Monster Monday: Zombie Horde

Today's Monster Monday is the zombie horde, a crushing mob of dozens of shambling undead, their insatiable hunger driving them inexorably onward. Zombies are nothing new in Pathfinder or D&D in general, but if you want to run a fight against a lot of them at once (as I'm sure you do), it can get pretty darn tedious to manage twenty-or-so individual low-level monsters. That's where troops come in.

The troop subtype is one of the best recent(ish) innovation that the Pathfinder RPG brings to the table. It basically functions as a swarm, but of larger and more intelligent creatures - a dozen individual monsters run as one big monster with a shared pool of hit points and an auto-hit swarm-like attack which ensures even low-level fighters can be deadly in large numbers. This allows the GM to run combats against veritable armies of men without getting bogged down keeping track of each individual soldier's attacks and hit points and whatnot, a task which I know from experience soon turns into the GM rolling bucketloads of dice and muttering to themself, robbing the encounter of its momentum and excitement. Currently the selection of available troops is limited to living humanoids organized for battle, but the troop subtype is much more versatile than that.

Night of the Living Dead movie poster, via Wikimedia

This stat block includes a number of special abilities to simulate our cinematic expectations of zombie hordes. Like individual zombies, the horde is staggered - able to take only one action per turn - but once the horde catches up to you it becomes a lot deadlier. The horde's troop attack does an extra d6 of damage to opponents it shares a space with. It also has improved grapple and the constrict special attack, which means it can grab and do ongoing damage to individual opponents that it overwhelms. Finally, once the mob slays an opponent, they take some time to devour them, destroying the body and regaining some health in the process. While D&D and Pathfinder zombies don't by default have the Romero ability to turn the living into more zombies, this 'devour' ability could easily simulate the conversion and addition of the defeated opponent to the zombie lifestyle.

Next week's Halloweenish monster will be another troop, but of a different sort of classic undead monster.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

A shambling horde of decaying corpses shuffles forward slowly but persistently, hungry for living flesh

Troop, Zombie Horde              CR 7

XP 3,200

NE Medium undead (troop)

Init +0; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +0

DEFENSE

AC 12, touch 10, flat-footed 12 (+2 natural)

hp 82 (15d8+15)

Fort +5, Ref +5, Will +9

DR 5/slashing; Immune troop traits, undead traits

OFFENSE

Speed 30 ft.

Melee troop (3d6+5)

Space 20 ft.; Reach 5 ft.

Special Attacks overwhelm (4d6+5), constrict (3d6+7)

STATISTICS

Str 20, Dex 10, Con --, Int --, Wis 10, Cha 10

Base Atk +11; CMB +16 (+18 grapple); CMD 26 (can’t be tripped)

Feats Improved Grapple^B, Toughness^B

SQ staggered

SPECIAL ABILITIES

Overwhelm (Ex)

A zombie horde deals 4d6 points of damage with its troop attack to foes with whom it shares a space.

Devour (Ex)

When a zombie horde slays a living creature, the horde spends its next turn dismembering and devouring the victim, gaining one bonus hit point per HD of the devoured victim, up to a maximum number of bonus hit points equal to the zombie horde’s max HP. A zombie horde can devour more than one victim per round. The horde cannot move while devouring, but it can attack as normal. A creature devoured by a zombie horde in this way cannot be raised by means other than resurrection or greater magic.

ECOLOGY

Environment any

Organization solitary, plague (2-4), apocalypse (5-10)

Treasure none

A zombie horde is a nightmare of reanimated flesh and necromantic malice. While an individual zombie may be slow and decrepit, a shambling horde of dozens of undead bodies is an implacable force to be reckoned with. Zombie hordes are driven by an insatiable hunger for the flesh of the living.

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Plot Hooks and Encounter Ideas

• As the full moon rises, the small woodland inn the PCs are staying in comes under attack by a horde of zombies.
• The necromancer lord brings an army of the freshly dead to the battlefield - a mass of zombies that seems to stretch on forever, dotted with the occasional zombified ogre or giant.
• As the PCs lead the army into the defeated city, they soon realize why the city's defense seemingly evaporated overnight: the defenders are dead, and the streets of the city are overwhelmed with roaming mobs of zombies. If the adventurers are to secure the city and its treasures, they must cleanse it of the undead plague.

-your night of the living d20 despot