The Many Shades
of Zombie
September 12th, 2011
Hello, and welcome to another Dark Designs. It’s Zombie Week here at Necromancers of the Northwest, and, considering our magical specialization, you can imagine that we’re pretty psyched about it. After all, we took all that trouble to pick a specialist school, unlike some generalist gaming companies one might mention, but the nature of the job means that we have to spread our attention not just between all the different schools of magic, but also provide some content and love to rogues, fighters, rangers, and all manner of non-magical classes as well. I’m pretty sure if you take a look through our From the Workshop archive, you won’t find more than three or four necromancy-themed articles.
So this week we get to really sink our teeth (in a purely metaphorical sense, thank you very much) into one of the number one staples of necromancy: the shambling undead. Animated, rotting corpses. Zombies.
Now, I say that zombies are a staple of necromancy, and I believe this to be the case. Sometimes (often, really) animated skeletons take the same niche, but if you have a necromancer raising an army of undead, you’ve got at least a 50/50 shot it’s comprised mainly of zombies. But even though the presence of zombies is a staple of necromancy, that doesn’t mean that all zombies are cut from the same moldy flesh, so to speak.
In fact, there are many different interpretations of zombies, and they can vary pretty wildly from one another. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try spending some time around a zombie enthusiast. They’ll be more than glad to tell you about all the different “species” of zombies, and, if you’re lucky, you might be treated to a lengthy and heated debate about whether the slow, plodding zombies from the original “Dawn of the Dead” were scarier, or if the faster, predatory zombies from the remake were the superior zombie.
But there are more “flavors” of zombie than just fast and slow, of course. For example, in the West, at least, most zombies are mindless creatures, driven only by a vague yet overpowering hunger for braaaaaaaains, but in some other cultures, most notably voodoo, zombies often possess all the intelligence that they had in life, sometimes even a little more.
In fact, even just in other fantasy settings “zombie” can mean something very different from what it typically does in D&D and Pathfinder. For example, in Magic: the Gathering, a lot of creatures that would be considered a separate type of monster in 3.5, such as lichs, ghouls, and the like, are considered “zombies.” Of course, lichs are “zombie wizards” and ghouls typically have an ability that allows them to “eat” something, but the point is that “zombie,” as a term, means different things to different people.
The reason that I bring this to your attention (and, believe it or not, there is a reason) is that the meaning of “zombie” is very important to designing good zombies. For example, if you feel that the point of zombies is to be an unstoppable, inevitable force of slow, plodding, mindless destruction, you would design them much differently than if you thought they should be super-fast, super-strong, feral, bloodthirsty predators. You would design them differently still, if you felt the main purpose of the zombies was to just be gross and disgusting, with open sores and pustules, or exposed intestines, or, you know, whatever other ickiness you want.
As an aside, I’ve always been lukewarm about zombies, at best, precisely because of the “ick” factor. They’re not very hygienic or easy on the eyes, most of the time. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know. I’m just not a fan of rotting flesh. That’s why all of my undead minions are skeletons. Very neat and clean, the skeleton; looks professional. And with just the bones, they look uniform even when they aren’t in armor, as opposed to zombies, which look scruffy no matter how you dress them, with eyeballs hanging out, limbs falling off, etc., etc. Still, though, some people really go out for that sort of thing. I wound up watching an episode of Walking Dead, for example, and they really seemed to love playing up the whole “how gross can we make this zombie look” thing.
But, in any event, different styles of zombie would need to be approached differently. Zombies are horror monsters (for the most part), and so in order for them to be effective they need to be creating a strong emotional reaction in the players. Typically that emotion is fear (though, again, as evidenced above, sometimes it’s nausea). So, it’s important, when designing anything zombie-related, that it is designed in a way that will, hopefully, evoke those sorts of feelings.
Let’s take the standard D&D zombie, for example. I don’t think there can be any question that it’s supposed to follow the slow, plodding, inevitable “school” of zombies. You can tell, in part, at least, because they actually have a special ability called “staggered,” and it makes them especially slow. On top of that, zombies tend to have high hit points for their CR, making them relatively difficult to kill.
Unfortunately, as anyone who’s ever really fought zombies in D&D will tell you, there’s pretty much nothing to fear. Their offensive abilities aren’t particularly impressive, and their defensive abilities (besides hit points) aren’t that great, either. So, unlike in a zombie movie, where the hero can kill two or three zombies before the press of zombies forces him or her to fall back and hide, the average D&D hero can basically stand there and hack up zombies from sunrise to sunset, with relatively little danger, especially after 3rd level or so. This means that, unlike in the movies, the players will never be running away from zombies, and therefore the “slow but inevitable” angle will never come into play, and the zombie is largely robbed of everything that makes it scary.
As for “fast zombies” (I refer here to the “style” of zombie, as in the remake of Dawn of the Dead that I mentioned above, not the variant zombie from the Pathfinder Bestiary), these can still work, though in a game like Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons, there’s not really anything especially scary about a strong, fast, bloodthirsty and predatory creature. After all, that describes most of the monsters that your average adventuring party goes up against. In fact, while the fast zombie alternate package from the Pathfinder Bestiary is the most obvious application of this zombie type, one could make a very strong argument that the glove is a perfect fit for the ghoul and the ghast, as well. And other than undead traits and general humanoid appearance, there’s nothing to separate those from, say, I don’t know, a grizzly bear. Or a cheetah. Or most oozes. You get the idea.
In your average game of Pathfinder or Dungeons and Dragons, this is probably fine. These tend to fall more into the fantasy or sword-and-sorcery genre than horror, and so zombies exist as cardboard cut-out extras for heroes to hack up by the score, which is generally exactly what they do. But, if you want to run more of a horrific zombie encounter (and every DM, at some point in his career, gets it into his head that it would be fun to do a horror campaign), then the standard D&D zombie just isn’t sufficient.
Obviously, then, to a game designer, the solution is obvious: create more horrific zombies. As you may have already guessed, there’s no single zombie stat-block to promote here: with the wide variety of zombie “flavors” that are available, no single stat-block could cover them all, and since they operate in very different ways (sometimes in direct opposition to one another, such as “slow zombies” versus “fast zombies”), a stat-block that tried to be multiple kinds of zombie would probably fail at being any of them, just because it was unfocused.
In general, though, a good rule of thumb is that zombies should be dangerous (at least, if you want them to be scary), which means that they either need to be able to do respectable damage (and have a halfway decent chance of hitting), or else need to have some other way of posing a threat (for example, the popular “people who are bitten by zombies turn into zombies” idea, making even a non-damaging bite potentially lethal).
If they’re the “classic” slow, inevitable zombie, you would want to find ways to ensure that that zombie was, well, inevitable (they’re generally already slow, so that’s less of an issue). My preferred way of doing this is to make them completely unkillable (as in, they just get back up in a few minutes), but there are other ways to do it. If they spread via biting, they might be “unstoppable” in a very different kind of way.
I’m interested to hear how you would go about designing a better zombie. If you have strong feelings or ideas on the subject, send me an e-mail at ariggs@necromancers-online.com. If I get enough responses, I’ll spend an article talking about them, or maybe just show off all the great designs in a sort of “guest” From the Workshop.
We’ll be taking a break next week, but be sure to join me in two weeks, when I’ll be discussing the outer planes. In the meantime, when it comes to game design, don’t be afraid to use your braaaains. Your delicious, succulent, tasty braaaaaaaaaaaaains.