Realistic Zombie apoclypse.

>>52864558
The pathogen is fungal in nature with single and multicellular stages.
It was initially spread by a large well organised doomsday cult (Think Aum Shinrikyo) who simultaneously released it in international airports and major transport hubs around the world by having members either working as or disguised as janitorial staff place automatic air fresheners with the pathogen in them in public restrooms.
There is no known cure but around 20% of the population is immune with about half of the immune actually being carriers.

Stages (Hours given are approximates due to high degree of variation in individual cases):
> Infection (Hour 0): Direct fluid transfer (e.g. bite) requires only a very small amount of infectious particles for infection to occur but infection can also occur from moderate amounts of infectious material in the mucous membranes or eyes, or even large amounts of infectious material on exposed skin.

>>52864576
>The pathogen is fungal in nature with single and multicellular stages.

So like Last of Us?

>>52864558
> Initial proliferation (Hours 0 – 12): The pathogen in its single cellular phase reproduces in the hosts tissues and blood, hosts are typically asymptomatic or have mild cold like symptoms. At this stage pathogen is difficult to detect and then only via specific blood test.
> Initial infectious stage (Hours 10 – 72): The pathogen having reached sufficient concentration in the host, some begin to enter the multicellular phase growing more complex structures centred on the host’s spine and central nervous system. The pathogen also begins to alter the host’s brain chemistry and hormones. During this stage all the host’s bodily fluids become highly infectious and behavioural changes occur. The host’s energy, appetite, libido, and desire for social contact all steadily increase during this stage, hosts in this stage also experience mild euphoria and difficulty feeling any stress or anxiety. Aside from the behavioural changes hosts are typically largely asymptomatic with the exception of an unproductive cough which facilitates droplet infection. Pathogen is easily detectable via testing of any of the hosts bodily fluids and appropriately trained sniffer dogs.

>>52864586
> Late infectious stage (Hours 48 – variable): The host has become completely saturated with the pathogen with multicellular structures dominating the host’s nervous system and with fruiting bodies emerging from the skin. To the naked eye these fruiting bodies appear to be a dark greyish green ‘fur’ surrounded by psoriasis. Closer examination reveals ‘spore launchers’ similar to those possessed by Ascomycota and Zygomycota which in addition to releasing a steady stream of infectious material will begin to actively fire when the host enters heightened states of activity. Hosts also begin to emit pheromones that will cause other hosts to avoid attacking them. In this stage the growing mania of the previous stage becomes more and more pronounced coupled with a rapid loss of higher brain functions the host becomes violent, frantically seeking out uninfected humans and attacking them. Attacks are viscous and brutal usually utilising teeth and fists. However the highly distractible nature of the hosts in this stage mean they are often non-fatal as the host will often become distracted before they can inflict truly serious injuries allowing the victim an opportunity to escape. It is important to note that from this stage onwards while hosts are still killable in most of the same ways as an uninfected human they lose all sense of self-preservation, become entirely incapable of feeling pain or going into shock, and the high concentration of pathogen in their blood dramatically increases the rate at which their blood clots reducing their chance of bleeding out. Hosts also will continue to eat and drink and will continuously wander heading towards any sign of life.

>>52864600
> Terminal stage (Variable): Typically triggered by either serious but not immediately fatal wounds or starvation, hosts that begin to die will experience a final burst of activity in which all the body’s reserves including non-vital organs will be metabolized as they will seek out the nearest uninfected human, high point (typically a tree or rooftop), or body of fresh water at which point they will enter the final stage.
> Consumption (Variable): During this stage the pathogen begins to consume the host’s body entirely converting all available material into its infectious single cell stage and launching them into the wind and or water. Once launched these cells typically remain viable for about 2-3 hours in the air or ground (double to triple that if not exposed to sunlight/UV) and for about 12 hours in freshwater.

Right so that's most of what I've got so far I was trying to make something that could theoretically actually exist and a scenario; giant outbreaks EVERYWHERE at once and a decent infectious stage where they aren't obviously zombies and can still think, that would explain why it wasn't just quarantined and stopped.

>>52864581
In so much that it's fungal.

>>52864655
It works pretty well. Twenty percent of the population being immune is pretty big though, even with carriers included.

I know this might be kind of a touchy idea, but have you considered associating immunity with some other genetic trait or even ethnicity? It seems weird that something like that would be completely random.

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>>52864586
>The host’s energy, appetite, libido, and desire for social contact all steadily increase during this stage
>libido

>>52864678
20% seems like a lot until you start realizing that there's going to be a lot of people dying from things other than zombies. The main idea was to create a big enough number for there realistically still be some (semi)functional groups forming.

As for your second point I'm I agree that it's a little weird but I couldn't really think of anything that would obviously make sense so I went with just random mutation/luck of the draw.

>>52864735
The pathogen is already doing everything it can to get spread and sexual transmission works just fine. Plus it fits with the whole 'desire to seek out other people' aspect.

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You mention sniffer dogs. Does the fungus affect any other animal besides humans?

Also, not a negative comment, but I feel like this would be a very short apocalypse. I doubt there would be any infected left even a decade after the initial global outbreaks. The population would rapidedly bottleneck into only people who are immune and the fungus doesn't have a very long life span in the wild.

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>>52864750
>wife real horny all the sudden
>fuckyes
>mfw she was just infected

>>52864813
Short is fine I'm planning on setting any games during the initial chaos/early rebuild period. The idea was to have a scenario where things go to absolute shit VERY quickly.

I figure that actual 'zombie' period won't last longer than about 20 years in total.

>>52864813
Oh and as for other animals this things pretty host specific I think at most the other great apes would also be at risk. Sniffer dogs were just mentioned because I figured with all the metabolic/pheromone changes anything with a sensitive enough nose would be able to pick up that something was going on.

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So what do you imagine the breakdown of society would look like? Because your initial descriptions of the pathogen look fine.

>>52864750
So you made rape zombies? Rapies?

>>52865101
Well there's where I've hit a bit of a problem. While I know enough biology/health science to have a pretty good idea of how the pathogen should work and enough epidemiology to propose a nightmare scenario I don't really know enough about what a massive global collapse would actually look like to be confident in how it would play out, any suggestions?

>>52865145
I should have known that would be the aspect that people would latch on too. Yes libido is up and some rape is probably going to happen but if you look at the description by the time they start getting violent they're also losing their higher reasoning and becoming easily distracted attackers. Chances are they're only going to rape if they were already rapists.

