In the last session of Rats in the Ranks, the PCs had to escape from a slowly collapsing dungeon before it crushed them alive. I’m not sure how I would have handled this in previous systems (never done it!) but the Warhammer 3 Progress Tracker gave me an excellent mechanism for doing it, not necessarily specific to the WFRP 3 rules, though the method I used is maybe enhanced by them. This is my description of that skill challenge.
The race against time in this case was the desperate race to get out of the dungeon. I constructed a 3 space tracker (that is, 3 spaces, and then the destination point, so a total length of 4 steps). I then put a token on the starting point for “the dungeon” and gave the PCs three choices:
Break and run separately for the entrance: everyone gets their own progress token, but they can’t help each other
Go with the fastest: the person with the best athletics skill determines their progress, but his/her skill checks are penalized for all those with lower skills, and any fatigue results are applied to the fastest PC
Go with the slowest: the person with the worst athletics skill determines their progress, but the skill checks are enhanced by all those with higher skills, and any fatigue results are applied to members of the party sequentially starting with the strongest
They PCs chose option 3, go with the slowest. The slowest was the mage, of course, with a Strength of 2 and no Athletics skill. I assigned an initial difficulty to the check of 1 challenge die (easy) that would increase by 1 misfortune die per round, and then become 2 challenge dice after a few rounds. Everyone with an equal or higher strength to Schultz could add one fortune die to the roll. I used the following outcomes:
x successes: advance that many spaces along the progress tracker
Fail: the token for the imminent collapse of the dungeon advances one space along the tracker
2 boons: add 1 fortune die to the next roll
2 banes: 1 fatigue
Schultz was initially successful, getting the party one pace along the tracker. Suzette cast a minor blessing to add one fortune die to the next roll, and Shultz used his once-per-session ability to add two fortune dice to a check, but it was a fail, which brought them back to equal with the dungeon’s inevitable collapse. They then got a bit desperate, with the difficulty now on 2 challenge dice, which is very hard to beat for someone with a strength of 2. So Shultz used his spell First Portent of Amul, and by a very lucky roll was able to neutralize the result of the next challenge die rolled in the skill check. Suzette cast another minor blessing and used her once-a-session bonus, and they rolled again for – a total of 3 successes, and 2 banes. This took their progress tracker to the end of the track, indicating they escaped from the dungeon, but I inflicted a single fatigue on Aruson and said that this was because he had to reach back into the crypt entrance and literally haul Suzette out as the stairs collapsed around her, and she landed on the snowy ground outside, still praying desperately.
I played a bit fast-and-loose with the rules here (allowing Suzette’s once-per-session ability to affect what was effectively Schultz’s roll) but it helped to add to the sense of desperation and hard scrabble built into the challenge. I find the progress tracker sometimes hard to use effectively but I think at times like this it works really well to give a sense of competition against time or the party’s own mistakes. And, it appears, it can be used to effectively construct save-or-die type situations, with the whole party at risk and the whole party working together to get through the challenge.
Last Wednesday was the culmination of the PC’s incursion into the Wizard’s Tomb, a small old tomb just outside Ubersreik, situated in the middle of an orphan’s graveyard and defended by zombie children. The PCs had already explored all the major rooms, and only two remained – a large room on the southern edge of the complex, and a large room reached by a set of stairs to the North. They decided to investigate the southern room first. But first…
Our First Experience of Career Advancement
In their previous incursion the PCs got enough experience points for Mr. 123 to advance his Initiate, Suzette, to her next career, Disciple. He spent 1xp for a Dedication Bonus, which enables Suzette to retain her Initiate’s special talent when she becomes a Disciple, as well as to choose a specialization in every skill she trained during her first career. So we have our first character at the next level. Mr. Shuto chose not to advance, because he wants to use the non-career advances available to his apprentice wizard to enhance toughness and get some extra training. Mr. Shop Owner chose not to advance because a) he was indecisive about where to go and b) he wants to spend some accumulated xp on increasing toughness. So we currently have one PC in their second career, meaning they can purchase higher-level spells and more skill training. Will this lead to an invincible party? I’m not sure yet, but stay tuned…
The Demon Tomb
The PCs entered the Southern room using the standard method – send the thief in first and wait for the sounds of frenzied slaughter. The Thief found himself in a large room with a raised plinth at the far end on which stood a huge, faintly glowing statue of a demon. This statue loomed over a tomb – the wizard’s grave – and the rest of the room was largely empty except for some decaying boxes near the door, and in one corner.
The thief hid behind the boxes to survey the room. A group of 3 imps burst from these boxes and attacked him, and combat was joined. Everyone else rushed up to help him, and from the shadow-enshrouded roof there emerged a fury, a much larger, winged demon-like creature, that went straight for the Roadwarden.
