zombies
Viral: Like in the Resident Evil
Voodoo: Magic zombies

Not sure if necromantic zombies are different enough from the voodoo ones to include them.

So the idea is to have them be different in origin, aesthetics (maybe some aren't decomposing?) and mechanics.

In most zombie movies, the different origin excuses are largely cosmetic. i.e. fungal zombies are functionally the same as viral zombies. However, there are different types of viral zombies within Resident Evil - ranging up to brutes and giant multi-body creatures.

In terms of abilities, there are slow zombies and fast zombies (and not much in between), and mindless zombies (i.e. insect-level intelligence) ranging up to semi-intelligent zombies. And there's whether a zombie bite will turn you into a zombie. That's most of the variation in zombie films. The vast majority closely mimic George Romero.

There were earlier voodoo zombie stories, mostly about the horror of a person's mind and soul still being in their body. It's a very different genre from zombie hordes following Romero. So I would go with generic necromantic/magic zombies.

Quote from: jhkim on April 25, 2023, 11:21:49 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PM
As you may know (or not) I'm working on a Pulp-ish game, I don't want to just copy paste the exact same monsters so I've been doing some changes and creating some new ones (will share some of those soonish).

Just like there's different types of Vampires from around the world I wanted to include different types of Zombies:

Bug: As in the worm that turns Snails into zombies so the birds eat them to keep propagating.
Fungal: As in a "recent" video game, a fungus infection makes zombies
Viral: Like in the Resident Evil
Voodoo: Magic zombies

Not sure if necromantic zombies are different enough from the voodoo ones to include them.

So the idea is to have them be different in origin, aesthetics (maybe some aren't decomposing?) and mechanics.

In most zombie movies, the different origin excuses are largely cosmetic. i.e. fungal zombies are functionally the same as viral zombies. However, there are different types of viral zombies within Resident Evil - ranging up to brutes and giant multi-body creatures.

In terms of abilities, there are slow zombies and fast zombies (and not much in between), and mindless zombies (i.e. insect-level intelligence) ranging up to semi-intelligent zombies. And there's whether a zombie bite will turn you into a zombie. That's most of the variation in zombie films. The vast majority closely mimic George Romero.

There were earlier voodoo zombie stories, mostly about the horror of a person's mind and soul still being in their body. It's a very different genre from zombie hordes following Romero. So I would go with generic necromantic/magic zombies.

IIRC Voodoo zombies can even talk, and if the witch got to them in time they're not decomposing. Not that they can figure out how to do X if it's a complex enough task.

I know that in the movies the differences are mostly cosmetic.
I don't want that in my game, I want them to be really different.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 11:27:04 PM
IIRC Voodoo zombies can even talk, and if the witch got to them in time they're not decomposing. Not that they can figure out how to do X if it's a complex enough task.

I know that in the movies the differences are mostly cosmetic.
I don't want that in my game, I want them to be really different.

OK, so from what I'm hearing, you want zombies that are distinctive (i.e. not just mirroring the genre) but still evocative of zombie tropes.

Fungal zombies could be slow zombies, that explode with infectious spores when their skulls are broken.

Viral zombies could be fast zombies that are still semi-alive, and have sharp senses and some vestige of their human self, but only low animal intelligence. Their bite is infectious.

Bug zombies could be smart zombies that can haltingly talk, but it's the bug speaking, with no relation to the former person. A victim gets infected when a bug crawls in their ear.

For magic zombies, I'd want to know more about what magic is like in the rest of the background.

The Lucio Fulci classic, Zombie (aka Zombi 2) features voodoo zombies that are infectious.

And for that matter, so does the 1950s classic Zombies of Mora Tau. Well, maybe more a curse than voodoo.  But still infectious.

Quote from: jhkim on April 25, 2023, 11:56:11 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 11:27:04 PM
IIRC Voodoo zombies can even talk, and if the witch got to them in time they're not decomposing. Not that they can figure out how to do X if it's a complex enough task.

I know that in the movies the differences are mostly cosmetic.
I don't want that in my game, I want them to be really different.

