Inspired by HP Lovecraft, World War Z, and a few other things. Based off of this post from alternate history forums [note that you'll have to register to read it, regrettably].
More than just Zombies go "bump" in the night...
The zombie apocalypse happened ten years ago. 99% of humanity is dead, but the species lives on. In enclaves and isolated spots, we survive. On mountain-tops and tropical islands, in arctic wastes and underground bunkers, we survive. And for the first time, there's a glimpse of hope. The hordes don't appear to be increasing in number. If we can hang on, we can reclaim the cities, spread back into fertile and easily-farmed lands, and rebuild. That is, if the other horrors lurking in the night don't beat us to it.
It came without warning. One day was normal, and the next featured all the dead rising from graves simultaneously. Millions died in that first wave of attacks, and then many of those millions joined their undead brethren. Humanity knows no cure. The recently dead are burned, and where fires are ill-advised, shot in the head. Oftentimes, both. Heavy sleepers have taken to wearing signs around their necks to avoid accidents. The internet is fragmented, and if you're lucky enough to have electricity, the only access to electronic information is from whatever happened to be stored on it at the time. Most places are cut off except for the brave or insane wandering traders and caravans full of the desperate.
As devastating as the apocalypse was to us, it seemed to have finally tipped the balance and unveiled the creatures of the night. Strange traders come from the far north, supernaturally strong and quick-witted, but awkward in gait and misshapen. Every village has rumors of creepy men and women that cursed this or that household, or rules the mind of a distant city's leader with malevolent purpose. A plague of anemia creeps across continents, and some whisper that entire villages have disappeared overnight. Strange flittering noises, as if from enormous rats, haunt underground bunkers, and pets disappear to the earth. Large monsters stalk the wilderness, assaulting unwary caravans and traders. And from Africa comes tale of strange cults in the desert sands.
This is a horror-based, classic "save the world" adventuring sort of RP. You'd start in the small human village of Losille (note that you don't have to play a human) at the foothills of the rockies in the southwestern United States.
Vampires - Territorial bloodeaters that would be mindles but for their immortality; currently considering a technological human farming scheme (involving keeping humans in comas and breeding them while they're still asleep); keeping tabs and records on all the human settlements; led by a very stodgy "old-blood"; zombies are a nuiscence to them at worst, as even those bitten retain their intelligence (if they're old enough to have intelligence), though zombie-vampires are pariahs.
Ghouls - underground carrion-eaters, having some sort of relationship with "giant ancient worms" deep beneath the earth. Seriously endangered and some communities nigh-unheard of since they holed up from the zombies. Still, though, they remain lords of the underworld, and tend to charge rent for anyone seeking shelter there.
"Egyptians" - They're the inspiration for Egyptian gods, live very deep underground, and mostly only do confusing and seemingly pointless rituals if they're awake at all, but tend to annihilate anything directly in their way; also called upon to defend tombs from desecration and take the duty seriously. A few nonconformists are eager to do something about this whole zombie problem, but are "discouraged". Pretty immune to the zombies on the whole, though; something about their skin causes zombie bites to barely pierce the flesh at all.
New Men - Mary Shelley's Frankensteins. Under serious threat from these damned zombies, as they no longer have a means of reproduction (hard to use rotting flesh as an arm), and are susceptible to the contagion themselves. On the other hand, they're quite strong and intelligent, and willing to hack off bitten limbs, so few get infected. They're working on cloning (of limbs) to fix the lack of supply. Rather distressed by the vampires, and split between wiping out the vampires (and humanity, as well), or being humanity's saviors. Very divided on this issue. Tend to be a bit of body-mod afficianados, too. There are quite a few nonhuman-shaped New Men wandering about.
Witchy-Folk - Folktale witches. They egotistically believe that they've had a hand in Mankind's destiny (they haven't). "Herding stray cats" is a good indication of the community's powers of organizaton. Because of these two traits, they're often the source of cults and secret societies. Very susceptible to the zombies; 90% are dead. Mostly taking refuge in/hiding within/enthusiastically meddling in the remaining human communities. A few took up with the New Men, much to the shock of the New Men, who didn't know they even existed. Mostly hate vampires and don't trust ghouls. Long-standing truce with the other aberrations, which is holding, for the moment, but they're lack of numbers may change this.
Skin-Changers - Green-loving were-____ (wolf, bear, tiger, jaguar) hippies, partly upset and partly pleased with the zombie apocalypse. Pleased because Man can no longer pollute the Earth, but upset because the conveniences of Man's society (ex: Fast Food, indoor plumbing) are gone. Not that the zombies can kill them in any meaningful numbers. Not pleased with the vampires' plans. Dubious toward the New Men.
Species: Details
The number of zombies is not longer increasing. Rather than a slowly expanding plague with a “patient zero”, the Walking Dead arose wherever lightly decayed corpses were not buried deeply or securely enough. Some of the more desolate parts of the Sahara and the interior of Antarctica seem to be “clean”: one can feel (relatively) safe in the vicinity of a corpse in such areas. If bodies are frozen immediately at death, they do not become a problem. Sterilization still results in nearly a third of corpses still becoming zombies, having somehow carried the infection past all precautions. Of course, zombies also spread infections in the more traditional way - through bodily-fluid exchange. And with a zombie's strange fascination with delicious brains, that exchange usually happens in the form of bites.
The zombie contagion is exclusive to humans and higher primates (zombie gorillas are not something you want to meet). They're generally are predators on their (living) kind: a zombie will soon lose interest in chasing after a deer, although they are happy enough to munch on any animals that they happen to actually lay hands on. Wee creatures such as mice and insects and small birds are generally ignored entirely, apparently passing right through whatever sort of crude cognitive filter zombies use to distinguish prey from rocks, machinery, clothing store dummies and other zombies. Zombies generally have poor eyesight due to eyeball erosion (zombies don’t blink), but their sense of smell and hearing are excellent, and they can perceive movement even if their eyes resemble desert sun-fractured plastic. Trying to blend in with zombies is difficult: they can pick up any oddness in one’s shuffling, and it takes a bird-call expert to successfully mimic zombie moans. And the only way to deal with the smell issue is to smear oneself with zombie parts, which has its own dangers .
Whatever the contagious element is, viral, nano-technological, magical, or the-absent-God-knows-what, it flourishes in the bodies of the dead – such as vampires. And a zombie will bite a vampire, if it finds one: never mind that the flesh from an old vampire soon turns to dust in their mouths. Since a vampire is already dead, it can’t kill him – but it turns his flesh grey and puffy, robs him of his ability to transform, and soon adds a craving for human flesh to that for blood. The vampire retains his mind, but has become, in the eyes of other vampires, a corrupted, lower creature, one which is, furthermore, contagious – in other words, a leper. The zombie-vamps soon find that their friends have moved their coffins and left no forwarding address, and he or she no longer gets invited to parties.
Zombies decay, but, as mentioned, slowly. They turn grey and puffy and their hair falls out and their eyes glaze over, but they rot reluctantly: whatever transforms them makes them unpalatable to bacteria (as well as larger animals: no scavenger has ever been seen feeding on a decapitated zombie), the tar-like, greenish-black stuff that oozes slowly from an injured zombie instead of blood making a quite effective germicide. Weather is a more effective destroyer: in areas of near-continual rainfall, zombies slowly erode away through full-body trench-foot. In hot deserts, zombies dry out and (slowly) flake away. Still, even under best-case scenarios, it will take years for the zombie to decay to the point of immobilization: three years after the outbreak, many zombies in moderately cool, moderately moist climates looked almost factory-fresh.
The largest zombie concentrations are generally along shorelines: zombies tend to drift downhill, but find water, especially if big waves are involved, too resistive a media to wander into too far if there is no prey in sight. Zombies who fall off boats or are washed out to sea by flood shuffle across the ocean floor, their chests caved in and eyes burst from the pressure, but still mobile and hungry. However, zombies in cities (those which haven’t burned down) often sort of end up stuck, wandering slowly around apartments and going in and out of buildings for months without ever getting out of the city: the smell of people still clings to the furnishings.
Although humanity knows of no cure, the other species have a few methods of staving off infection. The A vampire’s principal healing agent – human blood, and lots of it, works as a cure in most zombie-vamp cases. Say three or four good-sized human bodies worth of it, over a few days. But it’s hard to get hold of that many humans in a hurry nowadays. Of course, older and more powerful vampires can just turn into mist or a cloud of bats to avoid pesky zombies. But the damn things are everywhere, and seem to have a curious ability to suddenly spring out of just the last place you expected one to be. The Egyptians aren't bothered by zombies, for even if a confused zombie were to stumble into their dark halls and try to take a bite out of flesh as hard as wood and dry as the desert sand, the effect would be essentially nil. New Men are not immune to infection, although cutting off an infected limb quickly enough often works, and they're fairly blasé about limb replacement. Sufficiently massive doses of electricity also sometimes work as a cure. Witches generally have problems with zombies: a zombie has no mind to read or control or cloud, cannot sicken or suffer from a stroke or heart attack because it is already dead, and cannot be frightened, isn’t slowed down much by having furniture thrown at them, and takes rather a while to burn to the point where it won’t chase you any longer. However, some of the strongest witches were able to keep the infection at bay through sheer magical presence.
The zombie contagion is sufficiently wide-spread to affect all manner of nonhuman species. Although dead ghouls do not arise again, those bitten by what normally would be their meals become zombie ghouls, and while zombie ghouls aren’t bright enough to dig their own tunnels, they will follow one as far as it will go. A few nonconformist Egyptians feel this zombie thing is an anomaly, not something willed by the old Gods, and feel something should be done about it. Several have already been distributed among a number of canopic jars for their pains. Aside from the controversial “collapse of civilization” thing, with its pluses and minuses, zombies have also caused a decline in the population of large animals: as mentioned before, they don’t deliberately pursue them in the way they do humans, but they’re happy enough to devour them when they run into them. This is definitely seen as an annoyance, and the Were-folk cull the zombie population whenever they can.
Things did not go as well for humanity as in “World War Z”, since rather than a slowly expanding plague with a “patient zero”, the Walking Dead arose wherever lightly decayed corpses were not buried deeply or securely enough. The dead – and the infected – were everywhere from the start, and there was no containing them.
The disaster was slow enough that the environmental holocaust people envisioned in scenarios such as Life after People didn't take place: people remembered to metaphorically turn off the lights, usually, before fleeing for still zombie-free areas. And some others took steps to prevent apocalyptic disasters. But a lot of areas are still a ghastly mess: most major cities have burned down, and a number of atomic reactors abandoned in a hurry have suffered meltdowns, and there have been some terrible chemical spillages. Still, the worst might be over. Human population shrinkage seems to be bottoming out, and the number of zombies is not longer increasing .
