Dawn of the Dead in D&D?

[JoeGKushner]

Basing an entire campaign around zombies is easy. In some ways, the zombies become part of the background.

the trick is what do the characters do now!

D&D doesn't have to be just about "enemy of the week" style gaming.

The Walking Dead comic defines itself pretty well by showing how people interact with the new world of the dead and what compromises have to be made.

In a game with no clerics for example, adventurers are going to become a lot rarer simply because they can't be brought back from the dead.

If you're playing in a grim & gritty campaign using rules from say Dark Legacies or Black Company, things get even more dangerous.

Imagine the havoc brought onto the dwarves when humans come begging for help. They're not going to have the supplies to house, feed, and cloth them but the humans simply aren't going to go away, similiar to what happens in Dragonmech...

When supplies become limited, other humans become the problem. It becomes a matter of "running faster than you." in order to survive.

 

[Crothian]

Have you seen RPG Object's Blood and Brains: The Zombie Hunter's Guide? IT is for d20 modern but has a lot of fun and cool zombie ideas.

 

[AFGNCAAP]

Well, I was considering running a single adventure for D&D with a "living dead" theme to it, but not necessarily an entire campaign.

D20 Modern is an option if you want to go a modern-day route, though I think there may be some other games better suited for horror genres (perhaps Call of Cthulu, or the aforementioned All Flesh Must Be Eaten).

Also, expect character deaths. It's part & parcel of the genre. Running this as a long-term campaign may have the players go through a lot of characters--if they start to get tired of it, then that may be a clue that your game's will lose momentum/interest soon. The Aliens RPG was pretty much like this--very much in the spirit of the movies, but boy did it take a toll on PCs. You may want to go with a game that's really quick & easy to create characters with, since repeated character generation is another potential obstacle to continued play. ("Ah man, I just made up this character, & died off 10 minutes into the game! Sigh---hand me the rulebooks again; I'll make up my new guy for next session while you play...")

If it's a single adventure, then it may run the chance of being more of a memorable event rather than a dreaded experience. But, then again, it all depends on your players to decide that.

Oh yeah, one thing to sorta keep in mind: in D&D terms, the zombies aren't purely zombies--they're kinda-sorta closer to ghouls, except that they lack the paralysis effect, & they're subject to criticals (i.e., the head shot/brain damage method of "killing" the living dead). Ghouls are pretty much spot-on with the cannibalistic appetite & "infectious" wounds that they deal out. Just something to keep in mind.

 

[barsoomcore]

I ran a zombie adventure on Barsoom that went over REALLY well. The players were 10th level, although no clerics since such things don't exist on Barsoom. So I didn't have that worry.

The set-up is really important. You need a good supply of NPCs, with real personalities, for the players to interact with early on and then get killed in horrible ways.

What I did was have my party come across a village that was on the edge of a bad guy's territory and so said bad guy had decided to send a plague of walking dead against it. Our heroes arrive in the town and deal with an angry ghost out by the duckpond, get to know the locals who are all pretty good folk, and then zombies attack!

It was great fun. I had an initial incursion repelled pretty easily, but they knew that more were coming and set about setting up defensive works in the town, rigging buildings to burn and boarding up windows. Some intra-party conflict resulted in not all the defensive works getting built to the needed specifications, and they paid for that later. I also had a BBEG standing off a little ways and directing the zombies, to provide for a good final fight and a little break from all the zombie-killing.

My players had a lot of trouble grasping basic zombie-fighting tactics. They kept going outside, getting surrounded and then having to save each other. Very amusing.

Really pack the zombies in when things get going. Fill EVERY square on your battlemat with those creepy ghouls! Attacks of opportunity alone can really tear a group up if they're not paying attention. I ruled that zombies not in combat could pack themselves together even tighter, so there were actually two per square, and that half would get pushed back to create a normal 1/square in any area where a PC might be threatened. You just never run out.

It has to get hopeless. There has to be a point where your heroes look out over the world and see nothing but a sea of undead horrors and say to each, "There's no way out."

Now, D&D is not a horror game so you may want to provide a way out (like, say, a BBEG waiting in the wings who can be killed, thus stopping the whole bad process), and as soon as you do that, a lot of the fear abates. But it's D&D, right? Not CoC.

 

[LoneWolf23]

All this talk of D&D "Walking Dead", and nobody even mentions the Plague? Remember, the Black Plague's impact on medieval europe was the source of our western concept of death, as well as the source of the vampire myth and the idea of the "Danse Macabre", portraying Death as dancing with members of every social rank, reminding watchers that Death comes for all in the end.

So, here's an idea for zombies in a D&D setting: make the Walking Dead a litteral plague: a disease like mummy rot, transmitted by zombie bites, can contaminate the living and make them into zombies.

And so, the Dead walk the earth, spreading even more Death...

 

[Klaus]

And here's where I shamelessly plug Counter Collection: Undead. Within the tin box comes a mini full-color monster book. The last of the eight undead there is the Plague Zombie, inspired by all the fine zombie movies.

