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World Of The Living Dead:

Here’s the Halloween map for 2018. Happy Halloween everyone.

It all began in 2012, as countless conspiracy theories said it would but no-one really expected what would happen. It first started with a few risings in unmarked graves and sites of mass killings, a few bites here and there from rabid, cold-skinned people that weren’t properly treated, dark, gruesome rituals conducted in isolated graveyards and some covert and very illegal experiments into regeneration of dead cellular tissue. Then every corpse with a certain amount of flesh still on their bones tore their way out of the ground and set upon the living. In only a couple of years, the problem that the world has initially failed or refused to notice had spread out of control and the world collapsed into – almost total – anarchy and the various kinds of dead ran rampant.

The year is now 2100, the dawn of a new century where the dead still roam the Earth.

The dead still walk the Earth, though most of them have rotted almost to the bone and remain ambulatory through numerous unknown means. Some simply shrivelled up to a mummified state that, whilst decrepit, is still intact enough to remain physically mobile. Others, usually those animated by supernatural forces, are clearly using magic or other dark powers to replace musculature, tendons and other necessary body parts. Then there are those that have somehow managed to gain a self-sustaining supply of preservative substances in their bodies that keep them relatively intact.

Most of the dead are mindless corpses wandering around, some instinct occasionally guiding but usually just following the path of least resistance, stumbling about and moaning “brains.” there are, however, a few oddities scattered here and there and they are making something of themselves in this new world.

Then there are the remaining enclaves of the living, clinging onto life and desperately trying to reclaim land and resources.

The United States was the nation most uniquely suited to survive the zombie apocalypse in some kind of shape and did make a good showing of itself but unfortunately still ended up being isolated and divided by the hordes of the dead. Still they had the largest number of large and well organised enclaves: though they are prone to fighting one another these days as well as the dead – and sometimes more as well, the living often being easier to kill than zombies.

The official United States government remnant is still holed up in the Rockies and Colorado Plateau and is the largest surviving state in the world. It is still technically democratic, holding elections to vote in the official president of the United States but the system tends to be rigged in favour of whoever the military supports at the time. The remains of the US military, still holding powers granted to them during the early collapse of the old USA and the subsequent weakening of the government, effectively run the remnant. The regression of technology has also hampered things but a dedicated class of engineers manage to keep things moderately advanced and make the most of the limited resources available to the nation. They do maintain a few vassal states hat are tied to them but too much trouble to invade and annex directly.

Appalachia, a state founded by various isolated military units and local militia groups, is a wretched dictatorship. The original refugee state collapsed once and was almost wiped out completely, rebuilding itself from various remaining enclaves. It is currently an impoverished, despotic tyranny with a heavy Christian fundamentalist bent to its culture. It currently survives through intense religiosity, brutal repression, fear of the vast undead hordes still milling beyond their borders and the enslavement of a tenth of their population, most of them white by this point since previous slave repression campaigns killed off most of the blacks.

The Sierra Nevada (and much of the Great Basin in general) has also become a hotspot for various petty states descended from American and Mexican refugee groups that have, in many cases, become intermixed. Most are Catholic or some form of faith descended from it and tend to share rigid social systems that enforce law and order and help keep the dead out of their territories for the most part. There have been calls in the past to unify in some fashion but they usually fall apart and would-be uniters/conquerors quickly overstretch their resources. With the US now beginning to expand into their lands, however, that may change.

Mexico has recently seen a series of unification wars that have united the collection of impoverished petty states on the Mexican Plateau into a new – more or less united – state. It’s highly Catholic, rather impoverished and built on a foundation of mandatory decapitation upon the death of anyone and a slightly neo-Aztec, ritualised militarism that barely keeps the various factions cooperative with one another. At the very least they outlawed slavery and are trying to make their own excursions into the former ‘dead wandering lands’ though resource limitations and the simmering feuds between the ruling classes hamper their efforts.

The Caribbean, bizarrely, has become a complex community of island states and semi-nomadic boat settlements and communities. Though they still deal with the smaller hordes that wander ashore as well as the packs still hiding in the jungles, these states continue to hold up their complex networks of trade and exploration and are even expanding out and founding new outposts. Despite this optimism and new energy in the Caribbean Community, it doesn’t extend to everything, however. The democracy that does exist beyond the ‘small village’ level in this community has become quite exclusive and elitist and some member states have revived slavery in some fashion or another.

