The Dominican Republic Zombie Adventure

=== Session 1 ===
An interlude in the Tavistoc Expeditions Adventure when the party were waiting for contract magicians and physical items in the adventure Sancta Henrietta della Cordoba.
Most of this session was spent gathering intelligence from Mama du 
Tonniere, and planning. There are two sorts of zombies, she told the party, the dead and the 
living. The dead ones need to be ‘put to rest’ by destroying their 
brains, or they can be attacked with salt which also destroys them. The 
living ones are more of a problem – just as nasty as the dead, but they 
are still living. When the fetish which allows spirits from another 
dimension to take them over is destroyed they will return to normal, so 
they should not be killed.
Worried about the effects of long-term zombieism
 on the living victims, Mama duT only allowed them one day to prepare 
for the journey. 
The information they had was that zombies – both ‘living’ and 
undead – had crossed the ridgeline between Mama duT’s valley and the 
neighbouring one protected by Mama Deveraux. (Though they speak Spanish,
 it’s a tradition that voodoo practitioners take French names since the 
religion originated on the French part of the island.) Both are animated
 by the same kind of evil spirits, which take over and control human 
bodies – never animals. When they come through a rift from ‘de bad 
place’ they can seize the dead in their graves or overpower the living. 
Sufficiently strong-minded individuals can resist being taken over, 
which explains why some of the evil spirits choose the comparatively 
easy route of taking over a dead body. 
Evil spirits in control of a body have access to its memories, so
 they know the layout of the area around their homes, walls and ditches,
 etc. Most of them use weapons the body knows well – farm tools, etc., 
though if one is/was a hunter the evil spirit might well know how to use
 its guns. If Mama Deveraux still lives, the spirit inside her will have
 access to her magic. Most of it is beneficial – she, like Mama duT is a
 healer and has powers to boost farms’ and animals’ fecundity – but she 
does have a passion for fire and is quite good at conjuring flames. 
Zombies walk a little slower than average humans, at least for 
the first few days till the spirits get full control of their bodies. 
Animals fear them, able to detect the ‘wrongness’ about the spirits 
inhabiting the bodies whether they be live or dead. Dead zombies also 
appear to recognise the spirits within living ones and don’t attack 
them. 
The evil spirits will have been released into the world by a 
ceremony that presumably went wrong. The channel to the other world will
 be held open by a fetish. If the fetish is destroyed, the channel is 
closed but the evil spirits remain in this world, so the possessed will 
not recover. Only if a strong voodoo practitioner binds the fetish with 
the proper spells will the spirits be forced back into the ‘bad place’. 
When that happens, the dead zombies will die again, the living recover, 
though suffering any injuries etc. that they incurred during their 
possession. 
The plan is that the party will get Mama duT to the place where 
the fetish is, and stop any zombies interfering while she binds it. They
 ‘tooled up’ with an unusual assortment of weapons: fishing nets, large 
shields, baseball bats, and Albert even took a boathook. Since there is 
no access to the village suitable for motor vehicles, they borrowed a 
two-mule cart for their supplies and to carry Mama duT, and a couple of 
riding mules for Willie and Mrs Stanley. Haggart would drive the cart, 
Donald and Albert ride on it, and Kohath preferred to walk. They chose 
mules as steadier beasts, less likely to panic around zombies. 
On arrival in Mama duT’s valley they interviewed the locals, and 
came to the conclusion that killing a zombie by destroying the brain 
released the evil spirit. The drawback was that it didn’t vanish, but 
possessed a new body. A couple of the locals had felt something trying 
to ‘invade’ them, but thought it was their imagination till Kohath asked
 them about it and they realised that they weren’t the only ones. And 
someone in that fight had wandered off into the woods, strangely quiet, 
when the fight was over – they hadn’t gone after him because they were 
more concerned about getting the children back to safety. The party 
decided that they were going to leave the zombie heads intact so the 
spirits didn’t take over one of them!
