Namely that the best zombie stories are never really about zombies.
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| So... existential dread and the death of human community? That's way worse than zombies... |
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Zombies Are The Means, Not The End
From Night of The Living Dead, all the way up to The Last of Us, zombies have become a staple of the horror genre. They fill movies, TV shows, comic books, and of course tabletop RPGs. They're some of the most standard enemies you can face in most fantasy modules, and even some sci fi ones, and there are entire games dedicated to zombie apocalypse style setups.
In these stories, the zombies are the means (or one of the means) you use to tell the story in question... but in the really good stories, the zombies are never the end your players are striving for.
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| We are the mirror you hold up to show society, and one's own humanity. |
Let me take an example from popular fiction to explain what I mean, here. The book World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War is a collection of interviews and accounts with people who lived through this horrifying conflict, and it immerses the reader in this fictional time and place. It tells us the stories of civilians who hid out in the wilds, of politicians who tried to respond to the crisis, of soldiers on the front lines, and of people who were just average, working stiffs who were just trying to rebuild their communities in this horrifying new world. It's a fantastic read, and well worth all the praise it receives. The film based on the book, though, is a generic action movie that gives us a single perspective of a single character who ends up being the doctor that finds how to beat the virus, and to save the world by removing the zombies entirely.
Do you see the difference between these two things?
As an alternative example, take my All Flesh experience that I talked about in The Best Zombie Game I Ever Played (Where Nothing Happened). To recap, the game was set in Northwest Indiana, and our characters were all perfectly normal people caught up in a zombie outbreak. The goal of this single session was for us to get to an extraction point, and escape the infested region. The purpose of the storyline, though, was for characters who didn't know each other to develop connections, to learn to work together, and to pool their abilities to overcome threats while developing a bond together. You could have replaced the zombies with an army of aggressive black bears, an outbreak of any other disease, or even a natural disaster like a flood or a massive fire, and the story still would have had those elements front and center.
The zombies were not the point of the game, they were merely the factor that facilitated the characters' needing to come together to save themselves. This is, I would argue, the way zombies are supposed to be used. Because they are dangerous, yes, but they shouldn't be just a monster. Not only that, but opposing them, defeating them, eradicating them, shouldn't really be the point of the game.
So before you run a zombie game, ask what the purpose of the zombies are and what are you going to use them for?
Are your zombies the factor that led to certain world changes, leading to crumbling societies so there are now warring tribes of people trying to scrounge for resources? Are they a representation of empty consumerism, showing that to overcome them people have to move beyond selfishness, and to embrace a community in order to survive? Are they representative of how you can lose loved ones to cult mentality, or how hard it is to let go of people who've become toxic and don't want to get better, showing people who have to fight against those they once held dear? Are the zombies being exploited for gain by some powerful faction, showing how those with a vicious mindset will do anything, no matter how terrible, if it means maintaining power?
In most of these cases, the zombies could be replaced with a slew of other things, and the stories would still be poignant, and the games would still have challenges to overcome, while dripping with drama. The story isn't, at its core, about just caving in skulls and running over shambling corpses that have been reanimated into a shuffling, groaning parody of life.
I mean, you should have those things, but that shouldn't be as deep as it goes, or things are going to get really repetitive really fast!
Resources For Your Zombie Games
It's tough running a good zombie game. If you need some help with the heavy lifting, might I suggest checking out some of the following supplements to give yourself a couple of handy cheat sheets?
- 100 Descriptions For Modern Zombies II (all good zombie products need sequels)
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