There are some functioning outposts of government here and there, in the Swiss Alps, in the Rockies, on remote islands (an imperfect refuge: zombies who fall off boats or are washed out to sea by flood shuffle across the ocean floor, their chests caved in and eyes burst from the pressure, but still mobile and hungry), and elsewhere. General Tsien is a murderous SOB, but he’s managed to make Hainan a zombie-free zone and keep any fresh outbreaks suppressed. The US president is fine and dandy with enough canned goods to last a decade, although there’s not much left of the country that elected him. The near- total collapse of trade has not helped the situation: any surviving community too small to maintain the basics of a technological society (which is most of them) has needed to learn how to survive with pre-mechanical agriculture, and fast. The Greenlanders are eating a lot of marine mammals, regardless of endangered species acts, and things became rather grim in Hawaii after the petrol and pineapple ran out.
Most of humanity is living under nasty little dictatorships of one sort of another (a willingness to kill the sick, the old, and those suspected of infection is widely considered a survival advantage). Those that die are decapitated and burned immediately. People don’t go out at night and do not spend their time in hotels and motels and such where no invitation is needed. But with a certain degree of stability having been established (if most often on an early 19th century standard of living), people can actually begin to plan for a more distant future again.
A pirate atomic submarine roams the seas, raiding island communities for supplies. In the skyscrapers of Seattle (which survived long enough for people to shut off the gas, power, and other destructive-if-unattended utilities) a community of rooftop gardeners survives, commuting from building to building by rope ladders, scavenging supplies from the upper stories of buildings whose staircases have been methodically demolished. The shores of Tahiti are patrolled at night by locals bearing torches and heavy skull-crushing clubs, keeping an eye out for anything stumbling ashore.
Human beings have found various ways to explain the situation, from good ol’ political paranoia (secret government bio warfare projects/secret Jewish bio warfare programs) to science fictional (the Aliens did it) to back-to-basics Fundamentalism (the Rapture will be any day, now) to the bizarre (such as the Worshippers of the Rotting God or the We’re Living In the Matrix and the Machines are Sick of Our Shit folks). Several communities of survivors have imploded entirely as a result of ‘doctrinal’ disputes. More rational, science-minded folks remain baffled: whatever the contagion is, it doesn't appear on any type of currently-known medical scan.
The trouble is that there are other things out there than zombies: things which, unlike the zombies, can plan for a distant future just as well as humans. And some of them need humans to survive, too. With per capita feedings going up more than a hundred fold, people are wising up; if zombies, why not vampires? Ghouls have rarely passed for human, although they occasionally give birth to sports that regress to something more passable. The least ghastly are sometimes switched with human babies as a joke, while others, with the aid of extensive makeup, may venture out to do certain business with human beings. Even so, Ghouls remain more a myth than anything else. Although rumors and legends float from Egypt, nobody has ever conclusively returned from an encounter with an Egyptian. The occasional racial prejudice can lead to wild accusations, however.
New Men are gradually emerging from myth as concrete beings, though people still seem to assume that they've got hidden agendas for evil. Which, for some New Men, is not far from the truth. Of course, some New Men have always been around, and are only now revealing themselves, now that they feel more confident that they won't be lynched or experimented upon. Those that had children the natural way would sometimes leave the community and live among normal humans, abandoning their almost-normal children (the odd compounds and energies flowing through the bodies of their mothers produced kids with strange body chemistries, occasional odd deformities and a remarkable resistance to electrocution) and dropping out of sight when their own failure to age at a normal rate caused comment. Others lived among humans, often modified for a more normal look. They traveled, if they can pass for human, by train or bus or car: if not so much, in big, heavy vans with reflective windows, or in ships with Liberian registrations. Most are scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons: it’s in their blood, so to speak.
Witchy-folk are both more ingrained in human communities and feared than before. Witch-hunts and trials aren't unheard of, though more often than not, it's just some poor sod that happened to be doing better than all her neighbors. Every attempt in the history of the witchy folk to mold human history to their will, to create some sort of cult or society to get all the witchy folk marching in one direction, have failed, sabotaged by other witchy folk who disagreed with the project in question. So, up until the zombie apocalypse, they cheated and stole and bullied and cursed and scared the inhabitants of little villages and rural communities and often left town in a hurry. Sometimes they started a war or two, but by and large, they made only small ripples on the stream of human history. Now they're generally adding to the troubles of the existing human communities by energetically meddling in what they consider poor survival policies by screwing with people’s heads, striking leaders they dislike with sickness, etc., often in conflict with other witchy folk with their own ideas of what humans need to be doing to guarantee their survival.
Skin-changers are often blamed for disappearing trading convoys. Older skin-changers do occasionally fall prey to temptation during the wilding time of the full moon, after which the ‘he/she was practically begging to be eaten – hiking in the woods, waving those meaty, chubby arms and legs at me…’ excuse is often heard. Those newly transformed have little or no control over their animal impulses, but change only during a full moon. So travel during the full moon is ill-advised and outright banned in some places.
They are called witchy folk, hoodoo men, conjure women, juju men, obeahs and witches and wizards and warlocks. They are said to have the evil eye and you don’t want them to touch you, either. Unless they marry among themselves, their unique skills aren’t usually carried on, and they often don’t like each other. (How would you like a wife who could read your mind, or a husband who could give you cancer for burning the roast?) Many of their children are born defective in some way or another, and they are more often female than male, male children tending to die young. As a result, they have never been very numerous, pre-apocalypse perhaps 200,000 “true” witchy folk, perhaps another 100,000 with undeveloped powers or too badly malformed to appear in public.
They keep to themselves, sometimes out of sight in small rural communities in the back of beyond, sometimes hidden in the anonymous mass of great slums and urban no-places. They are of various colors and various races, but there is always something odd about their appearance: their eyes don’t seem to blink often enough, their fingers are too long and bony, their teeth too long in their mouths. Often shabby and poorly groomed and weak on personal hygiene, they walk with a certain sneering arrogance: for they consider themselves the Secret Rulers of Mankind. Their powers are varied and various; some can heal, some can cause sickness: some can glimpse the future, others reveal what is hidden; some read minds, others can cloud them. Others can send out psychic apparitions to spy and terrify; some can spy on or manipulate your dreams; some can start fires; a few can fly. A very few can do many of these things, and these are the rulers of their kind – as much as they have any rulers.
It's rumored that the First Witches got their start by making a deal with the "Shadow-Man", a mysterious quasi-religious figure. Many traditions passed down include going on a dream-journey guided by the Shadow-Man and taking The Oath. Thereafter they are made to sign a contract of sorts (in blood, of course) and adopt a new secret name given by their elders. Their connections to their powers run in many flavors, though they are always surrounded by ritual and mysticism. Some have intermediaries or familiars — quasi-animals and queer hybrids , birds-that-aren't-birds and rats-that-aren't-rats — that whisper dark secrets and tasks given by the Shadow-Man.
Getting the witchy folk to agree on anything is like the proverbial herding of cats: they have no armies, save as many as their own as can be bullied and terrified into being followers, and since the witchy folk are scattered far and wide, it’s hard to find recruits in the first place. They have no state, no greater organizational structure. They have no schools; refinement of skills usually take place at the knee of relatives or the local big bully (“warlock” or “sorceress”), although there are a few unpleasant and little-visited temples in Asia where something like an official “apprenticeship” exists. There are famous names throughout the witchy community, news sent by dream or apparition from one little village to another, but every attempt in the history of the witchy folk to mold human history to their will, to create some sort of cult or society to get all the witchy folk marching in one direction, have failed, sabotaged by other witchy folk who disagreed with the project in question. So, up until the zombie apocalypse, they cheated and stole and bullied and cursed and scared the inhabitants of little villages and rural communities and often left town in a hurry. Sometimes they started a war or two, but by and large, they made only small ripples on the stream of human history.
A number of them saw something very bad coming, of course, although the exact nature of what was to come was harder to make out, perhaps because it was so unbelievable. Some killed themselves, others hid far away from the haunts of human beings, others refused to listen to warnings. In the end, they died in great numbers: a zombie has no mind to read or control or cloud, cannot sicken or suffer from a stroke or heart attack because it is already dead, and cannot be frightened, isn’t slowed down much by having furniture thrown at them, and takes rather a while to burn to the point where it won’t chase you any longer. And although some of the strongest were able to keep the infection at bay, they couldn’t really heal themselves from having their intestines ripped out and their heads cracked open for tasty, tasty brains. Those with a gift for foreseeing the future usually managed to get out of Dodge before the shit really hit the fan, but the trouble was that there were very few safe places to run to, even with advanced warning. Those who could fly flew, but to where ?
So about 90% of the witchy folk are dead, too, and they have mostly taken refuge with the surviving humans, where they are adding to the troubles of the existing human communities by energetically meddling in what they consider poor survival policies by screwing with people’s heads, striking leaders they dislike with sickness, etc., often in conflict with other witchy folk with their own ideas of what humans need to be doing to guarantee their survival. Such a degree of involvement in human politics is historically very rare, and reflects the degree to which the witchy-folk community is in a state of panic. Historically, their only predator aside from other witchy folk has been humans, and they’ve always been confident in their ability to keep normal humans baffled and bewildered.
There has long been a truce between the witchy folk and the creatures of the night: although most witchy folk are no match for an ancient vampire or a Were-bear, it’s not safe to antagonize people who most definitely know where the bodies are buried. Some have joined the New Men (the New Men, who hadn’t known about them, were rather surprised, but find their talents rather useful). They do not get along with vampires, do not trust ghouls (besides being unenthused about tunnel life), and really aren’t able to handle the no-food, no-water lifestyle of the Egyptians or the rustic lifestyle of the skin-changers, although some (by certain dark magics) become Were-folk (such people are generally considered posers and are ostracized by both species).
The New Men (New Humans, some annoyed female voices reply: with much of their leadership over a century old, theirs is a conservative society) do not need human beings as a food source. What they want from humans is spare parts. Their Founder did not die in the Arctic as he had claimed to be planning to do. Instead, with books he had stolen from his creator’s library, he sought to apply that old adage, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” And he did succeed in the end, although it took half a century, an annoyed realization that his creator was brighter than he was, and several dozen trials, a number of which had to be mercifully destroyed .
