D&D 5E D&D meets the Walking Dead

[Mercurius]

I'm dabbling with ideas for a 5E campaign I'll be running come January, and given that the Walking Dead just started up again, I was playing with the idea of how I could do a D&D version of the Walking Dead. Anyone tried something similar? A few initial thoughts:

One, I would be worried about monotony. I certainly wouldn't only have zombies running around, but would diversify with all kinds of undead, and maybe undead monsters.

I wouldn't want it to be an entire campaign, maybe more of a mini or half-campaign - like the first five or ten levels. Even then, I'd probably want an "evacuation plan" if it got boring.

I'm thinking it could be regional - in other words, it isn't the entire world or setting that was afflicted, but a specific somewhat geographically enclosed region. Perhaps the story would be to try to get out and/or figure out what is causing the zombification.

One idea that came to mind is that the campaign starts with the PCs being "off the farm" types living in the same village that is attacked by a zombie horde. Eventually the village falls and they have to flee, and then are roaming the landscape, living off the land. It would essential be a sandbox where they could take any number of approaches, but with three main ones that come to mind: 1) They try to figure out what is the cause of the undeath and how to fix it, 2) They try to get the hell out of dodge, 3) They take advantage and go on a looting rampage.

Any ideas?

 

[Crothian]

Borrow from horror movies. Isolate the PCs and make so they don't know if it is local or world wide. In the typical zombie movie humans are as much or more a problem then the zombies. You can do that but D&D has all kinds of things so you can have goblins raiding for supplies or show a group of orcs fighting the undead. Do the PCs try to get a truce with them or are they competing against them for supplies.

Speaking of supplies are you going to make it an issue? Will the Pcs have to worry about finding food and having limiting ammunition and spell components.

There's a lot you can do with this kind of campaign.

 

[was]

You could have it be the work of a cult/priest, like Orcus, trying to populate the world with undead. Maybe the village is built on the grounds of an ancient keep in which rests an evil artifact that creates tons of undead (i.e. the Black Cauldron). Maybe thieves stole something and awoke a lich in the ruins of an old castle and the lich is building an army to reconquer his lost kingdom which includes the modern villages.

 

[charliebananas]

The zombie genre is really all about people, the zombies are just the background to the real horror, how far will people go to survive and how far will civilization fall, the Terminus story line shows this off to great effect, it's not always about zombies eating people it's about people eating people! When you have a community that has survived the first question you have to ask is how much blood is on their hands and how has the world twisted them. While it's OK to have different types of zombie, really the monotony will only set in if you constantly throw zombies at the characters with no real story behind the characters and people who inhabit the world.

 

[Wolfskin]

The following springs to mind: with the best of intentions, a kingdom tried to get rid of slavery and menial labor by founding a crown-sponsored order of necromancer-priests to raise the bodies of the deceased in order to performe those tasks. The system worked well for a few generations, with the priests carefully monitoring the numbers and state of all undead workers, until something went very wrong: perhaps an evil cult infiltrated the order, perhaps one unknown catastrophe wiped them out, a big ritual was terribly botched, or maybe their magics just ceased to work overnight. The outcome is the same: thousands of undead now run amok in the realm, posessed by a malignant intelligence and an insatiable hunger for their former masters' flesh.

 

[Mercurius]

Thanks all, good ideas. I'm spreading XP around, although annoyingly it takes 60 seconds to "re-load."

Anyhow, some of the ideas offered resonate with my own. For instance, there's a nearby undead ruler, the Grey King, who seeks to re-establish his long-lost realm. I'm thinking that he, in cahoots with a necromancer, would be the cause of the undeath.

I also like the idea that the PCs know nothing about whether this is local or regional, and that they would be fighting for resources along with other non-infected groups.

As far as the people aspect, my group is pretty casual and I don't think they have it in them for a heavily psychological/interpersonal campaign, so I'd have to diversify the adventure aspects. This also brings to light that I don't want a purely Walking Dead experience, but a kind of hybrid between the WD and a more traditional D&D campaign.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It might work best if the undead contagion were confined to a single area.

If this is a new campaign, undead are essentially an unknown: either new to the world, or something only from legends. If you have a player bent on making an undead hunter archetypal PC, make sure he knows this. If he still wants to play that kind of PC, make sure he has some kind of solid reason to have that lore & training: member of a secret brotherhood that has records going back to the past; knowing a prophesy regarding the dead returning to hunt the living. Etc.

You might even have a few adventures before launching your undead story arc. Then, on a cross-sea journey, they become shipwrecked- possibly with other ships in the area- and then the horror begins. The party must fight for survival as they seek a way off the island. Depending on the nature of the campaign reasons for why the undead exist, perhaps they also seek out ways to keep the undead from leaving their confinement.*

Going this route, I would definitely borrow from the Cuban horror-comedy, Juan of the Dead and the b-movie classic, Shock Waves: there are undead in the water who lurk just below the surface. Still and unbreathing, they are hard to detect until they attack...







* Of course, some escape.

 

[Rabbitbait]

I did it as a completely different thing in my (just concluded) 4e campaign. The characters had reached epic level and were indirectly responsible for the release of a trapped god. As the god was released all the dead in the world rose up and started hunting the living.

As the characters were epic level, they could pretty much travel without issue and did not need to fear the dead, but the general population were in a panic. As the characters ran around finding the means to retrap the god, the number of populated areas got steadily smaller and the remaining population increasingly paranoid and easily spooked.

So effectively I ran a walking dead theme, but it was all flavour and did not affect the characters mechanically at all. It posed no threat to them, but made things more difficult as time went on.

 

[Rabbitbait]

And, just as a boast - this was the longest campaign I have ever run. It took 5 and a half years and went from level 1 to level 28. We finished last week. Woo.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

While it wasn't an idea for a campaign, but more of an idea for an story arc, was that the planewalking party would end up on a world that's like the Walking Dead and Crossed combined. Most of the infected would end up as pestilent zombies, but for some the plague would not make them undead but instead turn them into extremely depraved and sadistic killers who are still among the living known simply as marauders, much like the Crossed. The source of the plague was a portal that opened up to Acererak's city of Moil, which in turn would allow for other undead to show up.