Zombies in need of freshness

I previously wrote how I think zombies are overused. This got me thinking that maybe some more constructive advice might be warranted.

So, below, some ways to maybe use the ‘zombie’ in new ways. Zombie here is being used to describe your basic ‘walking corpse,’ style monster.  

Give me that old time voodoo religion.

The voodoo zombie is something that gets surprisingly little use these days. I say surprising because you go back far enough, and they were all over. In fact, the only really modern, mainsteam depiction of the voodoo zombie I can think of, comes from an odd place.

Indiana Jones.

The blood of Kali is a hell of a drug

The dark priest of Kali, Mola Ram captures the illustrious Dr. Jones and forces him to drink a strange concoction which is described in horrific terms as trapping him living inside of his own body as it is forced to follow the insidious will of the Thugee cult. It’s subtly implied that all of the thugee were subjected to this.  Jones almost kills his friend and companion Short Round under he’s shaken out from under the spell.

See, when you said zombie to the folks who used to watch the pulp adventure shorts on which Indiana Jones and Star Wars were based they’d think about a creepy weird witch doctor who drugged people to turn them into their slaves.

Will, and action subverted. The power of agency and free will stripped away by some evil necromancer’s magic. See, the older zombie ethos wasn’t about creepy corpses shambling around or ‘the proles rising up,’ it was about violation. Violation of the self. Violation of the tomb. Violation of the sacred things that made someone a human being and not an animal.

Imagine that the zombies your party encounters aren’t necessarily walking corpses, but are glassy eyed fanatics who blindly, and mechanically surge forward at the behest of their creepy, bizarre taskmaster. Who show no emotion. No drive. No real will, besides the hatred burning in their blank eyes, that isn’t even their hatred. And can liberation be provided to these poor devils, or only in death will they be free?

The Weary Dead

Dark Souls made its bank on this one. And that bank has firm foundations in ancient tales, legends and the sort. The gunslinger who killed someone over a shot of whisky and is doomed to travel until he loses in a drinking game. The ghostly retainers called on in Lord of the Rings. A standard trope for the undead is being tired, something which gets overlooked frequently in tabletop RPGs where we get obsessed with ranting bad guys, or power sets.

Now, the gunslinger could be a Pathfinder Pale Stranger, or the ghosts are ghosts, but let’s examine say the hollows from Dark Souls.

In Dark Souls, every undead is cursed. Their curse is to not die. No matter how many times they get struck down, they eventually get back up again, and each time robs them of something, it robs them of the thing that makes them themselves.  Some try to find some use for themselves, a quest, a guide, a goal, anything to force their minds to remain focused before they fade into the blank madness. Each undead knows his ultimate fate is to be laying on the earth, immobile, staring blankly off into the distance in a waking nightmare of never ending despair because so long as the fire remains unlinked, they cannot rest.

And every undead in the game, looks tired.

Again, this touches on the idea that something wrong has forced the undead out of their graves. They shamble around, striking out almost blindly at what draws near, or are lost to obsession or memory. Zombies standing guard over long collapsed fortresses, who were once noble stalwart and dutiful men, but who now are just weary monsters. In a way this touches on the tragedy of death itself, but also how we have to move on when we encounter it. The dead shouldn’t be wandering around in their rotting corpses, it’s an insult, and a humiliation to them. They’re also very dangerous.

The perfect exemplar of this concept is from the King Vendrick of Dark Souls 2.

He was more impressive in life

A hero. A man of massive and impressive stature, who fought and bled to save the world from its fate. And when you encounter him, he’s an insensate naked corpse wandering around (who can still absolutely murder you if you aren’t careful).  

Have your players encounter a necropolis, filled with the weary remnants of its populace still carrying out their activities in silent, uncomprehending ways, until roused to violence by discovering the party or the players interacting with them. Bud from the Living Dead fame was akin to this, but played for comedy in how he’d still moan and play with tools like a mixture of toddler and ape. With the weary, describe things like how the faceless corpse still intricately moves its fingers over the empty loom, weaving a masterful carpet made only in her dreamlike memories, or the zombie musician who plays an incomplete masterpiece on a lute where half of the strings have snapped both of whom devolve into snarling or weeping beasts striking out brutally when agitated.

Persistent Worlds vs Plot Worlds

Is my world meant to be Persistent or does it exist for Plot? When you design a campaign, this is an important element of your world building.

To explain, you need to make a determination if you plan to use the campaign setting again and again, or if its sole function is to provide a fun game for the players at the time. This is important because it determines how you treat the world and the things in it, and how you play things out.

A Persistent World is one that is well, Persistent. After the adventure is over, another group of adventurers will have another campaign. This campaign might happen a thousand miles away, concurrently, or a hundred years afterwards, but the world continues existing as the stage for all of them.

The Plot World is a world where everything is designed for the purposes of accomplishing a given plot or storyline. The world is a backdrop for the story to be accomplished, and locations tend to be treated less as ports of call, and almost more like ‘nodes.’

For a lot of DMs, what they really want are Plot Worlds. Even when they pick up a module for Golarion, or the Forgotten Realms, or Mystara, they don’t really plan on revisiting each town. Once each place is ‘used up’ you don’t really need to come back to it. And when some games can run for years on end, well, that world dedicated to Plot can feel pretty consistent and persistent because its damn persistent to its own Plot.

When you design a world for Plot, you design it to be consumed. The towns are there to serve the plot. The dungeons serve the plot. Plot worlds tend to have what I’d call a big ‘story focus’ where most baddies are tied to the main storyline, most locations have plot elements tied to the main storyline, NPCs are involved with the main storyline in someway, and NPCs are also involved. The story tends to involve things that shake the world’s basis to its foundation. It feels put together, and feels, well, well designed. Your world in your average video game or the like is designed this way, most everything ties in and forms a cohesive whole. That’s because the Plot world assumes that plot threads will be handled, side quests will be pursued, and the main quest will be resolved. The bad guy will be dealt with, the horror of the day declawed, and the PCs disappear off into happily-ever-after epilogues. 100% completion, good job!