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Just take a few ideas out of nature, they liked to get up high so they can spread spores more effectively.

>>52865275
Yeah those were an inspiration for this thing read the terminal stage section.

>>52865231

I'd suggest avoiding the conventional 'everyone goes crazy and starts raping/murdering/pillaging' until after the start of play, keep some expectation of normal life at first and then show it being lost, or even give them some influence over how the inevitable descent plays out.

Confusion is a good cover for a lack of detail in society breaking down- if the initial discovery is politicized or made by fringe scientists, there might be large communities of people who don't believe there even IS a fungus until they see it firsthand. A media blackout is almost impossible in the modern era- too many different pieces of information, without clear conclusions is a better smokescreen.

But definitely the following- food stops being delivered regularly. Even if there isn't panic buying, the store shelves are empty real quick, trucks of supplies might get diverted by the government/military/bandits. Some gas stations run out, finding which stations still have gas is an activity people have to start doing. Electricity might be intermittent depending on it's source. Things become difficult and annoying, but they don't just *stop* and suddenly medieval era. There's a lot of ruin in a country, even when zombies are involved.

Of course, none of that applies if you start the game at ground zero with the zombies actively rampaging around the players. That's a fairly different game style to be honest, less tension and prep than full on combat. It's hard to imagine the players surviving all that long in most cases- spare set of character sheets made in advance, maybe?

>>52865458
>spare set of character sheets made in advance, maybe?
Hmm I like that, I was thinking of making 'forming a group' a big part of the game and letting players be influential people within their survivor groups recruit npcs and able to transfer to any of their npc group members in the event of their main dying.

Also I figured one of the biggest sources of confusion that would occur with this thing is the fact that given the way the infection works and was initially released you're going to have tonnes of late stage zombies cropping up at the same time plus the early stages are hard to detect so it's probably going to take a while before people even realize what the early infectees are like or even that you can have infected without any kind of bitemark on em.

>>52864558
Mutant bacteria found in beef. Spreads throughout the world before undergoing a sudden mutation.

>>52864576
>It was initially spread by a large well organised doomsday cult (Think Aum Shinrikyo) who simultaneously released it in international airports and major transport hubs around the world by having members either working as or disguised as janitorial staff place automatic air fresheners with the pathogen in them in public restrooms.
Is this fucking 'Эпoхa Mepтвых', comrade?

>>52866508
>Эпoхa Mepтвых
I have no idea what this even says. I just went with what seemed a plausible way for someone to release a bio weapon without being noticed.

>>52866496
That's really not how mutation works anon.

>>52866546
It was basically the plot of that zombie apocalypse series.

>>52864558
Just remember that if a human is reduced to their basest instincts, that includes a sense of danger. Shooting a zombie will scare them off.

>>52864558
>realistic 'zombie' apocalypse
>A handful of chucklefucks get infected
>They don't make any headway and are taken out fairly quickly, because zombies are the least threatening enemy ever.

>>52864739
how about some enzyme in the appendix? had a dm run a zombie game and say that since appendixes aren't needed for survival, and are slowly becoming less effective, theres an enzyme in the appendix that prevents the infection. if someone has their appendix removed, or has an evolved appendix thats too far gone, boom. infection

>>52866575
>they lose all sense of self-preservation

>>52866597
Did you read any of the description? That's specifically the scenario I was trying to avoid.

>>52866626
Yeah but the majority of people still have their appendix plus I'm going on the assumption that this is a new engineered disease.

>>52866737
thats where the evolved appendix comes in, so that its still a "luck of genetics" but it has more reason behind it

>>52866745

I heard that the appendix was useful for producing acids for our stomachs to eat grass

As humans ate less and less grass, till becoming more dependent on meat grains and more palatable vegetables, the appendix became less and less useful.

So maybe in our world, like in the last of us, the Zombie 'virus' is grass based.

If you get infected, your ass is grass

>>52864558
The "zombies" aren't actually dead; they still have a pulse and metabolize, but their mind is scrambled by an extreme, rabies-like disease that gives them animal behavior and a hunger for flesh. Also it might cause degeneration of the skin or tissues close to the body's surface for that decayed, zombie look.

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>>52864558
Do you know what the issue is with that is? Or really zombie apocalypses in which the zombies are still alive. Chemical weapons. I mean it. The simpler ones are not that hard to make and the hosts would likely be less able to stay function in the face of them then a normal person. Most live threatening inflections suppress immune systems and most 'living zombies' also kick the metabolism in overdrive. Taking together doses that would hurt a normal human would likely kill the host outright.

No, most of the world does not stock chemical weapons. Nor do they have production plants ready to go online per sa. However things like Phosgene can be made at ornery civilian chemical factories with production only taking days to get started.


Why point this out? One the protective gear needed to try to fight against something that has a airborne pathogen is the same needed to fight in a area that chemical weapons are used. Two homeland security toyed with the idea.

>It was initially spread by a large well organised doomsday cult (Think Aum Shinrikyo) who simultaneously released it in international airports and major transport hubs around the world by having members either working as or disguised as janitorial staff place automatic air fresheners with the pathogen in them in public restrooms.

Only issue that is it is very common for those places to have hepa air purifiers in their vents. Mostly to cut cases of employs getting sick. It would work inside the room were they put but most likely not go very far past it. Its also the case that those places have security that is among other things aimed at stopping people from trying to past themselves off as airport staff. For reasons of both terrorism and drug tracking. Not saying that at a given spot they will be found but doing it world wide greatly increases the odds of some of them being found at some of those sites.

>>52866772
grass? i always heard it was for raw meat

either way, 10/10 pun

>>52866745
Honestly I was thinking if I'm just going luck of the draw genetics it will have somehting to do with the blood chemistry and or CNS.

Also going AFK for a while pleas keep discussing and suggesting.

>>52866784
>con.

The thing is that inside hours of there being identified cases in different countries all air travel will stop will other types stopping short after that. If at one of the places they found the cultist they got them to talk travel would stop earlier. Basically the spread has a window to act in. If has gotten to critical mass (i.e the government can not stop it) inside that window then a lot more people will die them just from the fungus. Why? No time or ability to do a soft landing of the supplies chains ending.

If it did not reach critical mass in that window there is a good chance that it will be stopped. Because the government IRL is willing to go much further then it was in "The Last of Us".

>>52866893
idea: only people with o negative blood live

the virus feeds off of the other kinds of blood, cause proteins or some sciency shit

7 percent of the world has o negative, so thats still plenty to say that factions form, but low enough so that everything collapses

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>>52866795
Raw meat? Someone forgot to tell these lovely people.