Despite most of South America largely falling to the dead, the Andes managed to provide sanctuary to people. The petty states that inhabit the mountains are isolationist and xenophobic and some have gone down some very bizarre and disturbing directions (the people who revived child sacrifice – with safety measures, of course – occupy the middle ground of this region’s measurements of awfulness). The current patchwork of states are mostly Catholic though a few new religions have popped up with the growing sun-worship faith making waves not only in the mountains but also amongst the few intrepid communities that are interested in expanding back out onto the continent with steel and fire.

Europe, with its dense population concentration, fewer options for defence and higher propensity for facing explicitly supernatural undead did much worse compared to the United States. The near universality of this undead uprising also made defensibility difficult and the continent largely fell in most areas.

The Alps proved to be one of the bigger sanctuaries. After dealing with their own dead, the Swiss shut their borders to everyone except a small detachment of Swiss Guard escorting the Pope and cardinals to safety. Since then the Alpine Holy Kingdom has gone from relative strength to relative strength. The mountains have been largely secured and purged of the dead and the Catholic Church manages to consecration of all dead before their ritual beheading and burning. The Pope is essentially an elected monarch of the AHK which has since incorporated the surviving Austrians, French and Germans from elsewhere in the Alps and regularly delivers fiery sermons designed to whip the people up for their continued crusade against the dead. The current campaign intends to thin out the hordes of Italy so that the road to Rome and the Vatican City can be cleared and reclaimed.

The UK clung to life in a few fortified holdouts, most of them islands. They have since spent the decades trying to reclaim the mainland. The UK is somewhere between a military dictatorship and neo-feudal kingdom all loosely united under the monarchy that has recently moved its seat to the somewhat secured territory in Scotland as a signifier that Britain’s campaign of reclamation has made – castles and other fortified settlements have certainly made a comeback.

Despite being beset by draugr and other especially monstrous corpses, the people of Scandinavia also managed to find safety in their islands and mountains (and castles in a few cases). Norrland is a bizarre confederation of surviving statelets loosely centred around the combined royal families of Sweden, Norway and Denmark who have intermarried to the point of being one continuous clan. Many states have revived a sense of Viking professionalism, predating on the British, some of the remaining coastal human states (which they leave intact enough to be raided again at a later date) and the ruins – which they still mine and explore for any useful resources.

The Greeks were another group to benefit from plentiful islands and mountains though island hopping zombies proved to be a difficult threat. The Aegean Federation is a rickety construct that has about as many issues and tensions as the ancient Delian League. It’s also firmly oligarchic with the various strongmen of its constituent communities holding firm grips on their power. They are, however, enthusiastic colonisers and have perfected numerous anti-zombie tactics – as well as figured out the techniques needed to keep the Middle East’s demon zombies and Egypt’s mummies at bay: most of the time.

Israel is dead to the world, walled off completely and supposedly impossible to enter. Gateways in the walls have been sealed up and covered over and additional defences, of the static kind, have been placed on top of the increasingly sturdy border walls. The only proof that the Israelis are still alive is the fact that this construction is still going on and, on occasion, a few decapitated bodies and crushed heads are thrown over the edge. With the various threats that they directly face, the Israeli junta/theocracy is not taking any chances and covers everything they build with special runes, sigils and icons that they have learnt keep the more supernatural dead at bay – which is what tipped the Greeks off.

Most of the Middle East was depopulated by the dead: in particular the supernatural forms which were particularly common in that area. The new state that has emerged in the plateaus in the northern areas of the region turned to staunch religiosity to combat the endless hordes of walking dead and other horrors and, after finally having enough time to rally themselves under a fanatical new caliph, have begun to make expeditions into the lowlands in preparation for the first of a series of jihads to reclaim their holy lands.

The Himalayas looked like they would be a perfect refuge for whoever could get their first and organise a defence. That’s exactly why it failed, at first, anyway. As the world collapsed, refugees and the last groups of organised resistance from across most of Asia fled here from every direction and overwhelmed the struggling Tibetans and Chinese (and Afghans, in the west) that had holed up in there already. By now a mess of petty states, most of them made up of mixed populations, cover the mountains, warring with one another frequently but uniting if a particularly large or dangerous horde of the dead start to wind their way up the mountains – or if one of the states starts to get too effective at conquering its neighbours.

