Most of America has returned to nature— and to once-human hordes that shamble through the smoldering corpses of cities and stagger down wreck-strewn roads. High-security fortress enclaves and lonely keeps are scattered points of light in the surrounding zombie darkness. Within these safe zones, the “American way of life” continues, one that includes daily HRV blood screening, walls bristling with automated guns and drones, and lives separated by miles and miles of zombie-infested highways in poor repair.
Zed America is one of several recursions that hosted a zombie apocalypse. Most of these “Zed Omegas” aren’t as fortunate as Zed America, where civilization survived by finding a new equilibrium. The status quo is an uneasy one, because every year, new HRV replication events convert fresh victims, sometimes even those who hunker behind high fortress walls.
Zed America was created by fictional leakage.
Most foci that player characters can choose in Zed America are just like those available on Earth, with a few exceptions.
According to Zed America’s narrative, advanced biotechnology brought on the zombie apocalypse. But some good came of it as well, including this focus, which grants a character the ability to directly integrate weapons into her body.
Advanced biotechnology led to wonders of regenerative medicine and longevity. It even granted certain individuals the ability to regenerate tissue. The application of an engineered retrovirus called the human regenerative virus (HRV) combined with daily meditation using special biofeedback techniques allows a character to heal wounds that would kill a normal person. Most people live with a weak strain of HRV, but a person with the Regenerates Tissue focus has been inoculated with the real thing. Of course, it's best not to advertise that one is HRVpositive. Most people who caught the virulent strain went into uncontrolled replication and converted into hard-to-kill zombies.
Zed America Regenerates Tissue GM Intrusion: You go into uncontrolled HRV replication. To avoid becoming a zombie, you must succeed on three difficulty 3 Intellect-based tasks before failing two.
Many “Zed Omega” recursions offer foci that grant natives (and recursors who visit) improved skills in hunting zombies.
Humans who undergo a runaway HRV replication event convert over the course of one hour into hard-to-kill, aggressive, cannibalistic serial killers, their minds burned out with hunger. They’re commonly called zed, zombies, Z, or walkers.
Zombies aren’t intelligent, but enough of them together sometimes exhibit emergent behavior, just as ants can coordinate activities across a colony. More worrying is the continual evolution of the HRV infection. It began as a retrovirus that, once within an organism, turns on genes long dormant in higher mammals. This same capacity has had the additional long-term consequence of mutating base zombies, creating tougher, faster, or smarter versions, sometimes with frightening new abilities.
Of course, the infectious nature of zombies makes them most dangerous. A zed bite either infects someone with HRV or triggers a replication event in a Zed America native that already harbors a weak version of the virus.
In the former case, a victim bitten by a zombie within the previous hour must succeed on a Might defense roll whose difficulty is equal to the zombie’s level. Failure means the victim is infected with a virulent strain of HRV (a level 8 disease). Every twenty-four hours after the initial bite, the victim must succeed on another Might defense roll or move one step down the damage track. While the disease is active, normal recovery rolls aren’t sufficient to move a victim back up the damage track. If a victim dies while infected or because of the infection, he rises as a zombie 1d6 hours later. Sometimes, conversion happens much more quickly, over the course of just an hour, and no one really understands why.
In addition to regular zombies, Zed America hosts zombie hulks, zombie sprayers, and zombie sprinters.
Zombie: level 3, Speed defense as level 2; health 12. If an attack would reduce the zombie’s health to 0, it does so only if the attack roll was an even number; otherwise, the zombie’s health is reduced to 1 instead
Blood tests to screen for HRV are conducted frequently in Zed America. Mandated testing is required for people entering a fortress enclave (like New Chicago), for those who’ve had contact with zed, and for those entering and leaving a secure biolab. Law enforcement may also demand tests based on suspicious activity at their discretion. Anyone who refuses testing is treated as if he’d failed the test.
Blood tests are routinely applied by white drones emblazoned with red medical insignia. The blood draw is a quick jab, and results are analyzed and displayed on a screen within a few rounds for all to see. If someone passes, the drone flashes a green light and emits a pleasant tone. If someone fails, the drone activates a siren and tries to restrain the target. Failing a blood test is serious business and at minimum sees someone expelled, though, more often, targets are immediately euthanized.