These enemies were supposed to be much stronger than the zombie children, but they went down like hapless rags. The thief slaughtered the imps with two arrow shots, and after one vaguely effective strafing attack, the demon settled in for a good melee stoush, only to be destroyed by the roadwarden and Suzette the Disciple. The whole battle was done in two rounds, with very little damage for the characters. I think I may have mishandled the surprise element of the imps’ attack, but basically the fury is a poorly-named monster, doing very limited damage and not being all that much cop. So the PCs left its steaming body near the door and searched the room. They lifted the lid off the wizard’s grave and found his corpse, along with its magic items:
A robe (+1 defense)
A gold-plated wand, not magical but designed to be easily enchanted
A book, which if read successfully will grant the reader a new spell, probably Dark Magic (but carries a risk of madness)
A bottle of superior healing potion
They fully expected the wizard’s body to come to life and attack them but it didn’t, it just crumbled to dust. Why?
When they explored the room, the mysterious silver key they had picked up earlier began to glow when held near the crates in the corner, and to emit a soft sound. They searched carefully until they found a key hole and opened a secret door to a final room. This room was reached by a short corridor, and was empty but for a large, shallow pool in the centre of the room.
Breaking the Wizard’s Enchantment
The pool glowed with the same vague light as the statue, and in its centre was a small coin held inside an obviously magical circle of some kind. They debated for a while but, eventually, it had to happen – the thief took out the coin. Immediately, the glow that suffused the pool (and lit the room!) snuffed out, as did the glow on the nearby statue in the main room, and the PCs were plunged into complete darkness. Aruson the Thief started scrabbling around in the pitch black for a light for his lantern, but the walls and floor had started to shake and he couldn’t get it to work. In the distance they could hear something falling. In desperation, Shultz the wizard called forth a cantrip of light, and they realized that the walls and floor of the tomb were quaking and making a bad noise.
They decided to run. As they exited the main room the quaking got worse, and they suddenly found themselves in a race against time, as parts of the tomb began to collapse around them. Staggering on the shifting earth, they helped each other through the gathering dark, Suzette preying to Morr to protect them from the worst of the rubble and Shultz using his celestial magic to predict the safest path through the quaking. In the end, near the entrance, they just had to burst into a run and so they emerged from the crypt into the frigid outside air, Aruson dragging Suzette through just as the entrance collapsed and the entire tomb was swallowed up by the uncaring earth.
Save or Die
That’s right folks, that was a save-or-die scenario, played out against the progress tracker. This is another skill check/technique I came up with on the fly, and I’ll explain it separately. I might not have actually killed the entire party (I am not so wrathful) but I put myself on the spot and that’s how it worked out. They really had to scrabble through all their abilities to get out too – Suzette burnt all her available favour points, Schultz used up his magic points, and two characters used their one-time-per-session skill bonus to get through it. It gave a nice sense of panic to the ending!
Denouement
The characters returned to town, and paid a local magician a lot of money to identify their magical items. They’re now ready for a few days rest before they look for something else suspicious to get up to. They’ve survived their first ever Warhammer dungeon incursion in typical contrary style, being nearly slaughtered by the easy monsters and destroying the hard ones in the blink of an eye. Continual surprises for the GM, and further ponderings on how to balance monster power for encounters in such an unfamiliar system.
The Coin: “Wizard’s Last Wish”
The coin the PCs grabbed from the pool turned out to be the key ingredient in a ritual to bring the wizard back from the dead, perhaps as a lich or other undead. One side was blank, the other side inscribed with the invocation “Do not Die” (shinu na – this comes out better in Japanese I think). Unfortunately, the wizard lacked the power to make his ritual work and so after he died he just crumbled to dust – but all the servants he had prepared for himself remained around forever to guard his crumbling remains.
During their recent dungeon-delving, our heroes ran into some scary zombie children, and after a surprisingly challenging battle they had to retreat from the dungeon to recover from wounds, fatigue and stress. One character was carrying such a high load of fatigue and stress that he was essentially in a state of high panic, and any more trouble of any sort was going to lead to insanity. They decided to camp for the night, rest, and try and recover some wounds naturally.
Now, I’m not a big fan of allowing this sort of thing but I’m also not a big fan of random encounters, so I wanted to fashion a random encounter system that depended on the PC’s wilderness skills, and not on just a die roll. I don’t think random encounters should be something as simple as “occurs on a 1 in a 1d6” but should be avoidable by good sense. I also don’t think people should be able to recover wounds in a wilderness encampment setting unless they have made a solid, defensible camp and it is comfortable and well situated, i.e. unless they can sleep well, not be woken by every scary sound, and also be able to light a fire, eat good food, etc.