Korea managed to weather the storm in relatively good shape. North Korea had enough bullets to deal with their undead uprising, defences strong enough to keep China and Japan’s (and South Korea’s) hordes at bay – though even then it was a very close and miraculous thing – and enough of a callous disregard for their own people to gun them down if they so much as looked like they might be potentially infected. Though it took a lot of lives and resources as well as decades of constant, grinding attrition, the Korean Peninsula has been united and expeditions are now being made in all directions to add to the Juche state’s holdings. They have begun to clash with the equally expansive Japanese thalassocracy and the islandic Chinese remnants dedicated to reclaiming the burnt out coasts.

New Zealand has actually done decently for itself as well. They had a few islands of their own to escape to – and a surprisingly lucky and successful safe zone on the South Island and teamed up with the displaced people of Australia as well as some displaced Polynesians to set up a seagoing thalassocracy of their own – the Windsors that were sent to them for sanctuary even took over. They have actually managed to make a few successful expeditions onto the mainland and reconciled to some degree with a few holdouts there – the Maori ones are hesitant, however. Now calling itself Oceania, this union of ocean-based communities are also re-establishing colonies on the Australian mainland again and have even sent expeditions up north; running into the Indonesian, Philippine and Polynesian sea-going survivor states as they do so.

Most other human states, scattered around the world, are small and impoverished, struggling to get by and survive against the – still massive – hordes of the walking dead. Most of these communities cling on in elevated positions, the dead generally following the path of least resistance, and are walled off to add another vital layer of defence. Elderly or sick individuals are usually either culled early – via decapitation or head crushing – or tied down to their beds to prevent them from wandering off and attacking people should they slip away when no-one is around and are then decapitated or have their heads crushed. Vigilance or paranoia are commonplace as is religiosity, often to a rather harsh faith, whether its a new religion or an interpretation of an old one. Technology levels are low as is literacy, if it exists at all and is still regressing in most areas as new generations lose, forget or misunderstand the knowledge of their ancestors.

Alongside the walking dead are various, more aberrant, forms. Distinct and often intelligent forms of the dead, whilst more rare, do exist and have left distinctive effects on the regions they inhabit. Most disturbingly of all, they have built their own states and tyrannies on the bones of humanity and, like portions of the remaining human world, they are expanding as well.

The vampires probably did the worst out all of the various intelligent undead as the mass death of humans meant a loss of prey. Those in defensible location were able to take over the various sanctuaries their prey hid within, some even setting up safe zones and tricking people to come inside and end up their thralls and blood-banks.

Many of the scattered, fortified settlements in the former US Deep South are actually human plantations set up by enterprising vampires eager to reclaim the pre-abolition glory days when their kind could harvest enslaved black Americans in ease and secrecy. They’re a lot less discriminating these days and jealously hoard their human cattle, keeping the humans they raise ignorant of as much as possible. With renfields manning the walls, most of these humans don’t even know there is a world outside the high-walled plantations. They too have to deal with slaves who die and return as zombies, especially if malnutrition, disease or accidents kill their slaves. Losing their entire stock to zombification is a real risk that every vampire fears and organises against. Safe from the zombie curse themselves, the vampires usually handle trade, travelling at night in thick-walled coaches and hiding inside them during the day in order to communicate with their brethren in other plantations far away or being transported by renfields – a strategy which is not as safe as renfields, being human, attract zombies.

The vampire homeland (or so it is commonly assumed) in Eastern Europe is in a slightly more tumultuous state. The local terrain is a little easier to fortify and trap people within, especially as the Europeans are normally not that well armed but, at the same time, the Europeans are a little bit more aware of the supernatural and have secret organisations dedicated to hunting them. Infamously, the Carpathian Mountains have become a stronghold for them, where a hierarchy of vampiric aristocrats rule over castes of renfields who, in turn, monitor the human cattle that feed the ruling classes. Along with the continued threat of the remaining local zombies on the continent, the resurgence of the local – and fanatically religious – free human populations is also an impending threat.

The jiangshi in parts of China are completely different issues. Some have taken to feeding off of the residual qi in the bodies of zombies though the process has bizarre effects on them over time – in particular an odd loss of intelligence and self-control. Others who see that option as unhealthy or demeaning have often infiltrated surviving human communities. The return of large scale human habitation to the coastal east of China has been both beneficial and costly. Larger numbers of humans means more blood and qi to feed off of. However, these expanding empires are also much more organised and their dogmatic forms of social organisation and monitoring of their populations to prevent zombie outbreaks happening in their colonies makes it harder for them to be infiltrated.