OK, so from what I'm hearing, you want zombies that are distinctive (i.e. not just mirroring the genre) but still evocative of zombie tropes.

Fungal zombies could be slow zombies, that explode with infectious spores when their skulls are broken.

Viral zombies could be fast zombies that are still semi-alive, and have sharp senses and some vestige of their human self, but only low animal intelligence. Their bite is infectious.

Bug zombies could be smart zombies that can haltingly talk, but it's the bug speaking, with no relation to the former person. A victim gets infected when a bug crawls in their ear.

For magic zombies, I'd want to know more about what magic is like in the rest of the background.

What magic is like in the setting...

Okay, let's see, only low to medium magic is available to the PCs and most NPCs, this means there's no planar travel, at least not willing, the players might stumble with something that transports them to the past, future, other worlds by "magic" but they can't do this by themselves.

There's no resurrection.

The voodoo zombies can be magic or not, I'm not planing on making it clear. Maybe they're just under the influence of some unknown drug.

Low Fantasy.

My biggest complaint with modern monsters like Zombies that appear in "our world" is that they are all explainable via science and able to be combated by science. Vampires are caused by a blood disease, for example. I get that as storytrellers try to tell the same story again and again it is natural to use humanities actual and 100% real superpower.. our brains and apply it to supernatural situations... but the thing is I hate all that. Vampires are not just immortal douche bags that act exactly like any normal human but wear cool clothing and sit around in stupid euro-dance clubs. Vampirism should be a curse, a mystical curse and horrific curse at that. One which turns you into a hideous monster, that tourchers your soul. One that has no way of being explained by science. Having smeone look at a blood sample in a vampier movie and talk about invading cells or something is like midichlorians being the source of the force in star wars... it is lam af.

IMO, the best and easiest way to make a "new" take on monsters is to remove all that and go back to actual supernatural origins.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMVoodoo: Magic zombies

As far as Zombies go... personally, I'm a huge movie fan of the original Voodoo Zombies. There is a lot of room for creative expansion when you remove the modern "disease" angle introduced in the late 60s. Some old school horror movie fans might notice some things, but many people won't even know the old movies starting with White Zombie in the 30s. If I was using zombie in a story, I'm almost 100% sure it would be either something like Voodoo or Evil Dead.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMBug: As in the worm that turns Snails into zombies so the birds eat them to keep propagating.

I like this. It also means you can bypass the "shoot in the head" thing, as the bug is the thing you need to kill. You could even change the behaviour from random violence you see in modern zombies to something like Aliens, where they want to capture people and drag them into nests for consumption and breeding. Some kinf of controlling thing is a good idea imo.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMFungal: As in a "recent" video game, a fungus infection makes zombies

narr... Pass on this for me. I think the idea is fine, but Last of Us is the most popular computer game of all time, and the TV show is one of the most popular on the planet. Even years latter, people will point to the work and go.. "last of us rip off". Game of Thrones is long gone, X-Files is long gone. Buffy is long gone... but people still can't reuse that stuff, it is just to famous and linked to those stories.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMViral: Like in the Resident Evil

Yeah. See my original point. I really hate how zombies have been turned into something like a cold, and I mean that beyond the fact I want more supernatural in my horror. The virus thing just never hold water. The problem with using scientific concepts in your story, like Viruses, is that you need to make it bulletproof to the idea of viruses. Thing is we know viruses are real, and we understand them. That is, imo, why World War Z (one of the best zombie books ever written imo) is us avoiding the Apocalypse and winning, as there is NO WAY we couldn't beat zombies. Shoot a zombie and get splattered in blood, your fine... but one bites you.. you're stuffed? I can not even remember a time the zombie plague acted like a virus. It has never once made sense. A single tank and a guy with a can of petrol could destroy millions of zombies just by running over them on the freeway outside NY. Rage Monsters like in 24 Days latter make even less sense. People starve after 3 weeks of not eating. So the entire plague would only last a few months and be controllable pretty quick. I might not have even finished playing Horizon Forbidden West before the entire thing is over, and I never even noticed it happening.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMNot sure if necromantic zombies are different enough from the voodoo ones to include them

well, a difference you could use, if you wanted to here, is that one is a true undead, the other is an enslaved, but alive, soul. You could infuse a lot of different characteristics using this to separate them.