So, on the fly, I made up two new skill checks – actions, essentially – to be conducted in story mode to determine the success of finding and setting up a camp. I had to fashion all of this while my players were smoking, so I didn’t have much time and they’re a bit complex but I think they work. In a full nights rest a PC should recover fatigue, ordinary wounds and stress equal to their toughness (and willpower in the case of stress). They shouldn’t get this much in the wilderness! So here are the two skill checks.
Locate Camping Spot
Difficulty: Easy (1 challenge dice)
Skill: Nature Lore
Procedure: One character rolls for the group. Add one fortune die for every additional character in the group with either Observation or Nature Lore trained, and for each wood elf in the group. Add two misfortune dice if it is dark, and additional misfortune dice for difficult terrain, haste, etc.
Effect: Characters are able to find a camping site suitable to use the set camp action. Failure in this action adds one challenge die to the set camp action, while 2 successes adds one fortune die and 3 successes adds one expertise die. Additionally, if the PCs lack food, rolling two boons will provide them with access to a basic food source that they can prepare if their set camp check is successful. Two banes should lead to an increase in the party tension meter of 1.
Set Camp
Difficulty: Medium (2 challenge dice)
Skill:Nature Lore
Process: One PC rolls for the group, with the same modifiers as above, and including any modifiers from the find camp skill check. Additional modifiers: 1 misfortune die per additional day the camp will be set; 1 misfortune die if the camp is being set after dusk (additional to the darkness modifiers described above). Setting a camp proof against monsters is difficult! The GM should choose a hard and an easy monster for random encounters (in my setting I chose giant spider for hard, and 4 zombie children for easy).
Effect: The PCs set a camp suitable for resting in, and are not disturbed by monsters. See the lines below for specifics:
3 Fails: PCs are attacked by the hard monster
1 Fail: PCs are attacked by the easy monster
1 success: No encounter, PCs recover 1 wound each
3 successes: No encounter, PCs recover 2 wounds each
2 boons: PCs get warning of the monster attack (if they failed their roll); if they succeeded the check, they recover an additional wound (up to toughness maximum)
Sigmar’s comet: PCs get full rest and recover maximum possible wounds (only on a success)
2 banes: Opponents get +1 initiative when they attack
Chaos: Opponents get full surprise, a round of free attacks against the PCs
GM Notes
While I don’t like random encounters, I also don’t like safe wilderness wandering, and I think how one wanders the wilderness should be dependent very much on how well one knows the wilderness. Nature Lore is a skill that is not often used or rewarded, and I think these two tasks actually make it very important, particularly when travelling long distances. For extended journeys I would not force a check like this every night, but would force a single check for a leg of the journey, and put any encounter at some point in the journey. Note that this can be modified to, for example, a general safe travel skill check, with exactly the same rules, but replacing the find camp check with a research travel check, which depends on folklore or education for its basic roll and modifies the chance of a random encounter during the journey.
I know some people will view skill checks for setting a camp as “roll playing” but there’s a simple reason I prefer them: I find camp-setting and describing all that survivalist stuff to be hideously boring and I’d rather not have the conversation. I even get the players to describe their camp setting after they’ve rolled it. I also think my judgments of a successful camp-setting process would be flawed in any case, so I wouldn’t necessarily modify a standard random encounter chance “correctly” after a dialogue with the players. What do we, the players, know, anyway, about the best way to set a camp so as not to attract the interest of a nearby giant spider? Of course, if players like this sort of thing they’re welcome to try and stunt their roll in some way (I always reward this!) but I can’t, generally, be bothered with this nuts and bolts stuff. For the same reason, when people are in town I don’t play out every single shopping trip – I generally refuse to haggle, but if my players insist on such tedium I try to do it through skill checks rather than reliving my (generally very disappointing) experiences in Chinese bazaars. Bargaining over a roll of cord was not my most enjoyable experience in China and it isn’t how I prefer to spend my role-playing nights!
He skipped Cultural Studies for Bicycle Tech Class
Continuing this week’s zombie theme, Grey has raised in comments to my last post the possibility that our modern specialization and lack of basic survival skills – farming, hunting, that sort of thing – would be a major problem in surviving the zombie apocalypse. The obvious implication of this is that your average media studies graduate, pasty white-faced urban public servant, is meat hanging on a hook once the gates of hell open up. Now, every time I watch a zombie movie I’m thrown into something of a reverie of thought about this – how would I survive, what would I do, what skills make one a valuable team member? And I’m forced to conclude that the skills of urban man aren’t actually so useless in your classic urban zombie apocalypse. In fact, I think the classic survival skills that one associates with a man[1] of a previous, simpler, less specialized era wouldn’t actually be anywhere near as useful either in the short term or the long term as one might initially think. This post is my classically long-winded attempt to work out why, but first let’s consider two examples of modern urban humans – one “real” and one not – in a short term and long term zombie survival scenario.