The Caribbean Community, on top of their virus based zombies also took the opportunity to eradicate the undead summoning Voodoo priests they discovered were more extensive than most people had suspected (they left the benign ones with enough sense to not openly raise the dead alone). Driven from their usual haunts in the Caribbean and much of Gulf of Mexico, these renegade practitioners have fled up the Mississippi to build new sanctuaries. They now live in fortified, tight-knit clans, the most powerful witch-doctors ruling as theocratic overlords whilst hordes of specially crafted zombi servitors maintain their settlements, harvest crops and safely manage all forms of menial labour free of harassment from the others hordes of the walking dead.

The zombies that rose up in the Middle East, where the works of the Dark Ones and the Mad Arab were first written, were joined by much more disturbing entities that chose to puppet the bodies of the dead. Most of these demonic cadavers don’t really have a predilection towards building communities but some desperate people armed with forbidden knowledge have begun to harness and bind them. Now disturbing necromantic petty empires are beginning to emerge between the surviving human states, built upon the labour of enslaved demons and rotting corpses. Temples to foul entities and deities are being raised but they need something that the dead cannot offer, live sacrifices – something that the necromantic overlords of these states are sending raiders out into human strongholds to acquire.

Alongside the demonic undead of the Middle East were the mummified kings and other dignitaries of Egypt. They suffered from a slight problem of losing any human servants as the area of the Nile was especially vulnerable to the zombie hordes and with their low numbers (quite a few can, in fact, be found across Europe, North America and other parts of the world) they are more of an oddity. Most can be found in Egypt and there are in fact more than were initially known. Digging their way out of buried and lost tombs and temple complexes, the mummies of Egypt are being rounded up by petty kings and forced to do work far below their station in order to rebuild Egypt. Some have started to roam out to capture humans and one enterprising priest has considered mummifying and resurrecting their captured slaves to spare them from the zombies’ hunger – all to provide a proper labour force.

The Egyptian mummies were able to resurrect their ushabti but quickly discovered that miniature humans didn’t actually make very good servants.

Being truly undead themselves and not necessarily needing humanity to survive, the children of Dr Victor Frankenstein persist in Europe Asia and the Americas. The man himself is long gone but several of his later experiments have learnt how to recreate themselves. The Frankenstein monsters have several scattered communities in Eastern Europe that used to expand through the acquisition of parts from fleeing survivors. By this point there are few humans and fewer parts for the machinery necessary to revive their kind. One of their kind, a brilliant ‘woman’ of supposedly Japanese origin has taken to using whatever she can find to experiment and produce particularly disturbing creations; sometimes on commission from humans or vampires that come across her travelling workshop.

Revenants, the intelligent dead who remember who they were to varying degrees, can be found, either on their own or in small groups. Some are trapped in the small vestiges of their personalities, repeating minor actions that either defined who they were or were related to their deaths. Others are cognisant enough to change who they are but are too rotted or too obviously undead to make something of themselves in human communities. One lucky group have even rediscovered how to fall in love – the concept of sex, to the horror of anyone who could come across them, having also been revived.

The most common zombies are mindless, hungry flesh-eaters, wandering around in search of humans, specifically humans. They do occasionally eat other creatures but more often than not they’ll ignore them if they’re too much trouble. Being dessicated corpses, albeit ones that have a remarkable capacity for preservation, they aren’t that quick and have no real problem-solving abilities but sheer numbers and the fact that only destruction of the brain actually kills them makes them a threat even to this day. They tend to freeze over as well, unable to maintain a body temperature of their own. They subsequently thaw out later when the temperature rises, allowing fresh new hordes to emerge on unsuspecting survivors if a spring or summer is particularly warm.

On top of this strange ability to preserve themselves, the dead are also resilient to pressure and corrosion. They’re all able to withstand the crushing pressure of the deep oceans and can traverse the seas, clambering ashore when people least expect it. Coastlines often have to be watched or defended to prevent outbreak vectors from simply washing in with the tides or wandering out of the waves.

Their flesh is usually toxic, meaning anything that bites them is poisoned. If they’re human they will, of course, be resurrected immediately afterwards but any animals that bite the walking dead simply die. On occasions, however, there are safely edible variants of the disease that can be fed upon – though what exactly would want to is harder to fathom. Rumours abound of cannibal refugees in the mountains sometimes unintentionally infecting themselves with the active variety of the undeath virus after eating their dead and twisting, whilst still alive, and mutating into half-dead ghoulish creatures that skitter across the rocks, withered but never dying as they scramble about for fresh human flesh.

With the new century dawning things are changing. The lands of the living are moving back into the wider world, extending the borders of their strongholds but the more intelligent dead are beginning to do the same as well.