>>52866772
>If you get infected, your ass is grass
I laughed

>>52864558
>>52864576
Are you John Ringo?

>>52866893
You could have it simply that you have a 20% chance of survival with few symptoms and then you have natural immunity. Many viruses such as Herpes Zoster lurk deactivated in your nervous system for years, later it can reactivate and cause shingles.

Realistic zombie apocalypse is shit because the zombies are still operating human bodies and need food and water like a human. They are vulnerable to heat and cold like people too so even without doing anything the zombies would collapse on their own logistical idiocy.

>>52867057

Personally I always figured the major population centers would just get fucked, and then all the zombies would die or rot away while isolated rural communities were pretty much fine.

>>52867057
If you'd read the thread, you'd realize the zombies aren't the actual problem. They're just a way to make the fungal pandemic more hectic.

>>52864576
Wouldn't it be better to have some kind of virus that is highly contagious but with a very long long and completely harmless incubation phase? People maybe would get a fever and some minor rashes for a couple of days after initial infection and then symptoms would disappear. It's only tow or three years later that the virus would start to take effect, again progressvely.

For propagation, I assume that a blood and body fluids transmission would be optimal. Insects, like mosquitos, fleas and ticks could spread the infection. Body fluids is also pretty good for transmitting an infection through coughing, kissing and intercourse.

The virus could work in three stages. First stage is the long incubation phase where most of the virus is spread. Second stage is the virus slowly changing the carrier's hormonal balance, making hin more aggressive and increasing sex drive (the virus gets even more spread, criminality starts to soar). Third stage would then be the zombification. The carrier turns into a zombie. His blood is full of virus.

In the actual political context, we could say that North Korea creates this virus as some kind of doomsday device. Or if we want to go the /pol/-route, we could say that it's the Muslims.

>>52864558
Mostly actually realistic;

A form of highly virulent retrovirus somehow mutates to cause bleeding in the brain.
Probably large patches of micro-bleeding.
While it will obviously vary from person to person how much you show symptoms, sufferers get poor movement coordination, impulse control, and often become functionally retarded. A few even die.
Like HIV, once you have it, you carry it and spread it. It spreads through saliva and phlegm, like a flu.
There is no cure, and it is highly virulent.
To begin with, a large push is made to care for the sufferers, or treat symptoms, but as infection continues, society becomes segregated.
Walled communities become the norm, as in plague-times, because no one wants to risk their children or loved ones catching it.

Blood-tests become a norm for job-testing, and renting / buying homes.

Large communities of sufferers live in camps or run-down detroit-style shitholes, a parallel society with rampant violence and terrible living conditions.
Functionally, what if being a shit-tier-socioeconomic black person from the ghetto was infectous?

There is no right or wrong answers, or morally saved approach. The sufferers are still people, and not undead, just incredible prone to group-madness and violence, as a group.
All the while, many of them a peaceful, and not even exhibiting symptoms, but they might give you the virus, still.
And instead of 13% of the population, it is 80%.

'Realistic' zombie apocalypses usually still aren't very realistic.

It's possible to think that a disease or drug could make someone rabid and ignore pain. Going much beyond that is very unlikely. Zombies would still require food, water and air to survive, and would become weak or die rapidly without them. Just being outside in a lot of weather for an extended time would kill them. Injuries that damage critical organs such as the heart or lungs would kill them quickly, as would anything causing serious blood loss. If zombies aren't especially smart, this makes them easy to contain and highly vulnerable to modern weaponry, or indeed just to injuring and killing themselves by doing dumb shit. Zombies don't do much to maintain their own health, so the apocalypse will be over in any particular place within days, and globally probably within months.

Even if a disease is transmitted easily through blood or other bodily fluids and rapidly changes the host, it would be extremely easy to contain. Just stop people getting bitten, and quarantine those that have been or show signs of infection. Fungal diseases are a fun idea due to Cordyceps, but would struggle even more due to the inherently massively slower replication of fungi. This both makes it easy to catch cases before they become a problem, and makes it harder for the disease to rapidly adapt to develop resistance to treatments or otherwise avoid strategies to control it.

You can get around some of these issues, although how much you can change before they aren't zombies anymore I'm not sure. You could make it an intensely developed bioweapon to at least explain its potency and outbreaks across a large extent of the globe. It likely needs to be viral or bacterial, and preferably airborne, to explain its rapid spread and defeat of modern quarantine protocols and medicine. Zombies likely also need to be brighter than usual to survive for long, and immune to pain rather than injury.

>>52864558
You can't have dead zombies and realism, cadavers are ridiculously frail even when overtaken by parasites.
You either play with rabies, or with voodoo.
Rabies doesn't give you a perpetual threat, because suffering an illness that overcomes the human animal's survival instinct and drives it to relentless violence, the patient won't last long as they forget to eat, sleep and protect themselves from harm.
Narcotic mind control requires massive organizational efforts, more of a Blade Runner than a Mad Max.

>>52867211
>>52867373
>>52867510
Did any of you bother to read OP's scenario?

>>52867596
Yup. An infection that is serious and takes only a few days to reach terminal phase would quickly land on a watchlist and then very quickly become high-priority for treatment. Direct fluid transfer is also a pretty ineffective infection vector.

>>52867732
Yeah but unlike most outbreaks this shit is breaking out everywhere at once and direct fluid isn't the only vector.

>>52867102
This guy gets it.

>realistic zombie apoc
>6 month in and every zombie is dead of dehydrataion and/or lack of food.

>>52867774
They might no longer be very smart but they're still eating and drinking anything they find. Also any that start starving too much turn into clouds of infectious particles.

Op, why fungal? You could easily make a CRISPR carrier viral bioweapon that spreads through air. With CRISPR you can edit genome however you want. For example you could switch cells into adrenaline and norepinephrine factories. You could change cell biology to store large amounts of ATP for later use. This is an easy way to explain rage "zombies" that are usually comatose, but when they hear prey, they're able to run 20 km/h, lift cars and break through walls with their bare hands.
CRISPR is really the "it's magic, I don't need to explain shit" enabler of hard sci-fi.

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OP's is fairly decent, although some good points have been raised that it's in an awkward middle zone: It probably isn't devastating enough to entirely collapse society, just seriously fuck it up the ass, but it's bad enough that regular joes such as the PCs have pretty much no hope of surviving any sort of direct confrontation with the infected without being infected.

