Hey, I'm going to be DMing a game wherein the PCs are going to an island that is literally entirely zombified. All of the wildlife and people are going to be given the plague and fast zombie templates.
My question is that at about level 11~ would hordes of such zombies (like over 30 in the initial landing) be a threat to them? Or would the PCs simply rofl stomp cleave through them all?
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For an 11th level party of pathfinder PCs swarms of ordinary human zombies are just fodder. A high level party should be able to wade through hundreds or thousands without much difficulty. Plus, whenever they get tired, such a high level party should have no trouble retreating to a safe place to heal and rest.
An 11th level party should ROFLstomp a nearly infinite stream of fast zombies.
Unless they all blow up when killed, make it more damaging to kill then have them mob.
At that level, the PC's should have little problem with such creatures. But that's just fine, they're heroes after all, so being able to wade through swarms of zeds without breaking much of a sweat is kind of what they are expected to do.
If you want to make the Zombies themselves tougher, you have to get a bit shady. Take something that's got decent stats and HD for its size (Bugbears come to mind), slap on the Zombie template (with the mods like Fast and Plague), and just DESCRIBE it as being Humans. If there's some jungle cat, grab the most HD-buffed one and describe it as a lesser one, etc. That should give them a BIT more HP and the ability to deal some damage now and then.
Also, if you want to make them a bit uncomfortable, you can pull a page from the Ravenloft book and have ones that, when they would otherwise be brought to 0, have a 50% chance to have their HP stop at '1'. Some big massive 15D6+30 fireball annihilates 32 of the suckers, and fifteen of them are just charred husks that continue to walk forward, claws outstretched. (Incidentally, this trick helps make the martial types get some love, since with iterative attacks they are able to keep pounding until the things go down and move their attacks on to the next one, whereas most casters will unload AoE's that cut the numbers by half.)
However, since the PC's are higher level, the real challenge should involve what CREATED the zombie plague to begin with. Perhaps it was the test of some powerful spell created by depraved Necromancers? Or some unholy abomination that has cursed the living creatures with undeath completely as a side effect of its existence? Maybe the entire area is like some planar 'sinkhole' that's being drawn down into the Shadow or Negative Energy Plane (Or equivalent in your campaign) due to some even greater threat, and the Zombies are merely what happened to the poor unfortunates caught in the middle of the transition?
The part of the scenario you have now is best for letting the PCs cut loose and go nuts smushing their way through tons of rotting meat, smiles on their faces, until whatever the REAL threat takes note of their intrusion and chooses to deal with them... or they discover something terrible enough that they all have to get serious with a quickness.
The island is the colony that was zombified, plus all of the human/hobgoblin native tribes, the bugbears, wolves, and the Black Dragon guardian.
The creator of the plague was three vampires- a wizard, a cleric and a blackguard.
How populated is the island? Are we talking 200 medium zombies or 20,000?
Are ALL the creatures on the island zombified? All the cattle, all the horses, all the dogs and hogs? All the birds? There could easily be tens or even hundreds of thousands of zombied birds. Then there are the rats, the bugs, and the plants.
With these kinds of numbers standing and fighting will mean death to the party. Action economy and natural 20's on attacks will wear the party down. Med sized PC can be surrounded by 8 zeds. That is 8 chances at a 20 each round no matter how good the players AC is.
Magic will help but spells have durations, 20k walking dead will just wait it out or bury the spell effect under corpses.
The party will need to hide and run to survive especially if there are zombie birds whose dread croaking can alert the hoard.
Mind you this kind of adventure can easily bog down into an always fighting, always surrounded, grind if the players dray attention and cannot shake the dead army.
This may not be what the players are looking for by way of a fun game.
Gotta have zombie sharks too.
Ultimately, it'll be a grind. No dozen zombies can touch the party, and a simple fireball or channel can wipe them out by the score, so it's going to come down to resource management. Then the PCs just need to find somewhere to recuperate. If they have Teleport, Rope Trick or some similar refuge, they're essentially invulnerable. Even Fly will break this wide open unless there are a lot of undead flyers.
You will need to spice it up with some tougher individual undead, just to break the monotony. And you'll need to provide some reason for the PCs to stay.
Why are the PCs there? Shipwreck? Come to find something? Called in all unsuspecting, expecting to find a normal settlement? Come to eliminate the eeevil?
yup a grind. A thinking party will find ways around, Sanctuary, Invisibility, illusions, fast movement et multiple cetera. But a party that just wades in is risking being overwhelmed and eaten.
Add a Swarm template. Then you don't have to worry about rolling to hit; the PCs are just taking damage until they can disperse or outrun the swarm.
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Add a Swarm template. Then you don't have to worry about rolling to hit; the PCs are just taking damage until they can disperse or outrun the swarm.
Are there swarms of Medium creatures?
Oooooooo This will do nicely.
I don't know how that swarm gets awarded a CR14. One midlevel barbarian or paladin will shred it in two rounds. The Improved Overrun with CMB+29 is quite nasty, but that's about all.
The colony is only a hundred or two people large- the tribes make up around 500 people between them. The zombification only spread to the landwalkers and the dragon- because the caster wanted the plague to keep people away from the island, not spread.
The total island encounter composition is the zombied humanoids, bugbears, wolves, a few unicorns, crocodiles, will-o-wisps, and the black dragon. There is also a field of eternally re-rising skeletons (bloody), where a general sent to save the island was killed and rose as a graveknight, where he and his platoon of undying soldiers (also bloody skeletons, with 2 skele champs) are constantly battling anything and everything to walk into the plains. And then there is the "castle" where the 3 vampires are (wizard, cleric and blackguard).
It's actually pretty nice to know that the zombies won't be a problem if they play intelligently- that was the point. It's the vampires, dragon, and the Graveknight's warzone that I wanted to be the three awesome parts.