Part of Zombie Week here on MrLizard.com! It shuffles, it shambles, it eats your brains. What more do you want?

Zombie Braingnawer

The Zombie Braingnawer is my attempt to model the classic "modern"  zombie, the ones that want to eat your brains. This is part of a week-long series of Breakfast Crunch on zombies! Some of the items referenced, such as Zombie Plague, may not yet be written up, depending on when you read this. So it goes…

Braingnawer zombies only want to eat your brains. (Yeah, yeah, it’s the same link as in the main article. I can’t assume people read these things in order.) They arise as the consequence of foul rituals, depraved magic, or noble experiments gone tragically wrong. They are also very hard to kill permanently, at least for level-appropriate characters. If the PCs have no access to radiant damage (or if they have trivial access to it and know how to kill zombies), the DM may wish to vary the rules — perhaps zombies can only be killed by cold, or fire, or acid, or perhaps different zombies have different weaknesses.

A quick design note… this monster can be particularly nasty. The "official" writeup allows for a chance of "fast zombification" only if the zombie sinks its rotting teeth into a PC’s delicate, gooey, brain matter, but a DM may vary this so that any character reduced to a dying state which has been injured by a brainggnawer in the current encounter runs that 1-in-20 chance per turn of suddenly waking up with a hankering for neuron souffle.  At the very least, it will get the Leader types to pay attention when one of their friends goes down.

Some may object to the high Athletics check… I wanted to make them Inexorable. They can smash down doors. They can swim rivers. They can climb walls. It should also be noted that, at Int 4, they aren’t quite mindless. They can mutter a few words (such as "Send… more…. brains!"), turn doorknobs, and so on. (I may publish the Truly Stupid Zombie variant later on.) The high Will defense is designed to represent the fact they’re unlikely to suffer pain, torment, or agony, or be distracted or controlled — they are single-minded to fault. (Some DMs may wish to toss immunity or resistance to psychic into the mix, but there are some classes or builds which have few other attack options, and this can be shut out a player from many fights if killing zombies is the main goal of a story arc. Further, in general, in 4e, even "mindless" undead are still affected by powers which target Will.)