"Another zombie. Ho hum. I'll kite it, you stick it with arrows." There is nothing horrific about zombies. Here, look, courtesy of Basic Fantasy RPG: Zombie (undead) AC : 7[12] HD : 2 Attack : 2x +1/weapon or swipe (1d8) Mv : 20 ft. No. Appearing : 2d4 (4d6 in the wild) Save : F2 Morale : 12 Treasure Type : none XP : 75 It's basically a slightly worse gnoll that never retreats. This has been a chip on my shoulder for a long time. Here's what I propose: First, every undead creature should be freaky: they utterly violate the natural order of the world. They should be described with that in mind. Play up the disturbing appearance of their decaying yet animate corpses and their putrefying stench. Mechanically, we might reflect this character reaction in one of two ways: Characters need to save vs. fear (the save might be poison, willpower, or wisdom, depending on your system), with failure indicating that the character can't get closer to the undead.
A combination of another bout of Covid and elder family members getting hospitalized delayed this by a few weeks, but my hopes for a steady gaming group seem to finally culminate in an actual game last night. Socrates was delayed by theatrical problems, but Gwenchant and I arrived at Soddentowel's place, and, after discussing parenting and schooling, snacks and drinks, we got around to talking about play experience and what we were going to play. It probably helped a bit that we had hashed out lines and veils and a few other session 0 topics on our Discord. After determining that Gwenchant and Soddentowel's play experiences were more exclusive to latter day D&D , we decided to each make two characters to play the Shadowdark quickstart, using 3d6 down the line, with a house rule stolen from the *WN books of replacing one attribute with a 14. Socrates got there shortly after they started making characters while I skimmed the GM's Guide. I think it took us about an h