| Introduction
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xxxxxWeather's getting colder, folks are getting sicker.
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| History
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xxxxxMid-October finds the city experiencing a heavy upswing in cases of illness. At fist the media was reporting a particularly severe flu season, most likely due to a shortage of vaccine insufficient to meet demand. In early November, a drastic surge in reports of zombie attacks around the city are making it clearer that this is not likely just the flu.
xxxxxOn November 9, the Mayor announced that treatment centers would be opening all across New York for people to receive treatment for the zombie plague for free. Residents of New York were additionally encouraged to avoid speaking English as much as possible, and provided with resources for learning other languages as well as hotlines for reporting zombie outbreaks and requesting assistance disposing of bodies.
xxxxxIn the following weeks, the plague spread through the city. While the death toll was nowhere near as severe as the outbreak two years before, casualties were still heavy -- especially following the discoveries that some people's illness was proving resistant to the medicine that cured the plague. The secondary discovery that the drug-resistant strain of illness was producing a new breed of zombies -- intelligent, thinking, feeling -- put another complication in some people's fight as well.
xxxxxUltimately it took over a month to return the city to some modicum of safety, though even then the disease has once again not been eradicated -- only managed. The illness is still out there; there are still, occasionally, zombies lurking. Potentially very smart ones.
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| Involved Characters
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- Researchers working on the cure:
- Infected Individuals:
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| Errata
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- Though the zombie plague was never eradicated in the first place, actual deaths and zombie attacks for the past two years have been isolated and infrequent, due to the availability of medication to manage and cure the disease.
- There were small-scale appearances of Zombie in the Lower East Side, Greenwich, and Morningside Heights in the week surrounding/following Halloween.
- On November 5, Mount Sinai Hospital was the site of a larger mass zombie attack, a cluster of their patients having died and turned.
- Among the PC population so far, one PC has undergone the treatment normally used to cure the disease. The course of medication was unsuccessful.
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| NPCing Zombies!
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xxxxxThe question has come up on channel: do you need a GM to toss zombies into your scene? The answer is definitely no! While Shane and I are happy to NPC zombies for you if we are free and available, ever since the -last- zombie epidemic, zombies have never actually gone AWAY in New York and people have always been 100% welcome to toss zombies into any scene they want action in. That hasn't changed; you certainly do not need our permission nor our assistance in zombifying your scenes!
xxxxxWith that said, here are some guidelines for things to keep in mind while playing zombies so as to RP them according to How Zombies In This World Work:
- For the most part, the actual zombies are similar to how many classic Zombies work in terms of physicality, so that part should be easy. They are not Fast Zombies: in general they move at anywhere from a slow-ish shamble to a more or less regular walking pace, depending on their state of physical intact-ness & decomposition, and have a pretty telltale sort of disjointedness to their muscle movement owing to being Not Entirely Coordinated on the muscles front.
- So long as their necessary body parts are intact, they can both see and hear just fine, and are attracted to movement within their eyeshot and noises within normal human earshot. They also tend to make rattly kind of groans when they zero in on prey, and other zombies will follow after those groans, so attracting the notice of one zombie will tend to attract the notice of any others in earshot.
- They don't actually care about eating brains and do not appreciate your stereotyping. They are plenty happy with arms or legs or faces or any other of your delicious fleshmeats and will keep coming and coming and coming to try and bite, tear, rip, chomp, or otherwise separate You from Your Flesh. As a corollary, they're actually plenty happy with ANY delicious fleshmeats -- though they have a distinct and noticeable preference for FRESH meat and will tend to go for whatever is the most OBVIOUS prey, they don't have any preference for human vs. other meat, so chucking your dog at them to save your life, while totally heartless, is totally a Viable Option to buy yourself a minute of running time. Chucking a steak at them to save your life may only work if it's still on the cow, but YMMV. Distraction is distraction.
- As far as anyone is ICly aware, there have not been any reported cases of people being infected by zombie bites; only -living- infected people seem to be contagious. Zombies, therefore, while certainly a threat in terms of killing and eating you, have not been reported to be a threat in terms of infecting you. Human mouths are still gross and full of bacteria that might infect you horribly, plus getting bitten HURTS like a motherfucker, so obviously nobody wants to be bitten. But it's not a case of Once You Are Bitten You Are Now Definitely A Zombie.
- Mutants who die and come back as zombies retain their mutant powers after death. Unfortunately, they do not retain their cognitive faculties, so they tend to have little to no actual -control- over their mutant abilities. This means pyrokinetic zombies wantonly lighting everything around them on fire, teleporting zombies that can't aim or hold still, speedster zombies stuck on cruise control; in some cases this is likely to be utterly useless, in other cases enormously dangerous (zombies with super strength still have that; zombies with wings likely have absolutely none of the muscle coordination required to fly, zombies who can only read your mind probably nobody will ever notice, extrapolate as makes sense.)
- Keep in mind, though, that mutants are, still, a really tiny segment of the population, so outside of mutant enclaves like Xavier's or the Brotherhood compound or the Morlock tunnels etc., it's not going to be enormously likely to be running into -lots- of mutant zombies just At Large in the city. Every so often, sure! But probably not All The Time. (Xavier's, you're probably boned.)
- Zombie minds still register to telepathic senses! They do not register very PLEASANTLY. They sound like a very grating chaotic screech of static and mindless aggression and hunger that to the vast majority of telepaths will be jarring, dissonant, and, once they are aware of what it is, very easily recognizable as Zombie.
- Destroying the brains works to kill them. They don't react to pain or any other kind of threatening. Blowing off their limbs will certainly slow them down but they'll still keep dragging themselves after you so long as they have any possible means of locomotion. Disembodied zombie heads, while not particularly threatening, honestly, will in fact keep chomping uselessly until their brains are destroyed.
- Please also make some effort to keep in mind what is a realistic level of skill and competence for your character, both in terms of the actual combat and in terms of the emotional impact of possibly having to stab people who may or may not have been friends and family (who are now trying to eat their faces) in the head. Are they a skilled fighter with years of training who lived through this last time around in New York? Probably then facing down a bunch of zombies will faze them a lot less. Are they a newly-manifested teenager without training who has never seen a zombie before in their life? It may not be quite so easy for them to hold their own against several of them without taking a single scrape or being at all shaken up. Obviously we have no direct control over this, but we do encourage people to stay within the bounds of what is logical for their character's experience and temperament!
xxxxxIf you have any questions, feel free to @mail Hive or Shane! Otherwise, happy zombieing!
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| TP Contacts
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xxxxxshane and hive are gming this plot! please poke at one of them if you want to get involve! please reach out through @mail, NOT pages, thank you!
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| Flu Season
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| [[Image:|center]]
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| Status
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Completed
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| Type
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None
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| Risk-Level
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Choose-yr-own
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| (Estimated) Dates
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October 2015-??
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| Location
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All
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| Affected Factions
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All
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| TP GMs
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shaneface, Hive, Telo
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| TP Hooks
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| koff koff - perhaps you are sick? perhaps your bff or sibling or roommate? perhaps you are SPREADING YOUR TERRIBLE GERMS everywhere? we totally WANT you to be spreading your terrible germs everywhere, at any rate.
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| Hippocratic - Are you a doctor? Researcher? Pharmacologist? Somehow knowledgeable about diseases and their treatments? Your knowledge may be useful soon!
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| Badass - Got awesome zombie-fighting skills? There may just be plenty of New Yorkers who need your assistance, soon.
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