The test examines a creature’s viral load of HRV; everyone in Zed America has some, but past a certain threshold, a subject is deemed to be in imminent danger of going into wild replication and converting. A character with the Regenerates Tissue focus had better hope he has a medical card describing his situation, or he will be assumed to be on the verge of zombie conversion.
The following sites are a few of the many fascinating places that recursors can discover in Zed America.
New Chicago incorporates the northern portion of the original city, but most of the buildings lie behind the New Chicago Wall.
This 40-foot (12 m) high wall of steel and concrete (level 5) encloses the area of New Chicago, where regular folks live. Automated gun turrets dot the wall tops, though coverage isn’t complete, and mechanics are always on call to deal with frequent jams and other issues. A handful of autonomous flying drones patrol along the wall, mostly for surveillance. If the drones detect an advancing horde, the Chicago Fire Brigade is called to reinforce the wall turrets, usually from the safety of the wall top.
Access through the New Chicago Wall is highly regulated. The main gate controls traffic (sparse as it is) seeking to pass into and out of the city along Interstate 94. Anyone who wants into the city, even well-known citizens who drove out just minutes earlier, must submit to a blood test administered by an autonomous drone before the gates are opened.
Inside the wall, New Chicago resembles a well-to-do collection of normal Earth suburbs surrounding an inner core of skyscrapers. People work, go to school, talk on smartphones, drink coffee, and watch shows streamed on the New Chicago intranet (a limited remnant of the World Wide Web). Businesses and malls are open during the day, and nightclubs and theaters draw crowds at night. Most people in New Chicago lead a fairly normal life and never, ever go beyond the wall.
PR savvy and fashionable, Mayor Adams currently runs things in New Chicago, though her detractors are many. Some accuse her of overstating the fear of a new zombie apocalypse and holding onto power by making people afraid with too-frequent HRV warnings and blood tests. But Eleanor, for her part, does what she thinks is right for the community. She knows how dangerous the world really is, high walls or no, and that the thing that lives in the Milwaukee Ruins is something that must be dealt with eventually. That said, she’s not above taking down political rivals by fair means or foul.
Mayor Eleanor Adams: level 4, tasks related to interaction and administration as level 6
Autonomous flying drone: level 3, perception tasks as level 6; long-range movement when flying
Fire Brigade firefighter: level 3; short-range flamethrower deals 5 points of damage and burns the target for 1 additional point of damage per round until the target spends an action dousing the flames
Spreading south from New Chicago’s walled perimeter lies a much larger swath of original Chicago, now in ruins. Despite occasional forays by firefighters to clean the area, lone zombies and zombie hordes are likely encounters. That doesn’t stop treasure hunters and scientists from entering the old city looking for salvage or data, though doing so is incredibly dangerous.
Anyplace outside a fortress enclave or a keep is considered Badlands. In the Badlands, the rule of law is nonexistent, so meeting another group of humans along a wreck-strewn road isn’t necessarily a meeting between friends. Several gangs of highway bandits roam the Badlands, including Carla’s Rednecks, Diamondbacks, and the Psycho Choir. They’re usually at each other’s throats, though their rivalries fade in the face of fresh meat when travelers move between fortress enclaves and keeps. Caravans of three or more vehicles are less likely to be targeted, though sometimes larger caravans draw more bandits to investigate. And of course, conflicts with guns and racing motors are so loud that a wandering horde of zed is almost sure to follow.
A lot of the most obvious salvage in the Badlands has already been picked over, but much remains to be found. Vehicles, gasoline, canned food, weapons, tools, spare parts, and treasures of all kinds can be found in abandoned homes and garages across what was once America (or at least the part contained in the limited landscape of the recursion).
The Badlands also host small inhabited keep enclaves. These are usually fortified compounds established by an extended family, a religious group, or a team of scientists working on a Z cure (with concentrations of HRV deemed too dangerous to be used inside a fortress enclave). Some keeps are friendly to visitors, others not.
Badlands bandit: level 3; Armor 1; long-range firearm attack deals 4 points of damage
Keep scientist: level 3, tasks related to research and biotech as level 5
In Zed America, many towns (or parts of towns) lie in ruins. But Milwaukee is special. It’s home to a unique zombie called Patient Zero. Most people believe he’s the source of the mutant strain of HRV that caused the zombie outbreak. This might be true, though recursor visitors to Zed America theorize that he may not be a native zombie. He could be what’s known as a crowned shambler, a variety of zombie born in a recursion that operates under the law of Magic. Whatever his origin, Patient Zero possesses several uniquely scary abilities, including the power to control other zed, whole hordes at a time. The Milwaukee Ruins literally crawl with zombies, and many are atypical zed, with abilities even less understood than those of sprinters, hulks, and sprayers.
