Post/Author/DateTime	Post
hoodGamer 01-06-08, 11:00 PM	i'am about to run a heroes of horror campaign. iam thinking of doing a zombie plague. has anyone ever done this?? any ideas ?? iam thinking of making the plague like dc:13 -1 con every 3 hours. kind of like dawn of the dead or 28 days later. any ideas would be cool. ps, sorry about the name but seems that all this board likes is 1001 threads.
navar100 01-07-08, 01:03 AM	Living Dead (undead) Hit Dice: 2d12 (13 hp) Initiative: +0 Speed: 30ft Armor Class: 10 (DX +0), touch 10, flatfooted 10 Base Attack/Grapple: +2/+7 Attack: Bite +8 melee (1d8+7) or grapple Full Attack: Bite +8 melee (1d8+7) or grapple and bite Space/Reach: 5ft/5ft Special Attacks: Vorpal Bite, Infectious Bite (CO drain), Sudden Strike 1d6 Special Qualities: DR 5/-, Turn Resistance +2, Scent, Blind Sense, Create Spawn, Undead Traits, Vorpal Vulnerability Saves: For +3, Ref +0, Will +0 Abilities: ST 20, DX 10, CO -, IN 1, WI 10, CH 1 Skills: - Feats: Weapon Focus (bite), Improved Grapple Environment: Any Organization: Any CR: ?? Treasure: None Alignment: Always Neutral Evil Advancement: None Level Adjustment: -- A Living Dead has the appearance of a zombie but is far more deadlier and dangerous. Combat: Unlike a “normal” zombie, a Living Dead can take the normal move action and standard action in a single round. Also unlike a zombie, a Living Dead has miniscule intelligence enabling it to react to circumstances. Sudden Strike: If a Living Dead catches a living creature flat-footed or otherwise denied its DX bonus to AC, it will attack the creature with its bite attack, doing an extra 1d6 damage as it tears off its flesh to eat. Improved Grapple: When attacking a creature not flat footed or denied its DX bonus to AC, the Living Dead will attempt to grapple the creature, not provoking an attacking of opportunity. If successful, it immediately makes a bite attack. Infectious Bite: A creature bitten by a Living Dead immediately loses one point of Constitution. This is considered a cursed disease. The creature will continue to lose 1 point of Constitution every 10 minutes. A creature reduced to 0 Constitution in this way dies and rises 1 minute later as a Living Dead. Any creature who otherwise dies during this time will also rise in one minute as a Living Dead. The Con drain can be staid by a Remove Curse followed by a Restoration, Greater Restoration, Limited Wish, Miracle, or Wish. Only afterwards can the Con drain be healed by normal means. A Living Dead will ignore a corpse of a creature who just died due to the Con loss but will continue to eat the corpse of a creature who is killed during its attack. If no other living creatures are within 30 ft, the Living Dead will devour all flesh spending 1d6 minutes doing so. If living creatures are within 30ft it will eat for 1d6 rounds before setting off to attack the living creatures. If there are more than one Living Dead within 30ft of the kill, all will attempt to devour the corpse. Vorpal bite: If a Living Dead confirms the crit after rolling a natural 20, it has bit through the skull of its victim, killing it instantly and eating its brain. Damage Resistance: Living Dead are quite resilient. They are easy to hit but hard to kill. They have a DR of 5/-. Turn Resistance: Living Dead are treated as having 2 HD more to resist turning/rebuking. Scent: Living Dead can smell living flesh within 30ft regardless of obstructing barriers of less than normal stone walls. Blind Sense: A Living Dead has normal vision. However, if it picks up the Scent of living creatures within 30ft, it can function normally in darkness, including magical darkness. Vorpal Vulnerability: Despite being undead, a Living Dead is vulnerable to some critical hits. If a creature attacking a Living Dead rolls a natural 20, he can roll to confirm the crit. If successful, he has instantly killed the Living Dead - chopped off its head, bashed in its skull, pierced into its brain, or any method depending upon the weapon used to cut off the Living Dead’s brain function. DR is ignored in this case. A creature does not have to be wielding a vorpal weapon to benefit from this, nor even a magical one. Only a True Resurrection spell can return to life someone who has become a Living Dead but only after that individual’s Living Dead corpse is burned to ashes or otherwise obliterated. How a Living Dead is created is a mystery. Some say it’s from an alchemical substance carried along by a meteorite from a far off realm. The fallout of the impact spreads the substance and seeps into the ground infecting corpses of those buried within 1 year. (Insane) wizards might be able to create one dose of such a substance with a DC 35 Alchemy check, enough to create one Living Dead. Spell Focus (Necromancy), Greater Spell Focus (Necromancy), and 10 ranks in Knowledge (Herbalism) each can give a +2 bonus to the check, What materials are used to make this substance and how much it costs is to be discovered. It’s possible a Create Greater Undead spell might be able to create one Living Dead using one (somewhat) intact corpse as well.