IMO the point where society would really collapse is if you have something like the contagion from Stand Still Stay Silent, where the latency period is fucking HUGE, and the disease can spread to most mammals. But of course, then the apocalypse isn't so much the presence of zombies wrecking everything as it is the sheer number of people who are now doomed to be time-bombs.

Like, even in the modern day where we like to think we've largely excluded vermin from our way of life, zombie rats that give you zombie-itus would fucking end humanity. Rats get everywhere, and we still aren't very good at dealing with them. In fact, zombie rats and mice might not even be vulnerable to traps, which would make getting rid of them beyond fucking wild.

And then you have the whole WWOOOOO RABIES bullshit from >>52866778 which obviously creates a better gameplay scenario but would be contained super-quickly.

>>52866784
This is actually the route that the zombie containment efforts in "Instruction for a..." went down. Unfortunately for humanity, the zombies in that one were complete bullshit, pretty much 28 days later zombies that could also infect *any* lifeform with neurons, so blanketing the earth in white phosphorus and nukes rapidly became necessary just to get the infected clear of whatever shelters they could put together.

I ran a game like this once. It ended up as Resident Evil: Retarded edition.

>>52864558

Pretty much this >>52866784

The problem with a "realistic" zombie apocalypse is that if you make the zombies literally undead you've thrown realism out the window, but if you don't (e.g. "the zombies just have rabies") it's extremely hard to justify the world's militaries (or even police forces, for that matter) not being able to easily take them out, since humans are ultimately pretty fragile. World War Z goes into into detail about how unprepared modern militaries would be to fight zombies or how unsuitable modern weapons are but all of this depends on the zombies being undead (e.g. "Many soldiers would be lost because soldiers are trained to shoot at the center of mass and zombies must be shot at the head. Artillery would be useless because zombies don't have biological systems to shock and shrapnel that doesn't destroy the head is useless, etc.).

This doesn't even start to touch on the logistics of the zombie apocalypse. Again, if they're undead, it's not an issue but neither can you start calling them realistic. If not, they'll die out in a couple weeks from some combination of starvation and exposure.

>>52866784
This.

Remember the otherwise horribly bad "28 weeks later"? When the situation goes out of control and the HQ decides to just gas the area and contain everything.
Situation under control within 10 minutes

Last of us thread?

>>52867165
>Wouldn't it be better to have some kind of virus that is highly contagious but with a very long long and completely harmless incubation phase?
This Anon's got it.

A long incubation period is absolutely the only way something like this would get off the ground in a realistic way. If people are turning left and right the CDC, Military and Martial Law would stop the spread dead in its tracks in any first world country.

It's also highly realistic for a virus to incubate for extended amounts of time. For instance, Rabies has been known to incubate for upwards of eight months to a year.

>>52868341
You can also forget about the "spreading by bite" thing. It's just too conspicuous. Even if you assume this takes place in a setting where people haven't been bombarded with zombie fiction left and right, any event in which people start randomly biting each other is going to draw a lot of attention and contained as soon as it's clear shit's gone bad.

An airborne pathogen would be far more realistic. Something like Ebola, but far more contagious and with a far longer incubation period.

>>52867596
Yes. What I wrote included multiple reasons why OP's scenario wouldn't really work, as well as including more general commentary on why zombies are generally unrealistic.

Have you ever seen a major fungal outbreak? There has never been a single recorded fungal pandemic in human history. Fungi have complex life cycles, and generally display high host specificity. They grow and adapt very slowly, making them easy for the immune system, and now modern medicine, to beat. Millions die from fungal infections each year, but fungal infections are generally a disease of the diseased, killing people whose immune systems are already crippled.

Apparently OP's magical fungus can infect people with a small amount of material through multiple infection routes and then rapidly proliferate and take over the body in mere days, something pretty much unthinkable for a fungus even without a functioning immune system reacting to it. It possesses a complex life cycle that seems specifically adapted to infection of humans, yet has never been seen in human history. This implies it is perhaps a new weapon or similar, yet it is specific and complex enough that you could spend countless millions and decades trying to get a research team to develop such a thing and still fail, all whilst having to listen to them telling you how impractical and pointless it is to do so. Lets assume for now that the doomsday cult somehow pulled off this absolute miracle however, and that fungi actually grow and proliferate at an impossible speed.

>>52868411
Fungal spores are big, making them relatively easy to filter from the air. A lot may be filtered out accidentally before infecting anyone, and once health agencies know the pathogen is fungal they’ll have a relatively easy time containing it. Simply get some people in decent personal protective equipment and cleaning it properly after venturing outside and they’ll be immune. Blood tests and scans to check for ‘complex structures’ will likely allow you to differentiate infected people quickly and deal with them appropriately. 20% of people being immune is substantial, and will really help to prevent an apocalypse occurring and make repopulation easy after assuming this trait is heritable OP’s spores don’t remain viable for long for fungal spores so that could be increased however, making long term contamination of areas a scary proposition for those that aren’t immune.

The zombies themselves develop behavioural changes before or as they become infectious, making them easier to notice. In the late infectious stages they can apparently seek out water and food and approach the living. Good luck doing that effectively when they’re dumb as rocks. OP sensibly made them ignore pain and be resistant to bleeding but that’s not sufficient. The zombies will die within days, even without violent intervention. In fact, the extent of the physical changes described would kill them far more quickly than that due to the amount of energy and disruption to human physiology that they’d require.

>>52868416
I think these issues makes it tough for a full apocalypse to occur from this pathogen, even if it could exist. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim the scenario is particularly realistic or close to ‘hard science’. I do think OP has put some solid thought into this however and dealt with some of the common criticisms of zombie scenarios. I’m also always up for rule of cool trumping realism to create a cool setting too. There’s also grounds for interesting discussions about morality in the post-disaster world. How will the carriers be treated in the world afterwards? They could be a vast number of individuals, yet could further infect other people and possibly their own offspring assuming resistance is heritable. The popularity of the Cordyceps-style zombies in the media recently (The Last of Us, The Girl with all the Gifts, probably others) regrettably kills a bit of originality here too, but fungal zombies are still great and the weird nature of their life cycles means there’s always new ground to explore. In this case I agree with a lot of the other posters that the spores are a far more serious threat than the zombies themselves, and likely to kill the PCs unless they happen to be immune themselves.

>>52867904
It's fungal because it needs to be able to have complex interactions with the CNS and there are precedents in nature. The alternative was a parasite but they tend to be less infectious.

