Dude, it's television or. comics. Both make no sense. Take Walking Dead for example. That show can't even decide if the zombies are deadly, unkillable and slow. Or fast and killable like 28 Days, before it got stupid. Pick already because you already bore me and are bordering on flat passing me off. So we get ANOTHER southern retard as the villain? FUCK THAT and fuck the South for being so damn retarted. Nepean or what the fuck? My little sister could and would kill that retard just because she could, and he's offensively stupid.That's offensive and she would never would be in that position in the first place. Let alone someone not named Glen. At least Maggie has a set, small but it's a set.

You have any issues with that? Come on and explain if you can.

You bring up something that's bothered me for a while.

Why are they eating people?  What do they get from it?  At what point do they stop eating a person?  Do they have a digestive system?  What happens when they eat too much?  What happens when zombies are munching someone and they turn, do they just stop and exchange an awkward stare?

The only times I've seen it in an RPG where the zombie is treated as something 'serious'- it's been a magical construct of some sort (D&D), or something where a huge portion of the population become infected at once with a virus and they want to 'kill' and not 'eat' (D20 modern- they eventually started using crude tools and developed hunting strategies).

Zombies in fiction never seem to decompose as quickly as corpses are supposed to in real life, and even appear to settle into a kind of stasis where they just stop decomposing (as seen in films set years after the outbreak.)

I'd like to propose a twist on the genre:


Suppose zombies slowly regenerate.


Zombies can stall the effects of decomposition and regrow tissue by consuming human flesh. Devouring biomass in this way allows zombies to replace and even nervous tissue. Zombies start out as dull, shambling eating machines with insectile minds, and the vast majority will stay this way until they collapse under the hot sun as stinking piles of bone and necrotic slime. But the more successful zombies, the zombies that manage to catch and devour their prey, get faster and more intelligent over time. In theory, a zombie that consumes enough humans could eventually regain consciousness.

Those bodies that get ripped apart and devoured? The people that become little more than heads dangling from partial torsos when the zombie throng is done with them? Those regenerate. Human jaws can't bite through bone, so brains (and vital organs protected by the rip cage) are often spared. Internal organs aren't the good parts anyway. It's the flesh that contains most of the nutrients. So zombies go after the fleshy parts. Extremities mainly, plus lower torso, neck, and face. But they spare just enough to create a viable zombie, even if it's just a bottom feeder sluggishly dragging its belly by its jaws. That's all that's needed. Such bottom feeders can hungrily lap up whatever blood and entrails the other zombies clumsily drop on the ground, and use that biomass to regrow limbs.

If you want to get weird, you can give the regenerating zombies some kind of spooky respiration that siphons heat from their surroundings and burns them on the inside, giving them auras of coldness contrasted by a tendency to spontaneously combust into violent eruptions of boiling viscera.

Quote from: CRKrueger;942659A rather unsavory way to make Fast-Zombies work is rely upon humanity's other obsession.  Yeah we need to eat, but we love to fuck.  If they are hungry, they kill and eat you, if they're not hungry, they rape you till you turn.   All bodily fluids (male and female) carry the virus, so now you get Broo.

This sounds like the Crossed comic book series from Avatar Press.

Quote from: Crüesader;943070You bring up something that's bothered me for a while.

Why are they eating people?  What do they get from it?  At what point do they stop eating a person?  Do they have a digestive system?  What happens when they eat too much?  What happens when zombies are munching someone and they turn, do they just stop and exchange an awkward stare?

Of course the real answer to all of this is 'because Romero thought it would be scary.'

Quote from: Voros;943083Of course the real answer to all of this is 'because Romero thought it would be scary.'

Something about consumerism and whatnot.

The shitty thing about refusing to suspend disbelief when it comes to most things?  You end up realizing all the fun shit is completely impossible.  That rabbit hole doesn't lead to wonderland- that's boring reality down there.  And I play games to escape, dammit.

