>>217598
I'm currently playing through a Zombie Apocalypse styled campaign using my homebrew as a setting. Basically Zombies for the most part are just corpses animated by the Dark Wind of Magic and mostly exist in areas with a heavy concentration of the power. But they are controlled by Necromancers who use artifacts imbued with it. Otherwise the Zombies would "die" again, forcing the Necromancers to do a very long and tedious ritual to raise their corpse army. So if you want to stop a Zombie invasion, you gotta destroy the staff with the glowing dark crystal.
Zombies aren't even inherently malicious. Without a dark Wizard screeching at them, they just stand around blankly or just mindlessly move in one direction. Ignoring everything around them before either moving away from the hotspot of magic or just decaying into dust. They're also a decent source of free slave labor, if you can stomach your ditch diggers creeping out visiting tourists.
However Zombies can also be used as cheap infantry to simply overwhelm a opponent. Or as a roadblock to delay advancing rival armies. Cutting off the head of these zombies doesen't "kill" them, but it does disorient them. To some extent.
My players are currently in a Elven port Crusader-ish city besieged by a Zombie army. The Vampyres (hominid blood sucking bats in this world) plan to retake it after centuries of ethic tension which has finally boiled into a bloody conflict. While the Zombies are the cheap infantry, it's the sapient Ghouls who embody the "eat your brain" trope. They're the shock troops. Then there's the sown apart Frankenstein types who operate as essentially the elite storm troopers.
The players have to survive in the city until help arrives from the Elven homeland. The ports are also blockaded by a Dwarven fleet since the drunk Dwarves are now making back room deals with Bat People. Oh, and Humans (a rarity in this world) are largely blamed for the war, not helped by the Frankensteins resembling them more than the Elves.