Chatty's Halloween Post: The 2012 Zombie Apocalypse
This one is for The Maze, Scott, and HermitDave, and is a 100% RPG post inspired by my Influenza article.
I give you the Zombie Apocalypse RPG Trope Post!
Zombies are people, too… Okay, dead people, with poor verbal skills. And the only communication they understand is blowing off their heads.
- USA Network commercial for Night of the Living Dead
Stop being so pathetic! …Humans send robots to Mars. Zombies are baffled by doorknobs.- How to Survive a Horror Movie by Seth Grahame-Smith
The Real Pandemic
In 2010, humanity scrambled and achieved the near-miraculously vaccination (often at gun point) of 75% of the world’s population. The virus turned out to be benign. The conspiracy theorist had a field day… and a lot of science types looked like idiots.
Unfortunately, in mid 2011 the A(H1N1) virus recombined with new mutations of the Swine and Avian flu and a new, very deadly strain arose. A new pandemic started but this time no one wanted to get the vaccine and no government had the courage to impose it.
Things changed when the death tolls rose rapidly. Panic and civil disorder exploded. Mass Vaccination began again, through riots and armed conflicts. However, the conventional vaccine could not prevent infection.
Before the new pandemic broke out, the top vaccine manufacturers, grown fat with the profits made from selling the H1N1 vaccine, fell on one another like crazed jackals. Out of the corporate carnage rose GeneCore now the world’s sole manufacturer of vaccines and gene-therapy.
Faced with the threat of the new Flu virus, GeneCore proposed its experimental, non-FDA approved gene-therapy vaccine. The idea was to infect the body with a benign genetically-engineered virus that would reprogram all of the body’s DNA to protect it against the Killer Flu.
Mass vaccination, at least in the countries that could still afford GeneCore’s price, was started in late 2011. Protesters and conspiracy theorists were silenced, often violently.
Something was in that Vaccine’s virus… Something primeval, something almost evil.
54% of humanity had been vaccinated when it happened…
(fade to black)
In December 2012, 50% of humanity was dead, 30% had mutated into near-mindless cannibalistic predators and 5% were… something else…
Welcome to Zombie Apocalypse 2012.
The Game’s Setup
This 2012 Zombie Apocalypse idea is good for a short Post Apocalyptic modern campaign where most of the humans have become flesh-eating Zombies. What’s left of the world’s population hides in pockets all over the planet, trying to survive civilization’s collapse and the new predators.
PCs are not humans or zombies. They are part of the 5% that were mutated in something far better and worse, Vampires! With intact minds and prodigious powers, they need to feed on human blood…pure, unzombified human blood.
Thus, they must battle the hordes of zombies (and other mutants) and try to find humans to feed upon.
In terms of game system. I’d suggest using d20 Modern or World of Darkness. If you use d20 Modern, I propose you use Monte Cook’s World of Darkness for the Vampire PC Class (it works perfectly for that). You can also generic systems like Gurps or Champions but you may need to build the proper templates for PCs and adversaries. They all work.
Adventure Seeds
1) PCs “wake up” as starved Vampires in an abandoned hospital ward. The place is filled with Zombies. The PCs discover their powers as they fight through the hospital to find the hospital’s Blood Bank (or maybe a few hidden humans”. Great for a one Shot.
2) The PCs are newly created Vampires that have been enslaved by a Vampiric Coven that discovered how to successfully create new ‘members’. They must learn to play their captors against one another in order to escape. Aided by a few heroic human NPCs, they must then evade Zombie guards and Vampire enforcers to reach freedom into the blighted wilderness. This scenario works great for a more storytelling experience.
3) The PCs are virtuous adventurers seeking the ‘cure’ for their condition and must storm the Headquarters of GeneCore, held by a few Vampire Lords and an army of Mutated monstrosity. Great for players who want to play the internal struggle of killing humans to survive.
How about you? What cool ideas would you add to this setting? Adventure Seeds? Some monster concepts? Some other idea or cause for the Apocalypse? You tell me!
