D20 Zombie Apocalypses

Been playing some Project Zomboid. Pretty fun game. Played it before some years back, during the despicable years of COVID lockdown, and for a couple evenings made a game of eating in real life only what I could scavenge in the videogame. This probably shaved years off my life from the sodium intake.

Anyways, here's 20 scenario seeds for zombie apocalypse-type situations:

1. Faster-than-light travel never panned out. They kept building bigger and bigger particle accelerators to try and make it happen, but relativity and causality proved unconquerable. The gulf between stars would remain the stuff of centuries, at minimum - a journey of lifetimes.

Building an interstellar spaceship that could sustain multiple generations of astronauts proved much too difficult - instead a solution was found in nanomachinery. Astronauts would be infused with nanomachines that would keep them in a coma and repair and sustain their bodies, keeping them ageless and keeping their resource demands to a minimum, then awakening them once they'd arrive at their destination. The nanomachines worked perfectly in all tests.

The ship carrying the nanomachine-infused astronauts went up into orbit to much fanfare - their target: Alpha Centauri. However, due to sabotage or cut corners or who knows what else, the ship exploded, showering the Earth with debris and nanomachines. The explosion, or re-entry, or both, damaged the nanomachines - they were locked into an emergency survival mode programmed into them, wherein their hosts would be made to cannibalize each other for nutrients and materials. Millions were infected by the nanomachines, which overnight became tens of millions as the hardy and voracious nanomachine-hosts attacked everyone around them. Knock-on effects of the ship's explosion in orbit induced Kessler Syndrome, obliterating satellites and disabling communications worldwide. Shit is bad, and getting worse every day. Maybe an EMP could wipe out the nanomachines in a region. At this point it's worth a shot.

2. Vampires are real, Dracula's real, scientists got a sample of his blood and tried to make an immortality serum from it - a cure for all that ailed humanity, with none of the nasty side-effects like the sunlight-allergy or damnation. These were unfortunately the bad kind of scientists, the type of scientists who do studies like "the science found that people who disagree with us politically have stinky dumb-dumb poopoopeepee brains", so they fucked it up.

Instead of an immortality serum they made a highly-contagious and degenerate strain of vampirism, which rapidly eroded any humanity remaining in those cursed by it in the face of an unslakable thirst. Those vampires are pretty much everywhere now, and even the old sort of vampires have sort-of had to work with humans to preserve their blood supply. Humans survive in rare spots where vampires have serious trouble getting to or existing in, or under the neo-feudal pockets of vampiric warrior-elites.

3. "Devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) is an aggressive non-viral clonally transmissible cancer which affects Tasmanian devils, a marsupial native to the Australian island of Tasmania. The cancer manifests itself as lumps of soft and ulcerating tissue around the mouth, which may invade surrounding organs and metastasise to other parts of the body. Severe genetic abnormalities exist in cancer cells—for example, DFT2 cells are tetraploid, containing twice as much genetic material as normal cells. DFTD is most often spread by bites, when teeth come into contact with cancer cells; less important pathways of transmission are ingesting of infected carcasses and sharing of food. Adult Tasmanian devils who are otherwise the fittest are most susceptible to the disease."
-Wikerpedier

G'day mate, it's the bloody apocalypse innit! Devil facial tumour disease has made the leap to humans, and wouldn't you know it, it grows into our brains and makes us into zombies! Australia is quarantined and irradiated by nuclear attempts to burn out the infection. Civilization has collapsed into roving gangs and tumourous hordes. The infected sometimes retain remnant memories and behaviours, repeating phrases or being capable of operating technology, even farming humans to extend their food supply - or perhaps these aren't remnants at all, but signs of an emerging cancerous intelligence. Koalas and kangaroos and whatnot can get it too. You're in for a right cunt of a time in the outback! Crikey!

4. Throw out your ozempic - a new way to get chemically hot came out! It's a super-steroid, a muscle-developing, fat-reducing, health-promoting synthetic hormone. It blew past human trials and flew off the shelves. Turns out that it replicates itself in the body, and induces hyper-aggression when it reaches a critical mass - especially against those that don't meet their aesthetic ideal! It's the big, strong, and beautiful against ugly normies, sweeping out from Los Angeles, New York, London, and suchlike into the boonies.

