As I mentioned in another topic I've just wrapped up a Night of the Living Dead themed game in which the whole party died. They want to take another crack at it so I'm thinking the logical conclusion is to run a Dawn of the Dead themed game. I want to start if off a little differently than the last one, and I was thinking of having either the players start off in prison cells, or maybe on a ship. Sort of an Assault on Precinct 13 vibe where the overwhelming horror of the situation puts enemies on the same team. Thought I'd throw it out there to the wolves, see what you guys can pick out of it.
I've put thinking about this game off, and now I'm running it in two days and I still haven't put anything on paper. Gee, I hope my players aren't reading this.
As for the explanation, I'm not worried about it. One day, the dead no longer rest. I have five or six explanations culled from the source material (meteors, radiation, hell is full, etc), but much like the Living Dead movies, I'm not going to go into it. There won't be anyway to reverse it, however. The dead rising is as much a physical reality as rain falling or water freezing. (That’s one of the reasons I went with a lower fantasy, lower leveled world, so that things would be harder to fix).
If by succeed you mean survive, they have a slim chance of that. I'm not out to kill anybody, nor am i going to worry about keeping them alive. The party died in the first game because they got locked in that trap of thinking, "Hey, combat. Hey, let's roll initiative. Hey, we're all dead," that comes from the baseline asumption in D&D (borne out of the CR system) that says if a monster is on the table the party has a fair chance of killing it. I think however they realized why this logic doesn't apply to the survival horror genre, and are looking for a rematch while armed with this new information.
As for the overall story; this is a limited series run rather than a campaign. I'm planning on putting the pcs in a "hopeless" situation (one they can't overcome with brute force, like a city full of zombies... 1,000 or so), and see what they do.
Well, I'll give you the break down of the first two sessions, and asuming I live through the next one I'll see what I can do.
Pre-Game:
I told the players I was planning on running a horror-themed game, starting at first level and going 1d8 sessions, depending on how dead and angry they were after the first one. One of my players loaned me his Call of Cthulhu book to read up on some horror stuff, but I told them it wasn't going to be CoC. More like a game version of a horror movie (though I didn't mention it was going to be Night of the Living Dead).
Game 1:
The pc's return to their home village and find it and the surrounding areas devastated by drought and plague. About 40% of the population of the area has died in the past year. Most of their familes have passed away. In addition, over the summer they were gone three young women were accused of witchcraft and hung-- one of these was the betrothed of the party's cleric. (He was understandably upset.) The fourth girl-- the youngest sister of the the three "witches"-- remains locked up in the basement of the village public house, possessed by demons (or, in fact, suffering from a neurological disease, misdiagnosed by the commoners of the area). The pc's are asked if they will travel into the supposedly haunted woods and find an old wisewoman who would be able to help the girl. (This was a red herring to make the pcs think I had some sort of plot in mind.)
The pc's reluctantly agree, though to me it seemed like they would have agreed to torch the village on general principles if the cleric had wanted them too. That player decided that the village had suffered enough for their ignorance, and the party set off into the wilderness.
After a day's travel, they find the old woman's yoda-like forest dwelling in the late evening. They are also aware of the sounds of chaos and combat spilling from within, and immedaitely move up and discover that the old woman's house is being looted by goblins. Hilarity ensues. As the players begin to wipe out the goblins, the old woman arises (as a zombie) and begins attacking the nearest living thing-- the cleric who had moved up to protect her body... not his day in a lot of ways. Then, as the goblins who are killed begin to get up as zombies, the tide of the battle shifts away from the party. All of this was going on in a 25' square room, and there were 6 pc's and 6 zombies in there, so it was tight quarters. In the end the last two fighters were able to kill off the last of the undead, with the rest of the party in negative hit points but not dead. They camped, healed the next day, and walked back home.
Game 2:
At this point the pc's were asuming the undead effect was local to the old woman's house and not a world-wide phenomonon, though there had been meteor showers the night before. They get back to the village and its pretty much the opening scene of any zombie movie. They kill the first zombie that wanders up fairly easily (the party was 2nd lvl at this point, I took it easy on them and let them level), but as they move to investigate the village, they find themselves drawing the attention of 30 or so.