 

[Rackhir]

Dawn of the Dead for D&D has similar problems to running a Modern adventure where the PCs are members of a army unit. They are trained to fight and equiped for it. Which does set things into a different enviroment than your "Panicked Ignorant Civies".

That said, I love the ideas Barsoomcore had for his zombie adventure. If starting out at low levels a large horde of zombies can still be quite menacing. Since the turning abilities of a low level cleric are probably inadiquate to destroy any significant number of zombies and if they run away, well there's still 100 more coming at you.

The Myth (not Myst) video game series from the late and much lamented Bungie had some ideas that could be adaptable into a fantasy campaign. In particular, one of the scenarios has a force so large that if you try and attack it head on, you WILL be slaughered. So you have to skulk about the edges of the map taking out the forces you can't avoid and hoping that you don't draw too much attention to yourselves. Another good scenario was where you were sent to investigate this village and as you are winding your way through it, you find your unit surrounded by these creatures that blow up when they are damaged or get close enough to your troops to cause severe casualties. Plus there's a large force coming towards you and the "shrapnel" from the explosions will immobilize your troops. So you have to fight your way back out of the village while the blast zombies are coming at you from every direction and if you take too long, you'll be overrun.

 

[Wolv0rine]

Not to be outdone, I'll step foreward and plug Year of the Zombie, a campaign model for D20 Modern games inspired directly from George Romero's living dead movies from The Brood. Not yet released, but we're getting close. We've been working on it for the better part of a year now, following an IRC campaign run by Warlord Ralts (for anyone who's been following his Future Fun thread in the D20 Modern forum here), and if I can say so it's intense, brutal, scary, and spot-on.

 

[Ampolitor]

Ok for a D&D type zombie mod another good one among the others that has already been mentioned is Clerics challenge 2 with a little modification its a great mod.
As for D20 modern i had my own game back in the 80s called End war it was like dawn of the dead meets the terminator.
A great plague was spread through a terrorist faction of scientists bent on revenge. The virus gets out mutates and gets out of control. A few months and million deaths later the CDC eneacts project Tiberius total automated control. These frontline robots called QU's or quaratine units were to burn the bodies of the already dead and quarantine the infected. Of course humans being like they are they hid there infected family members. The CDC adopted and determined that to stomp out the disease the hosts needed to be destroyed. So they began to burn any living human they saw.
Meanwhile top officials using cloning tech began to launch a cure that was able to regenerate ead tissue. unfortunately it only brought back instint functions. So the zombies were raised and the world went in the toilet!
A quick strategic strike on the CDC crippled the robots, but the survivors had the dead to worry about!

Its kinda cheesy but the game ran for over 2 years, we had a blast. We even did a Dawn of the dead in the mall mod. We really had a good time, now if i only had D20 mod back then it would of made my life a lot easier!

 

[Janx]

Well, here's how we did a Zombie game:

player background:
It's september, and on of my players has a birthday. He likes zombies and zombie movies. So we all got him a cheap zombie movie (each of us). And then we dressed up as zombies. He liked it. Then we played our d&d session. which also had zombies...

game background:
the party is about 5th level. Previously in the game, the elves had wiped out various colonies. Now that the war is over, the party has been sent to check on one of those colonies...

The colony in question, happens to have an odd anual ritual. One that didn't occur, since it had been wiped out. There's a temple, with a crystal. And basically, that crystal sort of renews time, or at least it moves things back in time and resets things...kind of. Which basically ended up reanimating the city where the players are rebuilding with the surviving refugees.

So the plot's pretty simple, zombies start showing up, and after some figuring out, the players will run to the temple and perform the ritual. All while fighting and running from zombies.

Now as a straight through story, that's kinda ho-hum. There's a logic to it, but its pretyy typical. Which is where the twist comes in. The players have also been affected by this time renewal. So they don't get to experience the adventure in the boring linear format. Instead, we cut them back and forth from in the boarded up house, to barring the temple door, to a sunny day on the dock, greeting a merchant who's come to port, to running down the alley with zombies on their tail. And so on.

Basically, there were three stages, getting out of the house, running through the city, getting through the temple. And I basically cut back and forth after they resolved a basic segment and took action towards the next thing (like going into the next room).

They liked it. There were some calm cut scenes, talking to merchants (in the past). They even got some cool causality effects like: they started in the front room of the temple alone, having just barred the door from some zombies. Cut to the house. they leave the house with some civillians. As the game progressed they got into the temple with the civillians. A later cut scene puts them on the dock where two of the PCs arrive (from a trip previous game to get some supplies for the town), and they realize, hey, let's head to the temple now. Cut to the temple, sans civillians, and different time of day. Funky stuff.

Part of the odd time distortion was that their wounds would remain. Basically, they were physically travelling through time, occupying the place they were originally. The time hops were short distance. Namely within the last day or so, except for a few farther back hops (a couple months, to a couple weeks). The longer hops allowed me to fill in back story on how they got there, and give them a chance to collect details about the problem.

janx