Zombies In Space!!

[phavoc]

Braaaiinnnzzz!

Okay, so I'm a fan of the Star Wars fiction, and there's now been like two books that are kind of a zombies in space where the wee unfortunate beasties desire to eat flesh, and maybe some brains.

Sooo I was thinking of an adventure where the PC's get a job to investigate a lab ship (no, not one of those tiny leetle ones, but a big one, like in 5k tons range).

The basic premise is find out what happened to the ship, rescue survivors (maybe....), but most important is that they retreive the data cores containing the research info. So I was thinking... anagathics are like the big wonder drug, super-expensive and always in demand (legally or otherwise). And the drug has somehow warped the crew/scientists so that you have like three groups - survivors, infected, and the bodies. And the 'zombies' are hungering for human flesh, especially brains because the treatment they have causes them to 'hunger' for some enzyme only found in live human flesh... all the other food they've eaten won't satisfy their craving.

I'm really wanting to interject the horror side into the adventure, but is that too much? Obviously submachine guns and such will make short work of them, but I still think it'd be kind of fun. Should the zombies com in like different levels of infection... some seem ok, but are just smarter than the average zombie and will lure you in close and then try to eat ya? Too cheezy?

Any comments/suggestions?

 

[Nidhogg]

That sounds like a pretty cool idea.

Definitely do it on a big, quiet ship. As well as making the players look for survivors and research data you might want to ratchet up the tension a notch by having some key part fail on their ship which can readily be obtained in the engineering bay of the vessel (even if only to avoid the "I see what's going on here. We leave the vessel hastily and fire ze missiles at it from a safe distance" approach from the players).

I like the idea of the agnathics but of course there are many, many ways to achieve the zombie effect. I would potentially avoid the infection/infected angle so much as it may see you infecting players and having them die off (unless that kind of thing is OK in your group).

As for the different levels of affliction corresponding to different types... it certainly works in zombie slasher films/games/books. I personally feel that you can probably get the most out of the scenario by exploiting the psychological tension to the extreme and using actual zombies sparingly. For example hearing creepy noises, calling for recon checks regularly, finding grisly piles of mutilated corpses, log entries by crew members that allude to the slide into disaster and so on. That way you can save actual attacks for when the tension is highest (and make them maximally brutal but infrequent) rather than just having hordes of zombies getting mowed down all day.

In all the best zombie films the best drama comes out of the conflict between the survivors that arises due to the situation they are in more so than the fights with the zombies themselves. If done well you should see your PCs at each others throats over how to proceed while you just sit back and keep the tension building.

Thanks for reminding me of this idea, I'll have to drop it on my players soon! :twisted:

 

[AndrewW]

I like the idea of the agnathics but of course there are many, many ways to achieve the zombie effect. I would potentially avoid the infection/infected angle so much as it may see you infecting players and having them die off (unless that kind of thing is OK in your group).

Easy to avoid infecting the players. Could be the infectious period is already over so it wont infect the players. Or perhaps it only effects a certain race or genetic trait which the players lack, could also be a good reason there are some uninfected on the ship that need help.

 

[locarno24]

Sooo I was thinking of an adventure where the PC's get a job to investigate a lab ship (no, not one of those tiny leetle ones, but a big one, like in 5k tons range).

Which of course raises the interesting questions of:

Who the patron is
How they know what happened
How they know where the lab ship is
Whether or not they were involved

"I feel these new combat stimms are ready for human trials!"
"Do the test subjects feel the same way?"
"Well...none of them have objected. In fairness, none of them have been told, either, but that's not the point!"

 

[rust]

By the way, as a referee one usually creates a lot more tension if one
keeps the players in the dark and avoids to give the danger a name -
which means do not use the word "zombie" anywhere near the gaming
table, or your players' minds are at risk to snap into stereotype mode
and turn the adventure into a "standard situation" seen many, many ti-
mes before in some movie. :wink:

 

[locarno24]

Agreed. The Thing Moving In The Dark is always more scary.

The more mutagenic the effect of the drugs/virus/cthulu, in fact, the longer you can string it out before people realise this is the crew, rather than (a) some alien attacker or (b) some escaped specimen.

 

[phavoc]

Thanks for the ideas guys. I've already thought up a plot 'twist' that is going to separate the PC's into two parties - one that is stuck on-board the ship, and the other (with their ship) that has to go off on their own little adventure trying to track down something.