>>52868429
But rabies works too and it's a virus. With a designer virus able to target single cells and modify them, you can have complete control over all hormones, etc. IMHO it gives you as much control over brain as this fungus.

>>52868429
Parasites are less infectious as you say. Some such as Trypanosomes have really cool ways to evade the hosts immune system and make drug treatments ineffective, but they'd certainly be easier to contain. Engineering one would be even tougher than for a fungus.

An engineered virus would be the most likely scenario with our current Biotechnology proficiency. You might be able to produce a highly infectious airborne viral agent that is ultimately fatal, but that also makes infectious individuals more gregarious.

You'd miss out on the cool body horror elements of Cordyceps, and imagery of terrifying drifting spores in the air however. There'd still be plenty of scope to work through the moral dilemmas and questions about society that zombies are usually used to discuss I guess. In spite of concerns about realism, I'd be tempted to go with fungal zombies if I was building an entire setting.

Whatever the agent, one key feature of zombies is that they are generally pretty stupid. An angle I haven't seen 'zombie' scenarios take (although perhaps there are some out there) is perhaps for the infected to retain a greater degree of their intelligence, but for it to make them euphoric to the extent that they want to spread it to others to gift them that experience, even though they know they will die. The mental effects could vary, with some directly and almost rabidly trying to infect others, and some working more subtly to ensure its spread. This would also fit in quite well with a doomsday cult, although the infected probably wouldn't really be zombies at this point. There's probably better things along this line that someone could come up with.

Right looking at what people are saying it looks like despite the whole 'zombies just make the fungal pandemic worse' angle I was aiming for there's still too much opportunity for an organized response stopping this thing early.

To that end I propose two modifications to the original scenario:
> The initial infectious stage lasts much longer (say a week or two) giving a much longer period in which no one is likely to notice anything is wrong as more and more people just sort of get a bit more friendly. However a quorum sensing type effect occurs if hosts in this stage are exposed to enough people in the late infectious stage resulting in them entering the late stage faster.
> The doomsday cult that originally released the pathogen conduct a bunch of conventional terrorist activities around the world in order to jump start some of the chaos are provided a big distraction.

>>52864558
Here's the pro tip for a zombie apocalypse that doesn't feel run of the mill.

The whole world hasn't gone to shit, only pockets of infection exist across a single country.

The problem is that zombies are the fucking worst way to spread a disease. The only way zombies make sense is when you have some WW3 scenario.

Faction A and Faction B nuke each other. They've now run out of nukes. But Faction A and Faction B are still active. Both countries have lost millions of people, and their infrastructure is wrecked, but there are still soldiers alive with intact command structures and some material left. Faction A knows that an invasion of Faction B is possible, so Faction A deploys a zombie virus to ensure that Faction B remains focused on itself, while Faction A begins building up it's armies and infrastructure again.

drop the fungus, go full EBOLA IN TOWN
the infected are desperate because they know they'll inevitably liquify so some of them have gone into riot mode. It's crazy contagious so everyone's locked themselves inside. Some people are surviving but they're still infectious and also now completely fucking nuts. And to go with >>52869227, set it in some large city in some third world shithole, but with international interests and NGO's.
There are lots of strains of filoviruses so you can play around with the symptoms a little bit. Localize the infection so they aren't totally bedridden, make it airborne (real, ps), whatever.

>>52869227
>what do you mean jerry isn't here? we need those 5 kilos of coke right now, or william is going to cut us up and feed us to the pigs!
>dude, they locked down the interstate 35 in a 80 mile radius. there's been an infection. jerry is probably wandering around undead with the five kilos of coke in his backpack!
>fuck me, we gotta find a guy in the national guard who can get us into the zone...

>>52864558
>>52864581
>>52864586
>>52864600
>>52864615

You need at least a 2-4 week infectious period with no symptoms for this thing to get off the ground. Otherwise you're just going to have a fungal pandemic that's quickly contained. At worst, it'll be like the Spanish Flu hitting.

If you're not going for undead zombies that are ridiculously hard to put down and keeping things 'realistic', your vector absolutely needs time to spread beyond any reasonable hope of containment.

I mean, you do realize that most first world countries don't just yank freshwater from the rivers and lakes, they go through a purification process that kills or filters out fungal spores and bacteria, yes?

>>52864558
If you're going to make a realistic zombie apocalypse, why make a zombie apocalypse?
A normal virus ultimately create the same consequences as zombies and you don't have to come up with an explanation for why the fuck there are zombies in a realistic setting.
"Realistic" zombie apocalypse settings are overdone anyway.

>>52869310
Don't forget to make it an escaped or deliberately triggered bioweapon, for added military cover up. Make it real nice and difficult for the players to leave this place, else the campaign will lose all tension too quickly.

Instead have them hear reports on amateur radio stations and such as they treck through the infected streets.

>>52864558
>Realistic Zombie apoclypse
jokes aside, one of my country's political party asked the government about this, the government took it as a joke, and now the opposition is saying our government isn't taking state matters seriously.

Such is the life in the 1st world.

>>52867753
No it isn't. Not if you're only using airports as a vector and it only takes 48-72 hours to start showing symptoms. Seeing as OPs fungal spores only live so long outside of water, you're looking at -maybe- 100k people infected out of billions.

And that's being wildly optimistic. Even if it spreads, they die easily enough. Fists and teeth don't do so well against riot gear, and gas masks filter out fungal spores just fine. Since they're not undead that require headshots, a few automatic weapons on rooftops and a quarantine will bring things into line within weeks. And assuming the cultists didn't infect themselves and turn zombie, expect a flurry of dronestrikes or extraordinary rendition CIA ops within a few months.
>>52869195
Double that infectious period. You really do want to get practically everyone who's not immune. It needs to have time to spread aboard navy vessels, SSBNs in particular unless you want your survivors to be irradiated by fallout from nuclear strikes to take out large groups of urban infected.

Also, your cultists need to either infect themselves or suicide bomb. Otherwise, in a first world nation, they will be caught and more importantly interrogated before symptoms start to express, possibly in time for global quarantines to be enacted.

>>52869310
Sounds like Outbreak. Not a bad movie. I recommend watching it to get an idea of just how far authorities will go to contain infectious bioweapons.

>>52869429
How'd they phrase the question? Did they ask if they had a plan for 'zombies omg!' or 'a highly infectious bioweapon that manifests symptoms of hostility and psychosis?'