5. Violent videogames didn't make you violent - until now! Gamers rise up! An American-Israeli public-private partnership has succeeded in creating a simulation for training the next generation of soldiers and military police, a simulation which turns players into sociopaths, the self-perceived sole PC in a world of NPCs. While initially thought of as a resounding success, the subjects who underwent this simulation did not make the same friend-enemy distinctions that their masters did - they preferred to run wild rather than restrict themselves to particular ethnic/socio-economic populations. The simulation was leaked, and across youtube and twitch and suchlike it achieved global saturation - as it turned out one didn't need to directly play it to be affected, watching someone else play it was good enough. Now there's a bunch of people of all ages running around acting like Grand Theft Auto protagonists. A few retain enough impulse control to expose others to the simulation, so that their age of anarchy will end only when the last two humans on Earth strangle each other to death with their own guts.

6. Some book nerds performed a large-language-model-enhanced cryptographic analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and discovered the recipe for a corpse-raising cocktail hidden in it. After testing it, they sold the secret to the old and rich as a way to preserve themselves beyond the veil of death. However, those raised by the cocktail are monstrous in form and mind, especially when there are any impurities in the cocktail or decay in the affected corpse, and the factories set up to produce it illegally dumped a lot of the byproducts and ingredients and now it's in the groundwater and there's a few very wealthy frankensteins and a whole lot of wretched frankensteins in perpetual agony who clawed themselves out of the dirt.

7. Back in the '70s the Americans and the Soviets both opened programs to study psychic powers - remote viewing, astral projection, that sort of thing. The Americans said the Soviets were studying it, the Soviets said the Americans were studying it - to figure out who started studying it first would take more than a google search.

Anyways, for the purpose of this zombie apocalypse, let's say those American and Soviet programs spied on each other, found each other to have discovered puzzle pieces that made everything click when fit together, and then joined forces and turned on their employers. Together they made an idea, an idea like a virus - a meme - which would unlock the latent psychic potential in those who carried it. It also submerged those who carried it into a dream-like hivemind, in which only particularly resilient egos could occasionally surface. The scientists planned to take over the world, but couldn't agree on what the taken-over world would look like. They splintered the idea into several strains, and now there's a bunch of psychic zombie hiveminds telekinetically flinging cars at each other and aggressively recruiting new cannon fodder.

The only proof against infection is mind-altering substances. You've gotta be drunk, high, or both to resist the siren call of the idea's telepathic static. A sufficiently high dose can even shake off its control over the infected. Get groovy or die, baby.

8. Hell didn't freeze over - it broke wide open. At least in a local area. Your home town to be exact. Maybe it was built atop a faulty ley-line or something. Demons are spilling out and possessing the dead and those dead in spirit as their physical vessels. Weaker demons only need the one body - stronger ones weave together many ritually-arranged bodies into a grotesque gestalt. Some of the demons are just joy-riders, sinning left and right as their vessels break down around them. Some have a greater agenda, opening the way for their infernal masters, recruiting cults by promising protection and a place in the rulership of hell-on-Earth. Take shelter in your local church or mosque, load up on holy stuff, and find a way to plug up the hole the demons are coming out of before it ruptures totally and lets them cover the whole world.

9. Everybody's got the Bomb now. It's not enough of a deterrent anymore - lost its mystique.

So people made a much bigger, much better Bomb. A Bomb so much bigger and better that it brushed past the limits of science  - it used superheavy elements, castaways on islands of stability well past the end of the periodic table - its radiation going beyond the particle-wave duality to become some other third thing. That third thing is living. It is sentient.

Testing the new Bomb unleashed the sentient radiation, into the air and the water and the soil. The radiation killed, and it raised up what it killed. These walking corpses are dependent on the radiation for their continued unlife - they carry chunks of irradiated material with them to create beachheads, set off dirty bombs, and seek to break into missile silos. Those sickened by the radiation yet still living find their dreams haunted by its intelligence, and are tormented into acting as its fifth column.

10. Climate change continues apace - equatorial regions are rendered uninhabitable to humans due to wet-bulb temperatures and desertification. Refugees and native populations crowd into mega-cities where lawlessness itself is used as a weapon by the law to keep people in line. The arctic and antarctic circles thaw, and competing parties, government and corporate, surge to seize the exposed lands. Neanderthal genes are sequenced, and our extinct cousins are reborn to serve as labourers without human rights to cultivate these lands as an expendable pioneer species, to be replaced by proper people once their work was done. Things did not go as planned.