Their first encounter was with a local farmer on Mama duT’s side 
of the ridge. Mama duT recognised him and called out, but he did not 
respond with words. As he walked closer, Willie dismounted and prepared 
his net. When Kohath announced his diagnosis of zombieism, Willie ran in
 and cast his net nicely. With the zombie wrapped in its folds, the 
party had no trouble knocking him down and tying him up. A little more 
experimentation showed that, like Mama duT’s spells, the zombie could 
not detect the psi-blockers Kohath and Willie. 
They hauled the unfortunate farmer-zombie up a tree and secured 
him there so that no wild animals or other zombies would attack him, 
marked the tree with bright cloths (“Tie a yellow ribbon round the 
zom-bie tree…”) and moved on.
Their next encounter was more startling. Well into the 
‘dangerous’ valley, three zombies – two living and one dead – stepped 
out from the high sugar cane, startling their mules. The wagon and Mrs 
Stanley stampeded off into the canefields, crashing through the thick 
stalks. Albert, desperately clutching his boathook, fell off the wagon 
and hurt himself pretty badly. Only Willie and Kohath were initially 
effective: Willie controlling his mule long enough to dismount with a 
net, Kohath readying his shotgun and closing the distance. 
All three zombies ignored Kohath and Albert, concentrating on 
Willie. Willie cast his net badly this time – it draped over the 
zombie’s shoulder, not inconveniencing his machete arm at all. In 
return, he cut deep into Willie’s left arm with that machete, and the 
dead zombie beside him buried his hoe in Willie’s left leg. Both limbs 
were crippled, Willie was crumpled on the floor, and the hoe was deeply 
embedded. At the end of Round 2, it looked bad. 
Things turned around quickly. The stampeding mules, foiled by the
 thick sugarcane, came to a standstill. Mrs Stanley turned hers around 
and Donald and Haggart leapt off the cart and ran back carrying more 
nets. Kohath’s first shotgun blast ripped apart the dead zombie’s spine.
 It folded in half, but still hung onto the Willie limped up and managed
 to get his boathook through the third zombie’s belt and pull him 
backwards. The zombie looked baffled – its controlling spirit couldn’t 
work out why it was going the wrong way when it couldn’t see Albert, and
 its flailing arms couldn’t reach him because of the length of the 
boathook. 
The machete-zombie missed his next attack, and in rolling around 
Willie managed to free the hoe from his leg, at the cost of more damage 
that made him grit his teeth to remain conscious. But Kohath put his 
shotgun to the back of the dead zombie’s neck, severing it with the 
blast from his second barrel. 
Haggart and Donald arrived – Donald wasn’t much help but Haggart 
netted the machete-zombie neatly and the emergency was over. Mrs Stanley
 jumped off her mule and added her greater strength to Albert’s on the 
boathook. They could take their time securing both living zombies and 
suspending them in trees. 
Confirmation that the zombies could not see Kohath and Albert 
gave Kohath an idea. As the group closed in on Mama Deveraux’s home 
village, the majority of them went off to find a viewpoint from which 
they could watch the village, while Kohath and Albert went in. Their 
plan was to scout out the village, and even capture Mama D, unseen by 
the zombies. Only if they couldn’t bring out the fetish would they 
return for the rest of the group, and Mama D’s fire-raising ability 
would be neutralised by her being tied up and shoved in a cupboard 
somewhere. 
But as it turned out, all they found was a note on the door. From
 the similarity of some words to the shaky little bits of Italian they 
had picked up on their adventure with the Aesinas Codex, they worked out
 it was something about going to Pedro. They brought the note back and 
Mama duT translated it as ‘Gone to Pedro’s Landing’ – another village a 
couple of miles away. 
So on they travel…
=== Session 2 ===
Heading for Pedro’s Landing, the party were moving through farmland, 
which had the disadvantage that the zombies, doing their habitual 
activities, were around the farmhouses close to the road. Where they 
could, the party went off-road to avoid farmhouses, but with the high 
dense tropical vegetation (both natural and sugar-cane) they were forced
 to spend a lot of time on the road.
The most crucial encounter involved no less than ten zombies, 
coming at them in two groups – one along the road from the nearest 
farmhouse, the other out of the fields. While Haggart turned the cart 
around, Willie and Mrs Stanley dismounted and left their mules free so 
that they could defend themselves. Naturally, as soon as they smelled 
the zombies and the gunfire started, they headed for the hills. 
