Thursday, July 4, 2019

the walking dead

Like many monsters in the MM, the walking dead (skeletons, zombies, crawling hands, and similar lower tier undead) have some interesting aspects and some nonsensical aspects.

Skeletons versus Zombies: outside of a D&D context, skeletons and zombies are considered interchangeable. Skeletons are just really decayed zombies, and the only zombie movie that singled them out as different was Warm Bodies. Even in works that do not feature zombies at all, animated skeletons generally serve an identical role to voodoo zombies or shambling mummies. The prevalence of skeletons in D&D seems to owe its origin to their prevalence in Ray Harryhausen films (as do many other monsters in D&D with roots in Greek mythology, and it would not be inaccurate to label D&D a "supercut of Ray Harryhausen films").

Intelligence: As I mentioned in my post on undead intelligence, skeletons and zombies have different intelligence as of 5e. Zombies have minimal intelligence, while skeletons are smart enough to loosely remember activities they performed in life. This, I suspect, was based on their similar portrayal in the game Warhammer Fantasy or possibly the movie Warm Bodies. I like this aspect and consider it a superior way to distinguish them than the state of decomposition.

Senses: The walking dead have darkvision, which in all ways functions like normal sight. They may be blinded or deafened as normal. They are not immune to illusions. Since their sensory organs may be decaying or absent, this raises the question of how they are able to see, hear and be impaired or fooled. There have been arguments about special senses or whatever that are not supported by the rules (while granting a free pass to skeletons moving without muscles), but the simplest explanation is that the same magic that creates them grants the equivalent of human senses (so throwing sand in the glowing lights of a skeleton's eye sockets still impairs vision). Perhaps their sensory organs are the only anatomy that is not decayed, which would look quite horrible.

Lifesense: In the rules as written there is no way for undead to distinguish between living and non-living creatures, at least not any more accurately than adventurers, beyond DM fiat (much like how whenever the word "hostile" appears in the rules it is used in the dictionary sense rather than game jargon). One can only assume they rely on body language and/or smell to avoid zombie cannibalism, which means that a party of adventurers could presumably get past a zombie encounter by disguising themselves as zombies a la Shaun of the Dead or smearing themselves in zombie guts a la The Walking Dead. The party could even take advantage of the walking dead's stupidity to trick them into attacking the wrong targets, depending on the complexity of their orders. In the RPG All Flesh Must Be Eaten, the "Zombie Master" dead world introduces the concept of IFF (identify friend or foe) to allow zombies under the command of zombie masters to recognize allies. Food for thought, anyway.

Morality: The fluff in the 5e MM is full of contradictions, as though the writer did not proofread their work. One paragraph says that the walking dead lack any independent thought and only ever follow orders, at best the smarter skeletons pantomime activities from their lives while the zombies just stand like statues. A paragraph shortly after that states that they are instinctively driven to kill anything they see, and are somehow able to distinguish living creatures despite nothing like this being stated in the perception line of their stat block (see my notes on "lifesense" above).

As with undead in general, the D&D rules cannot decide whether undeath is inherently evil or not. Thus, different writers use their own interpretation and the resulting whole is riddled with contradictions. I went into detail on this in my huge post on undead alignment. Long story short, pick the appropriate power source for encounters with the walking dead depending on how you want them to behave.

Zombie plague: By default, D&D zombies do not spread their condition like a plague. They follow the voodoo rules for reanimated corpses enslaved by a necromancer or demon or whatever. Plague variants and spontaneous zombie apocalypses ("undead uprising") have been added in 3pp like Pathfinder.

Research links and further reading

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