In my mind, the Voodoo zombie retains its powers of speech and cogitation, and most of its original personality, but is subservient to the witch doctor that raised it. I prefer intelligent undead to mindless ones in general, and that approach helps differentiate them from George Romero style zombies. It also means there are a lot more interesting stories to play with. I also think of the voodoo zombie as being a more unique and rare creation, so where a Romero Zombie story almost necessarily requires hordes, I'd focus a voodoo adventure around a very small number of zombies that had been raised by the witch doctor for a specific purpose.

Another way of differentiating them would be to lean into the fact that Voodoo is not just a magic system, it's also a religion. One of my favorite examples of this is in the Terry Pratchett novel "Witches Abroad", where (SPOILER ALERT, and also paraphrasing) a witch raises her dead lover as a zombie, in order to make him into a vessel for the Voodoo gods. This gets to the point where by the climax of the story, he essentially becomes Baron Samedi. That's the outline of a pulp adventure right there.

There are a couple of other pop cultural versions of the "occult zombie" that might be worth considering as well:

One would be the Mummy. Personally I much prefer the Boris Karloff version where the mummy is more of an undead wizard, to the Christopher Lee version where it's kind of just a zombie in bandages. The 90s Mummy films (with Brendan Frasier) also engage with the idea of the undead as a sympathetic villain, so that's another approach.

Another would be the "Deadites" from the Evil Dead series. These seem to be human corpses possessed by demons? So that's another take on the undead you might use.

Outside of the undead world, there are versions of the voodoo zombie where they aren't corpses at all, but living people under the witch doctor's mind control. Possibly less interesting, but it has some pulp pedigree. There's a "The Shadow" pulp, which I've heard of but haven't read, called "The Voodoo Master" that uses that idea.

EDIT: Just saw that the above comment already mentioned the Evil Dead, so thought I'd acknowledge that.

I have done mission work in Haiti, which has Voodoo as its national religion. As such, I do know a thing or two about Voodoo zombies. How they're made and the mythology behind it. Witch doctors are very real domestic terrorists, and that bears out the instant you read the ingredients shared across most zombie powder formulae.

Zombie powder is a mix of of an extract from pufferfish (an absurdly toxic paralysis agent), cane toad skin (which causes the sensation of a religious experience like mescaline), a skin irritant, human feces, and ground glass. The idea is that you put the powder on your skin, where you will scratch. If you scratch too hard, the glass shards will tear small holes in your skin, smearing the feces into your bloodstream, which means you will die of an infection (usually tetanus.) If you do not scratch that hard, then the pufferfish and cane toad skin seep through the skin, causing a religious experience and a deep paralysis coma people have trouble distinguishing from actual death.

Now, Hatians usually bury their dead in above-ground concrete containers. The Witch doctor plays witch drums and a variety of other instruments which make truly terrifying and awful breathing noises, before breaking the container open and extracting the zombie. Usually, attempts to make zombies fail, meaning the zombie ingested too much of one of the drugs and died in the burial chamber, but I understand there are also cases where they didn't take in enough, they wake up, and successfully fight off the witch doctor. I came across an interview of a witch doctor where he said he attempted to make about 300 zombies in his career and succeeded 2 times, so this process has about 1% odds of success. In successful cases, the coma often causes brain damage because you can't breathe during the coma and parts of the brain asphyxiate. A Voodoo zombie is a mixture of the religious experience, hypnotic suggestion, brain damage, and the cultural expectation that zombies become the witch doctor's slave.

0 / 10. Do not recommend.

Quote from: jhkim on April 25, 2023, 11:56:11 PM
Viral zombies could be fast zombies that are still semi-alive, and have sharp senses and some vestige of their human self, but only low animal intelligence. Their bite is infectious.