Description

World Of The Living Dead:

Here’s the Halloween map for 2018. Happy Halloween everyone.

It all began in 2012, as countless conspiracy theories said it would but no-one really expected what would happen. It first started with a few risings in unmarked graves and sites of mass killings, a few bites here and there from rabid, cold-skinned people that weren’t properly treated, dark, gruesome rituals conducted in isolated graveyards and some covert and very illegal experiments into regeneration of dead cellular tissue. Then every corpse with a certain amount of flesh still on their bones tore their way out of the ground and set upon the living. In only a couple of years, the problem that the world has initially failed or refused to notice had spread out of control and the world collapsed into – almost total – anarchy and the various kinds of dead ran rampant.

The year is now 2100, the dawn of a new century where the dead still roam the Earth.

The dead still walk the Earth, though most of them have rotted almost to the bone and remain ambulatory through numerous unknown means. Some simply shrivelled up to a mummified state that, whilst decrepit, is still intact enough to remain physically mobile. Others, usually those animated by supernatural forces, are clearly using magic or other dark powers to replace musculature, tendons and other necessary body parts. Then there are those that have somehow managed to gain a self-sustaining supply of preservative substances in their bodies that keep them relatively intact.

Most of the dead are mindless corpses wandering around, some instinct occasionally guiding but usually just following the path of least resistance, stumbling about and moaning “brains.” there are, however, a few oddities scattered here and there and they are making something of themselves in this new world.

Then there are the remaining enclaves of the living, clinging onto life and desperately trying to reclaim land and resources.

The United States was the nation most uniquely suited to survive the zombie apocalypse in some kind of shape and did make a good showing of itself but unfortunately still ended up being isolated and divided by the hordes of the dead. Still they had the largest number of large and well organised enclaves: though they are prone to fighting one another these days as well as the dead – and sometimes more as well, the living often being easier to kill than zombies.

The official United States government remnant is still holed up in the Rockies and Colorado Plateau and is the largest surviving state in the world. It is still technically democratic, holding elections to vote in the official president of the United States but the system tends to be rigged in favour of whoever the military supports at the time. The remains of the US military, still holding powers granted to them during the early collapse of the old USA and the subsequent weakening of the government, effectively run the remnant. The regression of technology has also hampered things but a dedicated class of engineers manage to keep things moderately advanced and make the most of the limited resources available to the nation. They do maintain a few vassal states hat are tied to them but too much trouble to invade and annex directly.

Appalachia, a state founded by various isolated military units and local militia groups, is a wretched dictatorship. The original refugee state collapsed once and was almost wiped out completely, rebuilding itself from various remaining enclaves. It is currently an impoverished, despotic tyranny with a heavy Christian fundamentalist bent to its culture. It currently survives through intense religiosity, brutal repression, fear of the vast undead hordes still milling beyond their borders and the enslavement of a tenth of their population, most of them white by this point since previous slave repression campaigns killed off most of the blacks.

The Sierra Nevada (and much of the Great Basin in general) has also become a hotspot for various petty states descended from American and Mexican refugee groups that have, in many cases, become intermixed. Most are Catholic or some form of faith descended from it and tend to share rigid social systems that enforce law and order and help keep the dead out of their territories for the most part. There have been calls in the past to unify in some fashion but they usually fall apart and would-be uniters/conquerors quickly overstretch their resources. With the US now beginning to expand into their lands, however, that may change.

Mexico has recently seen a series of unification wars that have united the collection of impoverished petty states on the Mexican Plateau into a new – more or less united – state. It’s highly Catholic, rather impoverished and built on a foundation of mandatory decapitation upon the death of anyone and a slightly neo-Aztec, ritualised militarism that barely keeps the various factions cooperative with one another. At the very least they outlawed slavery and are trying to make their own excursions into the former ‘dead wandering lands’ though resource limitations and the simmering feuds between the ruling classes hamper their efforts.

The Caribbean, bizarrely, has become a complex community of island states and semi-nomadic boat settlements and communities. Though they still deal with the smaller hordes that wander ashore as well as the packs still hiding in the jungles, these states continue to hold up their complex networks of trade and exploration and are even expanding out and founding new outposts. Despite this optimism and new energy in the Caribbean Community, it doesn’t extend to everything, however. The democracy that does exist beyond the ‘small village’ level in this community has become quite exclusive and elitist and some member states have revived slavery in some fashion or another.