Today, there are close to ten thousand surviving New Men, some of them fourth-generation (creations of the creations of the creations of the Founder). They come in various shapes and sizes, from “traditional” twisted giants to those who (at least with their clothes on) cannot be distinguished from normal men and women. All are superhumanly strong, generally more intelligent, and possessed of a monstrous vitality. That's what happens when you can choose your body's physical makeup. And then there are those who have not considered themselves limited by the basic human design in their self-tinkering. And in some cases, not just “self” tinkering, but the creation of children not even remotely human, which is a divisive topic in the community. Not to mention the pets: the New Men actually have a sort of ASPCA dedicated to prevent the creation of particularly horrid and unhealthy hybrid animals.
Some New Men do make others of their kind uncomfortable, and it’s not the non-human ones which are the worst. Nor is it those who have taken up the modern habit of modifying themselves with cybernetic and mechanical parts instead of organic bits and pieces. Nor is it the death-obsessed ones, who remain fixated on the boundary between living and dead, and who look upon the zombies as a fabulous new research opportunity rather than a catastrophe. No, the ones who creep out their fellow re-animated the most are those who tamper with their own brains to increase their intelligence, a quixotic quest that often leads to madness or worse. The chap with five brains wired together inside one skull is at least entertaining at parties: the sinister lab hidden beneath the Ituri rainforest, where tons of wet, greasy nervous tissue now hangs from a trellis of feeding tubes, is a place where few go voluntarily. But in the end, in all their shapes and sizes, the New Men are in one fundamental way a failure, and the Founder (currently on his third set of limbs and fourth set of organs), in his now increasingly intermittent periods of lucidity (replacing chunks of the brain with chunks from other people’s will only get you so far) knows it.
For although Doctor Frankenstein was a genius when it came to the fundamental wellsprings of life, he didn’t know diddly-squat about genetics, or otherwise he wouldn't have feared to create a female version of his creature: in those cases where the Founder got the procreative organs up and running properly, they failed to produce babies that resembled their parents as opposed to the poor dead saps that provided the genitalia. Not that the children were entirely normal: the odd compounds and energies flowing through the bodies of their mothers produced kids with strange body chemistries, occasional odd deformities and a remarkable resistance to electrocution.
Some of the New Men were created from bits and pieces; others were made from single, relatively intact corpses. Some are the (almost) human children of New Men, slain to be raised again, usually after “habituation” through a childhood of occasional body modification, mechanical implants, and baths in electrified jelly. The exact nature and origin of some members of the community – for instance, brilliant fourth-generation surgeon Fran Madaraki – is quite obscure. The one thing that makes a New Man a New Man rather than a freaky body modification fetishist is that he or she has passed through death’s door and returned. Not something that can be remedied with genetic engineering, and it is essentially a sacred thing to many of the community .
The New Men desirous of descendants thus faced a grim problem: if they had children the natural way, they would either have to leave the community and live among normal humans, abandoning their almost-normal children and dropping out of sight when their failure to age at a normal rate caused comment, or raise their children within the community, and in the end bring them through a dangerous rite of passage and a technological rebirth which occasionally did permanent mental damage or “just” caused irreversible amnesia. If neither of these options was palatable, they could “assemble” families out of the bodies of the dead, although revived dead children would grow slowly, if at all.
Some of the New Men lived among humans, often modified for a more normal look; others lived in isolated, gated communities; others lived in underground hideouts, abandoned and rebuilt sewer systems, etc. (There are occasional problems with the ghouls: the ghouls control much of the Underworld, and a ghoul landlord will charge you an arm and a leg. Monthly.) They traveled, if they could pass for human, by train or bus or car; if not so much, in big, heavy vans with reflective windows, or in ships with Liberian registrations. Most are scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons: it’s in their blood, so to speak. Rifts in the community over whether or not to reveal themselves to normal humanity have led to occasional violence, although powerful social pressures and fear of becoming experimental subjects kept them a thing of urban legend and rumor up until the outbreak of the Zombie Apocalypse.
The New Men are ambiguous about their identity, since although different from normal humans they spring from their flesh and bodies and use the body parts of dead humans to replace bits and pieces as they wear out. Are they something new and superior, or modified humans, or just a form of parasite on humans, like vampires? (They know about vampires, and don’t get along with them at all. They sometimes catch and dissect vampires for study – alive, since they fall apart on death). Most recently, before the apocalypse, they had begun to achieve success in finally finding a way to free themselves from human beings – by the cloning of body parts.
Now, cloning is seen as being essential to prevent extinction through infection losses (although their most skilled surgeons are making good progress in developing new forms of thickened and armored skin) and a loss of new recruits - even those humans which die of natural causes rise again as zombies, eliminating both their supply of spare parts and new members other than their own rebuilt children (and due to the risks involved, a majority of their kind historically have avoided that route). And a zombified corpse cannot be revived, and is not good even for parts. Deliberately killing humans in a properly sterilized environment to produce parts sits poorly with many (and even then, nearly a third still become zombies, having somehow carried the infection past all sterilizing precautions). Others think they are being rather over-optimistic as to how long it will before a cornucopia of organs and limbs spill from the labs.
Even those most disdainful of normal humans were shaken by the zombie apocalypse, which also carried away nearly a third of their own kind – although most are strong enough to crush zombie skulls with a single blow of their fists, and do great slaughter armed with a goodly shaft of iron, they are not immune to infection (although cutting off an infected limb quickly enough often works, and the New Men are fairly blasé about limb replacement. Sufficiently massive doses of electricity also sometimes work as a cure).
The New Men are worried about whatever the vampires are planning: a vampire community no longer constrained by the need to remain in hiding from humans would be a serious threat, and many born-human New Men are not at all happy about their human “cousins” becoming inanimate bloodsacks. On the other hand, some New Men welcome the end of Old Humanity, and feel that once cloning is perfected, they can use some of the nastier biological inventions they have created to wipe out the vampires altogether. Or even, some whisper, the humans as well. Still, some see an opportunity to become saviors and perhaps even rulers of the remnant of humanity, and argue human labor is needed to maintain a technological civilization (the New Men are much more technologically adept than the Vampires, but they’re still not very numerous). Conflict dogs the community, even as their leaders have been communicating with the remaining players .
Interspecies relations, aside from the vampires, generally tends toward neutrality. Some witches have even joined the New Men (the New Men, who hadn’t known about them, were rather surprised, but find their talents rather useful). Skin-Changers claim they can hear the “song of the world”, something New Men and witchy-folk find rather dubious. Not to mention the New Men are a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime challenge even for Were-bears and Were-Tigers. On their part, viewing the New Men as exceedingly un-natural, the Were-folk are definitely a bit dubious about whether they want any alliances with them. So relations are strained, but not hostile between the two.
The skin-changers, or “Were-folk”, are a varied bunch. Were-tigers in Asia, were-panthers in Africa, were-wolves in Europe and North America, were-Jaguars to the south, some were-bears in the Eurasian north. (The were-chupacabra and the were-seal or selkie are almost extinct). Of all the creatures of the night, only the Egyptian Dry Ones have been less threatened by the apocalypse: given their healing abilities, skin-changers are essentially immune to zombie bites, and although a few urban Were-folk were cornered and pulled apart by overwhelming numbers of zombies, the great majority has survived unscathed. Some 250,000 of them survive around the world.
Also, unlike vampires or New Men, the Were-folk can reproduce themselves: aside from being able to pass on their curse with a bite, the curse is usually carried on in the children of two Weres, although it usually fails to manifest until adolescence. In any event, a little childhood nibbling makes for insurance. Some Weres are born, others have Were-hood thrust upon them, and some (by certain dark magics) become Were-folk (such people are generally considered posers). Control over one’s transformation and over ones transformed self varies with age and whether one is of the blood born: elder Were-born can transform at any time and at will, save during the full moon, when they must take their beast forms, and normally have enough self-control to avoid eating people (although they occasionally fall prey to temptation during the wilding time of the full moon, after which the ‘he/she was practically begging to be eaten – hiking in the woods, waving those meaty, chubby arms and legs at me…’ excuse is often heard.) Those newly transformed change only during the full moon, and have little or no control over their animal impulses.
Like vampires, Weres police their community – leaving savaged bodies in areas where predators larger than poodles are nonexistent is firmly discouraged, as is biting perfect strangers and then not eating them. Newby Weres are the major danger of exposure to the community, and Weres preferably prey on wild animals, or cattle and sheep in areas where actual big predators exist. Weres generally live in isolated areas, in the woods and hills, where someone can roam unseen and where few visitors will ask embarrassing questions about the cellar with the steel bars on the door (giving a young Were a place where they can transform without worrying about waking up next day naked in a pile of hobo guts is a common courtesy). They are generally close to nature, and they claim they can hear the “song of the world”, something vampires and New Men and witchy-folk find rather dubious. In any event, only a minority of their kind live in cities, with their lack of green space and non-sapient prey, numerous police forces, and often nosy neighbors.
Weres generally do not avoid eating people out of ethical concerns – they consider the relationship between themselves and humans as a normal predator-prey one – but simply a matter of common sense. One may pick off the isolated buffalo, but one avoids stampeding the herd. Vampires are despised by werewolves as essentially parasites, and they’re pretty much inedible to boot. Ghouls are seen as fair prey on the rare occasions they are seen aboveground, and the New Men are a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime challenge even for Were-bears and Were-Tigers.
The community is highly conflicted about the zombie apocalypse: some see it as a return to a better, greener, mostly-human-unspoiled world, while other, fond of human music, fast food (Were-bears in particular), and other pleasant aspects of civilization, are not fond of the idea of spending the rest of their lives in shacks in the woods. Aside from the controversial “collapse of civilization” thing, with its pluses and minuses, zombies have also caused a decline in the population of large animals: as mentioned before, they don’t deliberately pursue them in the way they do humans, but they’re happy enough to devour them when they run into them. This is definitely seen as a Bad Thing, and the Were-folk cull the zombie population whenever they can. The current situation with the vampires is troublesome: although the humans are prey, many Were-folk are of human origin, and humanity being converted into mere cattle is troubling in itself, as well as definitely indicating that the vampires are getting a bit big for their black, neatly creased britches. As for the exceedingly un-natural New Men, the Were-folk are definitely a bit dubious about whether they want any alliances with them.
Vampires need human blood. Since they depend on the mass of humanity remaining ignorant of them, they keep their numbers low, and ruthlessly cull their own ranks of idiots who want to make as many Children as possible. There are about 50,000 vampires in the world, which makes for a comfortably low percentage of the population being struck with inexplicable attacks of anemia (no actual vampire is dumb enough to leave woppin’ big bite marks on people’s necks) or a small enough percentage of blood bank deposits to be misdirected for nobody to notice.