Although the high vegetation had blocked the party’s view of the 
zombies till they were within 30 yards, they had time to start shooting 
out the legs of those who looked dead. That didn’t kill them, but it did
 slow them down as they had to crawl and would arrive at long intervals,
 allowing the humans to run around picking on each in turn, and of 
course being prone would make them more vulnerable. An unfortunate burst
 from Donald’s BAR took out not only the legs of one of the dead zombies
 but the living one behind him. It was a nasty shock when one of the 
zombies was carrying a loaded shotgun and fired it twice, managing to 
cripple Willie’s left arm again, but then failed to understand how to 
reload it and kept advancing, shooting an empty gun.
Their tactic of shooting out the legs reduced the number of 
zombies they would have to face in hand-to-hand combat to a manageable 
three. Kohath advanced to take one down on his own by netting it. His 
first attempt failed, but on the second try he succeeded in wrapping the
 net around the zombie and pulling it over, pinning its net to the 
ground with its own hoe and a pitchfork taken from a crawling zombie. 
The rest of the group concentrated on the two remaining upright 
zombies, both possessed live men and therefore not to be seriously 
harmed. Albert’s previous success in hooking a zombie’s belt with his 
boathook was shown to be a fluke as he failed at several attempts to 
repeat it. But working together Donald and Mrs Stanley netted the other 
one and Haggart, arriving late after setting the wagon for Mama duT’s 
getaway if everything went wrong, brawled Albert’s target to the ground.
Soon the living zombies were neatly tied up and the dead ones 
decapitated. Their heads were buried but not their bodies to save the 
work of digging bigger graves – and also to guarantee that if scavengers
 came around there would be enough meat on the surface to stop them 
digging and eating the heads, releasing the evil spirits to infest new 
bodies. Rather than hang them up trees, the living were deposited in a 
locked barn on the nearby farm after Kohath had healed the leg of the 
one they had accidentally shot as well as Willie’s arm. They debated 
whether to go after their riding-mules, but decided that chasing them 
around a zombie-filled countryside was probably a bad idea, as the 
afternoon was wearing on. 
The day advanced in a similar manner – lesser encounters not 
played through to avoid repetition now they had their tactics sorted out
 – until late afternoon. Rather than push on into Pedro’s Landing at 
dusk, they stopped and holed up in a farmhouse for the night. Next 
morning, after dealing with a group of zombies who’d gathered around the
 house overnight, they moved on to where they topped a hill overlooking 
Pedro’s Landing and saw the sunlight glinting off its giant spiderwebs.
Yes, spiderwebs. Unexpectedly, the whole village of Pedro’s 
Landing was festooned with them. Haggart reckoned that they were from 
hunting/herding spiders who chase prey into their webs since they were 
not the classic circular webs used to hunt flying prey. From the 
thickness of the web that made it visible at this range (a mile away, 
but through binoculars) he estimated that the spiders would be somewhere
 between a large dog and a horse in size. They could just make out human
 figures standing still at the edges of the web.
As they moved closer, there was much discussion about the 
sequence of events. Did Mama duT come to Pedro’s Landing to sort out a 
spider problem and the zombie-spirits were the by-product of her 
critical spell failure, or vice versa? Or was her business about 
neither, and both came through together?
They realised that the countryside around seemed to be less 
populated with zombies than elsewhere. The gaps between the web-strands 
were clearly too small for their wagon, so they cached the wagon and 
mules in a farm close to the edge of the village and set out to explore…
=== Session 3 ===
The group decided that the safest way to take a close look at the 
village would be from the river. Although wide (50 yards) it was 
shallow: good protection from both zombies and spiders, and slow-flowing
 so not likely to be too dangerous. 
Surveying the riverbanks, they realised that there were no boats 
on their side, but they did spot one on the far side. Praying that their
 memory was right that caimans too small to threaten alert humans were 
the only serious carnivores in Caribbean rivers, Willie and Donald waded
 the river, having to resort to swimming briefly in the very middle, and
 brought the boat back. They observed more zombies on the far bank, 
confirming that the area of effect of the infestation was circular. 