Despite most of South America largely falling to the dead, the Andes managed to provide sanctuary to people. The petty states that inhabit the mountains are isolationist and xenophobic and some have gone down some very bizarre and disturbing directions (the people who revived child sacrifice – with safety measures, of course – occupy the middle ground of this region’s measurements of awfulness). The current patchwork of states are mostly Catholic though a few new religions have popped up with the growing sun-worship faith making waves not only in the mountains but also amongst the few intrepid communities that are interested in expanding back out onto the continent with steel and fire.

Europe, with its dense population concentration, fewer options for defence and higher propensity for facing explicitly supernatural undead did much worse compared to the United States. The near universality of this undead uprising also made defensibility difficult and the continent largely fell in most areas.

The Alps proved to be one of the bigger sanctuaries. After dealing with their own dead, the Swiss shut their borders to everyone except a small detachment of Swiss Guard escorting the Pope and cardinals to safety. Since then the Alpine Holy Kingdom has gone from relative strength to relative strength. The mountains have been largely secured and purged of the dead and the Catholic Church manages to consecration of all dead before their ritual beheading and burning. The Pope is essentially an elected monarch of the AHK which has since incorporated the surviving Austrians, French and Germans from elsewhere in the Alps and regularly delivers fiery sermons designed to whip the people up for their continued crusade against the dead. The current campaign intends to thin out the hordes of Italy so that the road to Rome and the Vatican City can be cleared and reclaimed.

The UK clung to life in a few fortified holdouts, most of them islands. They have since spent the decades trying to reclaim the mainland. The UK is somewhere between a military dictatorship and neo-feudal kingdom all loosely united under the monarchy that has recently moved its seat to the somewhat secured territory in Scotland as a signifier that Britain’s campaign of reclamation has made – castles and other fortified settlements have certainly made a comeback.

Despite being beset by draugr and other especially monstrous corpses, the people of Scandinavia also managed to find safety in their islands and mountains (and castles in a few cases). Norrland is a bizarre confederation of surviving statelets loosely centred around the combined royal families of Sweden, Norway and Denmark who have intermarried to the point of being one continuous clan. Many states have revived a sense of Viking professionalism, predating on the British, some of the remaining coastal human states (which they leave intact enough to be raided again at a later date) and the ruins – which they still mine and explore for any useful resources.

The Greeks were another group to benefit from plentiful islands and mountains though island hopping zombies proved to be a difficult threat. The Aegean Federation is a rickety construct that has about as many issues and tensions as the ancient Delian League. It’s also firmly oligarchic with the various strongmen of its constituent communities holding firm grips on their power. They are, however, enthusiastic colonisers and have perfected numerous anti-zombie tactics – as well as figured out the techniques needed to keep the Middle East’s demon zombies and Egypt’s mummies at bay: most of the time.

Israel is dead to the world, walled off completely and supposedly impossible to enter. Gateways in the walls have been sealed up and covered over and additional defences, of the static kind, have been placed on top of the increasingly sturdy border walls. The only proof that the Israelis are still alive is the fact that this construction is still going on and, on occasion, a few decapitated bodies and crushed heads are thrown over the edge. With the various threats that they directly face, the Israeli junta/theocracy is not taking any chances and covers everything they build with special runes, sigils and icons that they have learnt keep the more supernatural dead at bay – which is what tipped the Greeks off.

Most of the Middle East was depopulated by the dead: in particular the supernatural forms which were particularly common in that area. The new state that has emerged in the plateaus in the northern areas of the region turned to staunch religiosity to combat the endless hordes of walking dead and other horrors and, after finally having enough time to rally themselves under a fanatical new caliph, have begun to make expeditions into the lowlands in preparation for the first of a series of jihads to reclaim their holy lands.

The Himalayas looked like they would be a perfect refuge for whoever could get their first and organise a defence. That’s exactly why it failed, at first, anyway. As the world collapsed, refugees and the last groups of organised resistance from across most of Asia fled here from every direction and overwhelmed the struggling Tibetans and Chinese (and Afghans, in the west) that had holed up in there already. By now a mess of petty states, most of them made up of mixed populations, cover the mountains, warring with one another frequently but uniting if a particularly large or dangerous horde of the dead start to wind their way up the mountains – or if one of the states starts to get too effective at conquering its neighbours.

