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We shall make an RP about zombies! Go!

Rules of zombdum, v0.1, including some questions

Zombism is infectious
Zombism is not immediately lethal but causes symptoms that reduce motility, awareness, and are eventually lethal
Zombism is not airborne, does not remain virulent on surfaces for more than a few seconds, and does not travel through water readily. Fresh bodily fluids from the donor must come in contact with the recipient's blood
Zombies decay at an exagerated rate, eating live flesh somehow slows this down in certain respects.
The first thing to decay is the brain, though certain portions are exempt, those pertaining to motor functions and coordination can sometimes improve.

Zombies suffer from unending hunger, though they may become placated after a large meal, and behave more passively, they will never overlook the chance to eat.
When a zombie has gone several hours without eating they will begin to actively maraud.
Zombies primarily feed on human flesh, but can eat any live flesh, including that of people who have been infected but have not turned.
'Fresh' Zombies, who have been zombies for less than three days, are capable of consuming meat that has been dead for an extended period, and in some cases plant life.
Zombies have been noted to behave as if familiar to places and people they knew in life, this nostalgia is less powerful than their hunger.

Though outward appearances just show rot, internally the biology of zombies is extremely different to that of humans. Their muscle structures become much more robust, their digestive systems become much simpler, many basic nerve systems are made redundant and all of the vital organs become autonomous, also most sensory capacity decays and is consumed by other systems, removing entirely the sense of pain, tactile sensation, fatigue sensation, and taste. Sight is reduced but hearing and smell are made much more acute. In especially old zombies the valued portions of the brain are even made redundant, making it so that destroying their head does not stop them, though it does remove all of their remaining sense organs, they will continue to charge or flail until their heart or spine is destroyed, all their limbs are removed, or they are physically immobilized. This change seems to start at the 2 month mark.

Lungs are also done away with, the cells of a zombie are converted to anaerobic processes and this makes the blood primarily waste material, with the heart pumping it to somewhere it will fall out of the body.

When a zombie fails to find nurishment for several days it's body begins to decay beyond a point it can return from. It's digestive system will be consumed first, and then it's skin. Less important brain functions follow, then sensory organs, bone matter, and finally muscle mass is saved for last.

What passes for zombie socialization is basically a power struggle, they all want food, the fight for it, the strongest wins. Zombies have been known to rip the weaker apart to claim the food inside their digestive systems. Higher intelligence has only been noticed in the oldest zombies, who have developed the redundent brain segments, and even then it's very limited.

Most zombies have no concept of fear, attempts to scare them off, dominant behavior, loud noises, setting fires, non-lethal strikes to areas that would normally cause severe pain, will only serve to attract others, and claim their attention.

Most zombies have very little attention, and will always go for the most obvious, or seemingly easiest target, but some have been noted to stalk a target for days, despite more opportune food sources. These have been dubbed 'Stalkers'. By itself a stalker doesn't serve much of a threat, no more than any other. They tend to be your average zombie, only malnourished so they can even be weaker than normal. Their problem is in that their attempts to get to the target draw the attention of other zombies, this is especially troublesome when attempting to escape a populated area for the wild. If it looses it's target a Stalker will wander in the last direction it followed endlessly, until it collapses or finds another target that strikes it's fancy.

How far should we go into specialized/mutant zombies?

That's all I have for that section at the moment, what's next?

Where is this happening? Important question.

I like the idea of a cityscape, sky scrapers barricaded off, connected by rope bridges and surrounded by hoards and hoards of hoardful hoards, with somewhat organized teams going out to gather supplies and independent groups, but other settings have entirely different feels. The point of this is to be a quick game. So that includes time period, I think you need guns to fight zombies effectively, and modern cities to breed them and run from. Superfuture would be cool, but somehow it seems ineffective.

Given the way I've written some of the zombrules it would seem that this has been going on a little while, but that's up for debate too, we can always change it to be a new thing, or maybe it's new to some people, not new to others.