First they looked more closely at the human figures standing at 
the edge of the village. They looked dead through binoculars, though 
strangely so. Their faces looked green, their arms puffy from the gases 
of decay, but their torsos looked normal. As the boat then drifted along
 the river, they did indeed see two giant spiders in the village, each 
about the size of a Shetland pony. One was high up on the church tower, 
the other nestled amongst its webs between two houses. Securing the boat
 to oars plunged into the riverbed to steady it as an aiming-platform, 
their three best shots (Donald, Albert, & Mrs Stanley) opened fire, 
two of them hitting their target. The spider scuttled down its webs into
 cover. Excited by the battle, Albert joined in. 
They moved to the second spider, again securing the boat and 
taking careful aim. This time all three hit, and the spider thrashed 
around in its death-throes. Suddenly from around a corner a third spider
 appeared and attacked the dying one. Another flurry of shots blasted it
 and it scuttled back into cover. They decided they had the measure of 
these monsters: they can survive two rifle-shots, but not three.
Next, they decided to investigate the web strands, again using 
the river as protection. They eased close to the great strands attaching
 the jetties to onshore buildings, and Kohath used a hoe collected from a
 zombie to grab and pull one. It stretched and flexed, not breaking 
easily. As he tried to free the hoe, he realised that it was stuck fast.
 He pulled, twisted, and shook the hoe, and the twitching of the strands
 did what it always does: it brought the spider. 
This was no pony-sized spider lurking still in its lair: this was
 the size of a full-grown horse and it was charging at full pelt towards
 them, pedipalps rattling in a dire clamour that triggered panic in 
Donald and Mama duTonniere, both of whom baled out of the boat into the 
river and tried to flee for the far bank. 
As it charged along the jetty, everyone left aboard opened fire, 
blazing away as fast as they could as they suppressed the panic. The 
spider reached the end of the jetty and leapt into the boat, but the 
accumulating weight of lead smashing into its body was too much even for
 the cross-dimensional monster; it crashed into the boat and rolled 
over. As the boat rocked and surged under the impact, Willie fell 
overboard and Haggart fired his remaining barrel into the bottom of the 
boat, but a calmer Kohath fired his second barrel right into the body, 
finishing the monster. 
As the boat began to drift downstream, taking on water from both 
the shotgun damage in the bottom and the list from the overhanging 
spider, the party recovered from the brief but furious battle. Still 
fleeing through waist-deep water, Donald’s foot slipped in the mud, but 
as he ducked himself under the water the shock brought him back under 
control. He seized Mama duT’s arm and talked her down. Meanwhile, those 
back in the boat managed to heave the spider overboard and from long 
pearl-diving experience Willie pulled himself back into the boat. 
They retreated to find material to fix the damage to the boat – 
fortunately, not a full hole through the planks, but enough splintering 
and stretching to let a good flow of water through. 
They decided to abandon the river approach for now: confined in 
the boat they were too vulnerable if another spider managed to jump 
aboard. They prepared two methods of countering the web: flaming 
torches, and blankets and sack-cloth from a nearby farm to drape over 
the sticky strands. 
They brought the boat in close and tied it up nearby for a quick 
retreat, with Albert guarding it, as they approached a narrow gap 
between two buildings. Closer to the zombies, they could see the reason 
for the lack of torso swelling: great holes punched in their abdomens. 
Haggart was able to explain: some spiders pierce their prey with 
external mouthparts and inject stomach acids, then suck out the contents
 when they are an acidic stew. Clearly, all the formerly-living zombies 
now standing around the edge of the webs had suffered that fate. There 
was no swelling because the torsos were hollow, and pierced.
The first experiment was with fire. It worked, the web strand 
sizzling and burning through, but it was slow. It took a full minute to 
burn through, till the ends pinged away. 
The party were getting ready to try something else when the 
spider attacked, approaching stealthily before leaping from the cover of
 one of the buildings. The party therefore got off its first flurry of 
snapshots before having to resist the panic of the chattering pedipalps.
 Once again Donald turned to run, but this time the spider was closer 
and leapt onto his back, sinking its fangs in deep and injecting venom. 