Unless they are half-zombies like the "hambies" in All of Us Are Dead. They are as intelligent as they were before becoming infected, but have enhanced senses and become stronger. That said, I actually prefer the Voodoo zombies from folklore and earlier stories. Most "zombies" in fantasy rpgs are simply magically animated corpses and hardly differ from skeletons except that they still have some flesh on their bones.

Voodoo zombies are necromantic zombies. The distinction that exists is cultural. Zombies come from Voodoo folklore. Liches (euro-zombies) come from the writing of pulp writers like Clark Ashton Smith. You can also place astral/spectral zombies until this archetype. They're slaves created by a necromancer. Most religions believe your soul remains attached to your corpse until it's completely decayed into dust, so reanimating a corpse to be your slave is offensive to the deceased. The idea that corpses are just shells is a modern atheist convention.

Necroscope puts a spin in this by making the main character a medium who can summon zombies that are willing to help him. In that setting, souls remain conscious after death but get bored because they're stuck in their corpses waiting to completely decompose. The only thing they can do is think. The proximity of a necroscope seemingly allows them to reanimate their bodies, even dismembered. Since the necroscope is the only one who can talk to them and alleviate their boredom, they always come whenever he's in danger. Unfortunately, Lumley's writing comes across as Gary Stu a lot. Harry is never actually depicted as doing anything for the ghosts in return. They just help because he's the hero and can talk to them... whenever he needs something from them. Harry is never once depicted as talking to them just to talk. His interactions are always transactional.

The 2001 French RPG Nephilim: Revelation included a character type who could learn what was basically necroscopy. (There are so many similarities that I wonder if Necroscope was a direct influence.) However, it was stated that they still had to do favors for their "flock" or they'd become unpopular. I never played the game when it was in print or had interactions with the community, so I have no idea how many GMs enforced this.

The evil/hungry dead (ghouls, vampires, etc) are a different archetype. They got confused/conflated with liches/zombies in the 20th century.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMBug: As in the worm that turns Snails into zombies so the birds eat them to keep propagating.
Fungal: As in a "recent" video game, a fungus infection makes zombies
Viral: Like in the Resident Evil
Voodoo: Magic zombies

There's also the option for some sort of mad scientist version of zombies. Since re-animating a human corpse was something that scientists did in 1803 (via Galvanism) which is what inspired Frankenstein fifteen years later. This would be similar, in practice, to voodoo zombies as it requires a secret formula or potion to perform with the potential of industrialization to expand the numbers of victims. Of course, voodoo zombies aren't always dead but sometimes just mind controlled living people (as in 1932's White Zombie).

When you say the game is "pulp" do you mean that it is set in the 1940s or just pulpy?

Quote from: hedgehobbit on April 26, 2023, 05:02:24 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 25, 2023, 10:49:59 PMBug: As in the worm that turns Snails into zombies so the birds eat them to keep propagating.
Fungal: As in a "recent" video game, a fungus infection makes zombies
Viral: Like in the Resident Evil
Voodoo: Magic zombies

There's also the option for some sort of mad scientist version of zombies. Since re-animating a human corpse was something that scientists did in 1803 (via Galvanism) which is what inspired Frankenstein fifteen years later. This would be similar, in practice, to voodoo zombies as it requires a secret formula or potion to perform with the potential of industrialization to expand the numbers of victims. Of course, voodoo zombies aren't always dead but sometimes just mind controlled living people (as in 1932's White Zombie).

When you say the game is "pulp" do you mean that it is set in the 1940s or just pulpy?

Yes, but unless you also make them mechanically different it's the same monster with a very thin coat of paint. I'm aiming at them being mechanically different. Some progress has been done.

I'm aiming at a post WWII setting, so there's also Commie Scum as the badies.

Are you familiar with All Flesh Must Be Eaten?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/10/Eden-Studios/subcategory/57_60/All-Flesh-Must-Be-Eaten
http://texaszombie.com/

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on April 26, 2023, 05:39:00 PM
Are you familiar with All Flesh Must Be Eaten?

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/10/Eden-Studios/subcategory/57_60/All-Flesh-Must-Be-Eaten
http://texaszombie.com/

Not beyond knowing it exists.