Of Zombies and Ghouls
It's Halloween, so that means it's time to talk about monsters. This is different from the rest of the year in that I am both eating candy and wearing a costume when I talk about monsters right now. Talking about monsters is sure to be interesting and not dull, dry, or boring at all. So why not mix in some talk about nomenclature and cultural drift at the same time to really keep the excitement cranked to 11.
I am here to try to talk about how Zombies in current popular culture are not the zombies of D&D.
Everyone reading this has probably seen Night of the Living Dead, but I would bet a smaller number have seen 1932’s “White Zombie”. Being as the readers of this article are gamers I would wager even most of the people who haven’t seen White Zombie are still aware that Zombies once referenced lumbering brainwashed corpses (or often near corpses) who obeyed their master, often being employed as labour (zombies being a pretty obvious metaphor for the horrors of slavery). In early D&D Zombies only acted under the orders of an evil cleric or magic-user, one reading of which is that you could encounter them as non-hostile so long as you didn’t interfere with their existing orders (or their existing orders weren’t to act as guards). They would mechanically soldier on in their tasks, even if taking horrific injuries (representing them having more Hit Dice than Skeletons). They also did not spread by killing others. They also had other “voodoo” aesthetics and mechanics, such as needing to pour salt in their mouths and sew their lips shut to permanently kill them. These are not the zombies of “Night of the Living Dead”.
But why is that? Why would Zombies be modelled after a 42 year old (At that point) forgotten movie instead of the much more recent 6 year old movie that was surely fresh in everyone’s minds since it played everywhere due to a copyright error.
A famous joke about Zombie movies is that they never call them zombies. But that wasn’t a joke originally, in Night of the Living Dead they didn’t call them zombies because that term hadn’t been misapplied to them yet. They called them what they were: Ghouls.
Ghouls from D&D are this monster. Rotting corpses that bite and claw, causing you to freeze in horror (paralysis) and sit there being eaten. Once killed your corpse rises as another ghoul to continue hunting the living. There was no need to go into elaborate rituals involving salt or wooden stakes to kill ghouls, just sufficient violence.
The reason I think this is a useful distinction is that the original D&D Zombie has a lot of scenario applications that don’t work with the current definition of zombie. You can have a necromancers workshop having zombies endlessly toiling to grind bonemeal and mix reagents. Party members have to carefully navigate through the lab without interrupting any work, else they will be swarmed with undead who feel the need to kill them to keep their work from being interfered with. You could have teams of zombies mining new tunnels, leading pursuers there becomes a tactical opportunity. If you can get your pursuing monsters to interfere with the zombies work while attacking you, suddenly you have a team of allies.
Happy Halloween everyone.
