The Savage Dead

The Savage Dead

by Rodney Orpheus

The following is a work-in-progress at developing a Walking Dead setting for the Savage Worlds RPG. I’m trying to stick as close to the standard SW rules as possible, but adding in a few touches as required to model the behaviour of the original Walking Dead comics and TV show.


 

Setting rules

Use common sense here – no Arcane Background Edges for example. You may want to use the Gritty Damage rule for added realism (and significantly lowered character life expectancy). Fatigue, Encumbrance and Hazards rules make a significant impact in the game and definitely should be applied.

Natural Healing will receive the +2 bonus for modern medical treatment only if the characters have access to antibiotics and antiseptics. Otherwise +1 assuming there is access to other basic medical supplies, such as bandages, clean water etc.

Lucky Shots

If you shoot or hit a walker enough, some shots are bound to hit the head even if they aren’t specifically Called Shots. Since walkers can only be killed by blows to the head, and there generally is no Hit Location system in Savage Worlds, assume that if a player hits with 2 Raises on their Fighting, Shooting, or Throwing roll that they have hit the zombie in the head, and deal damage as normal with that blow.

Optional new stat: Humanity

Each players starts with this at 0 and it can never go higher than 0 (representing the character’s basic inbuilt sense of empathy, which will get whittled away as the campaign progresses unless they consciously attempt to hold on to it). In any scene when a person emotionally close to a character dies, or where a character has to kill another living person, subtract 1 from this score. In any scene where the character saves the life of another human being, add 1 to the score, up to the maximum of 0.

Any time when a player must make a Spirit check, subtract the character’s Humanity level from the roll e.g. if a character has Spirit d8, and Humanity of -2, the roll would be 1d8-2.

Alternately, for easier bookkeeping don’t add this new stat and instead any time a character does something humane, like rescue the innocent, feed hungry strangers etc. simply give the player a Benny. Either way, it’s important to have some method of motivating the players not to become heartless murder machines.

The Set Up

X Days Later

Many modern zombie survival stories don’t start at the beginning of the zombie outbreak, but some time after most of the surrounding areas have already been infected – both The Walking Dead and 28 Days Later have the hero spending the first few weeks of the outbreak in a coma. This avoids the difficulties inherent in building up the story, and allows for action to be launched right away. If you want to do the same in your campaign, and don’t want the entire party to be waking up in special hospital unit for coman patients, here are a few example plot setups:

  • The characters have been on a cruise, or live on a small island off the mainland and have avoided the outbreak so far. But now they need to return to the mainland in a small boat / lifeboat because they are running out of supplies…
  • Characters have been locked away in a sealed experimental environment, such as a Mars mission simulator. Now the timer that holds the environment closed has expired and the doors are opening…
  • Characters are all inmates of a high security prison or lunatic asylum far from civilisation. But the food has run out… (in this case you might want to allow an extra Hindrance and Edge for each character to represent the characteristics that got them locked up there in the first place).

My Home Town

In this setting players play themselves, in the place where they live, after the zombie apocalypse. Google Maps is your friend here. Also makes going into town to do some shopping a whole different experience for the players.

Maps & Miniatures

The quickest and cheapest way to get these is to go down to your Friendly Local Game Store and grab the Zombies!!! board game and some of its expansions. The basic set comes with 100 zombie figures and a few adventurers, plus a bunch of excellent tiles to form a decent sized town. These tiles are a different scale than that of Savage Worlds combat but can be used for on-the-fly area creation. If you want to use them for combat, assume each square to be roughly 3” for range purposes, and assume humans can move 2 squares per turn and walkers move 1.

Alternately, download the free PEG zombie figure flats.

Walking Dead

Romero / Walking Dead style zombies are somewhat different from the fantasy style zombie profile as given in the Savage Worlds Deluxe book. The following is a simplified version of the Romero Zombie presented in Savage Bestiary. It is relatively straightforward for the GM to run but can be extremely dangerous and scary to players, especially when the zombies are in a pack:

  • Attributes: Agility d4, Smarts d4 (A), Spirit d4, Strength d6, Vigor d4
  • Skills: Fighting d4, Notice d6
  • Pace: 4 ; Parry: 0; Toughness: 6
  • Special Abilities:
    • Bite/Claws: Str +2 damage (Wild Attack)
    • Fear
    • Fearless: Shambling zombies are immune to Fear and Intimidation, with one exception: they have an animal’s instinctive fear of fire, and suffer a -2 to any checks involving fire.
    • Infected Bite: Anyone bitten by a shambler must make a Vigor roll for each Wound taken; failure means that they’ve been infected. The disease will incubate for 1d6 hours, at which point the victim must make subsequent Vigor rolls, also at -2, each hour or become Fatigued. When reduced to Incapacitated, the victim dies and within 1d4 minutes will rise as a new shambling dead. There is no cure or treatment.
    • Invulnerability: Attacks to anywhere but the head can only leave a shambler Shaken; they can only be killed by injury to the brain. However dismemberment, by making called shots to the limbs with an edged weapon, may render them helpless. Attacks which affect the body as a whole, such as explosions or fire, can kill the zombie as well (since they will destroy the brain).
    • Slow: Shamblers have a Pace of 4 and cannot run. They can never have an initiative greater than 5. If they draw an Action Card higher than 5, redraw.
    • Undead: +2 Toughness; +2 to recover from being Shaken; Called Shots do no extra damage (except to the head).
    • Wild Attack: Walkers always Wild Attack, and their Fighting and Parry stats listed above have already been adjusted to take this into account.
    • Tireless: Shamblers do not suffer Fatigue.

Not much is known for sure about Shambler behaviour, but the following can be deduced with a relative degree of certainty:

  • They are dead i.e. they do not metabolise in the same way as living creatures, but very slowly rot and decay.
  • Their higher brain functions are eliminated entirely and only very basic instincts to move and feed are left.
  • They either rest in a torpid state or walk slowly searching for food i.e. fresh living tissue. They do not eat other foodstuffs.
  • They are capable of seeing, smelling and recognising living creatures. Once spotted or scented they will move inexorably in as direct a line as possible to their prey. They have little to no understanding of obstacles in their way and will try to walk right through them or navigate clumsily around them.
  • They are attracted to loud sounds, associating them instinctively with the presence of prey.
  • Since they are already dead, they can’t be killed. The only way to eliminate an undead shambler is by destroying the brain which animates them.

Fear

Fear is a very real danger in any Savage Dead campaign, especially in combination with the Humanity stat. The first time anyone sees walkers, eviscerated bodies, etc. they will have to make Fear rolls (Savage Worlds Deluxe p. 85). As the campaign progresses characters will get used to the horror and require less frequent rolls, but remember that no matter how jaded a character becomes they are likely to be pretty scared if they see a bunch of walkers coming down the street heading straight for their loved ones.

Game Masters who own the Horror Companion, Weird Wars, or Realms of Cthulhu supplements might want to use the Sanity rules given there for an even more gritty and difficult game.

Zombie Attack

We model this in Savage Dead in the following way:

  1. Walkers don’t care about defence or tactics and have no Fighting skill to speak of; they just Wild Attack the nearest victim they can find. Their Fighting roll is Unskilled, plus 2 for making a Wild Attack, so 1d4 -2 +2 = 1d4.
  2. Note that this means their normal Parry of 2 is also reduced to 0 because of the Wild Attack, so consequently to make a Called Shot to the head with a melee weapon is TN  = 4. This keeps bookkeeping fairly simple.
  3. If they succeed they attempt to claw and bite their victim. Normally this would be an unarmed Strength roll, but also has a plus 2 damage from the Wild Attack, so Damage = 1d6+2.
  4. If the character takes a Wound as a result of the walker’s bite, she must immediately make a Vigor roll for each Wound taken. Failure on the Vigor roll means the character is Infected (see above)
    1. Optional: for a really gritty campaign, the character is infected on any wound damage at all from a walker. Note that this may make character lives very short indeed!
    2. Optional: when a character is bitten, roll 1d6. On a 1, character is bitten on the leg (choose randomly); on a 2, the right arm; on a 3, the left arm. The character may be saved from full infection if the bitten limb is amputated within 5 minutes of the bite occurring. After amputation the character receives one Wound, is considered be Incapacitated, and will bleed to death unless receiving successful medical attention within the next 10 minutes (tourniquet, cauterisation, etc.). A successful Healing roll will save the character’s life, but leave them with one Wound which can only be healed with Natural Healing after five days. The character also receives the One Arm Hindrance or One Leg Hindrance.

Zombie Horde

As mentioned above, walkers aren’t particularly dangerous alone, but they tend to travel in groups. If you want a really deadly enemy for your players, then a Zombie Horde will certainly deliver. Rather than have to deal with 10 or 20 miniatures and a lot of dice rolling etc. you can use a Medium Burst Template to represent a whole bunch at once. As such they will work similar to a Swarm (Savage Worlds Deluxe p. 141).

A Zombie Horde acts like a large creature that is immune to all damage except Area of Effect damage – because shooting blindly into a horde may take down a few walkers with accidental head shots, but it won’t stop the rest continuing to come at you.

