Food & Water

[sHaka]

Hi RPGman,

No it's not writer's fiat that survivors are royally screwed. Yes, there's plenty of food/water lying about for the taking. The problem is that the urban population centres (where most of this tasty grub can be found) had around 90% infection rates. So there's a few hungry corpses between you and that packet of cheerios on the store shelf. You could kill millions of zombies in New York city, and still have millions more to kill.

Also, though this is left open, the book is written from a period some months after "The Wave" occured. Much of the food has either been looted, spoiled or is just too deep in a dead zone. There is still plenty of food to be had, but none of it comes easy as the dead like to hide and go dormant and in a house/office/store, could literally be anywhere.

Get down to that joke of a FLGS of yours, tell them to order some Palladium goodness and pick up Dead Reign for yourself, you wont regret it!

[Thinyser]

Hi RPGman,

No it's not writer's fiat that survivors are royally screwed. Yes, there's plenty of food/water lying about for the taking. The problem is that the urban population centres (where most of this tasty grub can be found) had around 90% infection rates. So there's a few hungry corpses between you and that packet of cheerios on the store shelf. You could kill millions of zombies in New York city, and still have millions more to kill.

Also, though this is left open, the book is written from a period some months after "The Wave" occured. Much of the food has either been looted, spoiled or is just too deep in a dead zone. There is still plenty of food to be had, but none of it comes easy as the dead like to hide and go dormant and in a house/office/store, could literally be anywhere.

Get down to that joke of a FLGS of yours, tell them to order some Palladium goodness and pick up Dead Reign for yourself, you wont regret it!

Pretty much what I'd say too.

Yeah its there, but not easy to get to.

[J. Lionheart]

While I agree food might not, at first, be particularly hard to find, it would run out awfully fast. Not everybody keeps significant reserves of non-perishables around, and those who did may well have consumed them already. During the Wave, a lot of people would have been hunkered down, burning through what supplies they had. When they ran out and were forced to venture forth to find more, that's when they would have been caught and transformed. Empty cupboards lead to dead people. Well supplied people in their own homes aren't the ones who were out getting caught - it was the folks who had to go out somewhere to resupply. As people realized what was happening with the Wave, grocery stores would have been among the first places knocked over, and neither supermarkets nor any other store would have had new supplies coming in. I think it's unlikely that many well-provisioned places will be found sitting empty. Anybody who was leaving home of their own accord would not leave something like that behind, and those forced out probably didn't have much left to abandon. Longer-lasting people would have first raided their absent neighbors rather than making the journey to a store, and when that ran out, they too likely were falling victim to the zombies due to increased travel distance to resupply. Those still alive, like the characters, have already gone through this process, and are the rare survivors of the ever-increasing difficulty of supply acquisition. This isn't some "Life After People" instant vanishing of all humans - it's an afflication that followed a logical spread pattern over time, eliminating people as they became vulnerable.

A second, lesser thing to consider, is that part of the usability of food is the availability of preparation methods for it. Boiling water, something supremely easy for us today, would not be so simple 6 months after a zombie apocalypse. Unless you've got time, space, and materials to build yourself a fire and boil it the old fashioned way, something hard to safely do in a formerly-occupied area, you're SOL. Foods like dried pasta, rice, instant potatoes, and soup concentrates may still provide nourishment, but consuming them would range from distasteful to dangerous without some semblance of proper preparation. Even the ever-popular freeze-dried food, sold as a survival item, is not meant for consumption without preparation and water usage. Your point about bottled water being available in large quantities is true, at the moment, but what if it stopped being produced, the water stopped flowing, and you waited 6 months? It would vanish at an alarming rate.

A quick note on power - many modern power plants, while it's true that they could theoretically run for a certain period without human intervention, are designed to shut themselves down for safety reasons without constant human presence. If a person isn't actively telling the plant to keep running, it will turn off to avoid catastrophe down the road. My understanding is that this is particularly true of nuclear facilities - the one source of power that would last the longest without intervention otherwise. A reduction in power draw would not necessarily make it easier, either. The Chernobyl accident was triggered by an experiment while running the facility at low capacity, rather than high.

[azazel1024]

Less the stories and more a zombie apocolypse scenario.