Afterschool Trope Special: The Dungeon Crawl, Part 1
This is Post # 600 on Musing of the Chatty DM! To celebrate this and my Dungeon theme week, I decided to write an article in the style that has made me known as a RPG blogger: a Trope post! You are new to the blog and don’t yet know about Tropes? Here’s a handy link to get your started.
In order to celebrate Dungeon Week at Musings of the Chatty DM, and to get your gears going for our little contest, I thought we could explore one of the two foundation Tropes of our favorite Fantasy Roleplaying game:
Dungeon Crawling is the act of exploring a dungeon (or other dangerous area) while looking for treasure or some other important object. The characters must battle enemies (usually monsters) and use their skills and equipment to negotiate obstacles (usually traps.) Usually, but not always, there is a Boss Battle at some point, and a Mac Guffin or Plot Coupon at the end.
(Snip)… it is actually Older Than Dirt, since even old myths feature it (heroes like Orpheus voyaging into the Underworld, for example). However, it was the Cliff Hanger film serials of the early 20th century that defined the trope, and the Indiana Jones movies that made it popular again later.
Dungeon Crawling. The word implies slow progress through damp corridors of an underground complex, carefully checking every square inch for potential death traps. For decades, adventurers have prodded the depths of countless published and home-brewed dungeons, equipped with such classic staples as 10 foot poles (to trigger the traps), Iron Spikes (to stuck doors shut or prevent sliding doors from closing) and a mule-drawn cart to transport treasures.
Of course, experienced players of old school dungeon crawls have found much more creative uses for such staples and anything else that they could their hands on.
Dungeon Crawling can be defined many ways, as each era of Dungeons and Dragons found new ways of staging adventures around the concept of exploring a (relatively) fixed site where PCs discover various challenges and reap whatever material rewards they can find. Hot debates are sparked daily in RPG blogs and forums about Old school gaming and how it differs from the game styles encouraged by later editions of D&D.
My goal is not define what dungeon craweling is, nor to add to the debate. Rather, I’d like to explore dungeon crawling through the lens of game’s history to explore applications of the trope.
The Dungeon as the Campaign Setting
Many early campaigns (and several current ones based on retro-clones of older editions of D&D) were based upon the exploration of large, multi-levels underground structures. Later renamed Megadungeons, these sites were where most of adventures would occur. Partys of adventurers, drawn from gaming groups that could sometimes be counted in the dozens, got together and explored the dungeon, clearing large swats of a given levels before exploring deeper.
One of the core assumptions of such campaigns was that the deeper PCs explored, the harder the challenges were and the higher were the potential rewards. Another assumption was that cleared levels of the dungeon would eventually be repopulated, forcing returning adventurers to deal with new occupants or find alternate, less crowded paths to the deeper parts of the dungeon.
Creating a Dungeon-based campaign
Starting such a campaign is relatively simple, you need to set your dungeon in an area of your favorite game world (or you may create your own world to host it). You don’t need to flesh out the outside world too much. You can usually place your dungeon under ruins of some sort. Popular choices are:
- A ruined monastery, See here for a very recent example.
- Under a Mountain, usually within and under the ruins of some sort of underground city
- Under a City, like Forgotten Realms Undermountain found under Waterdeep or Monte Cook’s Ptolus
- Under a Castle, like the classic Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns from the co-creators of D&D
But you can also break out of the classic approach and build your megadungeon in other ways:
- Inside a crashed Spaceship (like the classic Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module which could be grown bigger by adding more floor decks)
- Inside the cone of a volcano (making your dungeon doughnut shaped) like Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil
- Across worlds/planes of existence (by placing portals that transport PCs from one world to the next)
- Outside! By making the dungeon stand on the various ‘levels’ of a stripped mine or on the side of a mountains with gigantic ’steps’ carved on its surface.
Its usually a good idea to find a reason for your dungeon to exist. This will help you define the type of encounters found within it, acting like a baseline theme on which to build upon. If you build your dungeon in a desert, you might want to borrow from Egyptian myth to give your campaign an exotic flavor. In a similar manner, if you want to place your dungeon under the ruins of a lost Jungle temple, than you can borrow from Indiana Jones or a plethora of classic pulp era adventure and Sword and Sorcery stories.
