One of the games I've always wanted to play using the One Roll Engine was a Zombie game. Maybe Godlike-style "Weird War Two" with superpowered soldiers against undead nazies, maybe more pulpy Hellboy-themed action, maybe something completly different. Either way: Zombies are cool. With that in mind, here are some idle thoughts I had on using Zombies in an ORE game.

The Basic Zombie

For the most part, a basic zombie is really easy to make up. Just take a normal human being and remove anything from the sheet that needs humanity or intellect to work. Which, more or less, leaves us with the physical attributes (Body, Coordination and Sense) and the Hit Location chart. Basic Zombies don't have Willpower, don't roll Trauma checks, don't have any Madness meters and can't use any powers, esoteric disciplines or combat techniques.

• Head: The zombie dies permanently. Probably in a messy "OMG HIS HEAD TOTALLY EXPLODED" way.
• Arms: When an arm is filled with killing, it's probably amputated or otherwhise sriously damaged. The zombie can't use it anymore and probably suffers a couple of dice worth of penalties for grabbing survivors to bite them.
• Torso: When the Torso is filled with killing, it can mean two things: 1. Nothing happens, because Zombies don't need annoying stuff like internal organs or 2. the zombies torso is destroyed in a way that splits it in two. The Zombie loses use of two other hit locations (Probably both legs or the arm and leg at one side) and suffers all the penalties that go with this loss. Which option is better depends on the game you run and just how splattery you want to have it.
• Legs: If one leg is destroyed, the zombies speed is cut in half. If both are destroyed, it's quatered, as the zombie keeps trying to drag itself along with its arms.

Because the Basic Zombie isn't very dangerous so far, it still needs a little something. To make up for all those lost skills, the zombie gets an Occupation called, surprise, "Zombie", which he get's to use for doiung all the things a zombie does, like "Standing around all day moaning", "Eating Brains", "Finding Humans" and "Staying Undead". The dice value of this Occupations depends on how dangerous you want the basic zombie to be, but for something that's nicely dangerous, 3-4 dice should work well.

Oh, nearly forgot an important thing about zombies: The Bite. I figure it works like this: The only thing a Zombies does is try to grab you, and when he does that, he will bite you. The first part is a basic Body+Zombie roll and if he rolls a match (and its not destroyed by the dargets defense), he grabs hold of that hit location, inflicting one Shock in the process and pinning the target down. As per the WT2 rules, this means that the target can't defend unless he unpins himself and anybody attacking the grabbed character gets a 1 die bonus on the attack. In the next round, unless the target managed to get away somehow, the Zombie will start biting, inflicting the Width of a Body+Zombie roll every round until he or the target is dead.

For additional fun, multiple zombies can and do grab the character and the penalties stack. (Bringing friends that can get that biting corpse off you is probably a good idea.)

The basic zombie is not infectious, he is only a hungry undead corpse. For some variations on the basic zombie, look below.

The Zombie Horde

One variation on the basic zombie is the Horde, usefull for GMs that want to use a whole bunch of zombies attacking together without the headache of individually tracking a dozen Hit Location charts. They basically work like Unworthy Opponents from Reign, with a couple exceptions:

• Morale Attacks don't work. They can't be scared and that Display Kill you just did leaves them totally cold.
• Their Threat rating is equal to their score in Occupation:Zombie, so they can get as far as threat five (or above, if you're really evil.)

One could make some changes on how area attacks work against mooks, like only counting area attack dice that show a ten as taking out an Unworthy Zombie, but I'll leave it at the above for now, they are nasty as is already.

The Infectous Zombie

One of the recurring things about zombies is that not only are they dead and still trying to eat you, they also happen try and CONVERT you! So here are rules for that. Whenever a Zombie bites somebody and manages to inflict Killing damage, he infects the target with the Zombie virus. (If you want things to be less harsh, you could let the target roll Body+Something here to resist.) From then on, the damaged hit location suffers a point of shock whenever a specific amount of time is over. Once the hit location is filled, the character suffers the normal penalties and any additional shock turn to Killing while also overflowing into the Torso (If a Limb is damaged) or the Head (If the torso is damaged). As soon as the torso or head is filled with Killing damage, the character dies, to reanimate after a bit as another brainhungry zombie.

(How much time depends on what kind of game you're planning and how fast you want infection to be. For a slow burn, you might want something like an hour or even more, so that a bitten character might take a day or two to actually get really sick. For a fast infection, something like ten minutes mean that after an hour or two, most people bitten are zombies themselves.)

To make that a bit easier to grok, here a basic example:

Bob got really unlucky and a Zombie grabbed hold of his leg as he was wading through a shallow stream muddy with dirt and garbage. Because he didn't see the Zombie, the corpse got an extra dice for the Sneak attack, in addition to his Body of 1 and his Zombie score of 3, rolling 8, 2, 7, 8, 10 for a 2x8 set. The Zombie grabs Bobs Torso and pins him.

(Hmmm, being pinned in the water. Should I roll for drowing? Nah... )

The next round, Bob starts to panik and tries to break the zombies hold, while the Zombie tries to enjoy his stuggling meal and gets ready for the first bite. Bob rolls his Body plus his Brawling, which amount to ... 3 dice. (Did I mention Bob is an Accountant?) Rolling 2, 3, 8, Bob fails to beat the Zombies roll, who then use the chance to take a nice and hefty 2 Killing bite out of Bobs tender side.

The next round, Bob manages through sheer luck to get a 2x9 set, breaking the zombies hold and manages to get the hell out of that river before he gets even more holes into himself. What he doesn't know, though, is that he is now infected with the Zombie Virus. Even worse, we're playing with a particularly fast-acting strain that has an interval of five minutes.

Five minutes after getting the hell away from the zombie, Bob takes his first point of Shock, noticing that that bite really hurts like a bitch. 35 minutes later, as he is hiding in the attick of a house he hastily barrikaded before trying to bandage the wound, the world starts to go dark on poor Bob and he falls unconcious as his Torso fills with Shock. 30 minutes later, as another surviver breaks down the barrikades to look for food or other ressources, he finds Bob fevery and with an ugly infected wound on the side that's weeping black ooze. Ten minutes later, Bob is dead. Five minutes after that, Bob the Zombie Accountant is out there, hungry...
I have some more ideas for the various other types of zombies like Runners, those special Zombies from Left 4 Dead or intelligent Zombies, but I'll leave those for later. Need food now...