The cleric and ranger fight a rear guard manuever to allow the rest of the party to move towards the public house, which they can see has become the last bastion for the living. Though with the rear guard taking single moves and the party making double moves, it only takes a round or two for them to get seperated. As the party makes it to the public house, more zombies-- drawn to the sound of conflict-- end up between the party and the rear guard. The bulk of the party makes it into the house and beats back the zombies that try to get in, but they can't hold the door. More zombies are coming up and the ranger and the cleric realize that they can't get to the public house and the party has to shut the door and barricade themselves inside. The cleric and the ranger take full run actions to another house where there are no zombies, though the zombies lurch off slowly after them.
At this point about half the party inside the public house had dropped to negatives and been stabilized. I gave those players pregen commoners to play until their characters could be healed (but since the cleric wasn't there, that wasn't going to happen). The cleric and ranger make it to a farmhouse that looks like zombies had already beaten the doors down and go inside, looking for a way to barricade themselves. The cleric notices the basement door has been locked from the outside and he calls down into the basement whereupon a raspy voice says, "Let me out of here."
Play was moving along pretty quickly here, and the cleric opens the basement door without really thinking it through, perhaps thinking zombies don't talk (and they don't, but I was taking a page out of the Return of the Living Dead and making "fresh" undead intelligent.)
So a feral undead comes running up out of the basement and the ranger wins initiative and tries to bull rush it back down the stairs but gets dropped by the AoO he provokes from not having Imp Bull Rush. The cleric acts next, and he bull rushes, and the zombie (or ghoul, since that was the stats I was using) has already taken his AoO, the cleric wins the opposed test, the zombie bounces back down the stairs, the cleric shuts and latches the door but by this point the slow zombies are there and after three rounds of hopeless combat, the cleric is dragged down.
Back to the public house. The pc's, realizing they're screwed, begin discussing options. This took place in realtime, as I had already calculated how long it would take the zombies to break down the barriacades (about 7 mins). 7 minutes go by of the pcs listening to zombies beat on the doors, with no real decisions made. The doors begin to fall, the pcs move into attack formation to guard the breech, but they can't kill the zombies fast enough, so the undead are making ground, the pcs are trying to stop them, once the undead clear a path it was pretty much over. Two commoners (played by pcs), manage to get out the open door after setting fire to the building, and were asumed to be run down by the undead and eaten (nobody was that curious about the details).
For the numbers, I was figuring that all the people that had died in the past three months would rise, more than that there wouldn't be enough meat to matter (and I wasn't planning on using skeletal undead except under special circumstances and later, if the game lasted that long). Recent undead (w/n two weeks) would be like ghouls, 2 weeks to a month and a half would be Animated Corpses from CoC (like zombies, but with Int 3), and more than that would be uncontrolled zombies. This put about 150 zombies in the immediate area, plus about 40 of the ghoul-type undead (but they weren't coming out until nighttime. I was treating them as light sensitive like the zombie/ghouls in Night of the Comet).
Mathematically, yeah, the players were screwed from the get-go. There's no way a scenario like this would make it past the CR censors. Combat was a dead end. The players realized this after the fact (we had about an hour after the game ended to post mortem things), and so we'll see how things go in the next session.
Day of the Dead, Game One.
The story goes that the pc's were crewmen on a longship (they had chosen the 13th Warrior to be the collective inspiration for the group) that encountered an abandoned ship. They investigated it, found the hold to be filled with ravenous undead, and they (just the pcs) managed to escape by setting that ship alight and sailing away on their boat... though it was damaged and most of their fellow crew was killed.
Play begins with the group in a damaged, slowly sinking boat. At the first light of dawn they realize they are approaching land, and as the sun comes up, they see that it is a city even though there are no lights and no signs of life. They pilot their craft to the beach and try to drag it on the sand, and then begin to investigate this apparently abandoned port.
The city shows all the markings of mass chaos and battle. The tracks seem to indicate that there were large crowds of people moving around the city recently (within a few days), but the tracks are random and seem to indicate a riot more than organized battle. The group moves through some partially destroyed buildings, some burned, some apparently collapsed by whatever rampant violence had occurred, and found a tavern. While there were obvious signs of great violence in the area, the pc's saw few corpses, and those they did see were either burned horribly or were just in pieces. Scavenging, they turn up some bread and vegetables that haven't gone bad, and decide to eat (the party had not had supplies for several days on their boat) in the half-destroyed tavern.