Once you have chosen the site of your dungeon you need to chart the closest point of civilization (City, town, village, Frontier Keep, etc) to the dungeon. The further away your dungeon is from civilization, the longer the transit time between forays and resupplying expeditions, allowing more restocking of the dungeon. Large distances may also explain why the dungeon hasn’t been touched by other adventurers before and may play a role in your choices if you are the type of DM that likes to have such questions answered.
Finally, a dungeon far from civilization often makes it more likely to remain the sole focus of the campaign as there is little or no ‘distraction’ to deter PCs from exploring deeper and deeper.
Dungeons that sit closer to civilization are more likely to be plundered faster, with shorter resupplying interludes between forays. It could also make it more likely to have been partly cleared by prior adventuring parties or being explored by ‘competitors. Such NPC adventurers may interact with the party, acting as friendly but competitive support or antagonistic cut-throat jerks.
In my own Primal/Within campaign, I made the City so close, it’s actually inside the dungeon itself!
Once you’ve established your dungeon and the closest point of Civilization, you are free to start mapping your dungeon. The one-page dungeon template is an excellent tool for that!
Such campaigns often don’t have an overarching plot line, the story is the one that the PCs forge through their exploration. In such cases, story arises from the players actions in and out of the dungeon. Planning future forays with other PCs, forging alliances with dungeon factions, buying real estate outside of the dungeon and developing lasting relationships with hirelings are all ways that roleplaying occurred and stories progressed in such campaigns.
DM creating such dungeons can therefore focus more on story hooks than developed storylines. By creating various opposing factions within the dungeon you create opportunities for PCs to discover and exploit the possibilities of such opposition.
Example:
The Orcs of the 4 fingered-Claws have recently invaded the Kobold Warrens of the 1st level of the Great Abyss, a semi-open megadungeon set on a mile-high cliff overlooking the cursed Dagonite Ocean. Many kobolds are now enslaved to the Orcs, the remaining kobolds have retreated to the cliff side network of ledges and tunnels. Hating the orcs above all, they will willingly let adventurers safe passage through their new found lair so they can get to the orcs faster.
The Brotherhood of troll-magi, a group of highly intelligent trolls trained in the arcane arts have subdued a Dragon and taken control of its sizable horde, scattering the dragon’s minions to other, less ‘comfortable’ parts of the dungeon. As the PCs explore the dungeon, looking for the horde, they catch hints that something happened to the dragon and need to prepare to face something mightier what they initially planned.
If you are interesting in capturing the tropes of classic dungeon-based campaigns, here’s an excellent list of assumptions to run an Old School dungeon (mega or otherwise).
Do you have ideas and concepts for dungeon-based campaigns you’d like to share?
Part 2 will be about… I don’t know yet, but definitively about more dungeon goodness!
Under New Management
Good day! I am Vanir the Chatty DM. You probably came here expecting Phil the Chatty DM. I’m sorry to say that Phil has taken an extended leave of absence due to a severe poutine-related injury and will not be back for some time. In the meantime, he has handed his cape and sceptre to me, and now I am the Chatty DM.
Phil’s shoes are quite large, and it will be some time before I am able to adequately fill them. Being a kind and generous former potentate, Phil gave me a practice exercise to run. Here it goes:
I find it best to separate the colors and the whites, because the whites stay much brighter that way. However, you may find yourself out of underwear if you don’t alternate loads. Washing baby clothes is an entirely different story. A person who can keep baby clothes clean probably made a pact with the devil at some point, and I cannot say the payoff would be worth it for me. However, some people are much more into doing their laundry than I, and if for some reason you find yourself at the fabled Crossroads ready to make a deal with Old Scratch, far be it from me to keep you from bargaining away your eternal soul to keep your whites whiter and your brights brighter. I don’t like socks very much. My wife and I threw away all our socks and bought 20 pairs of the same kind that we both wear so that we don’t have to sort. However, the dresser keeps spawning versions of our old socks and sprinkling them randomly into the sea of perfectly uniform socks. I’m not sure if an exorcist would even show up to get rid of this problem but as long as my socks don’t start spinning around and projectile vomiting on me, I think I can make do.
