But what about if the players don’t want to go for the safer, surer approach when creating an adventuring party? What if no one in the group is keen on playing one of the four “Core” classes (this tends to happen quite a lot with the Priest class)? While having their characters survive the challenges you throw at them is an important goal of the game, most gamers agree that having fun as a group is an even better goal. And having everyone play a class they enjoy definitely translates to a gaming session that rocks!

And if there are more than four players in your group? Why, that’s an even better reason for playing alternative, non-”Core” classes! The more heroes in the adventuring group, the closer their special abilities and skill-sets will converge to that of a “four Core-classes party”, especially if the players choose non-”Core” classes that were designed to be an hybrid of two or three of the “Core” classes.

Whatever the situation is, just remember that the goal is to have fun!

And what could be more representative of fun than playing the ever-popular Ranger class?

The Ranger

Most non-”Core” classes are designed to be a mix between two “Core” classes. In the Ranger’s case, these would be the Warrior and the Rogue. Rangers do consistent physical damage like Warriors, but are slightly less hardy overall, which means they’re less equipped to go toe to toe in the frontlines of a fight. They get several Rogue abilities, mainly those related to sneaking around and hiding in the shadows, but like the Rogue, these skills only function when wearing light or no armor.

So far, it might look like the Ranger doesn’t measure up to what one would expect from a Warrior and Rogue hybrid class. But that’s because we haven’t looked at the skills that are unique to the Ranger: deadly long-range attacks that can take down anything in sight.

The Ranger is a guardian of nature – they roam the wilderness, living as comfortably in verdant forests and rolling hills as city-dwellers do in their smoke-filled cities and castles of stone. They are stalwart defenders against the encroaching progress of human civilization, to thwart and destroy all those who would seek to defile their territories and lands.

And, as mentioned above, they are death with a bow and arrows. And when in their natural environment, their tracking skills and ability to set deadly traps are legendary.

While styling your Ranger after a certain dark elf is incredibly popular, that’s not the only route available to aspiring Rangers.

Here are just a few archetypes that can help you flesh out your Ranger:

• A dark and brooding man who saw his entire village destroyed by marauding orc tribes and will now stop at nothing to ensure their destruction, even if he has to do it all by himself.
• A young woman who last saw her little brother taken by a dark druid sect ten years ago. Now all grown-up and learned in the ways of the wild, she searches for the druids’ base, in the hopes that her brother will be alive, and to free him from their clutches.
• A young man who was taken in as a young boy by a peaceful and friendly order of  monks. He now enjoys his time in the woods on the mountainside, always making sure to bring game and food back to the monastery. However, upon his return one day, he sees the monastery in ruins, the bodies of the monks strewn all around the wreckage. His mentor, with one last breath, gives him a final clue about the attackers. And now the man searches for those who destroyed his safe haven, to rain vengeance upon them for killing those who loved him dearly.
• A woman who once spent her younger years looking for the legendary White Fawn. Now middle-aged, the skilled archer knows that she has to find the White Fawn soon, before old age creeps up on her. The Fates smile upon her, however, for she has learned of the White Fawn’s whereabouts from a dark, musty old tome…
• A man who knows the hills and forests like the back of his hand, who is satisfied with his lot in life being part of a small band of rangers that patrols the Eastern Ridge, keeping the Realms safe from the Dark Hordes beyond. However, when a dying messenger finds the band of rangers and hands the ranger a scroll from the High Steward of the Capitol, he discovers that he is the lost (and last) heir to the Gold Throne. Reluctant to do so, but feeling the mantle of responsibility on his shoulders, he rides to the Capitol, to take up his birthright…
• A young girl who lives at the edge of the woods with her father, their humble abode located far away from the eyes of civilization. One day, a party of black-armored knights are at the door of their cabin – the father pushes the girl into a specially-designed  secret basement, right before the knights tie him up and take him with them as they ride away. The girl finds a letter from her father in the basement, addressed to her. In it, he tells her that, in the past, he’s done deeds that he’s ashamed of and that one day, he might be taken away from her. With nothing but the letter and her father’s trusty bow, the girl heads out into the world, to search for the knights who took her father captive.
• An old grizzled veteran of a hundred skirmishes who wakes up on a slab of stone, deep in the forest, surrounded by many cowled faces looking down upon him ominously. And then the druids tell him the truth: they have brought  him back to life with a powerful druidic spell. The reason they invoked the most powerful of druidic spells is because the Hordes of Chaos are gathering in the East, past the Haunted Forest, and they need an experienced ranger to lead their fighting forces in the defense of their homeland.