Quote from: Cave Bear;943077Zombies in fiction never seem to decompose as quickly as corpses are supposed to in real life, and even appear to settle into a kind of stasis where they just stop decomposing (as seen in films set years after the outbreak.)

I'd like to propose a twist on the genre:


Suppose zombies slowly regenerate.


Zombies can stall the effects of decomposition and regrow tissue by consuming human flesh. Devouring biomass in this way allows zombies to replace and even nervous tissue. Zombies start out as dull, shambling eating machines with insectile minds, and the vast majority will stay this way until they collapse under the hot sun as stinking piles of bone and necrotic slime. But the more successful zombies, the zombies that manage to catch and devour their prey, get faster and more intelligent over time. In theory, a zombie that consumes enough humans could eventually regain consciousness.

Those bodies that get ripped apart and devoured? The people that become little more than heads dangling from partial torsos when the zombie throng is done with them? Those regenerate. Human jaws can't bite through bone, so brains (and vital organs protected by the rip cage) are often spared. Internal organs aren't the good parts anyway. It's the flesh that contains most of the nutrients. So zombies go after the fleshy parts. Extremities mainly, plus lower torso, neck, and face. But they spare just enough to create a viable zombie, even if it's just a bottom feeder sluggishly dragging its belly by its jaws. That's all that's needed. Such bottom feeders can hungrily lap up whatever blood and entrails the other zombies clumsily drop on the ground, and use that biomass to regrow limbs.

If you want to get weird, you can give the regenerating zombies some kind of spooky respiration that siphons heat from their surroundings and burns them on the inside, giving them auras of coldness contrasted by a tendency to spontaneously combust into violent eruptions of boiling viscera.



This sounds like the Crossed comic book series from Avatar Press.

That's kind of decent actually. Personally, I love Wrymwood:Road of the Dead where they use those fuckwads for fuel and the girl is a zombie with a brain and power and not stupid as a bonus.

You see this kind of issue a lot in RPGs in my experience. Certain plotlines and situations work just fine in a book or movie as the author has full power over what is 'witnessed' by the reader/viewer. We don't know certain things about the stories we view passively and there is no way to find out if the author doesn't offer it up. Could be there is perfectly good reason the zombies behave they way they do, or could be the author has no clue but thinks its cooler this way so that's how he wrote it. In RPGs however the players might, and often do, pry into such matters and the GM has to be able to provide answers.

Im currently using the cordyceps infection from "The Last of Us" for a short story arc but mine begins with the initial outbreak. As the video game doesn't show you much about this period I am forced to make a lot of assumptions, come up with some additional scientific explanations for certain things and more or less program the outbreak so as to ensure it actually 'breaks out' and doesn't collapse for any of a dozen good reasons it would have.

Sometimes turning fiction into an RPG is a lot of work! Writing the damn story would be far easier.

Quote from: Marleycat;943155That's kind of decent actually. Personally, I love Wrymwood:Road of the Dead where they use those fuckwads for fuel and the girl is a zombie with a brain and power and not stupid as a bonus.

Fucking hell. I thought you were dead.

I could see coming up with the "why" behind everything if the game centered around finding the cause of the outbreak or the patient zero- but if it's just about a group of strangers coming together and finding out what caused it, you probably wouldn't need to.

Quote from: Crüesader;943070You bring up something that's bothered me for a while.

Why are they eating people?  What do they get from it?  At what point do they stop eating a person?  Do they have a digestive system?  What happens when they eat too much?  What happens when zombies are munching someone and they turn, do they just stop and exchange an awkward stare?

The only times I've seen it in an RPG where the zombie is treated as something 'serious'- it's been a magical construct of some sort (D&D), or something where a huge portion of the population become infected at once with a virus and they want to 'kill' and not 'eat' (D20 modern- they eventually started using crude tools and developed hunting strategies).

Viruses in nature -want- to spread. They'll evolve into forms that encourage distribution. I assume the zombies are sort of the same. They don't need to eat; they get no sustenance from it. But killing is how the "virus" thrives, so they keep doing it.

