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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jdrakeh" data-source="post: 4298877" data-attributes="member: 13892">Speed and Intellect:I've liked fast, intelligent, zombies ever since they first turned up in Return of the Living Dead. Despite said film being mostly a parody (it was originally penned as an official sequel to NotLD by John Russo), the fast, intelligent, zombies seemed to be much more of a credible threat than Romero's slow, witless, shamblers. See also "Cannot be Easily Killed" below. Spreads by Infection:Infectious bites are part and parcel of zombie lore. If you get bit, you'll turn into one of those things. And if you turn into one of those things, you'll eat your buddy. Infection must be a credible threat for it to have any impact, however (which is why zombies never work out very well in D&D). Cannot be Easily Killed:Another reason that the zombies in RotLD stood out as a more credibel threat than Romero's zombies is that they couldn't be killed. Any ol' country boy could put down Romero's zombies (as indicated by the closing sequences of NotLD), but nothing short of a tac nuke could eradicate a Trioxin zombie. Unstoppable killing machines = spooky. Mysterious Origins:Romero wisely obscured the true cause of the zombie plague, which made NotLD about the protagonists and the zombies, rather than about the cause. In a zombie RPG, I don't think that there should be a defined cause, rather this Bad Thing (i.e., the recently deceased returning to life) should simply happen because it can. Keep the PCs guessing. It'll ratchet up the fear. The Clu Gulager Factor:Or, more correctly, there needs to be a take charge kind of guy who kicks ass and takes names but is destined to die horribly later in the <s>flick</s> game. There's nothing like building up hope for the PCs and then dashing it on the rocks just when things are looking up <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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