Phil was right, I feel much more competent now. However, he told me that to truly become a Chatty DM, I must discuss tropes at great length. I have just googled that word, and I feel ready. Let us begin.
Tropes are a process of inbred fertilization which employs certain decomposed organic materials– including, but not limited to animal sediment– to blanket an area in which vegetation is desired. The procedure enriches the soil for stimulated plant development while, at the same time, preventing erosion and decreasing the evaporation of moisture from the ground. To properly trope your garden, all you need is some simple household chemicals. I recommend about 1/2 ton of lawn clippings, a can of beer (for the enzymes, which are the catalyst to get all the bacteria going and give your tropes some real kick), 1/8 cup of antifreeze, and a few hefty squirts of Palmolive dishwashing liquid to give those bugs diarrhea. Wrap everything in newspaper over the winter, or your tropes might collapse, taking the foundation of your house along with them. Before you install tropes, you should check your local city or state zoning ordinances involving tectonic shift and/or manslaughter.
Upon further review, it seems that I was talking about something very similar to tropes, but not actually tropes. Please forgive me, I am but a novice Chatty DM. These powers are intoxicating and difficult to control. Please allow me to refocus:
One of the most common tropes in fantasy roleplaying is that every character has underarms. Subverting this trope might seem impossible to the novice, but daily diligent practice will allow you to overcome your limitations. PC’s frequently have heroic (or “good aligned”, as we say in the parlance) underarms, but this certainly does not mean a clever DM can’t speak in private with the PC’s underarms to make them do something unexpected. (Protip: try bribing them with food or diamonds.) Also, the number of underarms on a villain is typically directly proportional to the number of arms he has. (Or she! Don’t forget, girls have underarms too!) If you want to really spice up your campaign, try giving your villain three or four extra underarms. Or just one extra, but it’s a giraffe’s underarm! Now that’s what I call Proper Villainy!
(NOTE: DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES give your villain two giraffe underarms. You want your players to feel like they can win at least occasionally. Remember: you’re successful at being a DM when everyone is having fun.)
I think this would be a good place to stop. Phil told me not to lay too much on the audience at once. He said he gave out too many secrets at once this one time, and it killed his entire readership right there on the spot. Rather than undo all the hard work he has done rebuilding his user base and hiding the bodies, I would rather leave you all aching for more. Please don’t cry. I love each and every one of you just as Phil did.
However, I must tempt fate and leave you with one final golden nugget of wisdom: grow a beard, because the evil twin will always beat the good twin at Scrabble.
Good night, Chatty Nation!
Vanir used to write for Stupid Ranger before ascending to this higher plane of existence. His love, like Phil before him, is joy eternal.
Raiding the Library : Neal Stephenson's worlds, Part 1
Man, I haven’t felt like that in months! I feel like spending the whole damn day at the keyboard and churn out thousands upon thousands of words just for the sake of it. That’s always a good sign.
I’m one avid reader. I read novels by the buckets when I have the time to do it. When my urge to write waned these past months, I made up for it by reading and watching TV more.
Having been around long enough to resist falling into the trap of trying to make a RPG campaign out of everything cool I read or saw on a screen, I had an idea.
Why not try a new series where I share plot elements of books I read with you guys to set the ideas engine off for our collective RPG campaigns. Not quite reviews nor campaign plans, I just plan to ramble about cool stuff I’ve read and maybe try to churn new ideas for RPGs.
I start the series with my favorite author.
I’ve long been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s work. To this date, his Snow Crash and Age of Diamonds novels are, by far, my favorite Sci-Fi stories . I’ve read Snow Crash every two years since it’s first printing as a paperback and I’ve read the Diamond Age 3 times already and I’m starting to feel the pull to read it again.