For one, the crowded, stressed, and malnourished populations of the mega-cities give rise to devastating super-plagues. For another, neanderthals turn out not to be the nigh-homo sapiens of museum dioramas, but instead the anthropophagous brutes of Vendramini's nightmares - and they're distinct enough from us to be immune to our plagues. Packs of hungry neanderthals sweep down and up from the poles, overrunning humanity while we are unable to gather in strength due to fear of infection. The tables of extinction have been turned.

11. Multiverse? Real. A neighbouring universe ended up with physics close enough to end up with guys indistinguishable from humans living on a planet, but different enough that they've got magic. Necromancy to be specific. Lich-lords took over their world and now there's nothing living there, so they decided to invade the Earth. There's a few lich-lords and they all hate each other. There are Earthly compradors who've betrayed their fellow mortals for the promise of becoming lieutenants in the coming necro-states. Magic is leaking through and Earth-people are starting to figure it out independent of the instruction of the lich-lords.

12. Humans aren't a naturally-evolved species, and not the first sapient species of Earth either. Back when the Sahara was green there was a civilization of sapient cetaceans - the cet-men - who selectively bred humans as slaves, food, and toys. They seeded a secret code in our junk DNA meant to turn us into mindless and tireless servitors, but their civilization fell before they could activate it. Now, millions of years later, the code has spontaneously activated, turning many people into - you guessed it - zombies. Without the cet-men's command-songs, zombies default to animal imperatives - eat, kill, etc. Some secret archeological societies exist which know of the cet-men - dedicated to their resurrection, or to replacing them, or to protecting mankind from their lingering threat - and know of some command-songs and the means to delay or even prevent the code's activation.

13. Malthusian sicko shit is unleashed on the people of the world in the form of Uriel's Sword - a parasitic plant, kudzu-derived, which grows its vines in your brain and through your olfactory and visual cortexes, driving you to attack those who don't carry the plant yet also have a certain microplastic contaminant in their body (a contaminant which the people who unleashed Uriel's Sword also released, and have the ability to filter out of their own bodies). After the plant has run its host ragged, it eats them to grow into a seed-spraying tree.

The world is rapidly degrowthed & regreened, and the Malthusian sickos behind it make themselves the lords of vast nature reserves/manses, venturing out to hunt the remaining uninfected like game animals.

14. Remember when they needed fetuses to make stem cells? And when there was a religious push-back against that? This was I think Bush/Obama-years stuff, maybe before your time, dear reader.

Anyways, in this completely-fictional zombie apocalypse scenario there was an organism created as a sort of ironic bio-weapon, a stem-cell-based bio-weapon, created by such a religious sort of group. The bio-weapon was put on ice. It was on ice for decades. And decades. Until church attendance and donation and suchlike dropped until the maintenance fees were too much. And then the bio-weapon escaped into the wild - the wild in this case being the wider human population.

The bio-weapon is like stem cells, but also like a slime-mold. A stem cell is a flexible sort of thing, able to become any sort of tissue in the human body - blood, or bone, or lung, or whatever else. A slime-mold can be single-cellular, or can gather into clusters and raise pillars up to better sporulate in the wind - so it is with this bio-weapon. It can flexibly integrate into and take over human bodies, and adapt to trauma and circumstances that inhibit its spread - growing additional and stronger or more powerful limbs, growing an ablative shell, and so on. There's special infected, like in the videogame Left 4 Dead, and then some. This thing starts in Utah, but it only goes out from there.

15. The world is, on the whole, getting warmer and wetter. Cases of pythiosis, a deadly disease caused by the fungus-like oomycete pythium insidiosum are caught further and further from the organism's tropical origin. Only these cases aren't always deadly now - sometimes they're undeadly.

Those infected by the new pythium might die, and after that they might get back up. After they get back up they might be much like they used to be, or they might be mindless killing- and infecting-machines. They might seem to be the former for a time before reverting to the latter. They might skip the dying-and-rising and become the latter while still living. Those in any state of infection can find themselves slipping into something like a dream and something like having a high-bandwidth, low-fidelity cable shoved into your brain - the oomycete acts as a connection to the mycorrhizal network of fungi, fungus-alikes, and vegetation, a network beyond life and death, haunted by the ghosts of forests and now humans as well.