Vampires also need humans to create new vampires. Vampires are immortal, but fairly frequent new recruits are needed to keep up the population (vampires are always at risk from a dangerous predator: other vampires. They have no empathy for their own kind, and can carry grudges for millennia). Vampires don’t have kids: they do not sparkle. They are perambulating corpses themselves, (if more chatty than the zombie kind) pallid when hungry and pink and swollen when well-fed, smelling of earth and musty decay. They come to life as elemental, savage appetites and although if they live long enough they become wise and powerful, in the end they remain creatures of hunger, born of dead flesh stained with a life of rage or hatred or cruelty buried in bloody and unhallowed ground. No vampire has a soul or a conscience, although some can fake it. They form a society of sorts, a society of egotists with a strong touch of “enlightened” self-interest: the vampire elders are wise enough to realize that they need to hang together or be staked separately. They are rich: as George Hamilton put it, they’ve all put a little away for a long time. (Vampires loved the invention of compound interest). Human servants used to be easily available through a bit of hypnosis and the lure of immortality. Some vampires have enough of a notion of Fair Play and Good Form to wonder if they should let people know that becoming a vampire is less of a personal transformation and more of a soulless elemental hunger puppeteering their corpses and memories. They then laugh at their own silliness, and forget the idea .
The party is over. There are no more vampire movies to make fun of, the electricity is off in most places, and their human servants have mostly been lost to a different form of nigh-immortality than that promised them. Living humans now are much rarer, and rather better protected, better armed and rather more alert. It is hard to feed on them, and those that die are decapitated and burned immediately. They don’t go out at night and do not spend their time in hotels and motels and such where no invitation is needed. And of course, with per capita feedings going up more than a hundred fold, people are wising up: if zombies, why not vampires?
Fortunately, vampire doctors – and there are some – have a possible solution to the mass starvation facing vampire-kind. For some time, vampires have been working on creating a permanent backup supply, by mastering the trick of keeping humans in induced comas alive for decades to be “milked” as needed. Due to the unpleasantness of possible discovery, these projects were kept limited in scope – but now these secure, underground facilities, with their built-in nuclear power supplies, are a shining hope for the future. But they need to be greatly enlarged, and to do this a lot of labor will be needed – labor which will in turn provide the occupants of the new facilities when the laboring part is done .
So, Vampire archivists are busy compiling lists of all the human refuges and hideaways, the size of their populations, and the strength of their defenses. Of course, a breeding population will eventually be needed, but there is no need for either of the parents to be conscious for pregnancy to take place – and as for raising the children, it’s quite remarkable what you can do to a child’s brain by careful oxygen starvation early in development. A few vampires are raising certain questions about the logic of a high-tech, no-human-input approach to human-farming when there are too few vampires to maintain a high-tech society in the long run. Cautious questions: when it comes to differences of opinion, many elder vampires consider decapitation a valid rhetorical ploy .
The situation is made worse by the zombies themselves. Whatever the contagious element is, viral, nano-technological, magical, or the-absent-God-knows-what, it flourishes in the bodies of the dead – and a vampire is, of course, a dead body. And a zombie will bite a vampire, if it finds one: never mind that the flesh from an old vampire soon turns to dust in their mouths. Since a vampire is already dead, it can’t kill him – but it turns his flesh grey and puffy, robs him of his ability to transform, and soon adds a craving for human flesh to that for blood. The vampire retains his mind, but has become, in the eyes of other vampires, a corrupted, lower creature, one which is, furthermore, contagious – in other words, a leper. The zombie-vamps soon find that their friends have moved their coffins and left no forwarding address, and he or she no longer gets invited to parties. The only way to stave off the grim transformation is by use of a vampire’s principal healing agent – human blood, and lots of it. Say three or four good-sized human bodies worth of it, over a few days. And it’s hard to get hold of that many humans in a hurry nowadays. Of course, older and more powerful vampires can just turn into mist or a cloud of bats to avoid pesky zombies. But the damn things are everywhere, and seem to have a curious ability to suddenly spring out of just the last place you expected one to be.
Vampires have generally poor relationships with other species. Vampires and ghouls get along alright: vampire flesh, after all, is inedible to ghouls. New Men know about vampires, and don’t get along with them at all. They sometimes catch and dissect vampires for study – alive, since they fall apart on death. The New Men are worried about whatever the vampires are planning: a vampire community no longer constrained by the need to remain in hiding from humans would be a serious threat, and many born-human New Men are not at all happy about their human “cousins” becoming inanimate bloodsacks. On the other hand, some New Men welcome the end of Old Humanity, but even so, most would rather not see a new vampire hegemony. Witchy-folk do not get along with vampires, something to do with the clash of two naturally egotistical personalities. Were-folk despise vampires as essentially parasites, feeding on humanity without contributing to nature. They view the current situation with the vampires as troublesome: although the humans are prey to the were-folk, many are of human origin, and humanity being converted into mere cattle is troubling in itself , as well as definitely indicating that the vampires are getting a bit big for their black, neatly creased britches.
Also deep under the earth are the ones below Egypt, over a million dry and rustling beings wrapped in cerements, those who worship Gods older than the Pyramids in voiceless ceremonies conducted in vast halls miles below the desert sands. At times by twisting roads they ascent to the desert night, emerging from the sand like cicadas preparing to molt, and perform odd rites directed at certain dim stars before returning to the abyss. They are led by two of the oldest mummies under the sands: the great King Khephren and the terrible Queen Nitocris. These two rulers periodically make rounds of the ancient tombs, searching for freshly undead mummies, and guiding half-man, half-beast experiments from a forgotten dynasty into their legions of worshipers. The rest - the whole, human remains, are required to serve the older Gods for a mere three-hundred and thirty-three years, after which their memories of service are reduced to vague impressions and uneasy dreams. Following this period, they are allowed to either return to their places of rest, which many do, or serve the First Kingdom in other ways .
They aren't bothered by zombies, for even if a confused zombie were to stumble into their dark halls and try to take a bite out of flesh as hard as wood and dry as the desert sand, the effect would be essentially nil. Those shaped like men and those shaped like cats and ibises and baboons and those shaped like impossible mixtures will go about their business undisturbed, after the minor annoyance has been pulled into many small pieces and trampled underfoot again and again as the chariot of Ra wheels above in the sky of Egypt .
It used to be that now and then one of the lesser ones which lie far closer to the world above was dispatched to take vengeance on the desecrator of a tomb or the taker of a sacred artifact, but this is no longer necessary, for those who shamble across the sands of the desert in an eternal search for the flesh of the living have no interest whatsoever in the science of archeology. Now those that choose to remain awake are used for masonry-repairs and accountants deep underground, or sacrifice-gatherers above ground .
There are of course a few nonconformists, as in every society: one used to own a small bookstore in Pinsk, and there is general embarrassment over the chap who took on human form to pursue the supposed reincarnation of his beloved, of all the silly things. They are tolerated by-and-large, as the King and Queen's primary concern are the fulfillment of rites and rituals belowground. A few of these nonconformists, however, feel this zombie thing is an anomaly, not something willed by the old Gods, and feel something should be done about it. Several have already been distributed among a number of canopic jars for their pains .
So they continue their nightly rites, at intervals retiring to lie unmoving on stone slabs until the next step in the eternal cycle, which will continue until the world above has perished and the old gods arise again. As far as they're concerned, these other supernatural upstarts can have the world — above and below. So long as they can continue their dark rites, nothing matters. After all, in the end, the world belongs to their gods, not to any creature, mortal or immortal.
Pallid, twisted parodies of humankind, with dog-like faces, rubbery skin slick with fetid slime, yellow fangs, red eyes, and black claws, Ghouls have rarely passed for human - although they occasionally give birth to sorts that regress to something more passable. The least ghastly are sometimes switched with human babies as a joke, while others, with the aid of extensive makeup, may venture out to do certain business with human beings (concealment is unneeded in doing business with other beings of the night). They have their own odd culture and art, and have squirreled away a vast store of human knowledge and literature, treasures and sacred artifacts, which lie piled in heaps in deep caves dimly green-lit with phosphorescent fungi, amid drifts of bones human and otherwise. Human sacred literature is surprisingly popular, often read for dinnertime amusement over a properly aged meal, for they are carrion-eaters. It's not fit for a Ghoul's consumption if it hasn't started to rot, after all .
They have long lived beneath human cities, particularly under graveyards and slaughterhouses, in dark and cramped tunnels (they are quite fond of the extensive abandoned underground diggings in New York) and crack jokes among themselves about the services they perform in getting rid of excess homeless people and abandoned babies, along with a fair part of the cat, dog and rat populations (ghouls prefer well-aged human flesh, but they aren’t too picky when hungry enough). The increased popularity of cremation is an annoyance, but like vampires, the ghouls are few and humans many, and there are enough people being buried the old-fashioned way, added to animals and slaughterhouse offal to support what used to be close to 500,000 ghouls world-wide .
Emphasis given to “used” to, since although dead ghouls do not arise again, those bitten by what normally would be their meals become zombie ghouls, and while zombie ghouls aren’t bright enough to dig their own tunnels, they will follow one as far as it will go. It is uncertain how many of ghoul-kind has perished, but those who survive have burrowed deep and closed off their tunnels behind them. What, if anything, they live off of in these lightless abysses is unknown, although vampires (vampires and ghouls get along alright: vampire flesh, after all, is inedible) and others which have talked to them report ghouls claim a sacred relationship with ancient beings which gnaw at the guts of the Earth, deep, deep below any mine built by humanity.
The ghouls control much of the Underworld, and a ghoul landlord will charge potential renters an arm and a leg. Monthly. Witches do not trust ghouls, and such mistrust runs both ways. Generally ghouls are terrified of were-folk, as Ghouls are seen as fair prey on the rare occasions they are seen aboveground. If anything, the Ghouls are closest to the Egyptians, sharing a common sort of lifestyle. A very few Ghouls have even witnessed the Egyptians' sacred rites, and vice versa. They even share the same attitude toward surface-dwellers: who cares what they do? Although truth be told, the Ghouls are much more connected to the surface, relying on dead animals for food, and the Egyptians simply won't let anybody to be truly in on their worship and lifestyle.
Rules:
Useful Notes:
More than just Zombies go "bump" in the night...
The zombie apocalypse happened ten years ago. 99% of humanity is dead, but the species lives on. In enclaves and isolated spots, we survive. On mountain-tops and tropical islands, in arctic wastes and underground bunkers, we survive. And for the first time, there's a glimpse of hope. The hordes don't appear to be increasing in number. If we can hang on, we can reclaim the cities, spread back into fertile and easily-farmed lands, and rebuild. That is, if the other horrors lurking in the night don't beat us to it.
