-SNIP-
I was wondering if anyone had done a Zombie adventure / campaign / setting in the Shadowrun universe?
-SNIP-
How did your Zombies differ from Ghouls (aside from being the living dead) and why?
How did you deal with reanimated metahumans that had cyberware installed and why?
How did you use these undead in your games and how did it "work out"? (For instance, mindless brain seeking zombies epidemic, a necromancers minions or "Dead" special forces controlled by a corp or other organization).
While I wasn't the GM, I was playing a FACE in a "zombie run" in a game some years back (3rd Edition). In that particular case it was a Romero Movie in game form. The zombies were the classic shambling Romero ghouls out to eat people. They were, for the most part, mindless killing and eating machines driven only by the desire to eat metahuman flesh (well, really anything living or recently living). And yes, the only way to dispatch them was destroying the brain or brain stem.
I think the GM had 9 basic "classes" of zombie and pretty much all of them fell into those classes. There were (for the sake of comparison) Minion, Lieutenant and Boss zombies, then the same three basic types for ones with passive cyber and then the same three basic types for those who originally had active cyber (and were pushovers for the most part because they had to drag around all that useless metal). The "bosses" basically acted like "named NPCs" usually would in a regular run and had a modicum of intelligence, tool use and tactical skill, but not much (think the lead zombie in "Land of the Dead").
As we would find out late in the adventure, they were created by the accidental release of a military bio weapon that reanimated the dead intended as a "early release" weapon of terror in large scale conflicts.
From what I recall, passive cyberware worked, active cyberware did not. So, for example, armored plating and boosted reflexes worked just fine but cyberarms and wired reflexes didn't thanks to their actively communicating with a brain and body that wasn't working within software specs. Bioware, for the most part worked in the sense that they suffered no real ill effect from it. For example, tailored pheromones really wouldn't hinder the ghoul, but he's not going to be making any social skill checks either.
In that game it was mostly just "survival horror" in table-top form. The mission was blown by virtue of there being ghouls eating everyone, so out "mission" was to live long enough to get extracted (a few days as I recall). Since this was a isolated island out in the Pacific, once the series of games containing the scenario were over, they were never mentioned by the GM again (I was kinda disappointed by that) and the only mentions were token ones from characters who had been there.
As an amusing side point, my character and a friend's character had the "We're not using the Zed word" conversation, almost word for word two full years before "Shaun of the Dead" and when that conversation happened in the movie, we disrupted the whole theatre laughing WAY to much.
