Improvised Hideouts For The Zombie Apocalypse

[Koshka]

Or any other relatively-modern game that could use a hideout, but I've been talked into trying to write a convention game in a "the dead started eating people 6 months ago" type of setting.  To keep me awake for the full time slot, the game needs to be more than "find guns, load guns, shoot zombies".  I was thinking of placing the main fights in an unusual setting.  The questions, of course, are what sort of setting and are there maps on the Web?

One idea I had was a casino -- there aren't any windows, so all the survivors would have to do is block a few doors to keep the zombies out.  There's a couple casinos across the river, but I'm sensitive enough to tobacco smoke that heading over there with graph paper isn't a very good idea.  Not to mention the fun of explaining what I'm doing to security.  A police substation would also be easy to secure, but I'm definitely not poking around there  .

Branching out a bit, SJG has a map packet for an underground silo -- anyone have a review of it?  (I had trouble with their blank map sheets, I couldn't erase pencil lines without leaving obvious marks.)

[dadiceguy]

The best to hold off a zombie attack is a WalMart. They have guns, ammo, food, maybe even generators, and only has a few entrances to guard.

[Telas]

Interesting challenge.

Most telecom central offices are windowless buildings with alternate power and communication.  Due to the rate of return regulation of Ma Bell, they're mostly overbuilt as well.  (RoRR gives a guaranteed return on invenstments, in return for a monopoly, so it's worth your while to spend heavy on investments.) 

Co-location facilities would be similar; watch out for the raised floors (for ventilation). 

In Tornado Alley, storm shelters are commonplace.

I'm thinking a skyscraper could be built into a pretty good fortress, if you welded the stairwell doors shut.

Sewers and underground facilities would be easy to defend as well. 

The cliff dwellings the Anasazi Indians left behind at Mesa Verde seemed highly defensible when I toured them.  I imagine Hoover Dam is as well...

Actually, Vegas would make a great Zombie site...  Trams, big buildings, security passages, etc.

[Rick_TWA]

Any large industrial complex could be fun.  Those would be kind of hard to defend (they're specifically built for the efficient transfer of product, at least the well-designed ones are, which means lots of big entryways for shipping/receiving, multiple doors, open design, etc...) but they have lots of advantages both tactically, strategicly, and dramaticly.  They have large open areas with lots of terrain, cover, objects vehicles, etc... (think zombie forklift jousting!) a character with good electrical/mechanical/repair skills can treat the whole place as one giant puzzle if it's got power (let's get the power grid online, then boot up the security system, then we've got surveilance from the monitors and we can run the welding torches we need), they have maufacturing facilities, raw materials, and tools that you can't get anywhere else or transport, there are plenty of moving objects, sounds, chemicals, for ambiance, there are lots of places for zombies to pop up unexpectedly (duct work, in, behind, under machinery, etc...)

[longcoat000]

I'm going to have to go The Walking Dead route and say a prison would make a pretty interesting modern-day setting.  If you can turn back the clock to the first half of the century, you could make Alcatraz into a pretty neat location.

It would also help if we knew more about what you're trying to do.  You said you wanted it to be more than lock, load, and shoot, but we don't know any of the adventure details.  What do you want the characters to accomplish?  Simple survival?  Look for a cure?  End the meanace?  And what's the background outbreak?  Is it a virus that induces rage at the non-infected (28 Days Later), Romero zombies (shamblers), Romero-redux zombies (running shamblers), Spiral Zone gone awry (mind control device that robs free will), out of control voodoo, or what?  Also, you said "relatively" modern day, but what are the time boundaries?  Within a decade of today?  Anything from the 1920's on up?

[hellibrarian]

My group plays the occasional zombiepocalype one-shot set in our own home town (Clearwater, FL).  They have claimed a Sam's Club warehouse that is next door to a Home Depot as their new home.  Sadly there are no firearms sold out of Sam's or Wal Mart in our county, but there are plenty of other anti-zombie weapons that don't run out of ammo.

zombie forklift jousting!

Had I been consuming a liquid, it would have come out of my nose.

[darelf]

The cliff dwellings the Anasazi Indians left behind at Mesa Verde seemed highly defensible when I toured them.

You did what...?  Oh, wait... you toured them.  Not tortured them.  For some reason I had the image of you in caves torturing indians, hands and forearms covered in blood holding a curved obsidian dagger....

...

[VV_GM]

I'm also a big fan of The Walking Dead series, and second the prison idea. I'd also say a hospital could be made into a fortress with a little work. Lots of sections could be made off limits easily and there is usually a good supply of food and water as well as generators. Plus clearing it out could be a fun adventure. A museum would also be cool as many have secure sections, and you might find many surprising weapons at your disposal. It just matters how "realistic" you want the the setting to be. Some less than ideal locations could be cool places to defend with a little suspension of disbelief.

[xcorvis]

Do you want an urban location, or one farther out? A county manor house or a reclusive insane asylum might be interesting. I suppose there are mental wards in cities too, but they're usually attached to hospitals.

[kaelbane]

Well, here's someplace you couldn't really hide if the zombies have "live people sense", can smell brains, etc.
Most modern residential construction in the US.

A living person, with some pain and discomfort, can tear through the wall of a suburban house with few (or no!) tools. Since zombies don't feel pain, worry about damage to their fingernails, or understand the concept of the future, they won't mind sacrificing body parts to get access to the chewy goodness inside. Though I've been wracking my brains about how to figure it out exactly, I think a small group of zombies could dig a whole in the wall of a stud frame building in a few hours at most.