It came without warning. One day was normal, and the next featured all the dead rising from graves simultaneously. Millions died in that first wave of attacks, and then many of those millions joined their undead brethren. Humanity knows no cure. The recently dead are burned, and where fires are ill-advised, shot in the head. Oftentimes, both. Heavy sleepers have taken to wearing signs around their necks to avoid accidents. The internet is fragmented, and if you're lucky enough to have electricity, the only access to electronic information is from whatever happened to be stored on it at the time. Most places are cut off except for the brave or insane wandering traders and caravans full of the desperate.
As devastating as the apocalypse was to us, it seemed to have finally tipped the balance and unveiled the creatures of the night. Strange traders come from the far north, supernaturally strong and quick-witted, but awkward in gait and misshapen. Every village has rumors of creepy men and women that cursed this or that household, or rules the mind of a distant city's leader with malevolent purpose. A plague of anemia creeps across continents, and some whisper that entire villages have disappeared overnight. Strange flittering noises, as if from enormous rats, haunt underground bunkers, and pets disappear to the earth. Large monsters stalk the wilderness, assaulting unwary caravans and traders. And from Africa comes tale of strange cults in the desert sands.
This is a horror-based, classic "save the world" adventuring sort of RP. You'd start in the small human village of Losille (note that you don't have to play a human) at the foothills of the rockies in the southwestern United States.
Vampires - Territorial bloodeaters that would be mindles but for their immortality; currently considering a technological human farming scheme (involving keeping humans in comas and breeding them while they're still asleep); keeping tabs and records on all the human settlements; led by a very stodgy "old-blood"; zombies are a nuiscence to them at worst, as even those bitten retain their intelligence (if they're old enough to have intelligence), though zombie-vampires are pariahs.
Ghouls - underground carrion-eaters, having some sort of relationship with "giant ancient worms" deep beneath the earth. Seriously endangered and some communities nigh-unheard of since they holed up from the zombies. Still, though, they remain lords of the underworld, and tend to charge rent for anyone seeking shelter there.
"Egyptians" - They're the inspiration for Egyptian gods, live very deep underground, and mostly only do confusing and seemingly pointless rituals if they're awake at all, but tend to annihilate anything directly in their way; also called upon to defend tombs from desecration and take the duty seriously. A few nonconformists are eager to do something about this whole zombie problem, but are "discouraged". Pretty immune to the zombies on the whole, though; something about their skin causes zombie bites to barely pierce the flesh at all.
New Men - Mary Shelley's Frankensteins. Under serious threat from these damned zombies, as they no longer have a means of reproduction (hard to use rotting flesh as an arm), and are susceptible to the contagion themselves. On the other hand, they're quite strong and intelligent, and willing to hack off bitten limbs, so few get infected. They're working on cloning (of limbs) to fix the lack of supply. Rather distressed by the vampires, and split between wiping out the vampires (and humanity, as well), or being humanity's saviors. Very divided on this issue. Tend to be a bit of body-mod afficianados, too. There are quite a few nonhuman-shaped New Men wandering about.
Witchy-Folk - Folktale witches. They egotistically believe that they've had a hand in Mankind's destiny (they haven't). "Herding stray cats" is a good indication of the community's powers of organizaton. Because of these two traits, they're often the source of cults and secret societies. Very susceptible to the zombies; 90% are dead. Mostly taking refuge in/hiding within/enthusiastically meddling in the remaining human communities. A few took up with the New Men, much to the shock of the New Men, who didn't know they even existed. Mostly hate vampires and don't trust ghouls. Long-standing truce with the other aberrations, which is holding, for the moment, but they're lack of numbers may change this.
Skin-Changers - Green-loving were-____ (wolf, bear, tiger, jaguar) hippies, partly upset and partly pleased with the zombie apocalypse. Pleased because Man can no longer pollute the Earth, but upset because the conveniences of Man's society (ex: Fast Food, indoor plumbing) are gone. Not that the zombies can kill them in any meaningful numbers. Not pleased with the vampires' plans. Dubious toward the New Men.
Species: Details
The number of zombies is not longer increasing. Rather than a slowly expanding plague with a “patient zero”, the Walking Dead arose wherever lightly decayed corpses were not buried deeply or securely enough. Some of the more desolate parts of the Sahara and the interior of Antarctica seem to be “clean”: one can feel (relatively) safe in the vicinity of a corpse in such areas. If bodies are frozen immediately at death, they do not become a problem. Sterilization still results in nearly a third of corpses still becoming zombies, having somehow carried the infection past all precautions. Of course, zombies also spread infections in the more traditional way - through bodily-fluid exchange. And with a zombie's strange fascination with delicious brains, that exchange usually happens in the form of bites.
The zombie contagion is exclusive to humans and higher primates (zombie gorillas are not something you want to meet). They're generally are predators on their (living) kind: a zombie will soon lose interest in chasing after a deer, although they are happy enough to munch on any animals that they happen to actually lay hands on. Wee creatures such as mice and insects and small birds are generally ignored entirely, apparently passing right through whatever sort of crude cognitive filter zombies use to distinguish prey from rocks, machinery, clothing store dummies and other zombies. Zombies generally have poor eyesight due to eyeball erosion (zombies don’t blink), but their sense of smell and hearing are excellent, and they can perceive movement even if their eyes resemble desert sun-fractured plastic. Trying to blend in with zombies is difficult: they can pick up any oddness in one’s shuffling, and it takes a bird-call expert to successfully mimic zombie moans. And the only way to deal with the smell issue is to smear oneself with zombie parts, which has its own dangers .
Whatever the contagious element is, viral, nano-technological, magical, or the-absent-God-knows-what, it flourishes in the bodies of the dead – such as vampires. And a zombie will bite a vampire, if it finds one: never mind that the flesh from an old vampire soon turns to dust in their mouths. Since a vampire is already dead, it can’t kill him – but it turns his flesh grey and puffy, robs him of his ability to transform, and soon adds a craving for human flesh to that for blood. The vampire retains his mind, but has become, in the eyes of other vampires, a corrupted, lower creature, one which is, furthermore, contagious – in other words, a leper. The zombie-vamps soon find that their friends have moved their coffins and left no forwarding address, and he or she no longer gets invited to parties.
Zombies decay, but, as mentioned, slowly. They turn grey and puffy and their hair falls out and their eyes glaze over, but they rot reluctantly: whatever transforms them makes them unpalatable to bacteria (as well as larger animals: no scavenger has ever been seen feeding on a decapitated zombie), the tar-like, greenish-black stuff that oozes slowly from an injured zombie instead of blood making a quite effective germicide. Weather is a more effective destroyer: in areas of near-continual rainfall, zombies slowly erode away through full-body trench-foot. In hot deserts, zombies dry out and (slowly) flake away. Still, even under best-case scenarios, it will take years for the zombie to decay to the point of immobilization: three years after the outbreak, many zombies in moderately cool, moderately moist climates looked almost factory-fresh.
The largest zombie concentrations are generally along shorelines: zombies tend to drift downhill, but find water, especially if big waves are involved, too resistive a media to wander into too far if there is no prey in sight. Zombies who fall off boats or are washed out to sea by flood shuffle across the ocean floor, their chests caved in and eyes burst from the pressure, but still mobile and hungry. However, zombies in cities (those which haven’t burned down) often sort of end up stuck, wandering slowly around apartments and going in and out of buildings for months without ever getting out of the city: the smell of people still clings to the furnishings.
Although humanity knows of no cure, the other species have a few methods of staving off infection. The A vampire’s principal healing agent – human blood, and lots of it, works as a cure in most zombie-vamp cases. Say three or four good-sized human bodies worth of it, over a few days. But it’s hard to get hold of that many humans in a hurry nowadays. Of course, older and more powerful vampires can just turn into mist or a cloud of bats to avoid pesky zombies. But the damn things are everywhere, and seem to have a curious ability to suddenly spring out of just the last place you expected one to be. The Egyptians aren't bothered by zombies, for even if a confused zombie were to stumble into their dark halls and try to take a bite out of flesh as hard as wood and dry as the desert sand, the effect would be essentially nil. New Men are not immune to infection, although cutting off an infected limb quickly enough often works, and they're fairly blasé about limb replacement. Sufficiently massive doses of electricity also sometimes work as a cure. Witches generally have problems with zombies: a zombie has no mind to read or control or cloud, cannot sicken or suffer from a stroke or heart attack because it is already dead, and cannot be frightened, isn’t slowed down much by having furniture thrown at them, and takes rather a while to burn to the point where it won’t chase you any longer. However, some of the strongest witches were able to keep the infection at bay through sheer magical presence.
The zombie contagion is sufficiently wide-spread to affect all manner of nonhuman species. Although dead ghouls do not arise again, those bitten by what normally would be their meals become zombie ghouls, and while zombie ghouls aren’t bright enough to dig their own tunnels, they will follow one as far as it will go. A few nonconformist Egyptians feel this zombie thing is an anomaly, not something willed by the old Gods, and feel something should be done about it. Several have already been distributed among a number of canopic jars for their pains. Aside from the controversial “collapse of civilization” thing, with its pluses and minuses, zombies have also caused a decline in the population of large animals: as mentioned before, they don’t deliberately pursue them in the way they do humans, but they’re happy enough to devour them when they run into them. This is definitely seen as an annoyance, and the Were-folk cull the zombie population whenever they can.
Things did not go as well for humanity as in “World War Z”, since rather than a slowly expanding plague with a “patient zero”, the Walking Dead arose wherever lightly decayed corpses were not buried deeply or securely enough. The dead – and the infected – were everywhere from the start, and there was no containing them.
The disaster was slow enough that the environmental holocaust people envisioned in scenarios such as Life after People didn't take place: people remembered to metaphorically turn off the lights, usually, before fleeing for still zombie-free areas. And some others took steps to prevent apocalyptic disasters. But a lot of areas are still a ghastly mess: most major cities have burned down, and a number of atomic reactors abandoned in a hurry have suffered meltdowns, and there have been some terrible chemical spillages. Still, the worst might be over. Human population shrinkage seems to be bottoming out, and the number of zombies is not longer increasing .
There are some functioning outposts of government here and there, in the Swiss Alps, in the Rockies, on remote islands (an imperfect refuge: zombies who fall off boats or are washed out to sea by flood shuffle across the ocean floor, their chests caved in and eyes burst from the pressure, but still mobile and hungry), and elsewhere. General Tsien is a murderous SOB, but he’s managed to make Hainan a zombie-free zone and keep any fresh outbreaks suppressed. The US president is fine and dandy with enough canned goods to last a decade, although there’s not much left of the country that elected him. The near- total collapse of trade has not helped the situation: any surviving community too small to maintain the basics of a technological society (which is most of them) has needed to learn how to survive with pre-mechanical agriculture, and fast. The Greenlanders are eating a lot of marine mammals, regardless of endangered species acts, and things became rather grim in Hawaii after the petrol and pineapple ran out.