The Short Term Survival Skill of Greatest Importance: Media Studies and Jim from 28 Days Later
In the classic post-apocalypse scenario that everyone is familiar with, Jim wakes up from a coma in hospital. We know Jim is a bicycle courier, and he is in a modern (post-2000) world where the infected have taken over the streets. He emerges into the light of day and in a series of classic scenes stumbles through an empty London looking for clues as to what happened. He enters a church and takes altogether too long to figure out what’s going on, and ends up having to flee the scene with a bunch of infected chasing him, until a pair of survivors turn up with a few molotovs and save his bacon.
What was the key skill Jim needed here? He needed to have attended those early morning media studies classes, so that he could understand the narrative signs of a zombie apocalypse. No amount of gun-toting, pig-farming, deer-hunting experience was going to get him out of this one. What he needed was to know that in a deserted London with signs up at Picadilly Circus looking for lost loved ones who have fled to the country, going into an abandoned church is a bad plan. Similarly, the people who rescued him had a key skill they learnt at too many black block demonstrations – throwing molotov cocktails. And when he started to have his freak out, the woman in the group knew enough about medicine and nutrition to make him aware that he was suffering from his sugar-rich diet.
These aren’t skills or adaptation tactics one learns on the farm.
A Statistician in the Wilderness: Experimental Design and Community Survival in a Long-term post-Apocalyptic Scenario
Suppose that a gang of survivors that includes your humble blogger finds itself needing to carve out a long-term existence in the wilderness, having identified that there is no chance of society as we know it re-forming. Obviously we need to start farming at some point, because while survival hunting might be useful in the short term, it’s unlikely to provide sufficient food for a growing community and anyway, there are zombies out there. So, this community needs an efficient way of learning what farming methods are best within a few seasons, based on what knowledge we have between us. A statistician with training in experimental design is very useful for this sort of enterprise – a single season with a few crop yields will be sufficient to identify the best growth techniques in a well-designed trial, and this is very important for protecting a community long-term against crop failure and the destablizing effects of famine. It’s also essential to enable community growth. So even a skill as apparently useless as statistics can be put to work in the long-term interests of a post-apocalyptic community.
The Importance of Education for Adaptation
These examples are both facetious but they show that there is a key skill in surviving a zombie apocalypse – adaptation. And adaptation is facilitated by a wide and advanced education, popular cultural knowledge, exposure to media, and the coherent exchange of specialist skills in a community. In the short term the ability to farm or hunt is irrelevant to survival in a collapsing urban environment – key skills are adaptability, brutality, and knowledge of the urban environment[2]. In the long term survival is best facilitated not by the ability to hunt or grow food, but by the ability to research, learn and adapt.
If an early group of pre-moderns survived a zombie apocalypse[3] and escaped to the wilderness, they might find themselves at a deserted abbey full of books on farming, the origin of zombies, good herbs to cure disease, local hazards, and the quickest and safest way to the coast, but their illiteracy would render all this information meaningless. Finding good mushrooms would be a process of trial and error, as would building a decent roof. It strikes me that my long-term survival strategy would be:
Find a pharmacist
Loot a library
Start a community based around a source of power, a pharmaceutical manufactory, and a farm
You can’t do this with a bow and a good knowledge of how to grow potatoes. In adapting to a new world, common sense is nowhere near as useful, I suspect, as the ability to synthesize new information and turn it to advantage, and this is very much a feature of the modern urban world. Why, even looting a library is not an easy job if you have to do it in a very short period of time before the zombies come – that takes organization, planning, and knowledge of how libraries work and how knowledge is accumulated.
