When DCeased was announced a lot of returning fans were a little disappointed to learn there would be no playable Zombie mode to match with Marvel Zombies. Now of course there are a number of reasons for this; they’ve been explained elsewhere if you’re interested. As for myself, I say there’s always reasons not to do something. I think a bunch of us want to do it anyway. So this is my effort, over the coming months, before the Kickstarter ships out I will have posted playable rules for every Zombie Hero. You can mix them with your Marvel Zombies, custom up some rules to run them in DCeased missions, or just laugh at how bad my ideas are. Lots of people have some cool ideas for how to make these characters. These are just mine.
My customs are designed to feel balanced next to existing designs. They are designed with simplicity in mind; simplicity is what makes Zombicide so fun. I also design my customs to match the sculpt of the model and the version and powers that are presented there. In designing custom playable Zombie Heroes I have developed the term “Militia” as a shorthand to mean Trooper, Guard or Specialist. All cards were made using Wuxyteo’s card creator, which is pretty great.
We come now to the Gotham Knights box, and there is no way to do that without starting with Batman. The official lore states that anti-life makes him dumb, but that hasn’t been the way I have been designing these guys. They might go a little feral but they’re just as smart as the Marvel ones with my designs. This sculpt in particular, he doesn’t look dumb to me. He looks every bit the calculating creature of the night he always was. So that means he should be a character with a big impact. He should feel like he can hang in the same team with the other Justice League Zombies, so I turned up the complexity a little bit. Let’s take a look.
His basic attack is 3 dice hitting on 4+ with his Martial Arts. That’s a good crowd control statistic that feels right for Batman. In game I wanted him to feel and play like he does in the Arkham games with the signature free flow combat. To reflect this his blue skill lets him build up combos when he gets a kill, flowing into another zone and getting another kill. He can do this on every attack so you can chain combos together weaving in and out of danger and dropping goons until you run out of actions or become Ravenous. At Orange I wanted to capture his stealth abilities and add predator takedowns. So firstly when he devours he gets to vanish into a nearby empty space for free. Just yank a guy under the cloak and vanish as his screams cut out. The second part of this is once per turn he can do a short charge and devour attack for free. You combo this with his Undead Reflexes and free slip away move when he devours and he almost needs a game controller more than a dashboard. At Red his final ability, Master Plan shows what happens when the Caped GHOULsader has unlimited prep time. You gain a Trait whenever a Super Hero spawns, and you can discard traits to drop the toughness of Super Heroes by 2. Because he always has a plan or access to a hidden weakness for whatever he has to face, and I wanted players to feel like they finally get a chance to use that power for eeevil.