If the horde counter touches a character counter, that character is immediately torn apart and devoured, with no chance of repelling the attack. It will take the horde 5 rounds to finish devouring the character, during which time it stops moving. After 5 rounds it will use its Notice skill to look for more fresh meat.

If the players do manage to do enough AoE damage to stop a Zombie Horde, it’s not finished there. When the horde is beaten assume that it has just taken enough damage to stop acting as a horde, and it now works as individual zombies instead. Replace the Medium Burst Template with 2d4 individual walkers that keep on coming towards the players…

For a really tough challenge, increase the horde size to a Large Burst Template and give it 3 Wounds (because a standard AoE weapon won’t be able to cover it all in one burst).

  • Attributes: Agility d4, Smarts d4 (A), Spirit d4, Strength d12, Vigor d4
  • Skills: Notice d8
  • Pace: 4 ; Parry: 0; Toughness: 6
  • Special Abilities:
    • Instant Death: Anyone engulfed by a Zombie Horde has no hope of survival and is instantly dead. At least for a few minutes… then they return as a walker.
    • Fear (-2)
    • Fearless: Shambling zombies are immune to Fear and Intimidation, with one exception: they have an animal’s instinctive fear of fire, and suffer a -2 to any checks involving fire.
    • Invulnerability: Cannot be Shaken or Wounded except by AoE damage.
    • Slow: Hordes have a Pace of 4 and cannot run. They can never have an initiative greater than 5. If they draw an Action Card higher than 5, redraw.
    • Undead: +2 Toughness; +2 to recover from being Shaken
    • Crazed Attack: Hordes can’t Parry.
    • Tireless: Shamblers do not suffer Fatigue.

Survival Tips

Characters will need the following in order to survive, in rough order of importance:

  1. Weapons & ammunition
  2. Water
  3. Food
  4. Sleep
  5. Shelter
  6. Medicines

Note that the electrical grid and the phone networks will probably shut down within days of the original outbreak. Running water might survive for a few weeks. Or not. Once that’s gone, you have serious hygiene and sanitary issues to contend with, especially if the rivers get clogged with decaying bodies. Drinking unsafe water can kill you just as dead as getting bitten by a walker, but you can avoid walkers and you can’t avoid thirst. There should be lots of bottled water around at the beginning, but it’s bulky and heavy to carry. Portable water purification systems will be worth their weight in gold. Actually worth considerably more, because gold won’t be worth a damn thing.

Most food will decay unless it’s canned or dried – and cans are bulky and heavy too. Large livestock animals will most likely be slaughtered by walkers, so you’ll be hunting for smaller quicker creatures like squirrels and rabbits pretty soon if you want fresh meat.

If you don’t sleep at least a few hours every night your reaction time and decision making capability will become severely impaired, and you will eventually start to hallucinate. When you do sleep you had better be in a very secure area and/or have someone else to keep watch or you will likely be woken up by having your face bitten off.

Useful survival equipment gear can be found here and here.

Firearms

The availability of firearms in a campaign very much depends on where it is located. In the USA for example, there are roughly 90 guns for every 100 people, whereas in Japan it’s less than 1 in 100. That doesn’t mean that almost every house in the USA will contain a firearm, since the proportion varies from state to state, and most gun owners in the USA own several guns, but it gives the GM a rough idea of the chances of a player finding a gun if they go looking house-to-house. Bear in mind that after the zombie apocalypse many people will have tried to flee taking their guns with them, and even if they stayed they would most likely have used their weapon for defence until they ran out of ammo, so ammunition may actually be more difficult to find than firearms. If a GM wants to make a random roll, roll 1d4-3 – on a success the house has a gun somewhere (but the players will have to make Notice rolls to find it). For each Raise on this roll, add another firearm. Roll again for a full load of ammo to be with it, each Raise gives you an extra clip. Subtract or add other modifiers depending on state firearms laws.

In Scandinavian, central European countries, and Canada gun ownership runs to around 30% on average, mainly used for hunting or military and police purposes rather than personal defence. Consequently unless characters are raiding a government base they are much more likely to find random firearms in the countryside than in large towns and cities.

In the British Isles, Southern and Eastern Europe, and Australia, gun ownership is severely restricted, and so finding firearms in these places is going to be difficult. Even crossbows can be subject to severe licensing restrictions in these countries. There are sport shooting and archery clubs, and many farmers do own shotguns, but generally unless they were members of the military or police, or were drug dealers, the survivors living in those places are going to be stuck with improvised melee weapons for the most part. Again, even if they do have access to firearms, ammunition will be a serious problem. Time to raid the tool shed!