Most of humanity is living under nasty little dictatorships of one sort of another (a willingness to kill the sick, the old, and those suspected of infection is widely considered a survival advantage). Those that die are decapitated and burned immediately. People don’t go out at night and do not spend their time in hotels and motels and such where no invitation is needed. But with a certain degree of stability having been established (if most often on an early 19th century standard of living), people can actually begin to plan for a more distant future again.
A pirate atomic submarine roams the seas, raiding island communities for supplies. In the skyscrapers of Seattle (which survived long enough for people to shut off the gas, power, and other destructive-if-unattended utilities) a community of rooftop gardeners survives, commuting from building to building by rope ladders, scavenging supplies from the upper stories of buildings whose staircases have been methodically demolished. The shores of Tahiti are patrolled at night by locals bearing torches and heavy skull-crushing clubs, keeping an eye out for anything stumbling ashore.
Human beings have found various ways to explain the situation, from good ol’ political paranoia (secret government bio warfare projects/secret Jewish bio warfare programs) to science fictional (the Aliens did it) to back-to-basics Fundamentalism (the Rapture will be any day, now) to the bizarre (such as the Worshippers of the Rotting God or the We’re Living In the Matrix and the Machines are Sick of Our Shit folks). Several communities of survivors have imploded entirely as a result of ‘doctrinal’ disputes. More rational, science-minded folks remain baffled: whatever the contagion is, it doesn't appear on any type of currently-known medical scan.
The trouble is that there are other things out there than zombies: things which, unlike the zombies, can plan for a distant future just as well as humans. And some of them need humans to survive, too. With per capita feedings going up more than a hundred fold, people are wising up; if zombies, why not vampires? Ghouls have rarely passed for human, although they occasionally give birth to sports that regress to something more passable. The least ghastly are sometimes switched with human babies as a joke, while others, with the aid of extensive makeup, may venture out to do certain business with human beings. Even so, Ghouls remain more a myth than anything else. Although rumors and legends float from Egypt, nobody has ever conclusively returned from an encounter with an Egyptian. The occasional racial prejudice can lead to wild accusations, however.
New Men are gradually emerging from myth as concrete beings, though people still seem to assume that they've got hidden agendas for evil. Which, for some New Men, is not far from the truth. Of course, some New Men have always been around, and are only now revealing themselves, now that they feel more confident that they won't be lynched or experimented upon. Those that had children the natural way would sometimes leave the community and live among normal humans, abandoning their almost-normal children (the odd compounds and energies flowing through the bodies of their mothers produced kids with strange body chemistries, occasional odd deformities and a remarkable resistance to electrocution) and dropping out of sight when their own failure to age at a normal rate caused comment. Others lived among humans, often modified for a more normal look. They traveled, if they can pass for human, by train or bus or car: if not so much, in big, heavy vans with reflective windows, or in ships with Liberian registrations. Most are scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons: it’s in their blood, so to speak.
Witchy-folk are both more ingrained in human communities and feared than before. Witch-hunts and trials aren't unheard of, though more often than not, it's just some poor sod that happened to be doing better than all her neighbors. Every attempt in the history of the witchy folk to mold human history to their will, to create some sort of cult or society to get all the witchy folk marching in one direction, have failed, sabotaged by other witchy folk who disagreed with the project in question. So, up until the zombie apocalypse, they cheated and stole and bullied and cursed and scared the inhabitants of little villages and rural communities and often left town in a hurry. Sometimes they started a war or two, but by and large, they made only small ripples on the stream of human history. Now they're generally adding to the troubles of the existing human communities by energetically meddling in what they consider poor survival policies by screwing with people’s heads, striking leaders they dislike with sickness, etc., often in conflict with other witchy folk with their own ideas of what humans need to be doing to guarantee their survival.
Skin-changers are often blamed for disappearing trading convoys. Older skin-changers do occasionally fall prey to temptation during the wilding time of the full moon, after which the ‘he/she was practically begging to be eaten – hiking in the woods, waving those meaty, chubby arms and legs at me…’ excuse is often heard. Those newly transformed have little or no control over their animal impulses, but change only during a full moon. So travel during the full moon is ill-advised and outright banned in some places.
They are called witchy folk, hoodoo men, conjure women, juju men, obeahs and witches and wizards and warlocks. They are said to have the evil eye and you don’t want them to touch you, either. Unless they marry among themselves, their unique skills aren’t usually carried on, and they often don’t like each other. (How would you like a wife who could read your mind, or a husband who could give you cancer for burning the roast?) Many of their children are born defective in some way or another, and they are more often female than male, male children tending to die young. As a result, they have never been very numerous, pre-apocalypse perhaps 200,000 “true” witchy folk, perhaps another 100,000 with undeveloped powers or too badly malformed to appear in public.
They keep to themselves, sometimes out of sight in small rural communities in the back of beyond, sometimes hidden in the anonymous mass of great slums and urban no-places. They are of various colors and various races, but there is always something odd about their appearance: their eyes don’t seem to blink often enough, their fingers are too long and bony, their teeth too long in their mouths. Often shabby and poorly groomed and weak on personal hygiene, they walk with a certain sneering arrogance: for they consider themselves the Secret Rulers of Mankind. Their powers are varied and various; some can heal, some can cause sickness: some can glimpse the future, others reveal what is hidden; some read minds, others can cloud them. Others can send out psychic apparitions to spy and terrify; some can spy on or manipulate your dreams; some can start fires; a few can fly. A very few can do many of these things, and these are the rulers of their kind – as much as they have any rulers.
It's rumored that the First Witches got their start by making a deal with the "Shadow-Man", a mysterious quasi-religious figure. Many traditions passed down include going on a dream-journey guided by the Shadow-Man and taking The Oath. Thereafter they are made to sign a contract of sorts (in blood, of course) and adopt a new secret name given by their elders. Their connections to their powers run in many flavors, though they are always surrounded by ritual and mysticism. Some have intermediaries or familiars — quasi-animals and queer hybrids , birds-that-aren't-birds and rats-that-aren't-rats — that whisper dark secrets and tasks given by the Shadow-Man.
Getting the witchy folk to agree on anything is like the proverbial herding of cats: they have no armies, save as many as their own as can be bullied and terrified into being followers, and since the witchy folk are scattered far and wide, it’s hard to find recruits in the first place. They have no state, no greater organizational structure. They have no schools; refinement of skills usually take place at the knee of relatives or the local big bully (“warlock” or “sorceress”), although there are a few unpleasant and little-visited temples in Asia where something like an official “apprenticeship” exists. There are famous names throughout the witchy community, news sent by dream or apparition from one little village to another, but every attempt in the history of the witchy folk to mold human history to their will, to create some sort of cult or society to get all the witchy folk marching in one direction, have failed, sabotaged by other witchy folk who disagreed with the project in question. So, up until the zombie apocalypse, they cheated and stole and bullied and cursed and scared the inhabitants of little villages and rural communities and often left town in a hurry. Sometimes they started a war or two, but by and large, they made only small ripples on the stream of human history.
A number of them saw something very bad coming, of course, although the exact nature of what was to come was harder to make out, perhaps because it was so unbelievable. Some killed themselves, others hid far away from the haunts of human beings, others refused to listen to warnings. In the end, they died in great numbers: a zombie has no mind to read or control or cloud, cannot sicken or suffer from a stroke or heart attack because it is already dead, and cannot be frightened, isn’t slowed down much by having furniture thrown at them, and takes rather a while to burn to the point where it won’t chase you any longer. And although some of the strongest were able to keep the infection at bay, they couldn’t really heal themselves from having their intestines ripped out and their heads cracked open for tasty, tasty brains. Those with a gift for foreseeing the future usually managed to get out of Dodge before the shit really hit the fan, but the trouble was that there were very few safe places to run to, even with advanced warning. Those who could fly flew, but to where ?
So about 90% of the witchy folk are dead, too, and they have mostly taken refuge with the surviving humans, where they are adding to the troubles of the existing human communities by energetically meddling in what they consider poor survival policies by screwing with people’s heads, striking leaders they dislike with sickness, etc., often in conflict with other witchy folk with their own ideas of what humans need to be doing to guarantee their survival. Such a degree of involvement in human politics is historically very rare, and reflects the degree to which the witchy-folk community is in a state of panic. Historically, their only predator aside from other witchy folk has been humans, and they’ve always been confident in their ability to keep normal humans baffled and bewildered.
There has long been a truce between the witchy folk and the creatures of the night: although most witchy folk are no match for an ancient vampire or a Were-bear, it’s not safe to antagonize people who most definitely know where the bodies are buried. Some have joined the New Men (the New Men, who hadn’t known about them, were rather surprised, but find their talents rather useful). They do not get along with vampires, do not trust ghouls (besides being unenthused about tunnel life), and really aren’t able to handle the no-food, no-water lifestyle of the Egyptians or the rustic lifestyle of the skin-changers, although some (by certain dark magics) become Were-folk (such people are generally considered posers and are ostracized by both species).
The New Men (New Humans, some annoyed female voices reply: with much of their leadership over a century old, theirs is a conservative society) do not need human beings as a food source. What they want from humans is spare parts. Their Founder did not die in the Arctic as he had claimed to be planning to do. Instead, with books he had stolen from his creator’s library, he sought to apply that old adage, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” And he did succeed in the end, although it took half a century, an annoyed realization that his creator was brighter than he was, and several dozen trials, a number of which had to be mercifully destroyed .
Today, there are close to ten thousand surviving New Men, some of them fourth-generation (creations of the creations of the creations of the Founder). They come in various shapes and sizes, from “traditional” twisted giants to those who (at least with their clothes on) cannot be distinguished from normal men and women. All are superhumanly strong, generally more intelligent, and possessed of a monstrous vitality. That's what happens when you can choose your body's physical makeup. And then there are those who have not considered themselves limited by the basic human design in their self-tinkering. And in some cases, not just “self” tinkering, but the creation of children not even remotely human, which is a divisive topic in the community. Not to mention the pets: the New Men actually have a sort of ASPCA dedicated to prevent the creation of particularly horrid and unhealthy hybrid animals.