Some of these questions need to be answered before the plot direction can be determined, my opinions are worked into things, what's yalls think?

This is actually very much untrue and often misrepresented, the structure of a building requires almost no maintenance, nor is any true maintenance even possible as the act of replacing things would cause the building to fall half way through. As well modern buildings are built to need even less. Most of the money put into the up keep of buildings goes into the mechanical systems, exterior, and services, which can fail quickly but if water is supplied the plumbing will stay functional until the valves fail or the drains clog. As long as you contain any fires and what not, and don't experience earth quakes it's really not much of an issue.
-worktimebye-

Structural integrity does not need to be brought into account. The only time it would be a concern would be anomalies such as someone leaving a stove on, or an accidental office fire or some such. Otherwise, as lily said it's irrelevant. Our modern structures, especially skyscrapers and other commercial buildings, are meant to last decades, and I don't see anything in the zombie description stating they know how to manipulate/devise explosives or destructive tools- AND use them in such a manner.

Modern seems the best bet. The environments, technology, and society are familiar meaning there is less confusion on those sorts of details.

I don't think there's any real need for a great variety of forms/mutations. Other species makes it interesting.

Aaaand... that's all I've got for now.

I had to go to work two minutes before I completed the post

Other than Blackbird's mentioned accidental stuff that might lead into a big fire or explosion, the only reasonable circumstance we'll come up against that brings the safety of pre-existing structures into question would be if a floor or room of a building got so loaded up with zombies that it begins to fail. Because of that populated buildings would have to have extremely secure lower levels to prevent a hoard from entering the building. The best of them would even control ground around the building, possibly having erected barricades between smaller surrounding buildings, to prevent the zombies form corpse-ramping up.

In PM discussion with Bayer and Venom betweeen the three of us the most liked environment is that of a massive city, more than a couple hundred miles wide in it's urban center zone, with pockets of infection tens of miles wide. Occasionally the secure perimeter around the infected areas fails and near by areas are claimed by the zombies, replenishing the ranks. The people in the clean zones are doing little if anything to help the survivors in the infection zones so they're by themselves.

Also pointing out that in a happy accident, the way I described their hunger and eating habit it comes out that zombies are much more likely to consume any non-zombie whole, preventing most from becoming zombies themselves. This way it's only those who escape or kill their attackers after being infected that become zombies themselves, thus limiting the growth of the zombie populations and rate of spread.

I think we should cut the abnormal zombie question into two parts based on the nature of them. Specialized zombies would be like your average zombie only with abnormal behavior, physical ability, etc. Mutant zombies would be like those from various videogames, with fantastic and impossible powers.

Stalkers, Heavy, Sprinter, Children, Fleshbeasts, Shriekers, and Cannibals would be examples of Specialized zombies. At best these will in one area be better than humans, but usually they will just be better than other zombies.

Infectors, the Damned, and maybe Squirters would be Mutants, they in may ways appear as superhuman beings.

We shall discuss these concepts separately. Personally I don't like the idea of mutants, they don't really have anything to do with zombies, Damned seem interesting.

As I see it in game the classification o hoards isn't going to be terribly important or organized, more they're going to be estimated head counts or how much space they take up. The military forces in the clean zone might use classifications like this and pass the data onto their people in the field, but there are very few of those. We might also use it in the OOC stuff to describe situations.

Cities are definitely the most dangerous place in a zombopocalpse, they're high population density and hard to navigate, it's also very difficult to get resources and you have to be really careful with heating because it's so easy to start a fire.

To me any time period between around 1960 and 2020 would work fine, there are a lot of technological and some cultural changes, but it's a very similar world when fighting zombies.

We should also discuss the origin of the zombism infection. There are basically two options, magical, and biological, given the modern era that seems to be uncontested magic doesn't make much sense, but who knows. With biological we then have to choose between natural and self inflicted. Basically, is this someone's fault.

