any ideas for a contagious zombie plague, like Dawn of the Dead?

[lyle.spade]

So, I like zombies. I like hordes of them, in fact. And so I love the minions in 4e. What I've always wondered about was how to incorporate a highly contagious, mostly deadly zombie plague into DnD. Now that I'm running 4e, I'm looking to find a way to do just that.

Here's my initial thought: NPCs who get bitten are screwed, unless PCs with healing powers come to the rescue. PCs couls take advantage of certain healing powers to force the contagion out before them die...and come back hungry.

Anyway, before I go through the process of creating the disease/plague/whatever, and working up mechanics for it, I figured I'd as the community: do any of you have a working George Romero-style zombie plague, ready to use? If so, please share.

 

[ppaladin123]

In the recent book, "Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead," there are templates in the back of the book that you can apply to undead monsters. One of the templates (pg 217) is for an "infected zombie," that passes on a disease called, "zombie plague." The problem is that due to a printing mishap the actual disease was not included in the text. WotC knows about this though and has promised to include statistics for zombie plague in their next round of errata. In the meantime, you can probably use the disease "Worms of Kyuss,"(on page 218) or "Cemetery Rot" (on page 186). Both are rather nasty and can easily produce a zombie epidemic for you.

 

[lyle.spade]

In the recent book, "Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead," there are templates in the back of the book that you can apply to undead monsters. One of the templates (pg 217) is for an "infected zombie," that passes on a disease called, "zombie plague." The problem is that due to a printing mishap the actual disease was not included in the text. WotC knows about this though and has promised to include statistics for zombie plague in their next round of errata. In the meantime, you can probably use the disease "Worms of Kyuss,"(on page 218) or "Cemetery Rot" (on page 186). Both are rather nasty and can easily produce a zombie epidemic for you.

Thanks -- I have that book, but haven't read the whole thing yet. I'll keep an eye out for OG errata.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The main questions you have to ask yourself have to start with game mechanics. You don't want the PCs to easily end up being zombies. It probably should be POSSIBLE, but more as an element of suspense than as a desirable outcome, unless the players desire to get a kick out of wandering around dismembering the general public and have a hankering for brain pie!

On the other hand you probably want a raging plague, in general. Or maybe not. Maybe you wanted an outbreak in one place that only builds up slowly, I dunno. So there would need to be a way to judge when an NPC is infected and how the NPC reacts, and ideally that should be fairly close to how it goes for a PC, yet the PC should have a chance to resist or take a long time to zombify, or something.

Kind of tricky.

Basically I'd make it one of those "you have to be killed by the zombies to turn into one" type plagues. That pretty much would fit the bill. If a PC drops below 0 HP then he's going to zombify without intervention pretty quickly. NPCs are basically hapless, so the zombies just kill them and they add to the ranks left and right. That would be my approach. Any sort of healing spell can then potentially rescue someone if it gets used to raise them to plus HP before they zombify.

 

[Sceadeau]

For dawn of the dead style -- the rule was if you were scratched, you had the disease, it would kill you slowly, and when you died you'd be a zombie. For PCs to be able to come to the rescue (but not save the town), you'd need it to do something along these lines.

Damage: whatever+zombie infection

zombie infection: target takes ongoing 1(no save). If a creature with zombie infection dies, they become zombies, and whenever they deal damage in melee, they also inflict zombie infection.

zombie infection is cured whenever the target spends a healing surge.

---

This would have the effect of creating many zombies, and even put the PCs in danger if they are out of healing surges (would have to hole up for the night and hide), as well as allow them to heal other people, but only in a limited fashion.

 

[lyle.spade]

keep the good ideas coming!

Good ideas so far, folks. I want a full-blown contagion...as in, PCs might end up baricading themselves into a mall...sorry, market. I'm thinking a relatively isolated region gets slammed by a plague that creeps up tsunami-style, and then suddenly it seems that things go from bad to dire overnight. I'll putter with the mechanics put forth in the posts so far and will add some more detailed ideas to this post in a day or two for further suggestions.

What I want, somewhere in the back of the PCs' minds, is the feeling that surges & powers & whatnot might not do the trick, and that wading into combat just because the enemy looks slow & dumb might not be a very good idea.

 

[Sceadeau]

Good ideas so far, folks. I want a full-blown contagion...as in, PCs might end up baricading themselves into a mall...sorry, market. I'm thinking a relatively isolated region gets slammed by a plague that creeps up tsunami-style, and then suddenly it seems that things go from bad to dire overnight. I'll putter with the mechanics put forth in the posts so far and will add some more detailed ideas to this post in a day or two for further suggestions.

What I want, somewhere in the back of the PCs' minds, is the feeling that surges & powers & whatnot might not do the trick, and that wading into combat just because the enemy looks slow & dumb might not be a very good idea.

At low enough levels, my idea would significantly scare them. You could up the ongoing damage to 2 if you want to really frighten them. And add the mindflayer-like ability: if you ever go to 0 hps or less while afflicted, you instantly die and become a zombie.

'Spending a surge' isn't really as easy as all that.

At low levels, you basically can do it one of two ways:

Second wind
Leader ability 2/encounter.

Those are the most common ways of getting them. So players will have to decide between spending surges to cure the ongoing damage, but risk getting hit again and not having a surge to spend, or to wait till the end to surge, knowing that if at any time they go to 0, they're suddenly hungry for brains.

Remember, ending the encounter and taking a short rest allows for spending surges as well, but you'd have to endure 5 minutes of downtime (100 points of ongoing damage).

Another way to do it would be: the affect gains "save ends" after spending a surge, so it still doesn't go away right away.