Also, some skills that seem ubiquitous in zombie movies are actually extremely rare and probably more likely to be learnt anew than randomly occur in any group of survivors. The one that springs to mind most readily when watching US movies is gunplay. Not only is this skill extremely rare in the rest of the developed world, but getting guns is difficult and requires research and the ability to move large distances through hostile urban territory to find them. In fact, finding alternatives to guns is probably a much more viable option, and that – again – relies on adaptation. Not to mention that most peoples’ actual training in gunplay doesn’t extend to “using it safely in the presence of your comrades while exploring a deserted warehouse.”[4]
The Huge Range of Neglected Skills in Modern Life
I think it’s fashionable in the modern world to suppose that many of our jobs and skills are useless and really just represent the icing on the cake of civilization. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Suppose, for example, that you end up in a gang of survivors composed of a weekend warrior paintballer, a retired cop, a housewife and a history teacher – these are hardly the sorts of people who’re going to build the new world, are they? But these people all have skills you might not expect. The weekend warrior might actually be very good at shooting, which is handy; the retired cop would have first aid skills; the housewife might previously have been an urban planner, with knowledge of the sewage system and how to move through the city safely underground; and the history teacher could be the local organizer for the teacher’s union, with a lot of experience of getting disparate groups of people to work together in a common cause. Someone in the group may have studied agriculture at university; the history teacher may know the location of the city’s key commercial food warehouses, which would be an extremely valuable piece of knowledge.
The Importance of Social Connection
In fact that last example is probably the most important of all, because the history of zombie attacks tells us that the single most important survival skill is the ability to play well with others, and to make judicious rules about how a group of people is to work together. This is the pre-eminent achievement of the modern urban world – advanced skills in group dynamics, planning, and getting shit done. Surviving in the zombie world is about fast collective decision-making and coordinated action, not individual prowess with knife, stick or gun. In the short term the ability to coordinate a raid on a supermarket to maximize your useful acquisitions in the minimum time, while guarding the exits and maintaining clear communication, is vastly more important than how many zombies you can kill or whether you can catch fish. If you have no-one in that supermarket who can quickly and rapidly tell the difference between antibiotics and antidepressants in the pharmacy counter (or if you send them to the clothing department to get padded jackets instead), you’re fucked – and having a good supply of antibiotics and machetes and nutritious tinned food is probably going to keep your group alive longer than a gun, 7000 rounds of ammo and a fishing line. Anyone who has spent time in a modern company knows how to function as a cog in a larger machine, what part to play and how to play it, and it’s likely that most modern urban dwellers if forced could come up with a decent group response to their plight.
Conclusion
Never fear, telephone sanitizers and personal shopping assistants of the world, you have more to fear from the global financial crisis than you do from a zombie apocalypse! Especially if you have done enough team-building exercises with your fellow survivors!
Addendum
If you appreciate my thoughts on zombie survival strategies, please consider reading my novella Quarantine Breach, set in the world of 28 Years Later, which is freely available at Royal Road.
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fn1: And I think the classic survivalist scenario always assigns these skills to a man, not a woman
fn2: All well evidenced on any Friday night in the centre of London!
fn3: Which seems like an excellent campaign idea!
fn4: In fact, in this scenario would 15 years’ training in a shooting range be even 10% as effective as 3 weeks playing Time Cop at the local arcade?
Recently I have been watching The Walking Dead, a new Zombie apocalypse survival TV show from the US. So far – 5 episodes in – it’s awesome, with all the hallmarks of a good zombie show (zombies, good make up, gore, tension, nowhere to run) and all the hallmarks of a good US TV show (fine plot development, excellent acting, good scripting), and at the moment I’ve already enjoyed more zombie tv (5 hours’ worth, roughly) than I can usually bear. I won’t say more about the TV show yet except that it really is very good and you, gentle reader, should be scaring yourself grey on it as soon as possible.
This post is more about the sociological implications of zombification, something I don’t usually think about but was brought to contemplate by this essay on zombies as symbol of working class uprising. (I think this article is well worth a read even if you don’t agree with this part of its conclusions – it has some interesting ideas about keeping-up-with-the-jones’s and zombies as an allegory for individualism in modern pop culture that I quite like ). Zombies are rich with symbolism and, like Winnie the Pooh, just begging for analysis from every political and ideological perspective, so it’s no surprise that a socialist would fixate on them as a symbol of bourgeois fears of a working class revolution. I think there are a few flaws in that image, which I will describe in a moment, but the article got me to thinking about the rich symbolism of the modern zombie, and some of the many metaphors they can represent. Let’s go through a few.
Zombie as Working Class Revolutionary
This is the idea presented in the linked post, that Zombies represent middle class fears of the working class/ lumpen proles rising up to get them and take their stuff or destroy their lifestyle. Under this metaphor, zombies represent all those huddled faceless masses who are excluded from the tranquil pleasantries of middle class life, and whose exclusion is an essential element of the continuation of middle class life. In the zombie movie they come to take your pleasant life away from you, and you have to fight them off. This is a superficially interesting metaphor but I don’t think it works, because it’s a-cultural and a little bit a-historical. Particularly, the Zombie movie sprang up in 50s/60s America, when the industrial working class were well respected and integrated into American life, and the lumpen proletariat (i.e. the long-term unemployed) didn’t really exist. Had the Zombie sprung up elsewhere, e.g. in 30s Europe, I can see the power of this metaphor, but it didn’t. Furthermore, the linked essay doesn’t seem to take account of the importance of race in America, and given that the Zombie movie originated there, I think it’s important to consider. The main social tension in the US in the 50s was the final destruction of the barriers keeping black Americans out of ordinary life, and there was a strong fear of the loss of the established peaceful order of things. I imagine to many Americans at that time black Americans were faceless masses who threatened them, and the zombie may make the perfect image of the black American they fear – even the name is a caribbean import!
