GURPS Zombies

[Kromm]

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Guugh rahr gragh AAARGH grrr raghgrah
Ungh graghrah mmmm braaains

— Some hack

What is there to say about zombies? Quite a lot, actually! Talk to any 10 "experts" and you'll hear 10 different opinions about the origins, appearance, abilities, and flaws of zombies. Then there are the endless debates about whether a good zombie story requires contagion, an apocalypse, and the heroes dying at the end, or if it can look more like Gothic horror, classic adventure fiction, or even a soap opera. Asking "Do zombies imply horror?" can often lead to more entertainment (and conflict!) than the average zombie flick.

GURPS Zombies doesn't claim to be the final word on any of that, but it does propose a wide range of answers for anyone interested in including these monsters in their games. Above all else, it's inclusive. To the question "Are zombies undead, living-but-infected, or something else again?", it answers "Yes." And to the likes of "Slow or fast? Infectious? Flesh-eating? Supernatural?", its response is "That's up to you, and here's how to do it . . .".

To this end, Zombies surveys everything from traditional restless corpses, through enslaved plantation workers, to the brain-eaters of the silver screen, with stops along the way for necromantic servitors, futuristic science experiments, and countless other things that might be zombies . . . if you want them to be. After putting these myriad monsters on a timeline and providing them with context and purpose, it launches into a systematic exploration of how to create bespoke zombies and use them in play. This includes rules and character templates for the people who deal with them: victims, survivors, zombie-hunters, and zombie-makers. And it wouldn't be a GURPS book if it didn't wrap up with advice on how to fit all this stuff into your campaign, whatever its genre – oh, and a four-page "zombiography" of inspirational source material.

Zombies isn't just a tool kit, though. There are plenty of worked examples: bloated carcasses, buzzing corpses, corpse golems, crazies, face-eaters, galvanoids, ghouls (B-movie and fantasy), infected, infesters, Judgment's Legionaries, lurchers, necromantic reanimates, neuroids, possessed thralls, ReViv™-ified, selfish dead, Soldier X, Vodou slaves, whisperers, and zombots, plus rules for variants and bosses. Want to know what all those are? Get the book! It's available right now on e23 (and watch this space for news on the upcoming hardback release).