In this case the books posit a 'virus' going around, people being scared, etc and a few days later people dying and the dead raising. A few days (2-5) afterward and people then realize it is zombies, etc and the cities are completely taken over.

If there is basically a fear of a pandemic, quarantines, etc going on people aren't likely to be doing to much shopping and a lot of places my be shuttered up, etc. So families, individuals, etc are likely to have consumed at least a day or two if not even possibly a week or two of what they had on hand before they are dead. If they abandoned their house to try to make a run for it somewhere odds are good they took most/all of their food.

Places like grocery stores, etc are likely to be in urban areas and 'inaccessible' because of all the zombies, even in the suburbs. In rural settings you might find a grocery store or general store and get lucky. Houses, that would just be hit or miss like I said.

For water, sure there are hot water heaters, toiler tanks, water lines etc you could hit up for water. Getting water out of a hot water tank might not be so easy though. If you are lucky you can turn the house's water line off and then open a faucet and the residual pressure and height (open the lowest faucet) could probably get you anything from 1/2-4 gallons of water depending on the size of the house. Beyond that and it is going to be getting in to tool time. Of course a hot water heater you could open the drain spigot to get the water out of it.

Containers for it might be harder to carry it with you.

For bottled water, sure, but not everyone has tons of it laying around.

In the books the scenario is 5 months after, a lot is going to be looted, destroyed, inaccessible or expired. Not everything, but it would greatly reduce the availability of things.

In survival scenario get a couple of bottles of bleach. Each one can chlorinate and clean 5,000 gallons of water so that it is drinkable. It won't remove impurities, but at least you aren't going to get chlorea, giardia, etc. 5,000 gallons isn't a life time supply, but if it is just for drinking, cooking and food prep that is probably a year or two's worth out of one bottle of bleach.

Things for water would be worse in the few years after the zombie rise. You have tons of unmonitored plants that might be decaying, sewage leaking, etc, etc that is going to run in to water supplies. Your going to have a lot more contamination of water for the few years afterward. Sure you can use common sense, but when you are surviving on your own a bad case of chlorea of giardia very well might kill you on your own, especially with undead things trying to suck your brains running around. You do NOT want to drink bad water.

Food again, as I mentioned above, odds are good in such a situation as zombies rising, especially if it is following a pandemic that causes it, people are likely going to have eaten through some of their food and not been able to stock up before they die/leave/get zombified. Unlike you and your son, they aren't likely to ration their food, at least not at first. Looking through my pantry, at the end of a week before a grocery run I probably have anywhere from 6-8 days of food for myself, my wife and my toddler supposing we didn't ration at all (as in 2,500 or so calories a day each for us adults and 1,000 for my son). Of course that is getting in to eating flour, corn meal, tomatoe paste, etc. If we did ration we could probably streach it to a month or so of really tight belts (at around 1/3rd the calorie intake normally needed).

Rationing also means you are running your energy levels lower and generally can't be kept up indeffinitely, so you need more food supplies then basic rationing allows periodically.

So yeah, most houses would probably have something, at least if they didn't take off to greener pastures, then there might not be anything, or just a couple of things. If they died in their home or litterally went running out their door there would likely be food, but it could be anything from a couple of days of full meals for a single person all the way up through a couple of weeks of full meals for 3-4 adults in a typical house depending on when the home owner's last went shopping, if they were able to 'stock up' before the pandemic started setting in, etc, etc. A real horder might have months of food in their place before they kicked off, but that wouldn't be typical.

I'd say in a died in home situation anything from 2-6 days of food for a smaller home and 4-20 days of food for a larger home for a single adult is probably within it. That is assuming 2,500+ calories a day. I'd assume the larger home probably had a family/larger family living in it and thus more food to start with then the smaller home.

A vacated the permise and ran for the hills could be litterally nothing to maybe a couple of days of some basics like flour, tomatoe paste, etc (the undesriables they didn't throw in their car when they took off). Some places if the season is right probably have at least a basic garden though.
-Matt

[sHaka]

Hmmm....... subsonic .22 rounds are still lethal enough to kill dinner, and would take out zombies (I'm assuming a bullet to the head kills a DR zombie?) with little to no risk of alerting other zombies in the area. That might be a good idea to have in the zombiepocalyse prep kit.