>>52869409
honestly I was thinking something like this:
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Stop-consuming-corn-beef-
extra fun for being 'fuck someone put monkey in the chef boyardee'
could still be bioweapon of course

>>52869476
The exact question was "what are your government plans in case of an apocalyptic zombie infestation", no joking.

Our president answered: "Well, if we reach the apocalyptic part, nothing to do much about it" and laughed

>>52864558
Having been that kind of person who watched all of Romero's work and read Brooks and consumed a lot of overall shitty zombie media in my teens, because I was edgy and thought zombies were the shit, I've done a lot of brainstorming for more realistic outbreaks too.

I also arrived at the conclusion that the disease should be fungal in nature, but here are some things to consider, at least if you want to make a "lasting" outbreak scenario.
First, one big stuff about zombies is that they're pretty much exposed to the elements, and are either very sick or outright dead people - which means that if people just hid away for a prolonged period of time, the zombies just die off due to natural rot and decay. This is also due to the work of carrion eater animals, which, remember, include flies, and larvae can do devastating work - I've seen zombie settings which say "but vultures and other animals don't attack zombies because they're still moving!" well yeah, that doesn't apply to flies and other insects at all.
There are two ways to go around this - either the zombies have a way to actually benefit off these animals, or the pathogen plain makes their flesh 'poisonous' to the point flies would die just by resting on them.

Then there's the most realistic problem - for movement, zombies still require energy, therefore they need some way to eat and store energy. I don't remember if this was the case with Last of Us zombies, but I think the best conclusion is to make it so that zombies work basically like plants, requiring sunlight, water, and some nutrients acquired one way or another (like, say, their flesh working like carnivorous plants. Think of the drosera genera). This, coupled with periods of "dormancy" whenever there isn't a human being nearby, should work do the trick. It also paints a neat image - dozens of corpses laying down all over the street, but they're actually just... sunbathing zombies.

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>>52869332
So much this. This whole everything collapses shtick is boring tbqh. I think shit like this is more interesting because TWD gets so boring when marauding Band of psychos Nr. 600 appears.


I wouldn't limit infected zones to a single continent though.

I know shit about virology but rabies like shit with a looong incubation period sounds better than this funghi stuff. When people finally start turning it should be enough that in some areas military and Police organizations have to retreat.

The military, CDC and Police should get on top of things at some point (stabilizing most cities etc) with a good chunk of deadzones.

Some areas get reconquered but the infection periodically flares up again claiming others. There are asymptotic carriers spreading this shit.

Maybe the Players are asymptotic and have to dwell in infected zones to not get killed by the military (that runs the society in collaboration with the CDC).

Maybe they are running a large Meth lab in a Deadzone.

Maybe they are adrenaline Junkies running a successful webblog, having to please their viewers.

Maybe they are scavengers looting the infected zones.

Maybe they are escaped convicts trying to keep it low for a few years.

My point: this zones would be quickly populated. Ranging from Drug runners and corrupt National guardists looting to libertarian survavilists.

>>52869468
>Also, your cultists need to either infect themselves or suicide bomb. Otherwise, in a first world nation, they will be caught and more importantly interrogated before symptoms start to express, possibly in time for global quarantines to be enacted.

Solution there is pretty simple if you look at real world cults you often have multiple levels to the point where people living in the same compound don't have a clue what the other is doing. Just make sure the conventional chaos causers don't know anything about the bio weapon.

>>52869527
Well, they're not wrong. Not much to do if it reaches the apocalypse. As other anons have pointed out, chemical weapons will handle anything short of that or the undead sorts.

>>52869621
The problem I see with the idea that chemical weapons would solve everything is that if the infection has already spread everywhere by the time people realize that there's a zombie problem wouldn't it be a bit to late?

>>52869571
That's gonna be a hard sell if they're an apocalypse cult small enough to not be on a terror watch list to begin with. I mean, you're talking about a lot of airports and getting a good load of spores through security.

That sort of preparation and coordination doesn't lend itself well to secret. Particularly given the tech required to brew up this fungus in the first place.
>>52869645
Only for the people who aren't in the government and private bunkers, anon. You know, the plebs.

>>52864558
As epidemiologist that doesn't sound like huge threat unless the sporeshedding during the early stages is very infectious. No primarily injury/sex transmitted pathogen is going to threaten the first world.

>>52869667
'Cause our border security, quarantine and public health infrastructure is just too good.

But the ways you'd solve that - increasing airborne spread, increasing fomite survivability on surfaces - don't necessarily make for a good story. Lengthening the initial infectious but mostly asymptomatic stage might work if you played up the confusion and emotional disinhibition aspects.

Alternativelyset the campaihm in Brazil, Africa, India or somewhere else susceptible to massive disease outbreaks something that could be controlled in the west can still be devastating elsewhere. That sort of campaign also opens up plot points re. the resurgence of n xenophobia in the West vs humanitarian aid, and the goal of fleeing to the relatively safe West vs hunting down the cult vs helping find a cure vs just trying to look out for you family.

Another option is to massively boost the funding and manpower of the cult. You'd need a bit of an illuminati conspiracy aspect but that way you could justify widespread infection of the West and poor response from public health services

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=17939

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>>52869195
OP, maybe look into the Infected series by Scott Sigler. It got pretty pulpy occasionally, but it also legitimately scared me a few times.

>>52866950
>little monglet wearing little rubber wellington bloodboots and drinking blood out of a teacup with a cocked eyebrow while the others eat like savages
I want to be his(?) friend

>>52866772
It's for sampling waste matter entering your large intestines. Sets off an immune response if anything nasty gets through. There's also some evidence saying that it holds samples of natural intestinal flora in case your microbiome gets knocked out.
Nice pun though

>>52864558
Looks a lot like red markets
http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/category/systems/red-markets/page/6/

So, your players just either hold out until winter or travel far enough north and then win? No matter how "living" the tissue In any zombies body Is, they'll all pretty much just die off from exposure. Their muscles and tendons will stop working after a couple days In low temperatures, since they have no sense of self preservation. Even In earlier stages they wouldn't be thinking straight enough to survive the cold.

>>52869195
You could do an outbreak in a single city. It still takes time for the government to mobilize so a Resident Evil 2 scenario of a remote town/city going to shit and having to escape before everything is nuked still works.

The hard part is having some sort of macguffin to keep the players in the town at first instead of escaping immediately.