While eating, an observant pc notices a hunched, cloaked figure lurching down the street. (The players, having just died in the previous game knew they were in a zombie movie, but were playing it like their characters hadn't made that leap yet). Still suspicious of this person, the archers move up into elevated positions (most of the second floor of the survived) while a pc called to the stranger in an authoritative voice. The hunched figure reacted with surprise and began to lurch off in the other direction.
Not about to be outran by a limping, hunched figure, a pc jogs out after him and tells him again to stop. Realizing he is being pursued, the hunched figure turns to the pc, who sees this "man" is covered in stained bandages over most of his body, but where there are no bandages there is bumpy, pustule covered flesh that seems to be rotting.
Realizing that this is not a zombie but a leper, the party becomes more scared. The witch (variant d20 class from AE), calls out for the archers to shoot the leper, while the fighter decides that he's not going to attempt to wrestle this guy to the ground. (I should point out I'm using the term "leper" in a pejorative sense to denote a person with some sort of horrible, rotting skin disease and not Hodgkin's disease and no disrespect is intended to people who have it.) The party decides to let him go, on the theory they can track him later.
The pcs finish breakfast and go off to track the leper. They travel through a neighborhood largely destroyed by fire (I have a bunch of cardboard building ruins that I made a couple of years ago that I was using... every time they left and area I'd tell them to rearrange them. Pc's like to be kept busy) and come to what they recognize as a destroyed church. Here they lose the tracks, but keen listeners detect a clattering of stones in the darkened, skeletal shape of a burned out building nearby.
The archers fan out while the two melee fighters dare each other towards the building in a series of single moves and five foot steps. Once there they see not the leper, but instead a partially rotted corpse lurching from the ruin, moaning slightly. (For descriptions, I was using the 1993 Night of the Living Dead look... clouded eyes, largely expression-less faces that twist to a feral rage when close to the hated life and yummy brains... plus lots of gooey, smelly, slimy descriptors of bodies rotting and not working right... hands with broken fingers with the flesh torn away from using their arms like clubs, and so on.) I found it funny the pcs seemed more scared to find a zombie than a leper when previously they had been more scared of the leper than they were when they thought it was a zombie. I guess its all about managing expectations. The party concentrates on the zombie and whacks it dead shortly. Moving in to investigate the ruined house, they find a trap door locked from the inside, seemingly clawed at from the outside.
The party bashes it open no problem and heads down a rickety wooden staircase to an earthen basement 15' square. There they see two bodies lying on the floor-- a woman and child-- with horrible wounds, and a corpse sitting on the floor with its back to the wall, its face smeared with blood and brain, its belly swollen with the rotting gases and god knows what else... it moans slightly and looks towards the party, who hack it to pieces (with all the lovely smell amd sight descriptors you'd think).
Also in the basement are some hastily cached supplies, which the pcs bring up with them before setting the bodies alight. They make sure the other two corpses are not undead, which they aren't (though they do notice the heads look like they were broken open and scooped out like halloween pumpkins). The witch stays at street level and notices that there are two more zombies in the square, limping slowly their way. The methodical, mindless way they move almost makes them seem like they aren't a threat. They walk slowly and clumsily, towards the sounds of conflict and movement as if by reflex.
The pc's come up the street level and see that not only are a couple of zombies approaching, but there are five or six more in the rubble behind them... and as the party looks there is the hint of motion in the ruins behind them.
The first wave of (two) zombies is upon them, and the pcs form up and dispatch them in a few rounds. Realizing that there are plenty out there (and that in a few rounds, this house is not going to be a very nice place to be) the pcs abandon the supplies they haven't already pocketed and start a fighting retreat away from the bulk of zombies already on the board.
At this point the pcs were leaving the battlemat, so everything had to be centrally relocated so that the pcs could see that there were a few zombies in the the other direction as well. One of the players asked me that given the size of the village, what would the likely population have been. "A few thousand," I said.