Do note that Stephenson, much like the early work of William Gibson, assumes his readers are expert in the field he writes about… or are goddamn geniuses! This made me throw a few of his books away in disgust!
FYI: Feel free to skip any long Data Dump you can’t fathom, chances are its not necessary for the story. I ended up doing it for his 3 book Baroque cycle!
So here’s a quick summary of each story and sample of the key tropes I got from each book:
Summary:
A jerkish ecological militant, bordering on eco-terrorism, is the chemical equivalent of a film noir Detective. He gets caught in a conspiracy-level ploy that leads to the discovery of massive amounts of toxic wastes being released in his city’s Boston’s water.
Selected Tropes:
The well meaning jerk: The main character is one monumental asshole and he knows it.
The evil corporation: There’s always one, willing to pitiful things like client safety and future growth for some thing more important like this semeter’s bottomline
The cool boat: Zodiac boats! Weee! Not as cool now, but still the Eco-Guerrila vehicle of choice!
RPG nuggets:
I think that the well meaning Jerk NPC is a great way of modeling a modern day Magnificent Bastard. As usual, be careful not to piss your PCs too much (unless you want them to). This NPC model lives to annoy PC and motivate them through negative reinforcement.
Eco-terrorism is going to be a subject whose popularity will likely rise in the current global polarizing of opinions and stances. This makes it an interesting approach to explore, especially if you go at it cross genre.
- Fantasy: What if the rising use of Magitek had noticeable, yet still debatable ecological impact on the world? Final Fantasy VII’s initial plot hook IIRC.
- Horror: What if rising global pollution was a condition for summoning the Great Old Ones as they can’t survive if the Ocean is not polluted enough? Maybe those crazy cultists that blew up 5 stolen nukes under Bikini Atol are on to something.
Snow CrashSummary: TV Tropes writes it up better than I ever could.
The tale of a Mafia-backed badass pizza delivery guy who teams up with a badass courier in a Post Cyber Punk disincorporated USA to fight “Snow Crash” – a computer virus for the brain. Oh, and there’s a badass biker with glass knives and a nuclear bomb strapped to his motorbike, too.
This book is pure applied Rule of Cool.
Selected Tropes
Bad Ass characters and villains: This book is bursting at the seems with characters who are scary strong.
Cool Car and Boat (see a theme here?): The Deliverator is a high tech military grade car for… delivering pizzas. And part of the action of the book takes place on an Aircraft Carrier turned into a floating refugee city.
Big Fraking Gun: “Portable”-nuclear-powered-depleted-uranium-needle-shooting Gatling Gun… ’nuff said! It’s called “Reason” and you should listen to it.
The Plucky girl: A “I don’t take crap from nobody” 15 year old sketboard courrier girl. She somehow managed to also show up in a William Gibson novel… fancy that!
Serious Business: Your pizza in 30 minutes, or the delivery boy murdered free!
As I said, if you are a geek, like cyberpunk and haven’t read Snow Crash, go get it now!
RPG Nugget
I really like the concept of brain hacking. There’s something sinister and powerful behind that idea. You can easily build a whole campaign, regardless of genres, around an Evil Overlord (corporate or classic) going around and making zombies of the average population without having to invoke complicated rituals that PCs can interrupt by dropping a d20 on it.
Also, having tried it, making your characters Bad Asses in the eyes of ‘the average’ NPC makes for an Epic feeling in your game. Yes the bad guy waiting for you outside the bar can rip cars in half. However, while you are in that bar, the waitress is impressed with YOU.
I also really like the concept of the frail looking, Waif-fu mastering, teenaged NPC. So much so that my players now automatically assume that any underaged NPC I introduce in my games are automatically some sort of Avatar for a god of Battle or a guidance system for an Orbital laser cannon.
Then, there’s something to be said to let PCs handle an experimental, exceedingly deadly weapon and then throw something equally stupid cool at them for the weapon to be used. I mean, if you are going to be giving them a Wand of Nuking with four charges left, I suggest that you send them a squadron of flying Titanium Elemental Bombers!