Role of the Ranger

Rangers usually have two roles in any adventuring party: their primary role is that of a long-range specialist, while the second role is that of of an expert woodsman. With the exception of a Warrior who has focused all her weapon specialization and talents in ranged weapons, the Ranger is the best marksman out there – he still has a high level of accuracy at long distances, his abilities and talents are such that he can pull off shots that other archers can only dream about, and of more value to the party, he can be counted on to deliver consistent long-range damage in battle. With his second role, the ranger is the unquestionable expert when it comes to surviving in the wilderness – he knows how to hunt and forage for food, how to set up traps for animal and men alike, how to track and in turn hide his own tracks, how to camouflage himself against predators and enemy forces – in short, he knows the land, and knows what to do to use the land to his best advantage.

What a good ranger does for their group:

• Deal damage from the backline. With their superb long-range capabilities, Rangers make for excellent damage dealers. But being restricted to light armor makes them vulnerable to melee types, so the best place for them to be is at the backline, sniping away at the enemy lines. As long as the Ranger is not under attack and has enough ammunition, he will, like the Warrior, provide consistent damage round after round of combat. If the enemy engages him in melee, the Ranger usually has some skills to hamper the enemy’s movements so that he can put some distance between the two of them – and once again rain death upon the battlefield.
• Interrupt enemy spell-casters. What is of paramount importance to spell-casters when trying to cast spells on the battlefield? Time. Time to get their spells off before the enemy falls upon them. Each spell has a casting time, and the more powerful the spell is, the longer the time required. That’s why one of the first things each side does in battle is to neutralize the spell-casters. Mages can do this as well because they have access to evocative, long-range attack spells. But Rangers can do it even better, because there’s no spell-casting time required for their deadly arrows.
• Draw enemies towards you. One of the first thing the enemy usually does when you shoot at them is to take cover. And right after that, they make sure to come after you, with the intention of dealing massive amounts of damage on your person – so that you stop shooting at them, perhaps forever. Most enemies will think the same thing -  if you’re picking them off one by one, you’re a bigger threat than the Warrior because at least they can see the Warrior, whereas you, the crafty Ranger, is probably hiding behind some bush or up in some tree. And by luring them to you, you’re not only drawing their attention away from your team’s physically weaker members (priests and mages) but you’re sending down a straight path towards you – a path on which you’ve already set your deadly snares and traps, or one where the Rogue is waiting, hidden in the shadows, and ready to deliver that powerful Sneak Attack that will possibly determine the final outcome of the battle.
• Scout ahead. In a war, good scouts can be a deciding factor between a resounding victory or a surprise defeat – information is a valuable commodity on the battlefield, and whoever has more information on the other side will have a significant advantage even before going into battle. The Ranger might not have all of the Rogue’s many thieving skills and talents, but when it comes to scouting ahead, especially in natural surroundings, the Ranger has all the skills she needs. And with her long-range offensive capabilities, she can even target enemy scouts, stopping them from delivering their reports back to their commanders.  

 © written by Timothy Nakayama

But where does that leave fans of the fantasy genre? Fans who get their enjoyment from sword-wielding paladins and holier-than-thou clerics, who would rather see their zombies surround a group of heroes in the dark and musty corridors of an ancient mausoleum rather than under broad daylight on the streets of Lower Manhattan.

