Zombies in Star Wars

[CRMcNeill]

So, in light of World War Z coming out this week, has anyone ever done zombies in a Star Wars game? Since the Death Troopers novel established a version of virus based zombies, there is atleast some official basis for it? How would you stat them and use them in a campaign?
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Leon The Lion]

I've done zombies.

Like many other things, I don't consider Death Troopers cannon. My first zombie scenario came before I've heard of the book, and I didn't want to change my established world once I did. Not that I'm against the idea of "classic" virus zombies in the SW, I just had a different idea.

I've made it very clear to the players & characters, that in my SW universe, there are no zombies. They don't exist in popular culture like they do here. There are stories of ghosts, ghouls, wrights, vampires even, revenants, and just plain resurections. But no zombies.

And then bam! Zombies.

The adventure started when, cruising merrily on their way through the rim, the PCs' ship performed an automatic emergency hyperspace drop-out somewhere in the deep dark of interstellar space. Something big blocked it's path in normal space, something that shouldn't have been there.

The problem was, their ship was... Temperamental. It was heavily modified, with many non-standard, even prototype parts, and very old besides. The stress of the emergency stop triggered some short-circuit, and as a result the ship just went and dumped all it's fuel (which in my rules is used to run both the drives and power core). Oops. They ware left stranded, adrift, with no drive power and only three days of emergency life support power.

Luckily, there was still the thing which they almost crashed into.

It turned out to be a derelict ship. It was massive, about 4km long and 1km in diameter. It was of a type neither of the characters recognized, but it looked old, immensly old. It had a huge hole ripped in it's hull, looked like micro- (or not so micro in this case) -meteorite collision damage. Dead, dark, and deathly silent, slowly spinning, no power or life form readings. Sensors revealed that it didn't even seem to possess a hyperdrive, and it's sublight engine was not an ion drive but a nuclear fussion rocket.

In a different situation, this could be a monumental find - an ancient artifact, a ship from the "dark age", untold thousands of years old, from before the invention of the hyperdrive. As it was, it represented the characters' only hope for salvation.

The PCs' ship was equipped, among other things, with a solid fuel converter. And per sensor readings, the derelict - "SEED", as the lettering on it's hull claimed - still possessed radioactive fuel for it's reactor and drive on board. All they had to do was enter the derelict and bring over sufficent radioactives to shove into their converter and they ware home free.

Right. Enter the creepy - and it was creepy, something felt very off about it - dead ship, and go poking inside. No sweat.

But, having no other choice, they went. No light, no heat, no gravity, no atmosphere. Only an uneasy, oppressive feeling.

"SEED" turned out to be, best the characters could determine from their survey, a STL colony ship. It had immense supply and equipment stores, artificial environment habitats and farms... And over 20.000 crew and passengers in primitive cold-sleep capsules. All very, very dead...

Still, it was just beginning to look like everything would be resolved happily with nothing more than bad feelings they could laugh about later. The characters made two trips with the radioactives, and they only needed one more to have enough converted fuel to reach civilizaton.

Which was, of course, when the dead began to get up from their hibernator-coffins. Walking with no regard to the lack of gravity, deathly silent in the vacuum, swarming out of every corridor. They ware not fast, but they ware everywhere. There was, after all, over 20.000 of them...

It quickly turned out this was the type of zombies which ware not stopped by a head shot. Hell, blown-off parts, like arms, ware still animated on their own, and continued to try to get the characters.

It was a pandemonium of panic. It was glorious.

Somehow, the party managed to escape the undead horde without loosing their radioactives container. They promptly shoved it into the converter and punched it out of there like all the hounds of hell ware snapping at their heels, especially as the optical sensors revealed some of the dead climbing out of their ship onto its hull, apperently ready to jump across the void towards the PCs' ship.

Later, the characters found out there ware already stories of the Death Seed, a Flying Dutchman kind of ghost ship with it's walking dead crew, haunting the space ways around those parts of the galaxy.

It was, honestly, one of the best adventures I ever managed to run. I'm mightily pround of myself for setting and maintaining the mood so well. I'm even more proud of my players for playing into it so well. There was absolutely no meta-gaming there. They completely bought into the idea that their characters have never even heard about zombies, and sold the resulting confusion, revulsion and terror perfectly.