Korea managed to weather the storm in relatively good shape. North Korea had enough bullets to deal with their undead uprising, defences strong enough to keep China and Japan’s (and South Korea’s) hordes at bay – though even then it was a very close and miraculous thing – and enough of a callous disregard for their own people to gun them down if they so much as looked like they might be potentially infected. Though it took a lot of lives and resources as well as decades of constant, grinding attrition, the Korean Peninsula has been united and expeditions are now being made in all directions to add to the Juche state’s holdings. They have begun to clash with the equally expansive Japanese thalassocracy and the islandic Chinese remnants dedicated to reclaiming the burnt out coasts.

New Zealand has actually done decently for itself as well. They had a few islands of their own to escape to – and a surprisingly lucky and successful safe zone on the South Island and teamed up with the displaced people of Australia as well as some displaced Polynesians to set up a seagoing thalassocracy of their own – the Windsors that were sent to them for sanctuary even took over. They have actually managed to make a few successful expeditions onto the mainland and reconciled to some degree with a few holdouts there – the Maori ones are hesitant, however. Now calling itself Oceania, this union of ocean-based communities are also re-establishing colonies on the Australian mainland again and have even sent expeditions up north; running into the Indonesian, Philippine and Polynesian sea-going survivor states as they do so.

Most other human states, scattered around the world, are small and impoverished, struggling to get by and survive against the – still massive – hordes of the walking dead. Most of these communities cling on in elevated positions, the dead generally following the path of least resistance, and are walled off to add another vital layer of defence. Elderly or sick individuals are usually either culled early – via decapitation or head crushing – or tied down to their beds to prevent them from wandering off and attacking people should they slip away when no-one is around and are then decapitated or have their heads crushed. Vigilance or paranoia are commonplace as is religiosity, often to a rather harsh faith, whether its a new religion or an interpretation of an old one. Technology levels are low as is literacy, if it exists at all and is still regressing in most areas as new generations lose, forget or misunderstand the knowledge of their ancestors.

Alongside the walking dead are various, more aberrant, forms. Distinct and often intelligent forms of the dead, whilst more rare, do exist and have left distinctive effects on the regions they inhabit. Most disturbingly of all, they have built their own states and tyrannies on the bones of humanity and, like portions of the remaining human world, they are expanding as well.

The vampires probably did the worst out all of the various intelligent undead as the mass death of humans meant a loss of prey. Those in defensible location were able to take over the various sanctuaries their prey hid within, some even setting up safe zones and tricking people to come inside and end up their thralls and blood-banks.

Many of the scattered, fortified settlements in the former US Deep South are actually human plantations set up by enterprising vampires eager to reclaim the pre-abolition glory days when their kind could harvest enslaved black Americans in ease and secrecy. They’re a lot less discriminating these days and jealously hoard their human cattle, keeping the humans they raise ignorant of as much as possible. With renfields manning the walls, most of these humans don’t even know there is a world outside the high-walled plantations. They too have to deal with slaves who die and return as zombies, especially if malnutrition, disease or accidents kill their slaves. Losing their entire stock to zombification is a real risk that every vampire fears and organises against. Safe from the zombie curse themselves, the vampires usually handle trade, travelling at night in thick-walled coaches and hiding inside them during the day in order to communicate with their brethren in other plantations far away or being transported by renfields – a strategy which is not as safe as renfields, being human, attract zombies.

The vampire homeland (or so it is commonly assumed) in Eastern Europe is in a slightly more tumultuous state. The local terrain is a little easier to fortify and trap people within, especially as the Europeans are normally not that well armed but, at the same time, the Europeans are a little bit more aware of the supernatural and have secret organisations dedicated to hunting them. Infamously, the Carpathian Mountains have become a stronghold for them, where a hierarchy of vampiric aristocrats rule over castes of renfields who, in turn, monitor the human cattle that feed the ruling classes. Along with the continued threat of the remaining local zombies on the continent, the resurgence of the local – and fanatically religious – free human populations is also an impending threat.

The jiangshi in parts of China are completely different issues. Some have taken to feeding off of the residual qi in the bodies of zombies though the process has bizarre effects on them over time – in particular an odd loss of intelligence and self-control. Others who see that option as unhealthy or demeaning have often infiltrated surviving human communities. The return of large scale human habitation to the coastal east of China has been both beneficial and costly. Larger numbers of humans means more blood and qi to feed off of. However, these expanding empires are also much more organised and their dogmatic forms of social organisation and monitoring of their populations to prevent zombie outbreaks happening in their colonies makes it harder for them to be infiltrated.

