HELP! NEED IDEAS FOR INTRO TO Zombie apocalypse campaign

[VladDragoon]

This is my 3rd or 4th zombie campaign but im getting tired of using viruses or radiation to start it off. HELP PLEASE

[bookkeeping guy]

Zombie apocalypses are fun. Its the detail that's missing from many of them that stop people from taking their potential seriously. If you want to do one go for it.

However....the problem with a zombie apocalypse is that you can't take them back once they start. They will take away the infrastructure of basically everything there...

So the real question is are you OK with doing away with all infrastructure of society? And are you starting with an industrial civilization or pre-industrial? Medieval??

Up to you good luck.

It would help if you left some specifics like civilization type first.

And whether or not the main characters have some kind of economic advantage to help it get started could shape and affect how you get started....that's key.

Don't be afraid to do this type of campaign if you really like it.

[Pugwampy]

Are your players not getting sick of zombies ? 4 zombie campaigns in a row is way too much .

Might i recommend this mod to start you off ? It has lots of ideas to build upon .

https://dnd.rem.uz/3.0%20Adventures/A%20Dead%20Man's%20Party.pdf

[bookkeeping guy]

Maybe the DM really likes undead...?

How big is a campaign though? How many sessions I mean? Are we talking like 2 or 3 times a week for a month or just like one meeting becomes a campaign? You could switch things up and have the PCs follow the undead's source to a necromancer ring.

Then it could become a mage circle vs necromancer circle group campaign.

[Fouredged Sword]

I did a post apoc zombie game. I added a homebrew twist my players really liked. Basically the whole thing was caused by creatures native to an unlife plane connected to the material only through the plane of shadows. These creatures existed as an inverse of life, not-unlife or undead - anti-life.

The had the following properties -
Each had a number of class levels and all the properties of said levels, (saves, hd, hp, skills ranks ect)
They had all the standard stats including a con score (really important rules with this).
They exited as immaterial creatures. They cannot be touched or touch things.

They CAN posses undead. They had to in order to do anything. This was mechanically done by adding the traits of the anti-life character onto the undead creature

str - uses undead creature's score
con - uses antilife creature's score
dex - undead
int - anti-life
wis - anti-life
cha - anti life

HD - The creature has all the HD of the undead creature AND the anti-life creature's class levels.
HP - the undead creature now benefits from a con score, gaining hp from it. The HP of the hybrid creature is counted in two pools. First you have it's physical HP. This is the HP gained from it's undead HP. When this is depleted the body crumbles and the anti-life creature is unbound (but still alive). The HD from the unlife creature's HD is considered incorporeal HP and can only be damaged by ghosttouch or other things that hit incorporeal things.

This was an E6 game that saw ghosttouch almost completely removed from the game. Holy water was a big thing, as was some spells like magic missile. Lots of fun all around.

[the_david]

The OP didn't say 3 or 4 zombie campaigns in a row. I'm guessing this might be intended for the yearly Halloween adventure, which would make it less tedious.

Viruses and radiation are typical modern day zombie apocalypse things. I'd suggest going with fantasy for a change. Add in a powerfull necromancer as a boss and a dungeon to crawl through when the survival horror becomes a bit tedious.

And kill of at least one of the characters. Make sure the players bring extra character sheets.

[Segev]

Out of curiosity, what were your prior games about? What happened in them? How one tells a zombie apocalypse story is of interest to me, because when I try to conceive of one, I wind up with a lot of genericness and little specific on which to hook interest. So I'm curious how you hook "interesting" things into it. Make it a story, rather than a historical overview, so to speak.

[Fouredged Sword]

Also, I set my game 10 years after the zombie outbreak. A wizard with crippling nearsightedness, a bow ranger with one arm, a fighter missing a leg, and a cleric with a vow of peace, all ex-adventurers, ended up running an orphanage. The characters are the few children they could gather onto holy ground before the unresting wave of the undead army breached the walls of the city.

For ten years they raised the children. For ten years they grew what the soil could provide and used divine magic to fill in the gaps.

But now their wards are growing up. They have trained under them and are ready to explore beyond the small stone markers that show the edge of the holy ground.

[Segev]

Also, I set my game 10 years after the zombie outbreak. A wizard with crippling nearsightedness, a bow ranger with one arm, a fighter missing a leg, and a cleric with a vow of peace, all ex-adventurers, ended up running an orphanage. The characters are the few children they could gather onto holy ground before the unresting wave of the undead army breached the walls of the city.

For ten years they raised the children. For ten years they grew what the soil could provide and used divine magic to fill in the gaps.

But now their wards are growing up. They have trained under them and are ready to explore beyond the small stone markers that show the edge of the holy ground.

