Infectious bites of zombies

[garhkal]

Over the years, we have had dozens of Zombie movies, some good, some bad, and others utter crap. We have also had several Zombie related threads..

zombies in starwars

Fantasty monsters/alien creatres

resident evil rules/death troopers

and Dawn of the dead for starwars

One thing i never saw in any of those threads, was rules for how long/whether someone bit or killed by a zombie/undead critter, takes until they turn into one themselves.

So assuming you was running a game and had zombies, what rule(s) would you have for whether someone bit got infected, and IF infected, how long they had till they turned?
What rules would you have for whether it could be cured?
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[Savar]

Well you could base it off a stamina test. The worse the result the faster the change.

Or you could just test for infection and they don't change unless something else kills them.

It depends on what type of zombie "infection" your talking about.

[CRMcNeill]

Or use scaling damage. Start at something minimal, like 1D, but increase by +1 per hour. Once it gets high enough to start inflicting damage, resolve the damage normally. On a Killed result, the character dies, then reanimates as a zombie in 2D rounds.

As far as healing, it depends how you want to run your game. If the zombie virus is purely a temporal disease, then Force powers should be able to heal it. Personally, I like the idea of a Dark Side or Sith experiment producing the disease, which functions by attacking the body's midichlorians (the only useful idea I've ever managed to come up with for midichlorians), and is thus either immune to Force healing or much more difficult to resist.
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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

[garhkal]

[CRMcNeill]

[garhkal]

Bringing this back up. Lets say a few pcs DO get into a battle with some 'zombies in SPPPAAAACCCCEEEE', and get infected..

Would you allow a way to cure them, and if so how difficult would that be?

If they could be cured is there a time limit they need to GET that cure done in, before its too late?

If they can't be cured/are too late, do you take over the character and make it an NPC now??
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[MrNexx]

Depends on what you want to do. By default, I think Star Wars would assume you could cure them. If they weren't actually dead, you'd have to wonder how they'd be degrading... rakghouls from Taris spring to mind as an EU example.

I'd be inclined to say something like:

The Rakghoul contagion is opposed with a Stamina test. We'll call it a Severe disease... make a Stamina check every 3 Hours against 3D damage. Fail and you start turning into a rakghoul; succeed and you've held out. It lasts 1D days, so if you don't die in that time, you're free. 3D damage every 3 hours, for at least a day, is going to kill most people.

Curing someone of Rakghoul infection requires either a Force Power (Control Disease or Control Another's Disease, difficult check), rakghoul serum, or medical care to alleviate the symptoms and give someone a fighting chance. Let's say that knowing about the serum (not part of a standard kit) is going to be a difficult Scholar or Planetary Systems check, or a moderate First Aid check, or an easy Medicine check. Making it is a moderate Medicine check.
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[garhkal]

That's what we in sparks are using.. Rakghouls.
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[Savar]

[Tinman]

I've seen six examples of things which might be referred to as zombies, or zombie-like, in WEG or other published Star Wars material.

The reanimated dead created by Nightsister dark magic, and the Geonosian parasites capable of reanimating corpses, are the most prominent examples and fairly well known.

Darth Sion could probably be considered to be something like a zombie. He certainly wasn't mindless, but medical understanding of that era didn't regard him as a living thing. (He was at one point taken aboard a Republic starship, and assumed after examination to be a severely mutilated corpse until he "woke up.") So far as we know, he was the result of a dark Jedi somehow binding his spirit into his own corpse and reanimating it. He's also a good example of the sorts of "things" which come about when individuals delve into the more horifically twisted aspects of the Dark Side (along with "entities," for lack of a better term, like Nihilus.)

Charon biotechnology, which was described in the Otherspace and Otherspace II adventures, can also produce unliving things which might be called zombies, by replacing cells and organs with micromechanical components.

An example of super technology found in the Gamemaster Handbook also describes Nanogene Droids. These are basically nanites which rewrite the genetic makeup of those they infect, turning them into mindless monstrosities. They're also highly infectious (all it requires is being within two meters of an infected being for more than five minutes.) They take somewhere around a month (depending on how successfully the infection is fought) to do their work, and can be cured with a Heroic (A)Medicine roll before the process is complete.

There are also rakghouls, which are the result of twisted Sith alchemy, but those fall more under the category of mutants (as do the above.) The plague version of the disease was transmitted by a bite or scratch, and took a day or two to transform a victim.

If I were to introduce something like zombies into a campaign, I'd likely choose either the option of biotechnology or a twisted use of the Force as a cause. Most likely I'd tailor the exact mechanisms of transmission and transformation/reanimation to the storyline, as well as what sort of cure might work. Interestingly, a cure for the rakghoul plague was achieved by means of advanced (by the standards of that period) medicine, though it was the result of Sith sorcery.

I probably would not unleash something like this into a campaign for the sole purpose of doing so, but make it part of some larger plotline.