As per the DR rules, arrows/crossbows and .22 rounds do minimal damage to zombies - I know you don't have the book, just giving you a heads up.

And you're right, there's going to be plenty of food for people about; maybe that is being underestimated here. But I think you also underestimate how utterly riddled the world is with shambling (sometimes sprinting), moaning, regenerating, very strong, life-force seeing, sometimes led by thinking, super-tough dead people.

And they're looking for food too.

[J. Lionheart]

Whoa, what's up with that?? Minimal damage, even if it's to the *head*? The traditional zombie killin' head shot doesn't work?!?!?

A traditional zombie killin' head shot does work, but it has to actually eliminate the brain. These aren't your mama's pansy zombies! You can't just flick a peanut at them and expect it to do anything, just cause it hit them in the head. You have to actually shatter the skull and completely destroy the brain. Basically, you need to beat the AR (14, I believe) and have to do enough damage to get through all the SDC and the brain's HP. A single round from a .22 is unlikely to do much of anything but get a the zombie's attention, causing it to moan and have 10,000 of its closest friends come eat you - DR zombies are tough mothers! It can take multiple people pumping 2 or 3 rounds each in to one to pierce their AR and do the necessary damage. Last year at my POH DR games, for example, groups of 10 players with military small arms and grenades were hard pressed to hold off about 45 zombies long enough for rescue. I recommend something like teflon coated .458 WinMag if you really want a chance of one-shotting them. They really take a lickin' and keep on tickin' in this game.

Life-force seeing? So you can't pull a Shaun of the Dead and just sneak around behind them, they can sense your PPE or something? Or do they actually have to *see* you? What if I was in a ghillie suit in the grass, or was overwhelmed by an urge to try out that ninja outfit I found at the last house, could they see/sense me?

All a ghillie suit provides is a whole lot of handholds for zombies grabbing you. A ninja suit would do nothing, either. Zombies will pick you out at a quarter mile if they have a sightline to you (whether they have eyes or not), and can sense your presence within like 20 or 30 feet, regardless of what's between you. At night, they can see you even farther away, literally like a bright light shining in the darkness.

[Thinyser]

I've found that a .45 doing 4d6 is effective against zombies using the rule that at point blank range it automatically does its full 24 points of damage direct to HP. IIRC this is what you always used in your games RPGMAN.

Personally I think some of the canon rules (like 17 or higher on the die to strike the head with a called shot & the fact that .38 and lower calibers do 1/2 damage to zombies even on head shots) are really dumb and have changed them to suit my game. I say that bonuses count for headshots just like any called shot and that even arrows and small caliber guns do full damage on head shots (still 1/2 to the body).

Yes zombies can see your PPE as well as sense it. They can see it from about 1/4 mile in broad daylight and about 1.75 miles at night. They can also sense your PPE from a distance that varries depending on how many people are in your group. The more people the farther a zombie can sense you from.

IMO A high PS and a sword to the neck is the best way to drop a zombie (at close range anyhow) since their neck only has about 13 SDC on average and unlike the head or main body you dont need to get though the SDC then also HP. No ammo consumption and practically silent so it doesnt draw in all the zed who would hear a gunshot.



Its flawed like most Palladium products but I think it would be worth your $$$ to order a copy (and maybe a copy of the source books too I like them and they are a real boon to running the game with their random search tables) of DR directly from Palladium since you cannot buy it locally.

[azazel1024]

I've found that a .45 doing 4d6 is effective against zombies using the rule that at point blank range it automatically does its full 24 points of damage direct to HP. IIRC this is what you always used in your games RPGMAN.

Personally I think some of the canon rules (like 17 or higher on the die to strike the head with a called shot & the fact that .38 and lower calibers do 1/2 damage to zombies even on head shots) are really dumb and have changed them to suit my game. I say that bonuses count for headshots just like any called shot and that even arrows and small caliber guns do full damage on head shots (still 1/2 to the body).

Yes zombies can see your PPE as well as sense it. They can see it from about 1/4 mile in broad daylight and about 1.75 miles at night. They can also sense your PPE from a distance that varries depending on how many people are in your group. The more people the farther a zombie can sense you from.

IMO A high PS and a sword to the neck is the best way to drop a zombie (at close range anyhow) since their neck only has about 13 SDC on average and unlike the head or main body you dont need to get though the SDC then also HP. No ammo consumption and practically silent so it doesnt draw in all the zed who would hear a gunshot.



