NPC Monster, Zombie Crewmember

Zombie Crewmembers are, for lack of a better word, “ordinary” zombies, as if there is such a thing. They are animated corpses that kill the living. However, they are controlled by their creator, the Intelligence.

Zombie Crewmembers have only three specific purposes: One, killing intruders, and two, gathering parts, weapons, and scrap for the creation of Scrap Zombies, and three, protecting and maintaining the Resurrection.

Zombies are, in effect, monstrous robotic drones that lack true intelligence and imagination. Aside from animating the dead, the Intelligence programs each type of zombie and controls their actions similar to a person playing a real-time strategy video game. It gives them commands, but the dead can only follow very simple instructions. Zombies have very little mental prowess and even less cognitive awareness. In short, they are “meat puppets” or robots that follow very basic programming and orders. Too much information fed into them at once only confuses the monsters and makes them inefficient (reduce number of attacks/actions and speed by half). Therefore, their orders are usually simple commands like, “find and kill the living,” and “acquire salvageable weapons and scrap and bring it to the factories.” For the most part, zombies are slow and dumb, have poor spatial recognition abilities, and are utterly lacking multi-layered cognitive processes. When something catches their attention, they shuffle toward it, stumbling across rubble, rocks and whatever happens to be in their path. They do not pay much attention to things like walls or doors until they get right up on top of them.

When a Chaos or Scrap Zombie encounters something large and unliving blocking its way, its first reaction is to tear it down or go around it. If tearing it or knocking it down proves unsuccessful, the zombies usually give up after 4D6 minutes and try to find a way around it or move off in some other direction. That is, unless the creatures know there are living people on the other side of the barrier. If the zombies can see, hear or sense living survivors within 100 feet (30.5 m), they continue to tear and hammer at the obstacle, or try to push it or climb over it until the living people leave or perish, or manage to slip away or destroy the zombies.  The best bet for any survivor is to keep moving and stay hidden. All zombies recognize when their kin are agitated, on the hunt or have the living cornered, and that attracts them like sharks to blood.

However, they are not completely mindless, and are directed to seek out and target the weakest among any group of humans and attack that person before moving onto the next.

Zombie Crewmembers are programmed to find and use any available weapon from the environment, from wood and iron pipe as a club or spear, to guns of all kinds.