>>52874079
Maybe something akin to prototypes plot. Goverment realizes somethings up and quarantines the area as they figure shit out. Anyone who tries to approach the bridge gets gunned down, and as they begin to panic, they blow the bridges completely.

That or do it on a smaller scale like quarantine where they get locked in a building.

>>52864558

>realistic

Fuck this realistic shit, some random biological technobabble isnt any more realistic. "zombie apocalypse" is one of those incredibly juvenile scenarios in vogue with literal kids and falls apart at the slightest application of logic. There wouldnt be any band of inexplicably young friends getting to loot malls while everyone else died. There would be only thousands of soldiers in full enviromental protection suits effortlessly shitting on zombies everywhere. Actualy chemical agents are far WORSE than anything zombies can do, it would be downright trivial to decontaminate a zombie plague.

If you want to really do this, either make it full biopunk or just have a wizard use magic and skip a whole lot of bullshitting.

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>>52865231
Just use this.

>>52869195
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dark_Winter

Look at Operation Dark Winter. The US government pretty much admitted that it's not prepared to deal with a widespread bioterror attack. Least of all one that flies in the face of modern medical science.

Honestly though, you could just go with >>52874079 and go full Division but without the super future special forces guys running around.

So totally unrelated to OP but more so to zombies. If per say typical zombies were real, virus spreads through bites and liquid and can only be put down for good via destruction of brain. And for simplicity's sake let's say they're jogging max speed. How would the world realisticly fare? Would the government be able to stop it quickly? Or would humanity be fucked?

>>52869429
Apparently the Israelis use a "zombie apocalypse" scenario as part of their officer training. There's also a scenario involving an alien invasion.

They made a movie about it. A horror comedy. Doesn't remember how it was called.

>>52876090
>the Israelis use a "zombie apocalypse" scenario as part of their officer training
I guess if I had to select a country which I think trains its officers to think about how they'd most efficiently slaughter a crowd of unarmed, untrained "hostiles" slowly approaching them, they'd be it...

>>52875921
World would be fine. There is no situation were mindless creatures can threaten humanity by biting. Needing to head shot them is irrelevant.

>>52865231
You've thought this through pretty well, anon, and you deserve a good answer regarding the probable institutional response. I'm not a professional, but I'll look into it. It will take me some time to deliver; I have a lot of work to do right now. The thread will probably die before I get to it.

>>52867165
>>52867211
>>52866496
>>52868697
Honestly, I've always thought bacterial and viral agents are less likely candidates for a zombie apocalypse, simply because they don't usually go in for the kind of behavioral alterations which characterize a zombie apocalypse (rabies excluded, and rabies isn't necessarily a good model either). This makes the kind of virus suggested in >>52867211 look wildly contrived. A fungus seems somewhat more plausible to me, although they do indeed have larger, more fragile spores, grow more slowly, etc. Basically, I think >>52868429 has it right: bacteria and viruses aren't going to exhibit the behavioral properties you want, and macroparasites don't have the epidemiological properties you want; the best middle ground is fungi.

>>52868411
>>52868416
>>52868421
Yes, this is why you can't go out and actually enact OP's scenario. But that's a pretty high bar for science fiction, though— even hard SF. You're basically right, but there are parts of this assessment I'd quibble with. Once established, fungal infections are not easy for the immune system to beat, and it takes time to develop "blood tests and scans to check for 'complex structures' ". Most importantly, if the strike is big enough for a zombie apocalypse to be remotely possible, we're faced with a race between an effective response and institutional collapse: we'd know what to do, but we might lose the capacity to do it as chunks of civilization start breaking down.

>>52864558
>>52864576
A bunch of people get ducked initially, but odds are good you'll have those people in airports either going crazy on a plane or just going home and spreading out too far.

If it's still spread by bites after that, then you're looking at a very easy quarantine. Especially if fungicides are remotely effective.

>>52876090
>>52876144

It might seem weird, but Government think tanks do run these absurd crisis scenarios occasionally. Not just zombies, shit like "what if a giant monster attacked" or "what if Superman were deployed against us by X country," partly because they're fun but mostly because they're supposed to keep the members open minded in case some outside context problem really comes along and blindsides them.

>>52869195
The quorum sensing idea is pretty neat. I don't think anyone's done that one.

>>52867904
>>52868473
Posts like this remind me why I hate /sci/.

>>52866784
As other people have pointed out, this doesn't solve the epidemiological issues. Nor do the other notes regarding the vulnerable nature of the zombies; a viable zombie fungus would probably have to be contagious enough to render the short lifespan of the hosts in the zombie-behavior stage moot. "Zombies make the pandemic worse" is definitely the right way to think about it.

>>52869195
We might be caught somewhat flat-footed, actually; it's not like we have a huge stockpile of antifungals. In any event, the response is definitely more complex than "HEPA filters and quarantine lol." I suspect people are underestimating the casualty count; "you're looking at -maybe- 100k people infected out of billions" seems a bit odd when you can nail 800,000-ish with a botulinum attack on the milk supply.

>>52869665
>That sort of preparation and coordination doesn't lend itself well to secret. Particularly given the tech required to brew up this fungus in the first place.
Yes and no. The trouble, IIRC, is that nearly everything you'd need to do it has legitimate uses, and biological weapons are cheap relative to other WMDs. Do I lose sleep over the possibility of a terrorist attack using biological weapons? No. Is it harder than people think it is? Yes. Could such an attack kill us all? No. Is it *impossible* for a small-ish group of people with an extensive technical background to go undetected long enough to launch a terrorist attack using a biological weapon, possibly even one that has been modified in some way? Well, no, it's not. That's my current understanding of the matter.

>>52875921
Army vs. Naked dudes with just fists and teeth without an understanding of tactics.

Army wins. Hell, even 'unarmed' British cops would win.

>>52864558
The disease is NOT 100% fatal. 30% of cases is terminal in a short span and makes zombies. In 30% of the time it is still serious and those that die become zombies, but with medical treatment in generally healthy people it can usually be fought off. In 20% of cases it causes nothing worse than sneezing, but makes the individual a carrier for the next few months. They can still become Zombies if they die from other cases. 20% of people are out and out immune.

Make that the case and hard and fast "if you get bitten your dead anyway" thinking is worthless.

What system would you use to run a game like this?

>>52880545
Yeah, and I guess when you've trained expecting something that horrible, when it's just a horrific earthquake that has hundreds of casualties it doesn't seem as bad.