The scenario only worked so well however, because, at that time, there was no Jedi among the characters. A Jedi would have ruined it, as they would quickly have sensed the truth. Because, as the party found out some time later, those ware not zombies, not really.

The derelict "SEED", being the site of the violent death and the tomb of the 20.000 of it's crew, became a powerful Dark Side nexus. And a certain Sith found it and turned it into his personal sanctuary. Empowered by the nexus, he could use telekinesis to animate, like a puppeteer, a small platoon of dead bodies. Hardly all of them, maybe 20 at most at any one time. But clever maneuvering in the closed confines of the ship let him create the illusion of the entire vast horde waking up and coming after the intruders. He didn't even want to kill them. Just have some fun and give them a good scare. And feed the legend of the Dead Seed further.

The same Sith used dead bodies in a similiar fashion on several other occasions, but at his normal level of power, without the empowering influence of the nexus, he never bothered animating more than 1, maybe 2 at once.

The zombies didn't really have stats, I just handeled them descriptively. But they could be as strong and agile as the animator wanted, to the limits of the telekinesis used, and basically unstoppable, as long as the animator continued to apply his power to move any usable surviving parts.

Ok, story time over. Here I go, running my mouth again.
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[TyCaine]

I got into the Death Troopers novel, and also Resident Evil, a little while ago and pinged this forum for statting them, here's the original thread with stats for them on the 2nd and 3rd pages:

http://www.rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3028

Anything that can be added to that, or re-thought out, would be excellent.



T.C.
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"For every person with a spark of genius, there are a hundred with ignition trouble."

[DougRed4]

Sounds like a great adventure, Leon!

Reminds me of a spooky Supers game I ran last Halloween, which I really went all out for (spooky, horror music, playing by candlelight, etc.) and my players loved it. Some times atmosphere can really make a game session fun!
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[Dromdarr_Alark]

Wow, Leon. Mind if I steal that?
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"I still wouldn't have a roll for it - but that's just how I roll."

[Leon The Lion]

[ZzaphodD]

The Zombie-ship story above sounds like the first time my players ran into the Tyranids.. Not 20.000 'Nids, but a lot of the lesser creatures that kept pouring...

I had 'zombies' (not living dead, but a Tyranid bug that burrowed into the brain and turned the victim into a 'zombie'..
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[CRMcNeill]

[Esoomian]

[Rollenspiel]

There was a Clone Wars ep a year or two ago with zombie-like creatures. I just remember that it was a D&D-esque dungeon crawl with a blatant ripoff of one of the Alien movies.

[CRMcNeill]

So it seems there are three different approaches to zombies: virus based, parasitic and Dark Side based. Any other possibilities?
_________________
"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.

The CRMcNeill Stat/Rule Index

[Leon The Lion]

You could count four, if you split the Dark Side type into the telekinesis-animated puppet and actual possession by a Dark Side (or other) spirit.

You could have technology-made zombies, of either the "Herbert West, Reanimator" type, whose resurrection is purely chemical-based, or the "Frankenstein/universal soldier" type, created via advanced surgery. This could also include cyber-zombies, where dead bodies are reanimated using cybernetic implants.

Another possibility could be the "voodoo type" - made with brainwashing/mind control. This could be acheived using the Force, some kind of drugs, or maybe a neural implant. The result is similiar to the parasitic type zombie - the victim doesn't even need to be actually dead, but is under complete control and will follow any instructions with total disregard for their own safety and press on regardelss of any injury.
_________________
Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes! So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure to call it, please, "research".
- Tom Lehrer

[Esoomian]

I've always been partial to the idea of cybernetics that force a deceased host to find a new, living being to host the cybernetics.

It's an idea I might use in the future but probably not in a Star Wars environment as it has too much of a cyberpunk feel for my liking.
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[CRMcNeill]

[Leon The Lion]

For that, I'd recomend the 1995 movie "Virus".

There, a living computer virus from space kills people with machines and then uses parts of the corpses equally with machine parts to build more bodies for itself.
_________________
Plagiarize! Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes! So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize... Only be sure to call it, please, "research".
- Tom Lehrer