Rotted Capes: Alternative History Question

[Hopeless]

What changes would happen if a means of creating superpowers was found in the late nineties however it turns out that the drug if overdosed causes the superhuman to turn into a super zombie?

My idea is what if 9/11 and the June 7th bombing resulted in the release of such a biological weapon that turned the population of Manhatten into zombies and eventually spilled out into the rest of the world?

Some due to counter attacks against those held responsible even if contrived like the invasion of Iraq but all this did was cause the epidemic to erupt beyond anyone's control?

A suspected cure was believed created but the subsequent efforts to obtain it resulted in the destruction of the facility where it was being held along with most of the staff responsible for the research.

Since I'm thinking of a UK based game the surviving enclaves are in hiding because the super zombies are in charge of the major cities, occasional efforts are made to sneak into various cities and production facilities to recover supplies especially medicine and other materials they can't make for themselves running the risk of the zombies tracking them back.

What do you think?

Thanks in advance!

[JeenLeen]

I feel hesitant to talk about the cause of the zombies due to bans on real-world politics, but I think in general what causes the plague is less important once the plague has gotten going, especially if a cure is unlikely (which seems the case if the main research facility is destroyed.) Do you plan on the cause being really important to your campaign? As is, it seems like an interesting start reason, but not critical beyond "they just started showing up" or "mystery disease".
Would there be some end goal of finding traces of the destroyed research and making a cure?

If you think your players would like a 'recover supplies and build up own resources' type survival game, then it sounds good.

The only big thing to me -- and I admit I don't know the system beyond the basic concept -- is that they might mind not having any powers whilst the zombies have them. I would probably feel frustrated about that. Maybe, if they are researching a cure, they can find a benign version that gives them powers with some partial zombification?

[Telwar]

Soooooo...let's see. Bear in mind I hate the modern "...and add zombies!" stuff. But that's neither here nor there.

Pharmaceutical that, in lower dosages, gives/allows access to superhuman abilities (which really should be little-s super...I'm thinking something super-soldier serum-ish), but in higher dosages, turns them into walking dead, also with superhuman abilities, now craving the flesh of the living? Since real world pharmaceuticals that kind of overdose crap actually does get figured out pretty quickly (and certainly would once the first five dozen or so lab mice turn into dog-sized monstrosities), that means you're going to also have to have the drug wear off, to give people a reason to keep taking it and wind up risking overdoses.

Also, odds are that this would be *very* tightly controlled, and would be a national secret/treasure for whoever came up with it. So it's going to be very hard to engineer a global apocalypse with that, especially since something like this is not going to be kept in downtown Manhattan near the World Trade Center; instead it's going to be on a fairly secure military base where the nation's special forces are kept. The best I can come up with is some of the super-soldiers screw up their dosage, turn, and start turning their units. But that's still really, really hard to turn into a global apocalypse. But w/e, I'm sure you can do some handwaving, every other damn zombie movie does.

Now, I hate when zombies are immune to physics. So the drug wears off after a while. And for these supersoldier zombies to be able to spread around, at the very least they'll need to be able to manufacture the drug themselves internally, so they can go and turn their friends into superzombies and the people they start eating and get bored with into regular zombies. But this also gives them an incentive to Keep Eating People so they can keep making the drug for themselves.


This allows you to have these super-zombies that are a threat to the players, but not so much that they can't be mown down if you get a good shot and some firepower (which is fine, they won't because you were distracted by the cannon fodder zombies and they snuck up and turned your head 360 degrees). This also gives an outlet for the players to be able to go one-on-one with them if they get some of the drug, which should be a trivial exercise if you can capture one of the superzombies to begin with ("Time to milk Captain Lichtenstein!" "Aw, man, I did that yesterday, why do I have to do that again?"), and provide an element of risk in that they could turn, too, when fighting fire with fire.