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Old 04-06-2021, 08:02 AM   #105
phiwum
 
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: Boston area
Default Re: Show me the magic!

The feral zombies in Book of Unlife are more or less the same as your plague zombies. Perhaps you know this and altered the feral zombies for this purpose, but here are the differences I see.

In BOU:
* There's a straight 50% chance of infection rather than an ST test.
* The ST of a feral zombie is the same as the ST prior to death, not ST - 2.
* The MA of a feral zombie is the same as the MA prior to death.
* The daily ST loss for feral zombies requires eating the flesh of the living, but the amount is not specified.

I'm a Romero fan, so slow zombies are good. I mean, for thematic reasons, I might just say they can't run at all, so one MH per turn, but that would make them useless unless we really do a full scale zombie plague where a battle involves dozens of zombies and the characters are required to fall once every three turns to keep things interesting. One or two characters would be dubbed the leads and would fall only once every battle, always just far enough away from the zombies to escape at the last moment.

But maybe I should swallow my deeply held convictions and let them run. Bah.

However we prevent ST loss, whether 5 points per loss regained or some other method, feral/plague zombies can't heal normal wounds and also are limited to using clubs. I guess I'd go with not healing daily ST loss but preventing it instead, but all this concern about healing/loss prevention will not play much of a role in typical gaming. The zombies will be strong if they have a regular food source, weak otherwise.

Unless, of course, a player insists on continuing to play his favorite character after he's been zombified. Which I would be cool with. (Sorry, with which I would be cool.)

One comment about infection rates: If you go with an ST check minus wounds, as you suggested, the rate will be higher than a 50/50 chance, since the average person will have ST 10 minus wounds. Whether this is good or bad, I don't know. In the movies, anyone flat out killed by a zombie always rises, but that might just get out of hand.
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