The party makes a few attempts and going places, but by now they see that there are a lot more undead out, and every round they spend fighting them (making noise, spilling blood) seems to attract more. The party had a tendency to split up as the faster members would run, the slower ones would stay and fight, zombies would surround both, and they'd have to fight there way back to one another. The zombies were AC11 and Attack +2 Melee, so they needed 18's to hit most of the party and I wasn't rolling very well, so the party wasn't taking a lot of damage intitially.
During the chaos of the battle, one of the fast pcs ran off by himself in an attempt to lure some zombies away (the zombies had a tendency to lurch after the closest living thing, with a random roll to determine between targets the same distance away. If zombies were following someone who got too far away, they would stop and sort of "reset", all wandering in slightly different directions but zeroing in on conflict) and detected a drainage grate being pulled back from the inside into position in the street. The player noted the location of the grate and circled back to the party with this information.
A few more rounds go by, with the party making uneven progress but taking realtively little damage. The party makes it to the sewer grate in stages, with the fast character making a long run to pick up the witch's dropped crossbow in which he runs through three seperate groups of zombies (setting off 9 or 10 AoO's that all miss). They force the stuck grate up and one by one the party goes down to hole as the zombies start to catch up. The last pc steps down onto the shoulders of the party and affixes the grate back over the hole as the first zombie gets to him and reaches down through the metal bars. The pcs are about 10' down in a sewer tunnel, lit at first only by the circle of daylight above them until one by one zombies come up and blot out the sun. Play ends with the pc's breaking out their continual flame torches.
Notes:
A few things. One thing I decided is that the undead don't consider the lepers prey and so the afflicted that had lived in the city as beggars soon became the only living people walking around. This will be dealt with in the next session, as well as some of the undead that had been living in the city prior to the dead rising.
The Party:
Sven, a mobility based human Unfettered (AE variant class, think Fighter/Rogue), who wields a polearm most of the time.
Ugla, a half-orc fighter/barbarian/ranger who doesn't expect to live very long and so isn't worried about multiclassing penalties.
Jokull, a human winter witch (AE Variant class, think multi-class caster). He takes his name from apparently the Norweigan word for "glacier" but we all called him Joe Cool.
Hognar, a litorian barbarian/wolf totem (AE variant, think Cat Man ranger). Very fast. Built to be an archer.
That was the group... two players were out of town and another couldn't make it, but 4 worked out good. We only had about three hours to play but we got a lot done. The party was pretty screwed but didn't take much damage. I attribute this to bad rolls and to the higher armor classes this time around. What a difference a level makes.
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Ah yes, the undead game... it came to a bad end unfortunately. The lethality in it was too high for the players. I felt I had prefaced if fairly with the Survival Horror label, but there is a certain mindset in D&D that says, "Press on, we can take it," that just doesn't work. Players have a tendency to get locked into doing things one way, taking encounters head on, and when that doesn't work they say, "Well, we couldn't win."
As a gm, its kind of frustrating. I imagine its frustrating for the players as well. I was going to run the game throughout the month of October before switching back to more traditional D&D, but since the group wasn't having much fun and its not much fun to run for people who aren't having much fun, we decided to call it quits and pick up something else a little less lethal. Que sera, sera.
some guy said:
What do you do about Paladins or Clerics? (i.e. turn undead seems like they could get away somewhat easily perhaps) and the other What about mages? couldnt they cast invisibility to undead or even a fly spell later and mess thigns up? not criticizing but jsut wondering incase i use a similar theme? (doesnt hurt to be prepared)
Well, the beauty of having effectively limitless undead is you can burn through a paladin or cleric's turn attempts pretty quickly, and at low levels (I'd say below 5th), they can't turn enough to matter. Invis to Undead and Fly are good spells as well, but a mage will pretty much have to burn through most of his list in order to cover the whole party, and then the problem becomes, What do they do when they become visible/have to land somewhere.
On the other side of things, which I didn't run, you have the high level party that can wade through large numbers of undead, so the hordes of zombies are more of an inconvenience or a tactical consideration than a real threat, but there is plenty of higher level undead that'll be having a field day with the dead rising. I had a lot of ideas for things along these lines, but this type of brutal, high-mortality game wasn't as much fun for the players as it was for me so we moved on.