Which isn’t to say that the original creators of the Zombie (Romero?) were scared of a black uprising. They just read the mood and saw an excellent theme for a story. The zombie has remained an enduring vehicle for expressing certain social fears, and doing so doesn’t mean that we the viewer (or the creator) themselves feel those fears directly.
Zombies as New Left Demonstrators
If there was any political movement in the US in the 50s and 60s that could have genuinely stirred mainstream middle-class fear, it was the New Left with its huge anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, marches for equality, desegregation riots, etc. These people actually presented in public for the first time in a generation as a mass of faceless people on TV, confronting out-numbered and beleaguered security forces and all emitting the same senseless, mindless noise (“slogans”). These people didn’t usually carry weapons, but overwhelmed security forces by means of their bare hands and weight of numbers. Worse still, anyone could be infected with this disease – your daughter, your brother, white or black people, they’re all down there at the flower-power sit in. If the earlier Zombie movies represented a fear of any radical movement or revolution, it was surely the New Left, and the New Left was many things but it was not socialist.
In this sense we can see the survivors as the image of the security state, having to police each other for signs of nascent zombification. In earlier movies the police state was quite benevolent – you had to be bitten by a zombie, and they could wait for you to die before they administered any radical measures. But in the newer versions – particularly 28 Days Later – we see a newer, very post-9/11 (and I would add, very British) form of pre-emptive security. In the early minutes of that movie we see a brief, perhaps 2 second long debate between two survivors, in which one has been bitten and the other one gives him barely a moment to protest before terminating him with extreme prejudice. This is the logic of the modern security state, of control orders and imprisonment without charge. It’s the post-apocalypse-cinema version of executing a Brazilian chap on a train because he might be a terrorist, and getting away with it.
Reclaiming and Neutralizing Undeath through Zombies
The earlier Zombie was explicitly Undead – “when hell is full the dead will walk the earth” – but later Zombies have become a biological phenomenon. In later movies – especially 28 Days Later but also The Walking Dead and maybe Biohazard – they are a biological phenomenon, explained through viral studies and, for all that biological phenomena are explicable and potentially curable, infinitely more terrifying than the earlier zombie. The virus is transmitted even through a drop of blood, and in some cases can turn you to a zombie before you even die. Rapid intervention is needed, any form of exposure is not to be trusted, and there is no redemption or salvation. In earlier movies, the infected could be given a period of grace, could even be allowed to die with dignity. Not so anymore, the only solution to the viral zombie is immediate and extreme eradication. This change in the modern Zombie obvious corresponds to the development of modern public health consciousness, particularly the discovery and spread of HIV/AIDS, that most terrifying of infectious diseases. But in transforming the Zombie from undead to biological, we have removed the terror of ghosts, hell and the grave – we have rendered the undead into merely the viral, another form of explicable natural law, a pest that can be controlled. We know we can end the disease, and we know that no viral phenomenon is beyond modern science and public health. The modern zombie transforms our understanding of undeath, from a mysterious curse or magic to a mere biological mistake, easily cured.
Note also that the 28 Days Later storyline explicitly reflects modern fears about the transmission of disease from animals to humans, and indeed incorporates one of the main suspected causes of HIV into the story.
Zombies as critique of Urban Planning
Note that through all the eras of the zombie movie, the prime action tends to take place in a modern urban development of the time. From the suburban house of the 60s, to the shopping mall of the 70s, the pub in Shaun of the Dead, the metropolis and then the military camp in 28 Days Later. These places figure in the consciousness of the time and are incorporated into the movie as a central place of conflict between the main characters, who are aware of their difference from the masses, and the masses themselves. We may be defending some ideal of urban planning (the detached home of the early movies), retreating to the bastion of the modern order because it supplies all our needs (the mall in the 70s movies) or finding ourselves betrayed by the complex urban structures of our modern lives (28 Days Later), but in all cases the latest debates in urban planning are central to the development of the story, at least until it takes on its inevitable survivalist theme. Even survivalism takes on some form relevant to the modern debate about how we are living or should live – the pub in Shaun of the Dead, and the military camp in post-9/11 28 Days Later. Zombies are the ultimate, mindless incursion into our urban planning dreams and nightmares.
