Since the other thread is getting a bit derailed by zombie talk, I'm starting a new zombie thread. One of the comments in response to the oft repeated meme that zombies are just a backdrop to illustrate how horrible people are:

That never made sense to me. I mean 99% of humanity is gone, transformed into predatory animals, so the survivors not only have 100 times more food, equipment and supplies than they need, they have absolutely no reason to want to make any more of these predatory animals by killing one another.

Using zombies as an excuse for armchair histrionic psychodrama never struck me as all that clever to be honest. People are essentially cooperative, especially when there are ample resources.

What's not played up enough is the supernatural and visceral horror of the zombie. Rec and Rec2 did a reasonable job on this, but I like movies where zombies have both a spooky side to them and what I call zombie luck.

That is to say, no matter how secure your fortress is, there's always one either in there or one that found its way in. The zombie will strike when you're at your most vulnerable, leaping out of the bushes. A dull animal cunning if you will, combined with an "as we are you shall be" vibe.

Zombies as a dumb force of nature don't make any sense - unless 99% of the planet suddenly drops dead and rises up a zombie (in which case we're right back to supernatural), there is no way in hell that any amount of dumb animals could overwhelm modern militaries, even in third world countries. Watch Cloverfield for what I'd call a measured military response in these situations. And even then humans would be back on top in short order, we have lots of experience in dealing with dumb animals. So I mean, if your zombies aren't very good adversaries, they really should be.

I haven't run a zombie apocalypse game yet, although I did run a space exploration game where a character, built with cybernetics and combat drugs to be more or less Wolverine+sniper rifle had to go into a mist shrouded lost city to recover something.

Obviously said city was full of zombies and mister badass emerged several days later, battered and dressed in bloody rags, weeping and gibbering about the horrors in the night, a ruined shell.

Mass grappling rules are fun when there are thousands against one! It certainly answered the question of whether or not Wolverine can regenerate faster than a zombie horde can chew (just barely).

If I ever run an All Flesh Must Be Eaten game I'm half-tempted to have the first session take place during the first day of the zombie uprising, and to use this video as a prop during the session - so whenever the characters get near a television or laptop with power they see the next news segment and it'd give an indication of how bad things are getting. It's a neat little extra they put on the DVD of the Dawn of the Dead remake, so it's obscure enough that most players probably wouldn't have seen it but at the same time looks quite convincing.

I would like to see a zombie TV series a bit like Walking dead, but where there a re a variety of zombie types over time, maybe even boss type creatures controlling various types of zombies,  a bit like L4D or something.

So yeah, more like humans co-oporating to survive.

Well originally zombie movies were more a co-op vs relentless Zulu maneuver sort of problem. Run. Hole up, wait it out, etc.

At some point it started becoming more an every man for himself deal. And at times got to the point the zombies were just a backdrop for the horrible things the humans were doing to eachother.

I much prefer the D&D approach where they tend to be minions. Cannon fodder to drive off weak adventurers or slow down strong ones. Or a growing army for the necromancer of the week to terrorize some village.

My wife is a huge fan of zombie stuff and she wants me to run a zombie apocalypse game.

I like AFMBE well enough but I'm seriously considering Call of Cthulhu (the system, sans Mythos stuff, of course) for the job. I like the idea of the Sanity mechanic interacting with the visceral grand guignol of the zombie genre.

I wouldn't use anything supernatural, though. I'd treat zombies as living people with a highly contagious, agression-inducing rabies-like viral encephalitis. So these zombies will have a heartbeat and die from the same injuries that would kill a normal man or woman, only they'd be extraordinarily resistant to pain and harder to stop than their uninfected counterparts.

I'd also give zombies an "expiration date" -- after a few weeks the encephalitis starts eating the lower nerve centers of the brain and the zombie becomes a vegetable, then dies; not unlike rabies.

To spice it up I might throw in a terrorist group or government conspiracy that broke the thing out of the bioweapons lab.

I am not terribly concerned about the realism of zombies taking over as a force of nature, but do find it is effective for me as a viewer. Also, dont really have any issues with bad humans featuring promently as antagonists in zombie. This has helped mix up the genre in my opinion. The break down of law and order, and the psychilogical trauma surviving a zombie apocalypse would cause, as well as other factors make this work for me. That said, I think the cool thing about zombies, is people try new things every once in a while and this can freak you out as a viewer the first time around. Running zombies (28 Days Later and dawn of dead remake), smart zombies (monster island), talking zombies (return of the living dead), ninja zombie (return of the living dead III), nanobot zombies (meat market), etc. These are all things I liked or fiund amusing when I saw them (and none ended up replacing classic zombies so there is still a good variety out there). I like having lots of flavors.