The Caribbean Community, on top of their virus based zombies also took the opportunity to eradicate the undead summoning Voodoo priests they discovered were more extensive than most people had suspected (they left the benign ones with enough sense to not openly raise the dead alone). Driven from their usual haunts in the Caribbean and much of Gulf of Mexico, these renegade practitioners have fled up the Mississippi to build new sanctuaries. They now live in fortified, tight-knit clans, the most powerful witch-doctors ruling as theocratic overlords whilst hordes of specially crafted zombi servitors maintain their settlements, harvest crops and safely manage all forms of menial labour free of harassment from the others hordes of the walking dead.

The zombies that rose up in the Middle East, where the works of the Dark Ones and the Mad Arab were first written, were joined by much more disturbing entities that chose to puppet the bodies of the dead. Most of these demonic cadavers don’t really have a predilection towards building communities but some desperate people armed with forbidden knowledge have begun to harness and bind them. Now disturbing necromantic petty empires are beginning to emerge between the surviving human states, built upon the labour of enslaved demons and rotting corpses. Temples to foul entities and deities are being raised but they need something that the dead cannot offer, live sacrifices – something that the necromantic overlords of these states are sending raiders out into human strongholds to acquire.

Alongside the demonic undead of the Middle East were the mummified kings and other dignitaries of Egypt. They suffered from a slight problem of losing any human servants as the area of the Nile was especially vulnerable to the zombie hordes and with their low numbers (quite a few can, in fact, be found across Europe, North America and other parts of the world) they are more of an oddity. Most can be found in Egypt and there are in fact more than were initially known. Digging their way out of buried and lost tombs and temple complexes, the mummies of Egypt are being rounded up by petty kings and forced to do work far below their station in order to rebuild Egypt. Some have started to roam out to capture humans and one enterprising priest has considered mummifying and resurrecting their captured slaves to spare them from the zombies’ hunger – all to provide a proper labour force.

The Egyptian mummies were able to resurrect their ushabti but quickly discovered that miniature humans didn’t actually make very good servants.

Being truly undead themselves and not necessarily needing humanity to survive, the children of Dr Victor Frankenstein persist in Europe Asia and the Americas. The man himself is long gone but several of his later experiments have learnt how to recreate themselves. The Frankenstein monsters have several scattered communities in Eastern Europe that used to expand through the acquisition of parts from fleeing survivors. By this point there are few humans and fewer parts for the machinery necessary to revive their kind. One of their kind, a brilliant ‘woman’ of supposedly Japanese origin has taken to using whatever she can find to experiment and produce particularly disturbing creations; sometimes on commission from humans or vampires that come across her travelling workshop.

Revenants, the intelligent dead who remember who they were to varying degrees, can be found, either on their own or in small groups. Some are trapped in the small vestiges of their personalities, repeating minor actions that either defined who they were or were related to their deaths. Others are cognisant enough to change who they are but are too rotted or too obviously undead to make something of themselves in human communities. One lucky group have even rediscovered how to fall in love – the concept of sex, to the horror of anyone who could come across them, having also been revived.

The most common zombies are mindless, hungry flesh-eaters, wandering around in search of humans, specifically humans. They do occasionally eat other creatures but more often than not they’ll ignore them if they’re too much trouble. Being dessicated corpses, albeit ones that have a remarkable capacity for preservation, they aren’t that quick and have no real problem-solving abilities but sheer numbers and the fact that only destruction of the brain actually kills them makes them a threat even to this day. They tend to freeze over as well, unable to maintain a body temperature of their own. They subsequently thaw out later when the temperature rises, allowing fresh new hordes to emerge on unsuspecting survivors if a spring or summer is particularly warm.

On top of this strange ability to preserve themselves, the dead are also resilient to pressure and corrosion. They’re all able to withstand the crushing pressure of the deep oceans and can traverse the seas, clambering ashore when people least expect it. Coastlines often have to be watched or defended to prevent outbreak vectors from simply washing in with the tides or wandering out of the waves.

Their flesh is usually toxic, meaning anything that bites them is poisoned. If they’re human they will, of course, be resurrected immediately afterwards but any animals that bite the walking dead simply die. On occasions, however, there are safely edible variants of the disease that can be fed upon – though what exactly would want to is harder to fathom. Rumours abound of cannibal refugees in the mountains sometimes unintentionally infecting themselves with the active variety of the undeath virus after eating their dead and twisting, whilst still alive, and mutating into half-dead ghoulish creatures that skitter across the rocks, withered but never dying as they scramble about for fresh human flesh.

With the new century dawning things are changing. The lands of the living are moving back into the wider world, extending the borders of their strongholds but the more intelligent dead are beginning to do the same as well.