Crowned shambler: level 6; short-range bone-tipped viscera attack moves victim one step down the damage track; regains 2 points of health per round while its health is above 0; regains 1 point of health per minute while its health is 0; controls zombies within short range
About an hour out of Chicago lie the ruins of Braidwood, once a city of some 6,000 people. Near it is the Braidwood Nuclear Generating Plant, whose unique silhouette is always visible on the horizon. When zombies overcame the workers at the plant, the nuclear process spiraled out of control. This ultimately led to a catastrophic power increase in one of the reactors, which was closely followed by core explosions. Thankfully, the reactor was mostly shielded by a hard containment vessel, or a much wider swath of the landscape would have been irradiated.
However, the plant itself is highly irradiated, and for reasons not immediately clear, has attracted a large collection of resident zombies of all types, but especially zombie sprayers. It should come as a surprise to no one that the zombies infesting the Braidwood Nuclear Generating Plant are highly radioactive. When they come swarming out of the facility every few nights, they glow with a flickering, greenish-blue light. Where the radioactive swarms travel, they leave a blackened trail of dead plants and animals in their wake, which is impossible to miss.
Three zombies at the center of the nuclear plant never leave with the swarm, possibly because they have merged into a tripartite being in a fusion of melted flesh and bone. Unlike the others, these three operate with a scary level of self-awareness and refer to themselves as a single being: Ulysses. Ulysses has plans for its growing brood of radioactive zombies, which include growing the swarm large enough to overrun Patient Zero and its forces in the Milwaukee Ruins. For now, Ulysses seems uninterested in taking down New Chicago, possibly because the occasional living captives the radioactive swarm brings back are the only people Ulysses can talk to— until they inevitably die of radiation poisoning.
Radioactive: Zombies with this quality inflict 1 additional point of damage per attack. On a failed Might defense roll, a victim subtracts 1 from all recovery rolls for the next three days. Multiple hits escalate this penalty.
Ulysses: level 7; radioactive
Entrepreneur Kwan Kaya, a woman of formidable determination, has turned her attention to a new project: repair Zed America’s Internet so that far-flung enclaves are connected once more. The engineers require protection as they travel into the Badlands to accomplish their goal.
A new variety of zombie has been sighted several times in the old Chicago ruins. It looks like a regular zombie, but its bulging stomach is translucent and filled with sloshing fluid. New Chicago scientists want a sample for study.
Concerned father Denis Lin is looking for someone to smuggle his zed-positive son out of the secret room in the attic where he’s been kept since he converted, and then release the boy into the Badlands, “where he’ll have a chance.”
Mayor Adams is putting together a scouting team to go north into the Milwaukee Ruins. She’s received reports that Patient Zero is building something called a “Zed Conversion Bomb,” and she wants to see if it’s true.
Level: 1d6+1
Origin: Zed America (fictional)
Law: Weird Science
Form: Precision military rifle with fused bioreactor module and telescopic sight
Effect: The bioreactor contains live, concentrated human regenerative virus (HRV), which causes rapid-onset zombie transformation in those it infects. The HRV coats the ammunition when fired from the rifle. With the scope, the rifle can be fired at a target within 1,600 feet (488 m), inflicting damage equal to the artifact level. A target that fails a Might defense roll suffers an episode of HRV replication. If the target fails three subsequent Might defense rolls before succeeding on two, she falls into a coma and rises ten minutes later as a zombie.
Depletion: 1 in 1d20
Level: 1d6+1
Form: Cherry-red flamethrower plastered with anti-zed stickers
Effect: This weapon sprays a short-range line of flaming, high-pressure liquid at up to three targets standing next to each other, inflicting damage equal to the artifact level. Affected targets are also doused in burning liquid, catch on fire, and take 2 points of damage each round until they succeed on a Speedbased task to smother the flames. A zombie target hat has the special ability to retain 1 point of health is overcome one round after it would normally be reduced to 0 health. The zed burner is not a rapid-fire weapon.
Depletion: 1 in 1d20