Kapalen 01-07-08, 01:35 AM	Seems pretty cool, but I don't see why it wouldn't provoke when trying to grapple, that doesn't seem like any living dead movies I've seen. And I'de give it a couple more hit die and say cr 4-7ish.
hoodGamer 01-07-08, 02:00 AM	damn that is cool. thanks just 2 things. if a 1 hit die human gets bit does it get the extra hit die and does the Vorpal bite seem too powerfull to anyone else? have you run this before how did the campiagn play out??
hoodGamer 01-08-08, 03:57 AM	bump
metalmayhem80110 01-08-08, 04:36 AM	No fort save from the bite? Ouch....
navar100 01-08-08, 06:19 AM	I came up with this a couple of years ago as a Halloween treat for another, now defunct :weep: , D&D forum. I've never seen it play. I have run an adventure a few times for different gaming groups for 3rd level characters that was a virtual copy of Night of the Living Dead, complete with NPC family hiding in the basement with a "sick" daughter, but I used regular zombie statistics for it. To use Living Dead for an ongoing campaign, make sure the party has a way to "cure" themselves, what I came up with or something else; otherwise, really, once someone gets bit that's the end of the character, and that's not fun for the campaign's sake. For a one-shot adventure, anything goes. Ghouls, minus the paralyzing touch, might work just as well.
Carmine_the_Wolf 01-08-08, 07:23 AM	I'm running a Spelljammer campaign at the moment and I crossed the Borg with the Zombie Plague idea to serve as the big bad in the background, the growing threat that the PCs have chosen to overlook at the moment. The zombies function as a hive mind with a lesser undead such as a wight or ghast serving as a nexus-point for their group, with more powerful undead representing the higher functions in the hive. It was just too tempting, what with the pyramid ships and all.
ToastedAmphibian 01-08-08, 06:07 PM	Scent: Living Dead can smell living flesh within 30ft regardless of obstructing barriers of less than normal stone walls. Blind Sense: A Living Dead has normal vision. However, if it picks up the Scent of living creatures within 30ft, it can function normally in darkness, including magical darkness. What is with teh Bizzare altering of the Scent and Blind Sense abilities? Instead of butchering these abilites (And making them both into something completly diffrent than what they normally are) why not just give them the Life Sense ability. Lifesense (Su) A dread wraith notices and locates living creatures within 60 feet, just as if it possessed the blindsight ability. It also senses the strength of their life force automatically, as if it had cast deathwatch. Undead already have 60ft darkvision, so the only diffrence is that they wouldnt be able to see non-living things normally in magical darkness. If its that much of a problem you could also give them the "See in Darkness" ability See in Darkness (Su): Some devils can see perfectly in darkness of any kind, even that created by a deeper darkness spell. Just replace "Some devils" with "Living Dead" and your set.... Here, ill even do it for you! Oh, your feats are wrong, and your skills. A 2hd intelligent undead gets one feat, and 5x(4+int) skills in this case 5x(4-5 min 1)=5 skill points. You should probalby just make their int NA instead of 1, and list the two feats as bonus feats. Wisdom is the ability that is used to respond to your situation and surroundings anyways, so this shouldnt cause a change in their behavior. Wisdom (Wis) Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition. While Intelligence represents one’s ability to analyze information, Wisdom represents being in tune with and aware of one’s surroundings. Wisdom is the most important ability for clerics and druids, and it is also important for paladins and rangers. If you want your character to have acute senses, put a high score in Wisdom. Every creature has a Wisdom score. Living Dead (undead) Hit Dice: 2d12 (13 hp) Initiative: +0 Speed: 30ft Armor Class: 10 (DEX +0), touch 10, flatfooted 10 Base Attack/Grapple: +1/+10 Attack: Bite +7 melee (1d8+7) or grapple Full Attack: Bite +7 melee (1d8+7) or grapple and bite Space/Reach: 5ft/5ft Special Attacks: Vorpal Bite, Infectious Bite (CON drain), Sudden Strike 1d6 Special Qualities: DR 5/-, Turn Resistance +2, Life Sense, See in Darkness, Create Spawn, Undead Traits, Vorpal Vulnerability Saves: Fort +0, Ref +0, Will +3 Abilities: STR 20, DEX 10, CON -, INT -, WIS 10, CHA 1 Skills: - Feats: Weapon Focus (bite) B, Improved Grapple B Environment: Any Organization: Any CR: ?? Treasure: None Alignment: Always Neutral Evil Advancement: None Level Adjustment: -- A Living Dead has the appearance of a zombie but is far more deadlier and dangerous. Combat: Unlike a “normal” zombie, a Living Dead can take the normal move action and standard action in a single round. Also unlike a zombie, a Living Dead has innate wisdom and instincts, enabling it to react to circumstances. Sudden Strike(Ex)?: If a Living Dead catches a living creature flat-footed or otherwise denied its DEX bonus to AC, it will attack the creature with its bite attack, doing an extra 1d6 damage as it tears off its flesh to eat. Improved Grapple: When attacking a creature not flat footed or denied its DEX bonus to AC, the Living Dead will attempt to grapple the creature, not provoking an attacking of opportunity. Brain Eater(Ex): Upon sucessfully entering a grapple, a Living Dead make make a bite attack as a free action. This is in addition to its normal unarmed strike damage. (1d3 Non-Lethal Bludgoning Damage) Infectious Bite(Su): A creature bitten by a Living Dead immediately loses one point of Constitution. This is considered a cursed disease. The creature will continue to lose 1 point of Constitution every 10 minutes. The Con drain can be staid by a Remove Curse followed by a Restoration, Greater Restoration, Limited Wish, Miracle, or Wish. Only afterwards can the Con drain be healed by normal means. A Living Dead will ignore a corpse of a creature who just died due to the Con loss but will continue to eat the corpse of a creature who is killed during its attack. If no other living creatures are within 30 ft, the Living Dead will devour all flesh spending 1d6 minutes doing so. If living creatures are within 30ft it will eat for 1d6 rounds before setting off to attack the living creatures. If there are more than one Living Dead within 30ft of the kill, all will attempt to devour the corpse. Create Spawn(Su): A creature reduced to 0 Constitution by a Living Dead's infectious bite dies and rises 1 minute later as a Living Dead. Any creature who otherwise dies while afflicted by an infectious bite will also rise in one minute as a Living Dead. Vorpal bite(Ex): On a sucessfull critical hit with its bite attack, a Living Dead bites through the skull of its victim, killing it instantly and eating its brain. Damage Resistance(Ex): Living Dead are quite resilient. They are easy to hit but hard to kill. They have a DR of 5/-. Turn Resistance(Ex): Living Dead are treated as having 2 HD more to resist turning/rebuking. See in Darkness (Su): Living Dead can see perfectly in darkness of any kind, even that created by a deeper darkness spell. Lifesense (Su) Living Dead notice and locate living creatures within 60 feet, just as if they possessed the blindsight ability. Also, they senses the strength of their life force automatically, as if they had cast deathwatch. Vorpal Vulnerability(Ex): Despite being undead, a Living Dead is vulnerable to some critical hits. If a creature attacking a Living Dead rolls a natural 20, he can roll to confirm the crit. If successful, he has instantly killed the Living Dead - chopped off its head, bashed in its skull, pierced into its brain, or any method depending upon the weapon used to cut off the Living Dead’s brain function. DR is ignored in this case. A creature does not have to be wielding a vorpal weapon to benefit from this, nor even a magical one. Only a True Resurrection spell can return to life someone who has become a Living Dead but only after that individual’s