(When I was thirteen, I punched a whole in a Sheetrock wall and didn't even get bruised. Didn't hit the stud, of course. I'm not very strong, either. Another friend locked himself in a bathroom at a party in university (accidentally!), and one of our drunk bodies gave the door a kick by the door knob and it popped right open with surprisingly little damage to the door frame. The latch plate had to be screwed back on, and the door still worked for privacy purposes. In more recent years, a door in my home was slammed (slammer weighs 115 lbs at most) in an argument and it became impossible to close. The frame had to be repaired. Anyone who's done any home improvement knows that most new homes are barely up to code, let alone well built.)

Though many industrial complexes/gallerias/offices appear to be made of brick, the bricks aren't structural. If you weren't worried about the condition of your fingertips, you could rip them off with your bare hands. Again, zombies are going to make short work here. Some parts of the buildings may be concrete blocks, but many of the walls, even exterior ones, are aluminum frame with Sheetrock, insulation and siding.

Depending on how the security doors are attached to the concrete/blocks of a more solid building, they probably wouldn't take too long (probably no more than a few days, depending on how many zombies you've got in your world) to break through the door frame or cement around it. And just as fans at a rock show will trample living people to get closer to pretty lame rock acts, zombies will swarm (if they have any way to sense the living... and if they don't, you don't have much of a threat of zombie outbreak). Zombies won't even think about trying to defend themselves from being trampled by the other undead. Eventually they'd just form a sloping hill of zombie bodies up to the windows.

Some other thoughts:
Most zombies are vulnerable to head shots in the movies. However, mechanical damage to their bodies would be just as effective in many cases. Severed muscles, connective tissue, and bones will stop them from moving (or attacking).

Zombies do not defend themselves. Eventually a cool headed character with a bushwacker could immobilize them with little fear of suffering attacks, but you have to determine if the spray can cause infection.

Fire just makes zombies more dangerous. It takes a long time for cooking to do enough mechanical damage to immobilize something that feels no pain.

If the zombies are physically capable of rotting, eventually they'd be immobilized by decomposition. (According to Romero, zombies do decompose, and it hurts. However, near skeletal zombies can still move.) At six months, the world may be pretty post-apocalyptic, but would probably lack any really big groups of roamers. When the characters open up a nice cool military shelter, however, the zombies could be preserved for a lot longer.

If the zombies need to kill people to eat them, more people will turn into food than be reanimated. Also, as the number of zombies increases, their rate of death by starvation would also increase. If they just hate living people, and attack them until they're dead, it makes for a better adventure setting with more zombies. If zombies must eat brains, and destroying their brains is the only way to immobilize them, there probably won't be that high of a rate of spread of the condition. (The zombie kills John and eats his brain. John can't become a walking zombie, since he has no brain. Maybe he could lay on the ground and flail about until he randomly caught someone...)

I've done months of work for a short zombie hunting campaign (set at the beginning of the outbreak) and done lots of speculation on how the sessions should play out and eventually how the pandemic should spread. Unfortunately haven't played any of it yet.

[icanhashealingpotion]

I've been talked into trying to write a convention game in a "the dead started eating people 6 months ago" type of setting.  To keep me awake for the full time slot, the game needs to be more than "find guns, load guns, shoot zombies".  I was thinking of placing the main fights in an unusual setting.  The questions, of course, are what sort of setting and are there maps on the Web?

The convention hall.

[Koshka]

Sorry it took so long to get back here -- we had someone quit with no notice at work, so I was racking up the time-and-a-half.

Longcoat, sorry about the poor phrasing in my initial post.  I'm looking at a 2007 setting, though by the time this gets run it'll be 2008 at the earliest.  I could go very late 1990's, but nothing earlier than that, I don't want to waste game time with a recent affairs recap.  The zombies are really dead, but get around well; "Romero-redux" is a nice way to put it.  The PCs will need to rescue some researchers who barricaded themselves in a hospital or similarly-equipped building long enough to make some progress on a zombie-cure, but they're running out of supplies, and none of them are combat-trained (so can't make the breakout themselves).  I haven't decided yet if they're still holed up at the original site, or if the few combat-trained people with them got them partway to the PCs base before getting killed, leaving the scientists to lock themselves in someplace and hope the PCs get there first.

Rick, zombie forklift jousting sounds like a blast!  Makes me wish I had floorplans for a factory.

Xcorvis, I was thinking non-urban area for the PCs start point.  It just makes more sense to me that the PCs and their NPC allies could fortify someplace and hold off the zombie hordes if it takes the zombie hordes a while to get there.  They'd just about have to go into an urban setting for the rescue, though.  If the zombie cure can be whipped up in a rural vet clinic, either some country vet holds the Nobel Prize for medicine or zombie-ism should have been taken care of within two weeks of onset.

Kaelbane, good points on modern construction.  My former apartment building burned down (after I'd moved out, luckily) because some builder didn't bother to put in the proper dividers between apartments.

[longcoat000]

Just read this on CNN.com this morning, and it sounds like what you're looking for.  Modern day dungeon crawl that connects all sorts of buildings mentioned here.

[Telas]

Wow.  That story is one be-mulleted truck driver and one mannequin away from an epic adventure...

"Ok, you people! Sit tight, hold the fort and keep the home fires burning. And if we're not back by dawn... call the president."