Quote from: Herne's Son;943180Viruses in nature -want- to spread. They'll evolve into forms that encourage distribution. I assume the zombies are sort of the same. They don't need to eat; they get no sustenance from it. But killing is how the "virus" thrives, so they keep doing it.

Yes.  Our GM did, in fact, snag a page from the Walking Dead.  The virus was 'already there' and could only host itself in the dead (which gave some wiggle-room to add in zombies that were dead before the Apocalypse).  Apocalyptic Zombies can be fun, I just wish our GM would have elected to do something besides a Weird War 2 version.

Quote from: Crüesader;943086The shitty thing about refusing to suspend disbelief when it comes to most things?  You end up realizing all the fun shit is completely impossible.  That rabbit hole doesn't lead to wonderland- that's boring reality down there.  And I play games to escape, dammit.

Depends on how lazy the authors were. Boredom is in the mind of the bored. Reality can be more interesting than fantasy. Personally, I tend to lose interest when a story (or game) stops making sense that I'm willing to suspend disbelief for. If a story is supposed to be about something wild and amazing, but the author is too lazy or unable to figure out how that wild amazing thing could ever happen in a half-believable way... I'd rather listen to 9-year-olds make up crazy stories - at least they'll tend to be more funny and original.

Quote from: Cave Bear;943077Zombies in fiction never seem to decompose as quickly as corpses are supposed to in real life, and even appear to settle into a kind of stasis where they just stop decomposing (as seen in films set years after the outbreak.)

I'd like to propose a twist on the genre:


Suppose zombies slowly regenerate.

....

That's kind of my take, they don't slowly degenerate as much as don't decay and have incredibly efficient metabolisms.  I can see it as a horrible consequence of an anti-aging / regenerative drug.

What is they also are in symbiosis with some form of algae or mold for a low level source of energy.

Quote from: rgrove0172;943168You see this kind of issue a lot in RPGs in my experience. Certain plotlines and situations work just fine in a book or movie as the author has full power over what is 'witnessed' by the reader/viewer. We don't know certain things about the stories we view passively and there is no way to find out if the author doesn't offer it up. Could be there is perfectly good reason the zombies behave they way they do, or could be the author has no clue but thinks its cooler this way so that's how he wrote it. In RPGs however the players might, and often do, pry into such matters and the GM has to be able to provide answers.

Im currently using the cordyceps infection from "The Last of Us" for a short story arc but mine begins with the initial outbreak. As the video game doesn't show you much about this period I am forced to make a lot of assumptions, come up with some additional scientific explanations for certain things and more or less program the outbreak so as to ensure it actually 'breaks out' and doesn't collapse for any of a dozen good reasons it would have.

Sometimes turning fiction into an RPG is a lot of work! Writing the damn story would be far easier.

Check out Pontypool for a very unique spin on 'zombie' infection that doesn't involve biting, blood or elsewise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_(film)

Back years - good lord, decades - ago, I read a pretty OK short zombie story written first person style from a US Army physician holed up studying the virus.  One of the first things he dismisses is the notion that a "bite" from a zombie gives you the disease.  Like later zombie apocalypse stories, it's already in us, but the thing with "zombie bites kill you" is that (per this story) being bitten by a dead thing with a mouth full of horrible bacteria causes terrible but completely normal/mundane infections and during the height of the societal breakdown during the ongoing collapse, (hospitals being overrun, nobody knowing how the disease spread, everybody completely paranoid and itchy trigger fingers abounding) without hardly any medical care someone missing a huge plug of skin and muscle tissue that they can't even get alcohol to sterilize, they're gonna die.  But, again, because of completely normal infection, not some super-virus.

The only "real" "zombie plague" type movie that seems to make some kind of medical/biological sense is 28 Days Later (and 28 Weeks Later): super-rabies, and after about a month and change, every infected person has starved to death because they're so bent on kill kill kill, even the basic hunger drive isn't heeded (which is a funny juxtaposition of the typical flesh or brain eating zombie where that's all that's left).