I'm not sure how many PC's there are going to be, so there will be a few redshirts, err, additional security personnel clad in red shirts, that will give a few 'affected' crewmen something to seek their teeth into.

The PC's are going to get the feeling not everything is being told to them on the flight out. I'm going to make the PC's have to use their jump drive due to the in-system distance away from the starport. So they are going to start finding a few things, like why are there so many body bags, and other contents of the hold that get discovered. And like the other horror movies, the info they get at first will be incomplete, and maybe only after there's been a few attacks will they get to beat the complete story outa the company rep.. but by then their ship will be gone and out of range of their communications and they won't have any choice but to complete their search to find the captain and get his security card to access the ships locked-down systems.

I hope the players will appreciate all the backstory and other stuff I'm going to put into this.

 

[BenTOGS]

If I mught suggest, a novel I just read "Night of the Living Trekkie" (Zombie-like infection takes place in Houuston, the setting is a annuaul Star Trek convention) The zombies are interesting from a SF pov an d the aspect of undead Borg are pretty good.

 

[hdan]

"Death Station" (both in CT and the latest S&P) is almost this exact setup already and would be an excellent source of inspiration. Just slightly modify what went wrong.

 

[Nuclear Fridge Magnet]

If you haven't yet seen it, I'd recommend the movie Pandorum. It's a lot like your initial premise -- evacuation and 'nuking the site from orbit' isn't an option! :twisted:

For that matter, locate the stricken ship off the main shipping routes. A D or E class system would do fine, especially if it has a low population code. So nobody knows the vessel is out there, and even if they did, there's no easy way to get to it. Enter your PCs...

 

[Garnfellow]

I ran a zombie Traveller game a couple of years ago. I highly recommend All Tomorrow's Zombies, a scifi supplement for All Flesh Must Be Eaten. Lots of great ideas. Somewhere on this board, I think, is a thread for statting out zombies in Mongoose Traveller -- I got some very helpful advice.

 

[phavoc]

Thanks for the replies and suggestions guys.

 

[Matian]

For that matter, locate the stricken ship off the main shipping routes. A D or E class system would do fine, especially if it has a low population code. So nobody knows the vessel is out there, and even if they did, there's no easy way to get to it. Enter your PCs...

I very much like this idea. You can tie it into the planet (especially if it's TL <6) but having people wondering where their loved ones went, or having them believe that they're living a better life out in space somewhere. You can do this early on to foreshadow the horror, or as an epilogue to drive it home.

I would recommend the movie 28 Days Later as it is a "zombie" movie that is not of zombies - it is technically an pandemic movie. This could be a better approach rather than straight-up zombies, as an infected member could be incapacitated (thus opening up a race for a cure and a side-plot) rather than dying outright. The idea that it takes humans twenty-eight days without food before they starve to death can also be used to provide a variety of challenges and encounters based on the rate of starvation. Combat drugs rather than anagathics would work better for this approach.

 

[simonh]

The zombie infection has a gestation period of 24 hours. The only cache of the cure is in a secure locker deep in zombie territory. You can't just go round killing the zombies because they can be cured too, some of them are very senior scientists, people with political connections or just innocents. So stun weapons only, except perhaps in really extreme life or death situations.

Oh, and the player characters are already infected themselves.

The clock is ticking.

Simon Hibbs

 

[Garuda]

I wrote a kind of Zombies in Space adventure (sort of) a while ago. The players follow a line of investigation that leads them to an illegal bio-genetic research facility on a remote moon where things have gone just a little bit wrong.

I set it against Sturn's Terran Dawn background. If you want to have a peek you can find it here: The Stolen

 

[Jacqual]

Just remember if there are NPC's with red shirts on your group will not ever split up they will know the red shirts aint gonna make it. Now to seperate them from their own ship after they board the lab ship, have a mechanical failure occur and to fix it they have to go deeper into the lab ship. Make it a power outage that requires them to go to engineering. Then just before they get to engineering have the zombie's start up. Then the red shirts get it and they find some survivors that may or may not be infected, maybe they even caused the malfunction so the PC's have to rescur them. Sounds like your gonna have fun with them. Like the best I ever ran had a player his character was freaking out saying they was gonna die (Like the character in aliens) his toon was a 10 term Scout vet kept making his survival roles and hitting mandatory reinlistment lol. Its fun watching a scout have a meltdown.