>>52882470
All Flesh Must Be Eaten and GURPS are probably the best systems I'm aware of for zombie games. I've heard both praise and criticism for End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse, but I haven't given it a look myself. Dead Reign, by Palladium games, is a bad system but has some decent fluff/setting details and great tables to mine for zombie apoc games. Outbreak: Undead is trash. Heard about "Infected!" but don't know much about it. "Red Markets" has a lot of hype but is not out yet, but the pdf share thread has a beta available.

I imagine CoC/Delta Green and WoD cut down to regular modern stuff could do it well enough, too.

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I hate non-supernatural zombies on principle, but if you had to create a campaign
do this >>52864576

Just avoid virus's though, it pisses me off how many people fucking misuse virus's as a "instant zombie epidemic" without knowing how virus's actually work.

What about zombies that arise from some form of Illegal Drug Substance?

>>52883414
Isn't there a strain of bath salts or LSD that has similar effects as a zombie?

>>52883414
So like iZombie

>>52882644
Infected seems pretty solid. It's more a post-apocalyptic games with zombies in it. The main outbreak is over for some years already and human communities begin to rebuild society.

>>52864558
Try to be creative instead of realistic
Your player will thank you

Just interjecting that a devil tumor-like parasite might fit pretty well as something suitably scientific and creepy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease

>>52864576
>>52864586
>>52864600
>>52864615
If you want anything approaching realism you're going to have to slow down the rate of infection and incubation massively. This would just kill people before they had a chance to spread it very far, even if they were catching a plane somewhere.

>>52869332
Okay, now THIS would be a fun af campaign.

>>52869332
>we need those 5 kilos of coke
>jerry is probably wandering around undead with the five kilos of coke in his backpack!
This doesn't sound like authentic drug-dealer dialogue.

>>52889037
It's horror comedy in the making.

They should really make a movie on this premise.

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>>52864558
Having no realistic answers would be the most terrifying version, really.

Just think about it:
>zombie apocalypse begins
>scientists start to search for a cure
>they have no idea what causes the zombies
>they can't create an antidode
>they have to lie to the public, giving them hope

If you want to run a good zombie apocalypse game, you don't even need to explain why and how zombies exist.
Or, as I already explained, if scientists can't explain what happened and how to stop it, that'd only make the game more interesting / fucked up.

>>52880545
Ex-Israeli Air Force here. I don't know how it goes now but back when I served, one training scenario involved a fight against an alien space fighter/UFO with unknown, possibly physics defying capabilities. There was actually a team who's job was to sit down every year and come up with new, unexpected abilities for the UFO so the trainees would have to keep thinking outside the box (e.g. one time it can turn invisible, one time it teleports, one time it can shoot an infinite amount of missiles, etc.)

>>52880868
The problem isn't that they're making bioweapons, or that bioweapons are cheap.

The problem is that this fungus works ridiculously fast, hasn't got anything close to an analogue in nature, and has some very complicated interactions with the nervous system.

That requires either the sort of mad genius that governments keep a wary eye on as a matter of course, or a lot of work over a long time, as well as testing it to make sure it fucking works in the first place.

Working from stolen samples is a nonstarter.

>>52883531

Bath salts yes, LSD no. LSD just elevates your consciousness, and I'm not being new age. They recently started experimenting with LSD again and that's what MRIs show, more regions of the brain display activity when you're on LSD. So it really depends on the person, not the drug when it comes to dropping acid.

>>52889969
What was the solution for fighting off an alien with God Mode enabled? Don't leave us hanging.

>>52891856
That's literally classified.

>>52883531
I fucking wish I could bash your fucking brains in because fucking hell, you're retarded.

Learn some fucking entry level biology/chemistry, you fucking mongoloid.

There's only one class of drugs capable of creating "zombies" and that drug class is called depressants.

Think alcohol. Dumbass people with lowered inhibitions that no longer feel pain.

>>52891756
Well, sure. There's a reason we worry about botulinum, anthrax, tularemia, venezuelan equine encephalitis, etc. rather than a doomsday biological superweapon. But that sort of falls under "acceptable breaks from reality."

Here's the most plausible story I can think of:

Suppose that the cult is operating within a pharmaceutical company, that some people near the top of the organization are members, and that they also have a few members in the biodefense industry. They've got everything they need to do the actual engineering, and they have a perfectly sensible reason to have it. They have the budget to pull it off. They've got a handful of contacts who could get them immensely dangerous stuff—with a hefty dose of luck, of course. Handwaving the biotechnological aspects a bit (we can't actually engineer a massive fungal zombie pandemic in real life), the remaining technical obstacles are the testing, the bulk culturing of the quantity needed for the initial attack, and the weaponization; the main social obstacle is the need to maintain operational security over a very long period of time. From the events of the last decade, we know that the SEC is a largely toothless organization that will miss the accounting discrepancies, and the US domestic intelligence agencies probably don't have people embedded in every high-tech pharmaceutical company ever. Alternatively, as a global corporation, you could do some of the nefarious research and development in a country with lax or corrupt oversight, although that would open you up to monitoring from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Anyway, it's hardly a bulletproof plan, but there's a chance you could pull it off.

>>52864739
That leaves 1.4 billion people immune, even if half of them die due to riots or zombies or accidental deaths that leaves 700,000,000 people alive

>>52867073
except that's where every city dweller would be heading to, any resources the rural areas have would quickly be burnt through.

>>52897626
Depends if the rural communities have guns or not.

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>>52898075
>hurr durr imma gun down 1000s of people countryfolk stronk

>>52864558
Explain to me how the zombies last for more than 24 hours before dying. This is the one part where 'realism' breaks down.

>>52903386
Pull a Dawn of the Remake or 28 Days and have them not truly be undead.

You've got semi-living, highly contagious, very fast, agile, above-human-strengthed, voracious monsters.

This sounds like that Z-Land game that's out on beta now.

Realistically wouldn't zombies be fucked by heat and insects?

>>52903386
Well based on the description OPs zombies aren't actually dead and
>Hosts also will continue to eat and drink
implies they still take care of themselves to some extent.

Any good realistic zombie doomsday fiction?

>>52864558

Remove all of that mushroom shit.

Instead, make it a virus that alters the mind. Zombies are people who can't quite work out what they're doing (like they have dementia), have a strange need to bite people (even each other) though it isn't malicious (and they do it as if they aren't sure why), naturally congregate, don't feel pain, and have emotional and destructive outbursts on occasions of lucidity (mostly because they can recall mauling loved ones).

Zombies are becoming too inhuman lately, and it takes away the true fear behind them.