Drawing a long (cross)bow
These ideas are all silly, of course, or limited in their validity – there is no single rhetorical or metaphorical meaning to a zombie story, and they’re all very easily debated or dismissed. But I think when we watch the movies they invoke a lot of these kinds of themes and the sociological and political commentary makes a welcome undercurrent to what is usually a gripping and powerful story. This is why I think zombie movies have enduring appeal, even when their format is often very similar. It’s the setting and the underlying ideological conflict that makes the otherwise formulaic stories new and interesting. They’re a very versatile blank canvas on which to paint ideological and sociological debates. While blowing brains out.
Today I had an article published in the British Medical Journal, along with an accompanying editorial[1] and a front page press release (which will be visible for about 3 minutes before the next health care fad overwhelms it). The article itself is an investigation of rates of referral to secondary care (that’s “hospital” to the non-initiated) by General Practitioners (“Doctors” to the non-initiated), which uses GP routine monitoring data to estimate the difference in rates of referral for key conditions by socioeconomic status, age and sex. The key finding is that poorer people tend to be referred less frequently or at longer time intervals than wealthier people, as do the very old, except where strict guidelines exist that restrict GP choice. The implication, of course, is that something happens in the GP consultation that disadvantages poorer or older people.
The research was conducted in conjunction with a Public Health Trainee and two other academic departments while I was working at the King’s Fund, in London. The statistics are, in my opinion, pretty robust, and the findings pretty stark, and the diseases we considered are interesting for their implications. We looked at referral rates for three conditions:
Post Menopausal Bleeding, which is a symptom of serious health conditions and should always be referred to further care
Dyspepsia, which is a symptom of illness in people over 55, and for which referral guidelines exist in this age group
Hip Pain, which by contrast is generally considered an indicator of osteoarthritis and which has no clear guidelines or medical opinion on what level of referral should be provided
Our hypothesis was that the existence of guidelines would eliminate referral rate discrepancies (in the case of dyspepsia) and that the vague nature of hip pain science would mean that referral rates would be dependent upon the GP-patient interaction. Our hypothesis got strong statistical confirmation from a very robust dataset. The accompanying editorial attempts to present a theory of how this might occur, because it’s not immediately obvious why. Noone who wrote this paper thinks that GPs are sitting behind their desk concluding that poor people don’t deserve care, and the data don’t tell us why the discrepancy exists. Note that in the case of hip pain the available knowledge is such that we don’t even know what the right referral rate is.
My personal theory (not necessarily shared by my co-authors, who are quite capable of speaking for themselves) is that poorer patients are less capable of representing their interests to a better educated and highly respected, wealthy doctor. They don’t express the need for pain relief or advanced care, and they don’t advocate for their own needs. I think there may also be an internalized social view, held by many poor people (deferential toryism) and some doctors that poor people don’t deserve the same quality of life as wealthy people, and should be thankful for what they’ve got. This means that everyone involved in the consultation is not advocating for or not offering the service that should be available. Of course this only happens in some consultations and it happens subtly – it’s not like anyone is thinking “you’re poor, just go home and die already!” or even that the doctor is thinking anything less than that they should provide the best service they can. But there are different cultural expectations of health in different classes, and they create subtle barriers to the best quality of care amongst poor people. I think this is an important example of how culture is as important as simple structural or economic issues in setting the determinants of health inequality.
Other theories, of course, are welcome. This is hardly settled science, and my job is to do the calculations, not to explain them!
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fn1: incidentally, these articles require you register to read them fully. It’s probably not worth your time…
On the 20th of November I went with my friend Miss Y and her sister Miss N to view the Grand Sumo Contest in nearby Fukuoka. This event was supposed to be the event when the current grandmaster (Yokozuna), Hakuho, was due to set a world record for consecutive victories; unfortunately he got beaten on the Monday before, so no record viewing. Also, Misses Y and N are teachers at the same Ninja High School, and as you know Ninjas never rest, so they could meet me until 13:30 on the day, which meant we didn’t get to view the full day – we only saw the Makuuchi, the most important Sumo wrestlers, in the last 1.5 hours of the day. Sumo is a bit like a Japanese version of cricket, which means that it is a full-day event where you lounge around, drinking and talking and occasionally noticing that there’s a sport happening in the background. Here is an example of what I mean when I say lounging: Miss Y and I got a “Pair Seat”:
Special Big Man Viewing seat for normal people
Had we been here all day then just like in an Aussie cricket day, we could have spent the day drinking beers and enjoying the view. Instead we sat on the edge of our seats while the various wrestlers tried to tear each other apart. Here’s an example of two wrestler’s in preparation for the titanic clash:
All Ritual and No Trousers…
For those of my readers who aren’t familiar with Sumo (is there any such person left in the world?[1]), the preparatory rituals often take longer than the actual fight, which typically is resolved within 10-20 seconds of its commencement. Some wrestlers make a big show of the preparation, and the crowd is generally as appreciative of the stand-off before the bout as they are of the actual fight. So you see a lot of salt-throwing and not so much person-throwing.