Living Dead corpse is burned to ashes or otherwise obliterated. How a Living Dead is created is a mystery. Some say it’s from an alchemical substance carried along by a meteorite from a far off realm. The fallout of the impact spreads the substance and seeps into the ground infecting corpses of those buried within 1 year. (Insane) wizards might be able to create one dose of such a substance with a DC 35 Alchemy check, enough to create one Living Dead. Spell Focus (Necromancy), Greater Spell Focus (Necromancy), and 10 ranks in Knowledge (Herbalism) each can give a +2 bonus to the check, What materials are used to make this substance and how much it costs is to be discovered. It’s possible a Create Greater Undead spell might be able to create one Living Dead using one (somewhat) intact corpse as well. There. I think i bolded all of my changes (Except for changing your two letter abrivations to the mroe standard 3 letter abreviations) I dont belive i changed teh functionality of your creation much, if at all, just tried to standardize the formatting and the wording of the special abilites. I also added supernatural and extrodaniary tags, as seemed appropriate based on the designation of other creatures; Damage resistance: zombie Turn Resitance, Create Spawn: Vampire Vorpal bite: Razor Boar (Vorpal Tusk Ability) Life Sense: Dread Wraith See in Darkness: Demons Infectious bite could really go either way. The two closest abilites that i could find, Lycanthropy and Mummy Rot, are both supernatural diseases, and in a heavy magic world that might be the better way to go. However i think putting it as extrodanary might make it slightly scarrier. However the fact that you need powerfull magic to combat it strongly implies that it should be magical in nature. I hope you do not take offense to my editing your work. I think it is a wonderfull creation and might make use of it in a coming campagine. I hope that others will be able to make better use of it as well, and my changes are only intended to help people in putting it into their campagines without worring about future rules issues caused by your slight ommissions/errors. All in all, nice work!
hoodGamer 01-09-08, 12:26 AM	What CR would this be? it seems too powerfull to have alot of these attacking the pcs? mabe dump the vorpal bite or put it together brain eater attack so that you can only do it after target is pined and Infectious Bite could be 1 con every hour instead.
Andrew 01-09-08, 01:59 AM	Look for the "Lessons from DMing with my GF" thread, hosted by Oakspar77777. It contains several helpful posts about "Zombiegeddon" games. A key point is that if you're running a Zombie survival horror campaign, things like CR, party level, and XP are useless. It's an entirely different concept from the expected "defeat the monster, loot the bodies, rest-and-reflect on our experiences" game. Implicit in the concept of such a thing is this isn't fair, and you can't defeat them all. There's also a difference between a horror session and a horror campaign. Personally, I like using Wights for this style of game. Individually, they're not too challenging, yet they spread like wildfire and any strike can be deadly.
hoodGamer 01-30-08, 12:55 AM	realy it had a scripted for a zombiegeddon game but i don't run my game like a premade movie . looking for mabe like a list of things that did and didn't work in the game
Drackthor 01-30-08, 02:54 AM	Crimson Death. I didn't really think of anything to go with it, but I think he's cool enough to deserve his own sanity-wrenching, life-destroying, soul-devouring plague named after him.
LordPwntar 01-30-08, 10:21 AM	If you're looking for a neat way to incorporate "The Plague" into your storyline at pretty much any time, I'm running a campaign now where the infection begins when a nasty wizard starts experimenting with magical diseases. He tries infecting some undead with lycanthropy, screws up, and accidentally creates "necrotic lycanthropy." Basically it turns everybody into fast-moving, infectious zombies. Pretty cool, huh?