A conversation between Lily and I has lead us to discover several things about the setting of this particular zombie gambit, let's start from the beginning.

The city will likely be situated in China a generation or two after a 'first' devastating wave of zombocalypse. In this city refugees from around the world have gathered as it was one of the final clean zones left in the world. As time went on this city became the center of a new civilization built upon the fundamentals of zombie survival.

The zombie hordes that existed outside of the city have effectively eaten/starved themselves and as a result most of the world is now devoid of human life and a few groups of humans have chanced a living outside the walls of the city.

The city itself is divided by walls, 'concentric circles' to be exact. Within each one of these enclosed spaces there is a maximum number of people allowed and the walls themselves are tailored to retain a horde of a few more than that number. The outskirts of the city are still in development and are run by younger, less paranoid members of the city, thus allowing the outskirts to fall quickly. The inner city is more tightly secured and tightly run.

The political situation is that of a representative military dictatorship. Districts have representative, but over all the military presence provides the stability and control of a coherent society.

The people of the city have learned to be self-sustaining, food is only scarce in the underdeveloped areas and the "reclaimed" areas surrounding the city, the water situation has yet to be discussed, I propose a city by the sea with workable (and expanded) desalination plants, in this way there can also be a means of workable power, especially if they have adopted solar power (likely).

Vehicles only circulate within districts, and are largely unnecessary for anything other than inter-district travel.

As far as timeline concerns, the timeline chosen would be merely a "jumping off point" for the technological advancements as the setting would have to take place decades after the first wave. The style, trend, ideals, and other trappings of the decade/era would be lost due to the cultural mesh, and things would tend towards dealing with survival, zombism, and the complacency that lack of attacks by zombies has lead to. Therefore only the technology would have a significant effect.

If there's anything I left out Lily will tell me about it.

So I figure we've got enough here to get going, all we need now is characters and to throw them together knives out, heads first.

On that note, I can't really decide what information is actually important. Age to a certain extent, seems like, older characters will have grown up with a stronger fear of zombies and will have more experience, younger characters are probably more resilient, maybe even some turn out to be immune to zombism for plot. It would also be interesting to see very young characters (12-16) in the environment, but they would have a lot of trouble defending themselves and dealing with the psychological trauma, and we wouldn't want to be too much like Cinders.

Though it seems to me that one of the more important factors would be their role in society, people from a military background will be better for combat, but someone who worked on the power grid will be valuable in a different way, and of course someone who knows a lot about growing food as well.

And getting into the history, since this is a relatively new occurrence a lot of characters aren't going to have tons of events that matter to this to write about for a tableau, and simply writing the word history and personality with colons after them has a tendency to end poorly.

Venom recently suggested that we start with a group of defenders trying to prevent a district from being infected (presumibly they fail), and lead on from there, which means some of the main characters would be extra fresh at this.

Group wise, taking that into account there would be the people from the clean district, the people from the fortified buildings, and the people who supply those buildings. The last group would be a hodge podge of military types, relatively well armed, they scavange the city for supplies and survivors, then ferry them back to the buildings.

I'm trying not to worry about the actual plot of this, I figure ether we'll figure it out or we don't need it, but if there are any suggestions I'm listening.

Maybe their eating patterns relate to some confused instinct or humanity, but they would require a way to sense the infected-but-not-turned. The best way would be through smell. Ether they've still got that base instinct that sick things are bad for your health, or that part of their brain that thinks rotting flesh tastes bad is still in tact. As they age their base instincts degrade and they get over it.

As I see it the problem still remains that anybody, infected or not, that gets caught by a zombie, ether escapes or gets eaten. A single zombie might not eat the body whole, but it's also not going to be quiet about it so more zombies will show up. The exact time it takes to convert would vary by health, someone real fit with a strong immune system is going to be maybe a few days to a week, someone who isn't at their peak might change overnight, but ether way a hoard would have eaten them whole long before them.

--computer issues, continue later--