Satisfied that he was done, the spider next went for Willie, 
leaping from Donald’s falling body to the sailor, but Willie managed to 
dodge it. Being blasted by the massed guns of the party, the spider 
turned again and hurled itself at Haggart, sinking its fangs in but 
being blasted to death before it could inject more than a token amount 
of venom. 
With Donald unsteady on his feet from a combination of wounds, 
venom, and stark terror, Kohath rushed over and started treating him 
immediately. Mrs. Stanley wanted Donald moved to the boat so that the 
wounded could be treated in safety, which started a blazing row with 
Kohath, who refused to allow his patient to be moved until the venom was
 neutralised and the wounds staunched. By the time that was done, 
Haggart, who had been waiting patiently for treatment while suffering a 
combination of spider-bite and venom, had also collapsed. 
With their healer – and his magic powerstone – just about 
exhausted, the party retired to their ‘safe’ farmhouse for lunch and 
rest. It took most of the afternoon for Kohath’s breathing disciplines 
to restore his fatigue, and though they were tempted to settle down for 
the night, the question of what impact another day of not eating, 
drinking, etc. would have on the living zombies persuaded Mama duT to 
press them into going again as the afternoon drew towards tiffin-time. 
=== Session 4 ===
With Kohath’s power restored, they discussed the probabilities with 
Mama duT. She reckoned that it was unlikely that one incident brought 
out two such dissimilar outcomes. The most likely sequence was that the 
spiders broke through first somehow – if the zombies had been first, 
Mama D would have still been home as a zombie, as no-one would have come
 to bring her to where the spiders were. Mama D was called for and went 
to Pedro’s Landing to deal with the spiders, but fouled up somehow and 
blew open a portal through which the evil spirits came to possess 
bodies. 
While thinking about it, Mrs Stanley came up with the idea of 
wearing another layer of clothes. If they found themselves stuck to the 
webbing, they could lose this extra layer quickly and painlessly. 
Everyone scrounged another layer of clothes from the farmhouse they were
 using, and wore them despite the tropical warmth. 
First, they checked the outskirts of the village in case the 
ceremony that went wrong had been conducted outside it to avoid the 
spiders. They found no sign of that. So they decided to stand off and 
pick off as many spiders as possible from a distance. They tried 
drifting downstream in a boat again, tugging at the web-strands as they 
passed. The only response to that was a sighting of a human figure 
standing at a window in the village – but the fly-screen obscured all 
the details. 
Tugging the web threads did not tempt any more giant spiders out 
to the attack, either from the river or the land. So eventually they 
decided to go in through the shortest route to the centre: through the 
graveyard. Firstly they ripped away the fly-screen from the window in 
the end wall of the house next to the graveyard and bypassed the tangle 
of web threads attaching the outermost corner to gravestones and the 
graveyard wall. Reassuringly, there were neither zombies nor giant 
spiders in the house and they moved through to the front door, 
overlooking the graveyard. 
Sticking his arm out of a window, Kohath clumsily hacked away at 
the nearest web-strand with a machete. With the odd angle and his 
inexperience with machetes, it took him quite a while to cut through the
 tough, springy thread. The ominous news was that the thrashing of the 
web did not attract any more spiders – clearly, the party thought, they 
had plans beyond the animal-level instinctive ones they had used before.
 
They stepped out of the front door and made their way to the side
 wall of the church, ending up by the sacristy door. Since most of the 
web-strands were running that way it was fairly simple to avoid the 
cross-strands. 
The plan was to move through the church to come out in the 
marketplace right in the centre of the village. But Mrs. Stanley took 
the time to look through a window and saw thirty or more zombies 
standing inside watching the sacristy door, so that plan changed 
rapidly. 
They moved along the sidewall of the church. Ironically, it was 
the well-prepared Mrs. Stanley who came to grief: she overbalanced when 
stepping over a web, and fell into another strand. While Albert stayed 
back to help her out of the shift she was wearing over her own clothes, 
the rest of the party reached the corner and looked out at the webstrewn
 market square. 