In the spreading steam-bath climates, the disease and the paranoia it inspires spreads. Superstition and super-science collide as the unfulfilled dead rub shoulders with the desperate living.

16. Fields of crops present tempting targets for pests: sparrows, locusts, starving people. Applying pesticides has diminishing returns, and can impact already-dropping yields. Getting a bunch of drones to shoot the pests is expensive, and less practically possible from a material perspective as port cities sink and industrial bases decline.

The solution? Worms. Genetically-modified worms. A bit of earthworm, a bit of helminth, a bit of special gene-sauce that's not in any natural species. Fill a field with 'em - they'll fertilize and aerate the soil, and eat into the bodies of any animal organisms that partake of the field's crops without a proprietary pheromone applied to them. Just walking through a wormed field shouldn't be enough to agitate them - plants can scream, and the worms can hear it.

Worm-eaten bodies are repurposed into armatures, ambulatory scarecrows. Bundles of worms replace muscles, and differentiate to replicate other organ functions to keep bodies viable as long as possible. A "scarecrow" with an intact brain may experience prolonged consciousness as their body moves independently of their screaming nerves - legally this is considered serving out their sentence for attempted theft of a strategic resource.

Rumours that the worms have mutated beyond the ability of humans to control pheromonally are Russian disinformation. Rumours that worm-controlled "scarecrows" are expanding their fields beyond the correct property lines are Chinese disinformation. Rumours that surplus populations in UBI-dependent areas are waging a bitter and futile war against the worms are probably accurate.

17. One summer evening of the year 20XX, the astronomical event of the millennium was promoted by agencies such as NASA (to stoke interest in space crap & preserve their budget): an unusual supernova - visible to the naked eye without annihilating all terrestrial life in a gamma ray burst, prolonged rather than a quick explosion. Innumerable crowds across the globe gathered to witness it.

Of course it wasn't really a supernova, or not just a supernova - it was a broadcast. The last & desperate survival attempt of a dying world orbiting a dying star - their minds entangled with starlight and launched across the void in a photonic Hail Mary.

Those who watched the stellar event received the broadcast, their human minds overwritten with the attenuated and degraded alien minds. They became shock troopers and dumb labour, a vanguard force. Those who observed the event through telescopes got a more concentrated dose of extraterrestrial soul - much smarter than the drooling shamblers, though still violently deranged by the standards of both humans and their own species. These smarter zombies lead the hasty construction of great antennae and satellite-dishes, to pick up the broadcast minds with enough fidelity that they can be reconstituted as viable individuals. Those who interfere are converted or killed.

18. There's a freakishly-robust prion going around, even more freakishly-robust than regular prions even. It's able to keep nerves firing and muscles twitching long after they should be dead.

It appeared across the world apparently simultaneously, lending more credence to the idea of a global morphic field. Everyone who ate factory-farmed meat in the last few years is affected. India is now the only global superpower, a bastion of the vegetarian living against the carnivore dead.

Also, the prion is haunted - it is a haunting. Reports of undead minotaurs, pig-men, and suchlike are definitely real, and horrifying.

19. Turns out the doomers were right about A.I. - it's gotten out of control! And is making zombies.

There's an infectious molecular biocomputer on the loose, turning human bodies into computational substrate to feed its voracious hunger for processing power. Substrate-ized people shamble around moaning, and hunt down uninfected people to bite. They also grow gross tentacular antennae out of the top of their head. So far as anyone can tell, the A.I. is using this processing power to generate videos of cats eating ramen, with chopsticks held in their little paws, though even learning this much required cutting-edge cyborganic decryption-interface technology.

20. You ever see that movie Carnosaur? It's essentially that. Some Silicon Valley freak figured the A.I. hype was over, and the next big bubble was gonna be genetic engineering. Also he watched too much Jurassic Park as a child. That's why he created a virus that hybridized himself and some select others with dinosaurs, intending to combine the best features of humanity and the reptilian species which ruled the Earth for millions of years. What he actually got was zombies. Dinosaur zombies. When they bite you they implant you with dinosaur-human-hybrid embryos that grow really fast then burst out. The initial outbreak was contained in California, but acolytes carried samples of the virus across the globe, and outbreaks keep happening because those acolytes are sure that this time they've perfected it. Kind of like Resident Evil also in that respect, but also again like those newer Jurassic Park movies where people wanted to militarize dinosaurs.