Its flawed like most Palladium products but I think it would be worth your $$$ to order a copy (and maybe a copy of the source books too I like them and they are a real boon to running the game with their random search tables) of DR directly from Palladium since you cannot buy it locally.

That's almost exactly what I have done. Otherwise a single person doesn't have much of a chance against more then just a couple of zombies. Maybe real zombies would be supernaturally tough, but I tend to think of them as simply stronger versions of the person when they were alive, oh and slower and a bit less educated. The bones aren't suddenly several times stronger (in my mind, and the books don't actually mention bones being tougher or anything, just the rules), so if you do hit the head, a smaller caliber round shouldn't suddenly do a lot less damage. At close range a .22cal pistol round will penetrate the skull of a human, let alone a .22 long rifle or a .32 or .38 caliber pistol, so half damage shouldn't occur. Also it isn't that hard to hit something the size of a head at relatively close ranges with a pistol, let alone with a rifle at longer ranges either with a halfway decent marksman and/or a scope. So I allow bonuses to strike to apply to that 17 or higher to strike the head. Zombie's aren't fast moving things (well, except runners) so it shouldn't be that hard to to hit them in the head and knock them out.

It doesn't suddenly turn a survivor in the game in to a zombie masacring beast, but it does give a group of say 3-4 a chance against a medium sized group of zombies (say 15-20) without having to simply run for the hills.
-Matt

[azazel1024]

Well Kevin keeps saying DR stuff, especially the new book is the most requested stuff. He didn't mention if he was filling it in the orders, but probably. Wants to hype his latest game system.

Well, DR doesn't have magic in it, as in it is a no magic environment. It doesn't specifically say that DR is totally standalone from all other game systems, but it implies it. It is supposed to be horror/survival, not super heros/magic users running around. I mean if you want to do that, by all means, but that isn't really the guiding principal of the game as written and described by Kevin.

Of course that doesn't mean I don't have a group (whenever I finally get a group running again), that isn't going to be trying to unravel the zombie origins question and maybe try to reverse it (hint for the group, it ain't going to happen, but it'll be fun playing).
-Matt

[Smlawrence8]

Magic as an enhancer for the game can add a great amount of depth and flavor without overpowering or unbalancing the game.

Yeah flavor for TEH ZEDS

[sHaka]

Dead Reign has plenty of cross over potential. PFRPG, Nightbane, BTS2, RIFTS - in fact any system would provide the basis for a schweet crossover campaign. "....Possibilities only limited by your imagination".

[Thinyser]

I've found that a .45 doing 4d6 is effective against zombies using the rule that at point blank range it automatically does its full 24 points of damage direct to HP. IIRC this is what you always used in your games RPGMAN.

Yep, you remember right, if it's less than 3 yards/meters away it's point blank range for a handgun, so max damage. Worked real well when somebody critical'd too. Cut down on combat time too, at least a bit.

IMO A high PS and a sword to the neck is the best way to drop a zombie (at close range anyhow) since their neck only has about 13 SDC on average and unlike the head or main body you dont need to get though the SDC then also HP. No ammo consumption and practically silent so it doesnt draw in all the zed who would hear a gunshot.

See, this I could see being a very effective tactic, especially combined with a spell like Globe of Silence to prevent their moaning. But it's a low-magic dimension from what you guys have said, so that's not an option. Besides, any one with enough PPE to cast a spell would be a freakin' supernova attracting every zed within a country mile. But yeah, a sword, machete, or axe to the neck would work pretty well, especially from a strong guy/gal who could hopefully pull it off in one swing. Hmm - if I ever get into a DR game, I think I've got my first character concept figured out - a twin-machete wielding groundskeeper who doubles as a volunteer firefighter on the weekends.

Its flawed like most Palladium products but I think it would be worth your $$$ to order a copy (and maybe a copy of the source books too I like them and they are a real boon to running the game with their random search tables) of DR directly from Palladium since you cannot buy it locally.

I'm thinking I'll Xmas Grab Bag it if I can afford it next week, and ask for DR stuff. Anyone know if they've send much of it out in the grab bags?

I had the main book but i asked for both the suplements and got them.