Zombie plague?????

[Ynek]

Having played a number of "Zombie horde" missions, I can recommend using a small number of powerful zombies as opposed to a large number of weak ones.

When my gaming group played our first zombie apocalypse scenario, we found that the zombie's attacks were largely ineffectual (S40 unarmed attacks). Considering that it takes between 20 and 30 damage to put down the average character, they're going to take a lot of zombie attacks before they go down, and each one of those ineffectual attacks requires you to spend time rolling for hit, location, injury etc. This bogs the game down.

With regards to movement, if you limit the zombie's movement too much (Can only move at a walk, and an initiative in the single-digits, for instance), then you end up with every turn being slowed down to a crawl as you move your tide of zombies 1 or 2 inches. You would probably need a hell of a lot of zombies, because there isn't going to be a whole lot of them left by the time they get within whacking-distance of your heroes. It is better to have zombies move at a reasonable speed, thus reducing the number of zombies necessary and also reducing the 'uselessness of moving' effect caused by too-slow movement.

Nowadays, our group counts all zombie attacks as doing D10 damage. (To represent vicious, razor-sharp zombie claws such as those observed on the zombies in the half-life games.) Our zombies are also initiative 20, and cannot sprint. This limits their movement to a maximum of around 12" per turn.

Rules for human characters becoming zombies are best left for campaigns, since in most cases, it takes a few hours for the zombie-infection to fully take hold. Inquisitor games usually take place within a minute or two at the most, so the likelihood of anyone actually turning within-game is minimal. Thus, it's best not to bog the game down with unnecessary details such as zombie-infection mid-game.

One final suggestion is not to simply make the mission a "Zombie siege." That's just a recipe for boredom, since after three or four turns of just shooting at zombies from the rooftop, everyone will get very bored indeed. Instead, have an objective such as 'locate items to repair your shuttle', and then have numbered mystery markers all over the terrain, one or two of which correspond to items the players need.

Long story short, keep it simple, keep it quick, keep the number of NPCs reasonable, and have an objective. That way, the game will be fun for everyone.

[Dust King]

For characters getting infected in a campaign I'd use variations on the obliterator virus rules, the victim is not immediately aware of his infection and can try to hide it from his comrades once he finds out. You could increase the tension by having it so only the GM knows who is infected, add rules for characters getting tired and sore so not only the infected characters are losing stats. Have several different players in the campaign working together but getting more paranoid over who is infected.

Anyway that's how I'd run a zombie mini-campaign

[Macabre]

Personally, I'd use some of the daemonic possession rules, perhaps 'invulnerable' for plague zombies, and maybe 'cloak of darkness' for the I Am Legend 'dark dwellers' (make use of those photon flash flares). I was tempted to make a 'Day of the Triffids' scenario, purely because it'd be just hilarious and secondly anti-plant grenades would actually see some action in an Inquisitor games. On the dark dwellers front, I'd use Gorgers from the Ogre Kingdom line, but that may prove expensive if you want a lot of them....