They were promptly seen by Mama D – or rather, by the spirit 
inhabiting her body. She cried out a warning. Two giant spiders rolled 
off house roofs and scuttled down the web towards them, and zombies 
started emerging from the church’s main door. 
The spiders were again rattling away with their pedipalps to 
produce their unearthly drumming that terrified Donald (again), and this
 time both Mrs Stanley and Albert joined him in panicked flight, 
although Mrs S, still held fast in the web, did not get very far!The 
flight of the others . It didn’t last long either: both Albert and 
Donald ran full-force into webbing and were pinned strongly, Mrs Stanley
 writhed around and wrapped herself even more strongly into the strands 
that held her. 
The remaining party members blasted away at the nearest spider as
 it skidded down the web towards them, killing it just as it came within
 reach. Meanwhile, across the road Mama D conjured a jet of fire, but 
Haggart managed to dodge it. The zombies shambled closer, ignored, but 
then they were stopped by the web. Kohath and Willie switched their fire
 to the second spider, again dropping it at the last moment with 
point-blank shotgun blasts while Haggart changed targets and shot back 
at Mama D for daring to target him. His shot hit her right arm and left 
him with an empty shotgun. 
Kohath reloaded quickly while Haggart was still reaching for 
cartridges. Willie kept blasting zombies as they brought massive 
pressure on the web holding them back. As far as Willie and Haggart 
could see, Mama D just vanished. Next round Kohath could still see her 
(being immune to her psychic invisibility) and had one round up the 
spout so he blasted her, again hitting her right arm and taking her 
down, but at that point the web ripped loose under the weight of pushing
 zombies and they stumbled towards the fighters. 
With the spiders dead and their pedipalps silenced, Donald and 
Albert threw off the effects of the fear and pulled themselves free of 
the web by getting out of the extra layer of clothing, but Mrs Stanley 
had fully flipped by now, helplessly wrapped up in the web with a 
gun-battle raging around her and the moan of zombies coming ever closer…
Kohath, Willie and Haggart retreated slowly, blasting the front 
zombies’ legs away. Donald joined in quickly, while Albert struggled to 
free his rifle from the tangled web. They couldn’t run till Mrs Stanley 
could be freed, but every time they blasted the legs out from under a 
zombie it kept crawling closer and grabbing at their legs. Finally. Mama
 duT managed to cut the web-strands holding Mrs Stanley and the party 
could grab her, still wrapped and screaming, and run around the zombie 
pack, avoiding more web, to secure the house where Mama D’s body lay. 
They pinioned Mama D quickly and barred all the doors and window 
shutters. Kohath estimated the safe anaesthetic dosage for her and 
deliberately exceeded it to keep her evil spirit under control. At 
least, that was his excuse… but then he did surgically amputate her 
ruined right arm and bind up the stump properly. Mama duT promised to 
work regeneration magic on her later. 
The fetish they were looking for hung eight feet above the middle
 of the street, tangled in web and visible to all the zombies who had 
now emerged from the surrounding houses. Willie broke through the roof 
thatch and cut the attachment points on their house, dropping the fetish
 in the street. In order to redeem himself for achieving nothing in the 
climactic fight, Albert volunteered to run out and fetch it. Neatly 
sidestepping both web strands and ambling zombies, he managed to cut it 
loose and bring it back without incident. 
Safe inside a secured house, Mama duT had all the time she needed
 for a ceremony which blocked the access to this dimension by the evil 
spirits. The zombies in town dropped instantly – over the days they had 
been possessed, all of them had been sucked hollow by the spiders. Out 
in the countryside, the possessed living recovered control of their own 
bodies, suffering slightly from their experience but the worst effects 
of dehydration and hunger had been blocked by the psychic energy 
imparted by the spirits. 
Checking around the village, the players found in relief that the
 other spiders which they had wounded earlier had all died from their 
wounds, which explained why they hadn’t faced more in the final 
confrontation. 
The locals in Mama duT’s valley moved in to help their surviving 
neighbours, and also to throw a party for the player-characters. A lot 
of rum was drunk before the party moved unsteadily back to Ciudad 
Trujillo to find out how Casey was doing with assembling wizards and 
equipment for their dive.
Category:Adventures