Setting Idea: Zombie Apocalyptic Wasteland

[QuietBrowser]

So, I know I have my Malebolge setting, and I'm enjoying working on that, but this is something that's been bugging me for a while and which I'd like to get peoples' opinions on.

I recently played through and thoroughly enjoyed the Zombie Army Trilogy, a sniper game with a storyline in which the players are a motley crew fighting to survive in Nazi Germany where, as the Red Army closed in on Berlin, Hitler used an ancient arcane relic to animate Germany's dead as demonic-fueled zombies. Unfortunately, his scientists had separated the relic into its component parts, so whilst he could unleash the zombie army, he couldn't control it. The players ultimately fight their way through legions of shrieking, malevolent, hell-raised corpses before finally closing the hellgate allowing them to endlessly reanimate and killing Zombie Hitler. Unfortunately, though they can't reinforce themselves anymore, the existent zombies remain active, and that's where the game ends, with Germany and much of the surroundings still filled with psychotic, murderous undead.

So, I began to wonder... could this backstory be used to create a setting, or at least a sub-setting? A mighty evil empire, on its last legs, tries to avert the end with a daemonic ritual that converts the slain into zombies, only to lose control. And, when the hellmouth is closed and the zombies remain standing, the tired and broken nations beyond cannot fight anymore; they retreat to their own borders and wall off the "land of the dead", abandoning those living inside to survive as best they can.

What do folks think? In my mind's eye, there's two "styles" of campaign to this setting; natives who have fended for themselves for a generation or two now, scavenging in the ruins and slowly trying to reclaim their land, and "deathbreakers", from the lands beyond the Great Wall, who come in to loot the riches abandoned when this region was sealed away.

Do folks think this could be pulled off?

 

[Mercurius]

I toyed with a similar idea for awhile. One of the obvious potential problems is monotony: killing zombies can get kinda boring. So you have to find some way to make "zombie wasteland" the backdrop, but with lots of other things going on and, of course, you've got to have a good tavern every so often.

My recommendation would be to add another element, roughly synonymous with the Old West, which in a way would combine both of your approaches. Treasure hunters come from beyond this Great Wall, even possibly settlers. Maybe the PCs are paid by some foreign government to clear out zombies to make room for settlers.

You could also expand it beyond zombies to undead in general, with the zombies merely being the "outer layer" - the old citizenship of a fallen kingdom. But deeper in, the PCs would encounter more powerful undead, with of course a lich king/queen at the heart of the wasteland...