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10-15-2012, 12:55 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Wormtooth Nation
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Z tactics against Military
..or How Could Zed Dismantle Society
A recent thread inspired me to turn the question on it's head. It seems the hivemind consensus is pretty firmly that any situation where an organized military response is possible, standard contagion zed is not a threat. I've been thinking of running a ZED game for a while... So lets design an outbreak that IS a threat. Or in other words, take the winning elements of the zed formula and work backwards from there: IMHO those winning elements are: Misfit bands of survivors, always on the move or holed up in fortified positions, emphasis on resource management, zombies everywhere, zombies are dumb. I know an easy solution would be to make zed smart, but to me that breaks the premise - it becomes an issue requiring an organized response, rather than one that fosters the band of misfits scenario. All ideas are welcome. |
10-15-2012, 01:04 PM | #2 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Z tactics against Military
Just make zombies the side effect of the fall of civilization, not the primary cause. Pick your method for 'almost everybody dies', then add 'and come back to life as zombies'.
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10-15-2012, 01:07 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Z tactics against Military
The zombies are reawakened by a strange radiation that kills all communications. Without the ability to coordinate a response, and without C3I, the military won't know what to strike, where to strike it and with how much.
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10-15-2012, 05:24 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
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Re: Z tactics against Military
That works quite well with a lot of mythologies, where failing to properly bury the dead is a Bad Thing. On the other hand, it still leaves the problem of justifying a situation where "almost everybody dies" in a short period ...
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10-15-2012, 05:39 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
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Re: Z tactics against Military
Well, it doesn't have to be the entire world. It could just be everyone close by enough to matter for the game. Maybe a ZED-asteroid causes a massive wave that kills/infects everyone along the coast. If you are survivors near the center, it could be months or years before the nations that survived get a handle on their own problems and send help, if ever. Maybe you got on a radio only to learn everything for a thousand miles has been quarantined.
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10-15-2012, 11:58 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
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Re: Z tactics against Military
Quote:
Authority collapses as soon as it becomes obvious that the government can't help people find their next meal and there is no end in sight. Cities become massive centers of rioting and violence. People massacre one other over sharply limited food supplies.
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10-15-2012, 01:17 PM | #7 |
GURPS Line Editor
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Z tactics against Military
The warfare here is asymmetric. Good ways to ensure that zombies get close to wiping people out, making it less likely that the military will destroy them, are to invoke weird science so that (1) the epidemic is highly contagious in a way that defies classic containment (e.g., memetic contagion or protean vectors) and (2) the products of destroying zombies are insidiously dangerous in themselves. If every zombie you behead, burn, or blow to bits releases 1,000 times the LD50 of zombie toxin instantly, in a violent plume – and if that toxin is, say, weird radiation or an adaptive nanomachine that attacks and pierces biohazard precautions – then your army has a whole lot more to worry about. This is extra-true if the weird radiation is some kind of superscience that's activated by ordinary radiation, so that when you nuke a million zombies, you release a pulse of zombifying rays over, say, 30 times the demolished radius.
Of course, such measures mean that humans lose and your story is about the naturally immune survivors fighting monsters who can't infect them. That's the logical upshot of zombies outbreaks that aren't trivially contained. The in-between case – the zombies don't lose trivially but neither do humans, and it's a long, knife-edge struggle – isn't consistent with most of the things used to explain zombies. This is by far the best way to have zombies warring with humans on an equal footing. Of course, it isn't "zombies wipe out society" but "something else wipes out society, and then zombies take advantage of this." The Fallout video-game series is a great inspiration here . . . it has places where zombie-like things are a serious threat to civilization, and other places where they aren't, but the ghouls in question are a product of the nuclear apocalypse, not the infectious bringers of a zombie apocalypse.
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10-15-2012, 01:24 PM | #8 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Z tactics against Military
Another way is to make sure the Zombie Invasion happens in Medieval or earlier times. Having the commoners turn to zombies and revolt against the nobility also has a degree of Karma in it.
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius |
10-15-2012, 04:33 PM | #9 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Z tactics against Military
Glen Cook's "Reap the East Wind" is a somewhat interesting take on non-modern (fantasy-tech) zombies.
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10-15-2012, 04:50 PM | #10 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Z tactics against Military
Quote:
Besides the living commoners will help the nobility when this happens, no matter what ancestors the zombies had in their earthly lifes. Rent collectors are less obnoxious then monsters.
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brainstorm, setting, tactics, zombie |
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