I can't get enough of zombies and neither can my brother. I make it a point of telling him to attend a game whenever zombies might show up. But there's an art to making zombies more than just mooks you feel less guilty about shooting in the head. Here's how zombies differ in important ways:

• Zombies are already dead. This means that zombies skip a lot of biological functions we take for granted, like not having to breathe underwater, being immune to the elements, etc. Think of innovative ways to take advantage of this simple but important attribute. Zombies can function just fine in space. Or miles underwater. Or in a high altitude environment. They can sit in a car trunk forever. Lie buried in the muck for years. Be folded up into tiny boxes. Dropped from aircraft.
• Zombies are someone you know. It's very easy to make zombies nameless masses. They are much more horrifying if the resurrected corpse happens to be someone you're familiar with. So don't be afraid to resurrect dead relatives, beloved pets, and good friends. If you're particularly twisted, you can have the zombies moan their victims' names even as they try to kill them.
• Zombies are hostile ... usually. How zombies work varies from game to game, but zombies who don't do anything hostile are just as disturbing and pathetic as the more violent types. They might simply be mechanically going through the motions of their former lives. Imagine a little girl who perpetually asks for her daddy, or a zombie baby that never stops bawling. Zombies can be just as awful as victims never released of their torment, stuck in the final throes of death but never released from it.
• Zombies may be contagious. One of the fears of zombies is that you can "get zombie on you." However, this isn't necessarily all that fun as a role-playing experience for the player. Rather than "the corpse rises up as a zombie 1d4 days later," take a cue from horror movies and have the zombification be a slow, awful process. First the wound swells with puss. Then the skin turns blue. Then the irises go white…you get the idea. This attribute is even more effective if the symptoms of becoming a zombie could just be ordinary shock or illness. Played correctly, this can encourage players to hustle for a cure and make them paranoid. In one scenario, Agent Jim-Bean assassinated a potential zombie-victim on the spot in front his friends. Just in case.
• Zombies are numerous. If the zombie contagion can spread, that means there's more than one zombie. Hordes of them are fun to throw at a group, but there's a fine line between sending a wave of zombies after the characters and just sending an endless stream of flailing arms and gnashing teeth. If you want to hedge characters in, zombies can become a force of nature, a living wall that guides them along a path to certain doom. If you want to have the players fight their way out, then there should be a finite number of zombies. Point being, there's more of them than there are of you, and their numbers grow every day.
• There are plenty of reasons to make a zombie. They can be ice-zombies resurrected by an ancient deity, zombies infected by a chemical pathogen, an alien parasite with a thirst for brains, or simply an undead killer hell-bent on vengeance. Whatever the reason, zombies can come in a variety of shapes and sizes with different resistances and vulnerabilities. Mix it up.

Your Turn: What's the scariest scenario you've created using zombies?

Michael "Talien" Tresca is the National RPG Examiner