Zombies are corpses reanimated by necromancers or disease to seek out the living and consume them. Mindless, zombies do not use weapons, have trouble operating simple mechanisms like door knobs, and are generally thwarted by the most simple of obstacles, at least for a time. They are tenacious when it comes to accomplishing their goal of seeking out the living and consuming them and are totally immune to any emotional attacks. Their only true vulnerability is through burning, acid, psionic attacks, or piercing attack to their head. Hacking off body parts and freezing temperatures can slow a zombie down, but only destroying their brain can truly kill it.

Zombies can wear armor and clothing and even magical armor and clothing if they died with them in life, and gain the force and elemental bonuses associated with those armors and clothing.

Cognitive attacks, including optical and auditory illusions, are generally very effective against a zombie for a time, though a zombie’s sense of smell is keen and it will eventually smell what is alive and what is not and abandon illusions for what it knows are real live brains. Zombies created by necromancers will never attack the necromancer who created them no matter how hungry they get. They will also never attack zombies or other undead because their brains don’t smell right.

Zombies will never use any weapons other than their teeth and claws. Attacks by teeth or claws are based on size with tiny zombies rolling two dice, very small four dice, and so forth up to gargantuan zombies which roll fourteen dice.

Movement is by the race of the creature affected (there are zombie birds), but it is always slow moving, and flying creatures generally choose to walk rather than fly except when flying gets them to their prey more efficiently. There are rumors of fast-moving zombies though this is generally considered a myth. While most animal life can be affected, there are no known cases of zombie insects and no known cases of sentient plants being affected.

Zombies created by disease transfer that disease to anyone struck by them and taking disease damage. The disease roll is only rolled if there was a successful attack from a claw or a bite. There is no known natural method of curing the disease which will turn the character into a zombie when their hit points reach zero, but there are magical methods of doing so.

Because a zombie’s body is slowly but steadily decomposing, they generally won’t last forever. After one to five years, a zombie will be reduced to a pile of unmoving bones, though any diseases causing that zombie will remain on the bones long after they have decayed to immovability. The decay is more rapid for zombies not subsisting on a steady diet of brains.