This is not bad. The players walk away fulfilled, they feel like they had fun spending time in the world, and are ready to move on.

Persistent worlds are however, different. They aren’t as clean.

Towns are there because they are. Subplots are floating around from two campaigns ago. The world may have persisted through edition changes, players or even DMs. Bad guys exist who have plots and plans that are completely unrelated to the main quest elements. The main storyline for your guys is just one of many the world’s suffered over time (and as a result most DMs will tend to make it less world shaking). The plot threads might be all over, waiting for players to follow up on them, and they will metastasize into other threads if left unexplored. Bad guys might float through the setting for no discernable purpose, and continue with their own stories despite the players. Threads are everywhere. The main quest may be resolved, but other nonsense will keep happening, and when the heroes retire at the end of the story, they do not necessarily disappear over the horizon but may find themselves as NPCs for the next batch of heroes.

Persistent worlds tend (note tend) to have plots that are more local, and less ‘world shaking’ then Plot worlds. This is because Plot worlds eventually run out of Plot, and Persistent worlds tend to nurse their plot elements, never wanting to give one up until they have a new one to replace it.

An example of why this is an important distinction to keep in mind is a Persistent world gone wrong: Dark Sun.

Dark Sun was a world based around survival in a dusty desert wasteland. A magical post-apocalypse, where water is scarce, and the pathos of living in a world dying is the guiding focus. People lived at the whim of insane king-priests who lived over the few spots of civilization. Man’s spirit was being crushed and consumed as the landscape had been consumed. And heroes were needed to contend against vile kingpriests and reclaim what could be lost. And then the first novels came out.

Now, novels aren’t adventures, but the novels do show what a player would do, or want to do with this setting. They set out to fix things. Defeat the kingpriests. Liberate the people. Restore the world.

After the first novel series, the world was unrecognizable to what was originally pitched. Green arable land had been discovered. The iron law of the kingpriests was shattered. It rained occasionally. Things were improving. And the question that became raised was ‘we still have all of this interesting setting, but what do we really do with it?’ The Kingpriests were the only really established bad guys. There were some slumbering evils, but they were also inexorably tied to the Kingpriests. Without Kingpriests, you kind of didn’t have much.

Lord of the Rings is another “Plot World,” once Sauron’s army is defeated, you’re not realty in Lord of the Rings anymore, which is also why I’ve always found games of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings based in the era of the mainstream kind of awkward. You tend to end up either trying to tell The Plot differently, or spend the entire time dodging it, and I’d rather have something new.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is set in a Persistent world. This is because while the game has a clear driving element to it, the setting leaves the world at large relatively untouched. There are threads and streams only hinted at in the game, and things with which the player can only shallowly interact while going about his own quest. There is more stuff going on. Now this frustrates the player, but it frustrates him into wanting more. Now at the same time, that Persistent World desire to keep the Persistent World stable, also robs the player of his chance to do stuff that’s /world shakingly awesome/. The world itself is huge, with countless troublemakers, problems, issues, and so on. When you visit a town, the town might have nothing at all to do with the ‘main quest’ or you, or your desires or personalities. It might just be a town. Maybe it’s a town that meant something to somebody who played in the world before, and your engagement with it now is just a shallow thing.

I Understand, You're Still A Jerk

Villains are a tough thing to develop. They’re a really tough thing to develop in tabletop.

I’d argue they’re hard to make work in tabletop because they’re difficult to keep alive, but that’s a subject for another post.

They’re also tough because a good villain requires an emotional investment, and well. As I’ve stated, that’s something you can’t really ‘compel.’  And a lot of bad writers, bad artists and bad adventure designers, try to force it.

A bad guy you can connect to, is one who has a better chance of grabbing onto the heartstrings. Or more to the point, villains and antagonists have as a defining part of their function, the need to provoke and represent things about the protagonist/hero.

Batman’s rogue’s gallery, at least the better parts of them, are mirrors on him.

Bane is a representation of Batman’s preparation and skills, turned to thuggish brutality by his baser aims. A sort of warning to Batman when his high minded crusade turns to an ideal of self satisfaction.

The Riddler is a representation of Batman’s skill with the mind, and skill as a detective, but twisted and pushed to the nth by a desire to show off his intellect to the detriment of those around him.

Two-face is a representation of the duality of Bruce Wayne and Batman, except when those two forces are adversarial and thus pulling someone ‘in two directions, ‘as opposed to the unity of purpose between Bruce and his alter-ego.

And so it goes.

But again, that’s a villain in writing. And way too many DMs try to emulate writing. See, in tabletop, you don’t control the characterization of the hero and the villain, just the villain.

The way the player views the hero might also be tricky to determine, and a lot of players don’t appreciate when someone tries to make clever narrative asides about them. Therefore, a better angle is to harken back to the antagonistic angle.

The villains’ jobs thus become to be warnings along a road, as well as threats to overcome. They’re catalysts the heroes can use to better define themselves. Whether as shining incorruptible knight or tempted anti-hero, bad guys serve to provide that ground work.    

And to accomplish that, you need two things.

Firstly, the villain’s modus operandi and goals need to be sensible.

Secondly, the villain needs to be a villain.

Lack the first, and you have an evil underwear gnome. Lack the second, and your players have either little reason to enjoy beating the guy, or might even feel bad about it.

I hate how it seems every post of mine turns into a Matryoshka doll of other posts, but I’d rather unpack those two ideas a bit more in their own threads.