Zombie_Babies 01-30-08, 11:00 AM	Zombie ideas? Check the name! :cool: I really did run a game with this as a central plot expansion. It was fun, a little odd and where I took my name from. Not exactly a plague, but there were a ton. If you want more info on the idea let me know. I'm not sure if it would mesh with your plans, though. As I said, not a plague per-se. Oh well. Just toss in some baby zombies. It's fun. I just used small-sized zombie stats. Hopefully it will weird out the PCs a bit. One of mine actually said something like "Zombie babies?!?! Why didn't I ever think of that!". Good times with baby undead. :D
Ikyotojin 01-30-08, 12:29 PM	Baby undead are sure to get any group a little uncomfortable. I did it with just one instance - a city that was cursed and each and every perosn was killed, then raised as hopeless undead. One female shuffling towards the party with it's undead baby trying to claw it's way out... I gave one of the players nightmares. I like the modified "living dead". I'll try them out this weekend as the party is going back to that same city!
Zombie_Babies 01-30-08, 12:54 PM	The way I incorporated the baby zombies was by having the party's noble employer go off her rocker. She was already evil (half-fiend) but after tricking the party into retrieving the pieces of an ancient phylactery, she went lich. The phylactery corrupted her further and she went completely nuts. She had already implanted the PCs and much of the town with a small piece of onyx that, upon their death, zombified them. The PCs ran into this but never found the reason it happened. As they adventured on (I brought the zombie babies in very slowly as it was the end to the story arc) they began to hear stories of children and babies dying inexplicably. This was effecting everyone they spoke to and kept increasing in regularity. Eventually, they checked the water, as it was rumored this was the cause, and found traces of onyx and Necromantic magic. They tried blessing the water and it helped, but only for small amounts. Besides, the damage was already done. I sprung it on them so they had no time to formulate an escape plan. I wanted them to think on the fly and feel some urgency. I started with a love interest of one of the PCs (and a servant of the noble in question) confide to said PC that her mistress had lost her mind. While there, another servant (and a friend, as well) showed up and attempted to murder her. The PC then found his friends and went to a temple. While there and talking about what to do, they hear a loud scream and look outside to see the zombie baby/child horde ravaging the city. End of session. I described a lot of what the zombies were doing as well. Good times.
1 ton ghost 01-30-08, 03:55 PM	i've posted my own and replied on quite a few zombie pandemic-esque threads, but it's late in the work day so i'll keep this short as i can. you going for Romero zombies; Night/Dawn/Day of the Dead, 28 Days Later "infected", Return of the Living Dead "clever brain eaters", what? -get Libris Mortis, consider Fast Zombie and/or Bloodthirsty as templates. simple, easy, handy. apply as you see fit given the motif you are going for. good book overall. particularly liked 1/2 vampire and necropolitan PC options. -Mobs (DMGII) makes for good "groupings" of large amounts of plain vanilla undead. just call it a crowd of zombies if you will. they have provisions for undead. once you've "broken up the HD" a bit, then deal w/ them in singular fashion. -for regular human-esque zombies w/ an Infectious Bite (are you considering claw?), you gotta' remember they are still humans "in frame". thusly, they should have to grapple first before they land a bite as they do in movies. yes, draw AoOs and all that, but they have superior numbers and self-preservation isn't in a zombie's interest. they don't suddenly grow big teeth or claws, they're just humans w/ the same equipment, but a rather virulent disease/curse/whatever you want to call it. inescapable craving as a ghoul, but mindless and so on. those w/ Combat Reflexes will undoubtedly be in luck. mob them accordingly. -not sure what to rule the Save at. perhaps even a Con check. who knows. most would rule a Fort save, probably a safe bet...set your own DC. -look at All Flesh Must Be Eaten (excellent zombie RPG), World War 'Z' (book, Max Brooks), and his Zombie Survival Guide, The Walking Dead (graphic novels), and pick through your library/blockbuster for any obscure zombie movies you can find; Cemetary Man (black comedy), Dead Alive (peter jackson black comedy, hilarious/vile) and variations on the theme at large like Invasions of the Body Snatchers, etc. don't try and get it down to the nap, just keep it loose or you'll lose detail.