Those Bird-Brained Zombies

[DerVVulfman]

Trust me guys, I didn't come up with this.
I got this from a youtube video recounting pen-n-paper RPG stories.
Unfortunately, no names were attributed.

Those Bird-Brained Zombies

I am the DM of a campaign that has an aarakocra player, or a member of a bird-folk race if you're not familiar. And the party of five is basically low level, so flight is over powered as hell sometimes. But to counter this, I normally have encounters with ranged units.


Now we have a rule at our table that says no one can change canon once it's canon. I was lazy once and didn't fully read the descriptions of the random zombie-like units I was tossing in. I just glanced at the description and didn't see anything wrong.

The zombie-like horde wasn't too hard, they all had low stats but the sheer number of them was going to put some pressure on the party of five players.

Cue the encounter.

The party hears growling and scraping as they turn the corner, and see a small horde of about fifteen to eighteen zombies ahead of them. The aarakocra then flies and parks himself six feet above the horde strangely not attacking. The party all just stood there and laughed, making me very confused.

I asked what's up, and the party asked me to read the zombies description carefully.

My eyes go wide as I realize what I have done. The zombies will only attack the closest hostile unit. And due to an Intelligence score of 3, they won't care if they can't actually reach the hostile unit.

The next twenty minutes was me role playing a horde of zombies reaching foor the aarakocra while the rest of the party slowly killed them all off with ranged weapons.