From: James Frusetta (gerakkag@wam.umd.edu)
Date: Fri 21 Feb 1997 - 21:46:34 EET
Simon Phipp writes on Derak the Dark Troll's Zombies:
Good lord, I wish I'd had a GM _half_ that permissive. Carrying ballistas
around on your back... getting a mantis... wow. My troll characters would
have been a _lot_ more fun. ;)
> It took the Humakti in the party days to work that one out!
Well, if they hadn't figured out Derak was a Zorak Zorani (what with
casting Create Zombie all the time), they couldn't have been that
bright... "Hmmm. Troll. Lots of death runes... uses Seal Wound a lot...
all the Humakti on guard duty with him seem to disappear... summoned that
salamander last week. Must be a Karrg's Son!"
***
Just something to toss out in general: I've always quite enjoyed writing
my Zombies to function as if they were using BASIC. (Yeah, yeah, I'm not a
comp sci major, okay? Obviously, my Zombies are old, slow and obsolete. ;)
I usually pass this along to my players, too, if they made zombies (which
they, uh, never did. :(
Anyway, just adds kind of a fun feel -- one of the tricks to fighting
zombies was to try and figure out what their limited programming could and
couldn't cover. :) A flow chart works well, too. Not exactly a
completely original trick, and I suspect it's been around before, but the
that broo-demon zombie inspired the comment -- either you take
_hours_ programing it as part of the ritual, or you do something like
10 Kill stuff.
20 Goto 10
and deal with the consequences later. Depending on how good the enchanter
is, they can add more "lines" of programming, and thus make zombies that
can react to more and different stimuli.
Just a thought! :)
James Frusetta
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