Some New Men do make others of their kind uncomfortable, and it’s not the non-human ones which are the worst. Nor is it those who have taken up the modern habit of modifying themselves with cybernetic and mechanical parts instead of organic bits and pieces. Nor is it the death-obsessed ones, who remain fixated on the boundary between living and dead, and who look upon the zombies as a fabulous new research opportunity rather than a catastrophe. No, the ones who creep out their fellow re-animated the most are those who tamper with their own brains to increase their intelligence, a quixotic quest that often leads to madness or worse. The chap with five brains wired together inside one skull is at least entertaining at parties: the sinister lab hidden beneath the Ituri rainforest, where tons of wet, greasy nervous tissue now hangs from a trellis of feeding tubes, is a place where few go voluntarily. But in the end, in all their shapes and sizes, the New Men are in one fundamental way a failure, and the Founder (currently on his third set of limbs and fourth set of organs), in his now increasingly intermittent periods of lucidity (replacing chunks of the brain with chunks from other people’s will only get you so far) knows it.
For although Doctor Frankenstein was a genius when it came to the fundamental wellsprings of life, he didn’t know diddly-squat about genetics, or otherwise he wouldn't have feared to create a female version of his creature: in those cases where the Founder got the procreative organs up and running properly, they failed to produce babies that resembled their parents as opposed to the poor dead saps that provided the genitalia. Not that the children were entirely normal: the odd compounds and energies flowing through the bodies of their mothers produced kids with strange body chemistries, occasional odd deformities and a remarkable resistance to electrocution.
Some of the New Men were created from bits and pieces; others were made from single, relatively intact corpses. Some are the (almost) human children of New Men, slain to be raised again, usually after “habituation” through a childhood of occasional body modification, mechanical implants, and baths in electrified jelly. The exact nature and origin of some members of the community – for instance, brilliant fourth-generation surgeon Fran Madaraki – is quite obscure. The one thing that makes a New Man a New Man rather than a freaky body modification fetishist is that he or she has passed through death’s door and returned. Not something that can be remedied with genetic engineering, and it is essentially a sacred thing to many of the community .
The New Men desirous of descendants thus faced a grim problem: if they had children the natural way, they would either have to leave the community and live among normal humans, abandoning their almost-normal children and dropping out of sight when their failure to age at a normal rate caused comment, or raise their children within the community, and in the end bring them through a dangerous rite of passage and a technological rebirth which occasionally did permanent mental damage or “just” caused irreversible amnesia. If neither of these options was palatable, they could “assemble” families out of the bodies of the dead, although revived dead children would grow slowly, if at all.
Some of the New Men lived among humans, often modified for a more normal look; others lived in isolated, gated communities; others lived in underground hideouts, abandoned and rebuilt sewer systems, etc. (There are occasional problems with the ghouls: the ghouls control much of the Underworld, and a ghoul landlord will charge you an arm and a leg. Monthly.) They traveled, if they could pass for human, by train or bus or car; if not so much, in big, heavy vans with reflective windows, or in ships with Liberian registrations. Most are scientists, engineers, doctors, surgeons: it’s in their blood, so to speak. Rifts in the community over whether or not to reveal themselves to normal humanity have led to occasional violence, although powerful social pressures and fear of becoming experimental subjects kept them a thing of urban legend and rumor up until the outbreak of the Zombie Apocalypse.
The New Men are ambiguous about their identity, since although different from normal humans they spring from their flesh and bodies and use the body parts of dead humans to replace bits and pieces as they wear out. Are they something new and superior, or modified humans, or just a form of parasite on humans, like vampires? (They know about vampires, and don’t get along with them at all. They sometimes catch and dissect vampires for study – alive, since they fall apart on death). Most recently, before the apocalypse, they had begun to achieve success in finally finding a way to free themselves from human beings – by the cloning of body parts.
Now, cloning is seen as being essential to prevent extinction through infection losses (although their most skilled surgeons are making good progress in developing new forms of thickened and armored skin) and a loss of new recruits - even those humans which die of natural causes rise again as zombies, eliminating both their supply of spare parts and new members other than their own rebuilt children (and due to the risks involved, a majority of their kind historically have avoided that route). And a zombified corpse cannot be revived, and is not good even for parts. Deliberately killing humans in a properly sterilized environment to produce parts sits poorly with many (and even then, nearly a third still become zombies, having somehow carried the infection past all sterilizing precautions). Others think they are being rather over-optimistic as to how long it will before a cornucopia of organs and limbs spill from the labs.
Even those most disdainful of normal humans were shaken by the zombie apocalypse, which also carried away nearly a third of their own kind – although most are strong enough to crush zombie skulls with a single blow of their fists, and do great slaughter armed with a goodly shaft of iron, they are not immune to infection (although cutting off an infected limb quickly enough often works, and the New Men are fairly blasé about limb replacement. Sufficiently massive doses of electricity also sometimes work as a cure).
The New Men are worried about whatever the vampires are planning: a vampire community no longer constrained by the need to remain in hiding from humans would be a serious threat, and many born-human New Men are not at all happy about their human “cousins” becoming inanimate bloodsacks. On the other hand, some New Men welcome the end of Old Humanity, and feel that once cloning is perfected, they can use some of the nastier biological inventions they have created to wipe out the vampires altogether. Or even, some whisper, the humans as well. Still, some see an opportunity to become saviors and perhaps even rulers of the remnant of humanity, and argue human labor is needed to maintain a technological civilization (the New Men are much more technologically adept than the Vampires, but they’re still not very numerous). Conflict dogs the community, even as their leaders have been communicating with the remaining players .
Interspecies relations, aside from the vampires, generally tends toward neutrality. Some witches have even joined the New Men (the New Men, who hadn’t known about them, were rather surprised, but find their talents rather useful). Skin-Changers claim they can hear the “song of the world”, something New Men and witchy-folk find rather dubious. Not to mention the New Men are a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime challenge even for Were-bears and Were-Tigers. On their part, viewing the New Men as exceedingly un-natural, the Were-folk are definitely a bit dubious about whether they want any alliances with them. So relations are strained, but not hostile between the two.
The skin-changers, or “Were-folk”, are a varied bunch. Were-tigers in Asia, were-panthers in Africa, were-wolves in Europe and North America, were-Jaguars to the south, some were-bears in the Eurasian north. (The were-chupacabra and the were-seal or selkie are almost extinct). Of all the creatures of the night, only the Egyptian Dry Ones have been less threatened by the apocalypse: given their healing abilities, skin-changers are essentially immune to zombie bites, and although a few urban Were-folk were cornered and pulled apart by overwhelming numbers of zombies, the great majority has survived unscathed. Some 250,000 of them survive around the world.
Also, unlike vampires or New Men, the Were-folk can reproduce themselves: aside from being able to pass on their curse with a bite, the curse is usually carried on in the children of two Weres, although it usually fails to manifest until adolescence. In any event, a little childhood nibbling makes for insurance. Some Weres are born, others have Were-hood thrust upon them, and some (by certain dark magics) become Were-folk (such people are generally considered posers). Control over one’s transformation and over ones transformed self varies with age and whether one is of the blood born: elder Were-born can transform at any time and at will, save during the full moon, when they must take their beast forms, and normally have enough self-control to avoid eating people (although they occasionally fall prey to temptation during the wilding time of the full moon, after which the ‘he/she was practically begging to be eaten – hiking in the woods, waving those meaty, chubby arms and legs at me…’ excuse is often heard.) Those newly transformed change only during the full moon, and have little or no control over their animal impulses.
Like vampires, Weres police their community – leaving savaged bodies in areas where predators larger than poodles are nonexistent is firmly discouraged, as is biting perfect strangers and then not eating them. Newby Weres are the major danger of exposure to the community, and Weres preferably prey on wild animals, or cattle and sheep in areas where actual big predators exist. Weres generally live in isolated areas, in the woods and hills, where someone can roam unseen and where few visitors will ask embarrassing questions about the cellar with the steel bars on the door (giving a young Were a place where they can transform without worrying about waking up next day naked in a pile of hobo guts is a common courtesy). They are generally close to nature, and they claim they can hear the “song of the world”, something vampires and New Men and witchy-folk find rather dubious. In any event, only a minority of their kind live in cities, with their lack of green space and non-sapient prey, numerous police forces, and often nosy neighbors.
Weres generally do not avoid eating people out of ethical concerns – they consider the relationship between themselves and humans as a normal predator-prey one – but simply a matter of common sense. One may pick off the isolated buffalo, but one avoids stampeding the herd. Vampires are despised by werewolves as essentially parasites, and they’re pretty much inedible to boot. Ghouls are seen as fair prey on the rare occasions they are seen aboveground, and the New Men are a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime challenge even for Were-bears and Were-Tigers.
The community is highly conflicted about the zombie apocalypse: some see it as a return to a better, greener, mostly-human-unspoiled world, while other, fond of human music, fast food (Were-bears in particular), and other pleasant aspects of civilization, are not fond of the idea of spending the rest of their lives in shacks in the woods. Aside from the controversial “collapse of civilization” thing, with its pluses and minuses, zombies have also caused a decline in the population of large animals: as mentioned before, they don’t deliberately pursue them in the way they do humans, but they’re happy enough to devour them when they run into them. This is definitely seen as a Bad Thing, and the Were-folk cull the zombie population whenever they can. The current situation with the vampires is troublesome: although the humans are prey, many Were-folk are of human origin, and humanity being converted into mere cattle is troubling in itself, as well as definitely indicating that the vampires are getting a bit big for their black, neatly creased britches. As for the exceedingly un-natural New Men, the Were-folk are definitely a bit dubious about whether they want any alliances with them.
Vampires need human blood. Since they depend on the mass of humanity remaining ignorant of them, they keep their numbers low, and ruthlessly cull their own ranks of idiots who want to make as many Children as possible. There are about 50,000 vampires in the world, which makes for a comfortably low percentage of the population being struck with inexplicable attacks of anemia (no actual vampire is dumb enough to leave woppin’ big bite marks on people’s necks) or a small enough percentage of blood bank deposits to be misdirected for nobody to notice.
Vampires also need humans to create new vampires. Vampires are immortal, but fairly frequent new recruits are needed to keep up the population (vampires are always at risk from a dangerous predator: other vampires. They have no empathy for their own kind, and can carry grudges for millennia). Vampires don’t have kids: they do not sparkle. They are perambulating corpses themselves, (if more chatty than the zombie kind) pallid when hungry and pink and swollen when well-fed, smelling of earth and musty decay. They come to life as elemental, savage appetites and although if they live long enough they become wise and powerful, in the end they remain creatures of hunger, born of dead flesh stained with a life of rage or hatred or cruelty buried in bloody and unhallowed ground. No vampire has a soul or a conscience, although some can fake it. They form a society of sorts, a society of egotists with a strong touch of “enlightened” self-interest: the vampire elders are wise enough to realize that they need to hang together or be staked separately. They are rich: as George Hamilton put it, they’ve all put a little away for a long time. (Vampires loved the invention of compound interest). Human servants used to be easily available through a bit of hypnosis and the lure of immortality. Some vampires have enough of a notion of Fair Play and Good Form to wonder if they should let people know that becoming a vampire is less of a personal transformation and more of a soulless elemental hunger puppeteering their corpses and memories. They then laugh at their own silliness, and forget the idea .