Finally, that ’serious business’ part, makes for such a great tyrannical, Lawful Evil, setting spark.
Anyone else got ideas from these two books?
Afterschool Trope Special: Fill Up the Nighmare Mobile
What, two Trope posts in the same week?
Why not? It’s been ages since I wrote any of them, and this is Halloween after all.
With a satisfying ‘thunk’ Tragak the barbarian sheared the Orc Shaman’s head, sending it flying in the room’s dank, dark corner. As he was looting the body, he failed to notice the eight spindly spider legs bursting out of the shaman’s brain case and 2 huge mandibles pop out of the head’s eye sockets in a jet of aqueous gunk. Tragak was in for a surprise.
A lot has been written about Horror RPGs and how to host a scary game. The word out is that it’s not easy scaring players, even less easy to scare PCs without coercion.
Well I decided to add my voice to the echo chamber by digging in the deepest wells of my depraved soul to come up with some seriously troubling imagery.
And what better way to look for new ways to scare the guts out of your players than looking at one Horror Trope I find intriguing and troubling:
A catch-all term describing stuff in popular culture that gave us nightmares, whether they meant to or not.
To really be effective Nightmare Fuel, as our examples show, you’ll need something that was meant to either amuse, entertain, or be only slightly scary to the audience. In execution, they’re so trauma-inducing that they may cause even adults to void themselves in terror.
When the effect is 100% intentional, the trope becomes Unleaded.
Take an aspect that defines your favorite Roleplaying game but push it too far and see the result. Go for out of this world creepiness that will make your players skin crawl.
Fantasy Nightmare Fuel #1
The PCs are asked to recover a legendary suit of plate mail armour renowned to be nearly weightless and make it’s wearer nigh invulnerable. As the player race to recover the item against a recurring villain, they arrive just too late and see him wearing it.
During the ensuing fight, the villain is hard to hit and the armour lashes out with tentacle-like metal spikes whenever it is hit. However, as soon as the villain becomes bloodied/badly wounded, the tentacle dig in the Villain’s wounds and the armour starts flowing inside the wearer’s body!
Screaming inhumanly, the villain’s organs burst out from all sides as the armour fuses with his wearer’s muscles and Bones, becoming a dread construct of gore and Steel, ready to unleash its true potential.
Fantasy Nightmare Fuel #2
While eating at the Inn and waiting for the next dancing plot point to show up. the PCs hear disgustingly wet popping sounds all around them. Looking up from their mutton, they notice that all other customers are turning inside out, exposing their insides and rising as freakishly bloodied and chunky zombies… Then have the Innkeeper’s family burst out of the kitchen, fangs-a-showing, telling the PCs that ‘this meal is on the House’
Modern Nightmare fuel #1
A lone, very anxious 6 year old is running scared and crying in the streets of your campaign’s metropolis. Whenever people stop to help her and look her in the eyes, she screams in fear as they turn into grotesquely inflated fanged psychotic clowns!
The circus is in town, and the only way to stop it is to wake the sleepwalking girl, gently…
Modern Nightmare Fuel #2
On a dark night under the shadow of some ancient evil, a gun fight erupts between the PCs and a street Gang. An inordinate amount of screaming and cries of pain are heard throughout the fight. Investigating leads to the gruesome discovery that all bullets are alive and doing all the screaming, drowning in blood and suffocating in the bodies of the dead people…
Further investigation leads to the discovery that a twisted priest of chaos has trapped the souls of countless innocents into ammunition and is engineering gang violence to sacrifice all these souls to bring about Chaosocalypse.
Modern Nightmare Fuel #3
One name, The Corinthian
Fear is in your head
Horror roleplaying is about atmosphere, setting, mood and description. Don’t try to scare PCs, go for the players. Give them the creepiest WTF moments you think they can handle… and the ask them how their characters react.
Therein lies you next drum of nightmare fuel that will leave your players creeped out long after the game.
Happy Halloween.
Credits: Robin Stacey (Ragz), Sandman comics (The Corinthian)
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