The Walking Dead (The Drowned)
- HP
- 7
- Defense
- 6
- AR
- 0
- Mettle
- 0
Attacks
| Attack | Pool | WR | Tempo | Qualities | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Embrace | 3 | 1 | 4 | — | Initiates Grapple. |
| Lungwater | 0 | 0 | 0 | — | While grappled: target begins drowning. 2 damage/turn, ignores AR. IRON TN 11 each turn to resist. |
Traits
- Waterlogged: Immune to Bleeding, Poison, and Fire (too wet to burn). Moves at half Speed on land. Full Speed in water.
- Undead: Immune to Fear, Pain, Stun, and mental Psionics. Does not breathe.
- Salt Vulnerability: Takes ×2 damage from Salt Rounds. A salt circle keeps them at bay. Salting the body permanently destroys it.
- Pitiful: The Walking Dead look like the people they were. Attacking one that resembles someone the PC knows or cares about requires an ECHO + Resilience TN 9 check or the PC hesitates (loses their first action against that target).
The unsalted dead of the Fen of the Fallen — bodies that should have stayed in the black water but didn’t, because in the Fen, the boundary between living and dead is a suggestion. They emerge when Two-Mouth Spring flows backward (always at night), dragging themselves from the muck on waterlogged limbs, trailing weeds and the faint bioluminescence of the Fen’s toxic algae.
The Walking Dead are not hostile in the way a predator is hostile. They are confused, sad, and cold. They want warmth. They want company. They will wrap their arms around you and hold you close — and the water in their lungs will fill yours. They don’t understand that the embrace kills. They just don’t want to be alone in the dark anymore.
The worst encounters are the ones where the Dead are recognizable — the drowned child from Bellhaven, the ferryman who capsized last month, the mother who walked into the swamp and didn’t come back.
Speed 4 (on land); full Speed in water.
Tactics
Emerge from water in groups of 3–8. Shamble toward the nearest living person. Embrace and hold. They make no sound except a wet, hitching sob. If one is destroyed, the others do not react — they are too focused on the living.
Encounter Design
Walking Dead are horror encounters, not combat encounters. The tension comes from the emotional weight of fighting something pitiable. Use them during night scenes in the Fen, rising from the water around the party’s camp. The real danger is numbers — one is manageable; eight will drown the whole party.