Because I'm bored and taking care of two small kids gives me plenty of opportunity to think about being overwhelmed by zombies ...


How about some Slang?:

Enclave - a town, or even group of buildings that have a large group of survivors. Maybe enclaves in cities (if any exist) would have a different name.

Holdouts - houses and ranches were a small number of people (usually families) live.

Scavangers - bands and/or novas that raid into the cities and roam the country side looking for goods they can use or trade with the enclaves.

Burners - bands of humans and/or novas both scavange (for larger enclaves) and raid smaller human enclaves and holdouts for their stuff. Burners may also be slavers.

Keep in mind that its only been six months. Would new slang really be likely?

Might be a little early for Burners, but the others sound good. I don't know if Burners would be that common yet that there would be slang. It probably took a couple months for the infection to spread and do most of it's damage, probably another month for people to start settling into new lifestyles and enclaves to start forming. 3 months is very short for any kind of slave trade to start up. Not that there wouldn't be people out there taking others as slaves, but I doubt they'd be trading much yet. I think that in America such a practice would be slower getting started than elsewhere given our history, too many people would be outright opposed and would fight slavers as a matter of course. Over time that sort of thing would develop, but I doubt slavers would go near the larger enclaves even to trade given how strongly people feel about that sort of thing.

Rather than looking to Mad Max as a role model for what the world would be like. You should absolutely watch the latest Resident Evil movie. It is almost exactly what the world would be like. That movie is almost tailor made for this game concept right down to the main character being a low level nova. Ok, she's not a nova, but she's pretty equivalent to our starting characters.

It's been six months since the world went to hell, not 3.

Also, I like the slang, Priest. Consider it stolen

6 months since the infection began or 6 months since the population was devastated. Even extremely virulent infection would take a couple months for 90+% of the earth's population to die off. I was assuming you were meaning 6 months out from the beginning.

Mr. Fox, that might be something worth looking into in game. How did it spread so fast (if it did) and why in so many places?

Question for Drew:
- if people just die (say a heart attack), do they rise as a zombie, or do they have to be infected?
- how long does it take from the time someone gets bitten for them to sicken and die?
- have any of us witnessed zombies behaving strangely?
- have we ever known a nova to go down to the infection?

Absolutely, and that's one thing that Fox would want to investigate. I imagine that he'd be talking with people around the world via Ham radio. Even if this thing happened in just a matter of days or even hours there would have been TV news reports of it until things collapsed, and it would have been broadcast that it was a Global pandemic. We see images of Riots in third world countries and car bombings in the Middle East just after they happen. Surely something like a Zombie infection would be plastered over the TV until the stations started going off the air. For that not to be the case it would have had to have happened globally in just a matter of a couple hours. Which also would tell us something about the situation.

Those are good questions that we would have answers to after six months.

Personally tragic would have been the Blogs as they slowly and grimly went off the net too. You know, like the last guy in Hong Kong, in some highrise, with zombies packed up at the door. Still some people would be making the effort to figure out what went wrong.

I wonder if Google map searches with their live camera shots still function at all. Probably not, but imagine what it would be like to see your home ... and the horde of zombies gathered outside ... waiting.

The internet would have gone down within weeks if not days. Many data centers have generator backup systems to keep them online even in the event of a power outage. At most though, even my company couldn't keep them online more than 26 days without main power. The real question would be how long before the power plants went offline.

Ooo... there's a question. What happened to all the nuclear plants? Hopefully they were shutdown cleanly and didn't go chernobyl on us.

ouch...glad I am taking adaptability...cant drunk anymore though..that sucks, given circumsatnces we would probably want to be...

Chernobyl was a case of grossly incompetent design combined with grossly incompetent operation.

I think we can assume, both IC and OOC, that at least one guy in the nuke plants was smart enough to push the button which would take it off line... or that some computer would do it.

Whew. Lotsa questions. I'll do my best to answer but keep in mind I'm a bit sloshed at the writing of this message.

First and easiest - no Chernobyl crap goin on.

Priests questions:
- If people Just Die, they stay Just Dead.
- It varies, but it usually takes about 8-10 hours for someone to zombify.
- You've probably seen zombies that move faster than normal or possess animal cunning. If you're (un)lucky you've seen one with teeth and claws.
-You've never seen a nova go down to the infection. But you've seen a baseline infected that didn't zombify, instead erupting in a crazy-ass crackheaded manner that resulted in something nova-ish and profoundly warped (aberrated).

When I get back from Dallas I will devote a thread to Zombies, The Universe and Everything. Questions will be answered and various thingies clarified.

OK, different question/problem. If the zombie virus is also the creators of the novas, and the virus is spread by body fluids, can novas create zombies/novas with a kiss, bite, or sex?

If we're truely immune then the answer is no, but we could be just carriers.

Novas cannot be carriers. You're infected or you aren't, and novas aren't, ever.

Some of the virus-triggered eruptees technically aren't novas, however. More on that when I have more than five minutes at one time - that is, when I get out of Dallas.