One thing walking dead has show me, is how a zombie rpg might work for a long term campaign. I have done zombie, end of the world one shots or miniature campaigns. But it wasnt till I saw the heavy exploration focus of walking dead that I realized how a long term zombie campaign could become feasible. I just never saw them going past the initial outbreak for some reason. There were movies that had gone past that and focused on the apocalyptic setting a bit, but something watching walking dead opened my eyes on zombies in rpgs. It is one part oldschool D&D, one part mad max, with a little bit of 24 thrown in there.

Quote from: The Traveller;716514What's not played up enough is the supernatural and visceral horror of the zombie. Rec and Rec2 did a reasonable job on this, but I like movies where zombies have both a spooky side to them and what I call zombie luck.

I'm reminded of Fulci's Gates of Hell trilogy. His original zombie movie, Zombie Flesh Eaters (marketed as Zombi 2 because his producers wanted to cash in on Dawn of the Dead, which was released as Zombi in Italy), is kind of terrible, but then with his subsequent movies (City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, House By the Cemetery) he wanted to tell ghost stories but could only get funding for zombie movies. Solution: give the zombies all the powers of ghosts...

Quote from: The Traveller;716514That never made sense to me. I mean 99% of humanity is gone, transformed into predatory animals, so the survivors not only have 100 times more food, equipment and supplies than they need, they have absolutely no reason to want to make any more of these predatory animals by killing one another.

Using zombies as an excuse for armchair histrionic psychodrama never struck me as all that clever to be honest. People are essentially cooperative, especially when there are ample resources.

If people were more rational thinkers then you would be right. As far as "ample" resources go there may be plenty out there initially, but the problem is getting to them and the danger involved. Eventually all foodstuffs will go bad (even twinkies) and most food will have to be gotten from the wild or grown. There is the issue of being able to do that in a location that is safe enough.

A few years after the outbreak, raiding stores for food won't be possible and areas safe enough to raise crops without being overrun by massive herds of zombies may be few and far between. I can certainly see a "me first" attitude prevailing in that landscape.

Humans are generally cooperative but we can be brutal in survival situations.

I'm rather enamored of zombies-as-rabid-humans as in 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later and the Left4Dead videogames rather than inexplicable "I dunno!" dead-rising-from-the-grave zombies (which has a whole host of "that can't work" issues).

See, the problem (for me, anyway) of "walking dead" is that as quickly as it's understood that they're dead - they're corpses, they won't get better, they're not your friends and loved ones - springing in to action and getting rid of them (especially the slow, lumbering zombies that make up the Romero films - which I still enjoy btw) is easy to conceive.  The ending of Shaun of the Dead is more the likely outcome than the ending of, say, Land of the Dead...

But...if it's a disease that can be "cured"...well that's a whole different kettle of fish isn't it.  Now your best friend is just that, your best friend.  He (or she) is sick with the Green Flu or Rage or whatever and ... well...

The problem with zombies is that they got popular. Popular enough that some academics decided that zombies must be important. Wank followed. Then creatives followed wank. Then we wound up with zombie soap operas.

Had a lot of fun playing THW's All Things Zombie.  It's a skirmish wargame/quasi rpg that plays well and to me, hit all the right notes of a zombie flick.

Quote from: therealjcm;716591The problem with zombies is that they got popular. Popular enough that some academics decided that zombies must be important. Wank followed. Then creatives followed wank. Then we wound up with zombie soap operas.

People have always taken too seriously. Night of the living dead was basically social commentary. Dawn of the a Dead was about consumerism. This has been with the genre for a long time.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;716593People have always taken too seriously. Night of the living dead was basically social commentary. Dawn of the a Dead was about consumerism. This has been with the genre for a long time.

Social commentary by the creator is one thing. Theories about how zombies are our friends neighbors as other and that zombies reflect a fear of terrorism is pure wank. I didn't notice any of that "zombies reflect such and so about the culture" type stuff until the last 10 years or so.

Quote from: therealjcm;716595Social commentary by the creator is one thing. Theories about how zombies are our friends neighbors as other and that zombies reflect a fear of terrorism is pure wank. I didn't notice any of that "zombies reflect such and so about the culture" type stuff until the last 10 years or so.

I dont see a huge difference between what romero said his movies were about, and what people see in zombie films today. I've been hearing this kind of stuff aobut zombies for decades now. I think they are just more mainstream so the conversation has moved into the spotlight more (i think the language of film criticism is also more mainstream these days and that contributes as well).

Quote from: therealjcm;716591The problem with zombies is that they got popular. Popular enough that some academics decided that zombies must be important. Wank followed. Then creatives followed wank. Then we wound up with zombie soap operas.

If any academics are entertaining the idea of reanimated corpses then I as a humble person with just common sense, suggest that they are undeserving of the designation.

Zombie soap operas are fun.