There are certain things about Sumo that I find surprising. Here is a short list…
Sumo Wrestlers are really big: you get to stand near them at the match (there’s not much security or separation) and they really are big, bigger than the few rugby players I’ve met, giants among men. This is even more striking for Japanese people – I’m small in my own country but big here, and these guys make me feel small.
The constant flux: Sumo is a serious business – that ring they’re standing in is a significant religious object, kind of like a shrine, and every aspect of the sport is steeped in ritual. But as they prepare for and conduct the fight, there are constant distracting mundanities happening around them – men cleaning up the salt from the ring, new wrestlers entering the area around the ring, people running by. It’s strange to see this holy activity surrounded by such a buzz of normal life
Lack of professional distance: The Sumo wrestlers move around the outside of the hall with almost no separation between themselves and the crowd – you can actually stand right next to them and take photos as they line up, and see them wandering around the halls around the changing rooms. This is quite different to western sport
Weakening of the sport: A lot of the victories I saw were oshidashi, that is one person pushing another from the ring. I think this is the easiest way to win a fight and I think it indicates a slow loss of skill in the sport. I think in previous eras there was more agility and skill, and I wonder if the size-related arms race has led to a loss of delicacy and finesse in the sport
Intrusion of the everyday: As Hakuho, the grand master, was preparing for his bout lines of men entered the edge of the ring and walked around carrying banners advertising Tea Rice and McDonalds. These men were so numerous and their line so long that they actually interfered with Hakuho’s preparations – he was retreating to the salt bin but had to wait for the advertisers to pass! This happened twice in the run up to his bout. I’m surprised that even though the ring is like a shrine and he is the most revered participant, mere advertising is allowed to intrude on his preparations (see the picture below). I can’t figure this out
Who said advertising and religion don't mix?
Sumo is Japan’s national sport, but the top ranks are top-heavy (literally!) with foreigners, but during the day I didn’t get any impression of racist abuse or comments being yelled at the wrestlers. In fact quite a few of the top flight’s most popular members are foreign (e.g. Kotooshu), and my friend Miss Y was recently mortified when a gambling scandal overtook Sumo, but only the Japanese wrestlers were implicated[3]. I don’t think you’d see quite the same attitude in European soccer, though it seems to be common in rugby. For all its many charms, even in NZ rugby is not a religion, though, and if it were I can’t see the English-speaking world being as accommodating of foreign involvement as the Japanese are. But this will never be tested, it’s just supposition on my part.
I’m generally of the belief that sport is better watched on TV than live, but if you get the chance I do recommend a visit to the Sumo, particularly if you go with some friends and spend the day eating and drinking and making merry while Big Men smash into each other in the far distance. Especially if you like the sport, as I do. But ultimately, like every other sport, Sumo is probably better seen on TV.
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fn1: People unfamiliar with Sumo, that is. I know that there are a few people in outer Mongolia who are as yet unfamiliar with my blog[2]
fn2: Though in a strange coincidence those people already are familiar with Sumo. Maybe this post will complete my saturation coverage of the globe?
fn3: I think this is for the simple reason that Yakuza hate foreigners and won’t deal with foreign wrestlers, not any particular moral superiority of the foreigners[4]
fn4: Though I do think that Sumo is an environment of bullying and abuse that probably encourages only the people with the worst characters to join or stay. So maybe foreign wrestlers raised in foreign sumo schools – e.g. in Mongolia – avoid this culture? I don’t know how they train though, or if they train there or here…
This picture is a scan of the map my players drew during their latest session, when they entered the wizard’s tomb. A classic dungeon map, but done in Japanese, with rats in silhouette and of course, typical honorifics – “Honourable Talisman of Morr” is written in very small letters near the top of the map, for example. Notice as well that the location of the Giant Rats is noted, but due to the pernicious influence of D&D, they are noted as “Gianto Ratto” rather than the Japanese term, which is “kyodai nezumi.” I think Gianto Ratto sounds very cute.
The stairs leading up (上) have not been explored, on the assumption that they’re going to go somewhere deadly…
Compromise and Conceit 