The party is over. There are no more vampire movies to make fun of, the electricity is off in most places, and their human servants have mostly been lost to a different form of nigh-immortality than that promised them. Living humans now are much rarer, and rather better protected, better armed and rather more alert. It is hard to feed on them, and those that die are decapitated and burned immediately. They don’t go out at night and do not spend their time in hotels and motels and such where no invitation is needed. And of course, with per capita feedings going up more than a hundred fold, people are wising up: if zombies, why not vampires?
Fortunately, vampire doctors – and there are some – have a possible solution to the mass starvation facing vampire-kind. For some time, vampires have been working on creating a permanent backup supply, by mastering the trick of keeping humans in induced comas alive for decades to be “milked” as needed. Due to the unpleasantness of possible discovery, these projects were kept limited in scope – but now these secure, underground facilities, with their built-in nuclear power supplies, are a shining hope for the future. But they need to be greatly enlarged, and to do this a lot of labor will be needed – labor which will in turn provide the occupants of the new facilities when the laboring part is done .
So, Vampire archivists are busy compiling lists of all the human refuges and hideaways, the size of their populations, and the strength of their defenses. Of course, a breeding population will eventually be needed, but there is no need for either of the parents to be conscious for pregnancy to take place – and as for raising the children, it’s quite remarkable what you can do to a child’s brain by careful oxygen starvation early in development. A few vampires are raising certain questions about the logic of a high-tech, no-human-input approach to human-farming when there are too few vampires to maintain a high-tech society in the long run. Cautious questions: when it comes to differences of opinion, many elder vampires consider decapitation a valid rhetorical ploy .
The situation is made worse by the zombies themselves. Whatever the contagious element is, viral, nano-technological, magical, or the-absent-God-knows-what, it flourishes in the bodies of the dead – and a vampire is, of course, a dead body. And a zombie will bite a vampire, if it finds one: never mind that the flesh from an old vampire soon turns to dust in their mouths. Since a vampire is already dead, it can’t kill him – but it turns his flesh grey and puffy, robs him of his ability to transform, and soon adds a craving for human flesh to that for blood. The vampire retains his mind, but has become, in the eyes of other vampires, a corrupted, lower creature, one which is, furthermore, contagious – in other words, a leper. The zombie-vamps soon find that their friends have moved their coffins and left no forwarding address, and he or she no longer gets invited to parties. The only way to stave off the grim transformation is by use of a vampire’s principal healing agent – human blood, and lots of it. Say three or four good-sized human bodies worth of it, over a few days. And it’s hard to get hold of that many humans in a hurry nowadays. Of course, older and more powerful vampires can just turn into mist or a cloud of bats to avoid pesky zombies. But the damn things are everywhere, and seem to have a curious ability to suddenly spring out of just the last place you expected one to be.
Vampires have generally poor relationships with other species. Vampires and ghouls get along alright: vampire flesh, after all, is inedible to ghouls. New Men know about vampires, and don’t get along with them at all. They sometimes catch and dissect vampires for study – alive, since they fall apart on death. The New Men are worried about whatever the vampires are planning: a vampire community no longer constrained by the need to remain in hiding from humans would be a serious threat, and many born-human New Men are not at all happy about their human “cousins” becoming inanimate bloodsacks. On the other hand, some New Men welcome the end of Old Humanity, but even so, most would rather not see a new vampire hegemony. Witchy-folk do not get along with vampires, something to do with the clash of two naturally egotistical personalities. Were-folk despise vampires as essentially parasites, feeding on humanity without contributing to nature. They view the current situation with the vampires as troublesome: although the humans are prey to the were-folk, many are of human origin, and humanity being converted into mere cattle is troubling in itself , as well as definitely indicating that the vampires are getting a bit big for their black, neatly creased britches.
Also deep under the earth are the ones below Egypt, over a million dry and rustling beings wrapped in cerements, those who worship Gods older than the Pyramids in voiceless ceremonies conducted in vast halls miles below the desert sands. At times by twisting roads they ascent to the desert night, emerging from the sand like cicadas preparing to molt, and perform odd rites directed at certain dim stars before returning to the abyss. They are led by two of the oldest mummies under the sands: the great King Khephren and the terrible Queen Nitocris. These two rulers periodically make rounds of the ancient tombs, searching for freshly undead mummies, and guiding half-man, half-beast experiments from a forgotten dynasty into their legions of worshipers. The rest - the whole, human remains, are required to serve the older Gods for a mere three-hundred and thirty-three years, after which their memories of service are reduced to vague impressions and uneasy dreams. Following this period, they are allowed to either return to their places of rest, which many do, or serve the First Kingdom in other ways .
They aren't bothered by zombies, for even if a confused zombie were to stumble into their dark halls and try to take a bite out of flesh as hard as wood and dry as the desert sand, the effect would be essentially nil. Those shaped like men and those shaped like cats and ibises and baboons and those shaped like impossible mixtures will go about their business undisturbed, after the minor annoyance has been pulled into many small pieces and trampled underfoot again and again as the chariot of Ra wheels above in the sky of Egypt .
It used to be that now and then one of the lesser ones which lie far closer to the world above was dispatched to take vengeance on the desecrator of a tomb or the taker of a sacred artifact, but this is no longer necessary, for those who shamble across the sands of the desert in an eternal search for the flesh of the living have no interest whatsoever in the science of archeology. Now those that choose to remain awake are used for masonry-repairs and accountants deep underground, or sacrifice-gatherers above ground .
There are of course a few nonconformists, as in every society: one used to own a small bookstore in Pinsk, and there is general embarrassment over the chap who took on human form to pursue the supposed reincarnation of his beloved, of all the silly things. They are tolerated by-and-large, as the King and Queen's primary concern are the fulfillment of rites and rituals belowground. A few of these nonconformists, however, feel this zombie thing is an anomaly, not something willed by the old Gods, and feel something should be done about it. Several have already been distributed among a number of canopic jars for their pains .
So they continue their nightly rites, at intervals retiring to lie unmoving on stone slabs until the next step in the eternal cycle, which will continue until the world above has perished and the old gods arise again. As far as they're concerned, these other supernatural upstarts can have the world — above and below. So long as they can continue their dark rites, nothing matters. After all, in the end, the world belongs to their gods, not to any creature, mortal or immortal.
Pallid, twisted parodies of humankind, with dog-like faces, rubbery skin slick with fetid slime, yellow fangs, red eyes, and black claws, Ghouls have rarely passed for human - although they occasionally give birth to sorts that regress to something more passable. The least ghastly are sometimes switched with human babies as a joke, while others, with the aid of extensive makeup, may venture out to do certain business with human beings (concealment is unneeded in doing business with other beings of the night). They have their own odd culture and art, and have squirreled away a vast store of human knowledge and literature, treasures and sacred artifacts, which lie piled in heaps in deep caves dimly green-lit with phosphorescent fungi, amid drifts of bones human and otherwise. Human sacred literature is surprisingly popular, often read for dinnertime amusement over a properly aged meal, for they are carrion-eaters. It's not fit for a Ghoul's consumption if it hasn't started to rot, after all .
They have long lived beneath human cities, particularly under graveyards and slaughterhouses, in dark and cramped tunnels (they are quite fond of the extensive abandoned underground diggings in New York) and crack jokes among themselves about the services they perform in getting rid of excess homeless people and abandoned babies, along with a fair part of the cat, dog and rat populations (ghouls prefer well-aged human flesh, but they aren’t too picky when hungry enough). The increased popularity of cremation is an annoyance, but like vampires, the ghouls are few and humans many, and there are enough people being buried the old-fashioned way, added to animals and slaughterhouse offal to support what used to be close to 500,000 ghouls world-wide .
Emphasis given to “used” to, since although dead ghouls do not arise again, those bitten by what normally would be their meals become zombie ghouls, and while zombie ghouls aren’t bright enough to dig their own tunnels, they will follow one as far as it will go. It is uncertain how many of ghoul-kind has perished, but those who survive have burrowed deep and closed off their tunnels behind them. What, if anything, they live off of in these lightless abysses is unknown, although vampires (vampires and ghouls get along alright: vampire flesh, after all, is inedible) and others which have talked to them report ghouls claim a sacred relationship with ancient beings which gnaw at the guts of the Earth, deep, deep below any mine built by humanity.
The ghouls control much of the Underworld, and a ghoul landlord will charge potential renters an arm and a leg. Monthly. Witches do not trust ghouls, and such mistrust runs both ways. Generally ghouls are terrified of were-folk, as Ghouls are seen as fair prey on the rare occasions they are seen aboveground. If anything, the Ghouls are closest to the Egyptians, sharing a common sort of lifestyle. A very few Ghouls have even witnessed the Egyptians' sacred rites, and vice versa. They even share the same attitude toward surface-dwellers: who cares what they do? Although truth be told, the Ghouls are much more connected to the surface, relying on dead animals for food, and the Egyptians simply won't let anybody to be truly in on their worship and lifestyle.
Rules:
- Standard forum rules apply. No god-modding, have a reasonable command of English spelling and grammar, etc.
- If you haven't posted in the IC for a week, your character will be zombified and used as an NPC combat encounter. Also, see rule #3.
- Let me and the other players know if you're going to be away for more than a day. If you don't and you've been gone for a week, see rule #2.
- Have an idea for a side-plot? It doesn't exist if you don't PM me about it. That way we can work it into the lore and tie it into the main quest.
Useful Notes:
- The ideal character for this adventure is a curious, exploring, problem-solving type of person who'd go out of their way to help people (even if only for the material reward at the end). Not that you have to have a character like that; it'd just help the plot along.
- The more you can set up situations for other characters and interact with them, the better the RP.
- Feel free to talk about the adventure in the OOC. Not that there's a particular restriction on topics in the OOC, but I encourage you to discuss the setting, current plans for your charcter or other characters, ridiculous NPCS, crowning moments of awesome, probable outcomes of fights, flights of what-if? fancy, or what-have-you.
- While I do have a main plot for the adventure in mind, note rule number 4. And if you've got a brilliant idea that would add to the world, just throw it in your post. One of the fun parts of doing play-by-post is group world creation. Unless it egregiously goes against the general theme of the adventure or inhibits the main plot, it's canon.
- Going off my previous point, I highly reccommend familiarizing yourself with the improv rule of "yes, and".
