The zombie outbreak should also have been going on long enough that there is a considerable force of undead for the players to have to deal with. The characters should preferably be strangers and a little disoriented, out of their element.

It needs to be a scenario where a decent-sized group of random, ordinary people (remember, each player gets 4 characters each) are trapped together.

However, the one thing that I was missing was the opening hook - where the players start in their initial onslaught against the rising tide of the undead. I've been using the many tables in Palladium's DEAD REIGN™®© books (about the only thing those books are good for) for most of my inspiration, tweaking them as necessary. Sometimes the group meets 1d4 stray dogs, sometimes they meet 1d4+1x100 roaming zombies. Partly this is to keep my prep work down, partly it's to keep the tension and suspense high as the party never knows what to expect. To keep the game as chaotic as possible, in our first playthrough I just rolled the scenario out randomly as we went along - determining encounters, locales, etc purely by a toss of the dice - and I plan to continue doing the same thing. It uses basic d20 rules that everyone is pretty familiar with. In case you weren't aware, I've been playing around with a zombie/horror game based on the Dungeon Crawl Classics Funnel system - basically you send in a gang of 0-level schlubs, hoping that at least one survies to become a level 1 character in an on-going post-apocalyptic survival game. Can you smell Halloween on the air? Smells like non-toxic face paint and burnt pumpkins.

Outbreak undead character sheet pdf