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.

Lament for the Zombie

Zombies are overused and just plain aren’t scary.

I’m sorry, but that’s my opinion.

Zombies rose to particular prominence as the ‘undead horde’ thanks to George Romero’s watershed horror film Night of the Living Dead which was released back in 1968.  The film was creepy, intense and gave the overall sensation of a world going mad, along with the loom, lingering forms of the undead as they attacked the humans, whose foibles caused them to fray, falter and so forth.

 The success of the zombie film was also due to the fact that zombie films, in general, are cheap. Undead people tend to look like, well people, and extras are easy to come by. Romero used to find it funny, supposedly, that extras always wanted to be the ones who got shot or blown up or chowed down on people, meaning he had plenty of gruesome opportunities to let his special effects guys go crazy.

Now, I’m agoraphobic, so crowds bother me. I can understand why someone would worry about a horde of malicious insensate, unreasonable kinda-people coming for you. So I appreciate why zombies were scary and successful.

The problem is that they aren’t scary in RPGs, or video games for that matter, and the common idea of the zombie film, is well, tired and was kinda stupid to begin with.

It’s been said that Romero always thought we should be rooting for the zombies. This is probably out of some hideworn 60s era dross about them being the silent unwashed proletariat waiting to rise up and take what was theirs. The whole ‘eat the rich’ nonsense. So most zombie films portray, well, morons and jerks, who end up as zombie chow in short order.

It’s also been theorized that the reason the ‘true zombie fan’ doesn’t like fast zombies is because, well, nobody has a chance against them. Similar to the ‘eat the rich’ bullshit, there’s also the idea that only cagey, resourceful people ‘like me’ could survive the zombie outbreak. Strangely, zombie films tend to portray the religious, the well off, the well armed and such as the people least likely to survive the onslaught of slow, shambling brainless killing machines. Which again, is probably due to the dime store socialism that seems to have infected the indie-side of Hollywood in the sixties that Night of the Living Dead was born out of.  Basically, the ‘true zombie fan’ wants to envision that only he and his friends could really survive and that people made into chow are done so just because they were too dumb, too foolish or too (insert trait he doesn’t like) to survive against slow moving oceanic seas of corpses. Fast zombies wreck that because well, anybody can be run down if the zombie is the cheetah and you are the antelope.

And in that, is why zombies in RPGs are always kind of well, dumb. See, RPGs inherently give the player character capability and agency and zombie films, more so then normal horror films, don’t function if the heroes aren’t hamstrung.

Player characters don’t forget to call the cops. Don’t buy that shambling undead hordes can overwhelm military bases with astounding ease (given that they tend to have at least a passing understanding of how modern firearms or military tactics work), refuse to accept that they have to throw fifteen different breakers on dozens of floors of an apartment building to turn the lights back on, and know that Home Depot carries generators, gasoline and other fun stuff. So DMs are usually left with alternatives of putting their heroes in bizarre locales, which raise further problems for the zombies (why don’t they free solid at the arctic base, why aren’t they being liquidifed by pressure on the ocean floor, etc) Fantasy zombies are little better then creepy robots, and most classes are literally given specific anti-zombie artillery, which has led some to just straight up making something like ‘unturnable zombies’ to keep the cleric from flash eradicating them.

There are some specific ‘zombie RPGs’ out there, but most operate on the intrinsic conceits of taking away the player’s capability to do anything at the onset. The problem here is that the ‘weak pc’ vs the zombies really turns the game into either a shaggy dog story, or else turns the game into a puzzle. That of course discounts that some people do go in for a ‘storyteller’ like experience.

Zombies end up as the baseline, the lowest threat. After all, they don’t think. And the only threat they present is when there’s a lot of them. Some DMs try to get around this by making other weirder zombies (zombie sharks!) but that’s tricky since zombie doesn’t necessary mean ‘all undead’ and sometimes people want fancier, or weirder undead: Ghost sharks, vampire sharks, etc.

Ironically, the older version of the zombie, that with the voodoo priests and the like, can be arguably more compelling. The idea of loss of control, or the despoilment of family members can strike more firmly then just a wall of necrotic flesh. The idea that the voodoo zombie may or may not even be dead might also make dealing with them weirder. Undead who talk, but talk like the dead, are far scarier than just fleshy robots groaning out ‘brains!’