Do the undead literally roam within eyesight of this boundary, or is the boundary a softer one, where they could have "bravery games" of how far outside they'd go before running back? Were "foraging missions" feasible even as younger kids, as long as they couldn't see zombies?

[Fouredged Sword]

Undead wandered the whole area. The church was on the outskirts of a walled city. Though the bulk of the undead stayed within the walls (called there by three anti-life) there where plenty of undead wandering the countryside. Pelor, mortally wounded, sustains the holy ground in several places to preserve the last of his faith. Those who stand on holy ground are invisible to undead and undead will not walk onto holy ground or even acknowledge that it exists.

Such cannot be sustained though. Anti-life creatures are not undead.

The game started with the group deciding what parts of town they wanted to go scavenging through. It would have been the first time a person left the protection of holy ground for ten years. If the players where careless in going home the anti-life creatures would realize that they had a pest problem that their undead could not follow home and set about trying to solve the problem themselves.

They would not have been able to enter the space with a undead body in tow, but they would be able to make it MUCH harder for the party to leave.

The game was E6 as well. Undead stay dangerous.

[Calthropstu]

This is my 3rd or 4th zombie campaign but im getting tired of using viruses or radiation to start it off. HELP PLEASE

Might I interest you in a Bodak?

[Yogibear41]

Was playing in a d20 modern zombie campaign before it died because most of the players left. Took place in the 1990s. Basically got started when out lost group caused the world to end (mostly one of our players was an idiot) To sum it up he got sacrificed by what was an artifact and it unleashed a death wave that crossed the entire country in a matter of hours and eventually around the entire world. Wiped out pretty much everything, but pockets of people somehow avoided the effect do to cover or something. Our new characters all started in a massive casino in Vegas, the one that looks like a pyramid, somehow we were all shielded from the blast. We had to sneak/fight our way out of the city, came very close several times to being TPK'd due to unwinnable odds, lost several npcs on the way, few npcs got turned. Finally managed to find a decent place to fort up at a hotel in the Nevada desert that had its own generators and several thousand gallons worth of water already stockpiled up. Then we learned that vampires had survived the blast, many of whom were military/ex-military and they were using the remnants of the government systems to track down and capture the surviving humans so they didn't starve to death. Also one faction of aliens were helping the vampires, mutants also survived the blast, and we heard via radio that the vampires were worried about "demons" that had been unleashed as well. Then the game died :smallfrown: Even tried to recruit on the forums here to get it going again, one guy showed interest, then he never messaged me again. :smallfrown:

[Jack_Simth]

This is my 3rd or 4th zombie campaign but im getting tired of using viruses or radiation to start it off. HELP PLEASE

A few questions:
What sort of setting are you going for? Yes, Zombie apocalypse. There's a lot of variations on that, though. Are you looking at "Modernized country Zombie Apocalypse", "Third world modern times Zombie Apocalypse", "Sci-fi future Zombie Apocalypse", "Historical fiction Zombie Apocalypse", "Fantasy realm Zombie Apocalypse", or something else? Also keep in mind that there's variations on each of those. I suggest getting a list, and using dice to pick.

How do the PC's know the source? There's no particular reason that they'd be certain. Anything that goes in the intro is expected to be known by the PC's by most players unless spelled out otherwise.

A few throw-away sources, ignoring radiation and disease:
Ancient Curse: someone got into a place they shouldn't have, and unleashed it accidentally (variations: Ancient artifact, angry mostly-forgotten gods/demons/devils)
Side effect of an immortality serum that was cheap for everyone: You stop aging, no longer need to worry about 'normal' diseases, and will even slowly regrow lost limbs... but when something happens that would kill someone on the serum outright (or close enough), brain damage and personality loss occurs, resulting in a violent psycopath (which is also really hard to kill, as that's how it came about in the first place).
Powerful necromancer did it deliberately, and is in full control of the Zombie Apocalypse.
Powerful necromancer tried to make a controlled version of an infectious zombie, but lost control (miscalculation and the control isn't passed on past a certain number of generations, Necromancer got deaded and now there's nobody at the helm, the widget that did the control got lost/damaged/stolen/destroyed, it's a form of "chain control" [Necromancer controls the first directly; the first controlls all of it's spawn - the first generation; the first generation control all of their spawn - the second generation; and so on] and a link in the chain broke due to zombie death leading to the Zombie Apocalypse)
Powerful necromancer WANTED an uncontrolled Zombie Apocalypse, and got it.
Nanites. Someone wanted to turn immortality into an STD to bring it to the world, and made a mistake in alpha testing: it maintains the body in mostly-working order, but causes the brain to degrade rapidly.