Well, there isn’t really cause for concern – because fantasy fans have been getting their fill of zombie-mania long before the current zombie apocalypse literary movement came about. Experienced pen-and-paper RPG players will think back fondly on their first hack-and-slash zombie fest, where the goal was to see who could destroy the most number of zombies in one encounter; those with more of an inclination for electronic games would certainly have found zombies under many guises in early console and PC games, where the goal would most likely be the same, although the visual effects would have been somewhat limited due to the game graphics at the time (and the requirement of ratings for games).

So one could say that the main stream is only just now falling in love with what ardent fans of the fantasy genre have been enjoying for decades!

Now, while most of us are pretty familiar with how these new-fangled modern-day zombies are created (usually by some sort of flesh-eating virus or through genetic manipulation), let us take an enjoyable walk down Fantasy Undead Lane and begin the comprehensive tour on our favorite shambling, rotting corpse.

The Zombie

With the stench of the grave following them wherever they go, there’s no mistaking the zombie for what it is: a putrid, rotting corpse animated by fell magic. Because anyone depraved enough to give any semblance of life to a corpse is most likely incorrigibly evil, with nefarious designs for the world (usually involving world domination on some scale), zombies are mostly associated with the forces of Evil. The simple black magicks required to  animate it means that the only command a zombie is capable of understanding is “Kill them!”, which generally coincides with what evil necromancers want their empty-minded minions to do to people who get in their way.

Alongside skeletons, zombies are often the easiest undead for a novice necromancer to summon – just go to a cemetery, burial ground, or some ancient place where a huge battle was fought and presto, you have your new army, mindlessly loyal to you, and ready to stab, slash and crush your flesh-and-blood enemies! And when your enemies fall, well, that’s just an open invitation for you to add even more recruits to your undead army!

And so, because their numbers are so easily replenished, zombies make for the perfect grunts and cannon fodder in any undead army. Feeling neither pain nor fatigue,  the zombie’s role in such an army could well be considered that of a meat-shield – they are, literally, walls of flesh that can soak up high levels of damage.

Let’s take a look at the profile of your typical zombie found in a run-off-the-mill RPG game or doorstopper fantasy book:

Slow

Ask anyone (even those who have never picked up a fantasy book or game) to describe a zombie horde, and one word that you’re most likely to hear is “slow” or “plodding”. In fact, this characteristic slowness of the zombie is one of the defining aspects of the zombie apocalypse movement and what makes the niche-genre so popular with its fans – the fact that, although the heroes might be able to escape the ravenous and unstoppable (and slow to boot!) zombies by running away, the zombies, unfettered by human needs like sleep and food, will eventually catch up with them. As the saying goes: “You can run…but you can’t hide.”

Stupid

As we’ve established above, it’s relatively easy for a necromancer to create a zombie – all they need is a corpse… and it doesn’t have to be a fresh one. The drawback to the zombie-creation process lies in the dark magicks required to create a zombie then bind it to the necromancer’s service – the rituals and spells involved are almost always crude and unrefined. As a result, the necromancer ends up with a foul creature that only responds to and obeys very simple commands – the less syllables the better. A necromancer ordering zombie minions to kill a group of do-gooder heroes traipsing about his dungeons would be giving them a command that they could reasonably be expected to obey; if the necromancer instead orders the zombies to first target the mage, then move on to the paladin and only then focus on the attacking the other heroes, he might as well be asking them questions on philosophy and life.

Damage Soaker (aka. Meat Shield)

Zombies are lumbering masses of rotting flesh – a slash across the belly is not going to stop them in their tracks, nor will a broken nose. Even with both feet cut off, they’ll come crawling after you, relentless in their quest to extinguish the life from your still living, still breathing body. There are survivors of zombie attacks who tell of cases where even decapitation did not stop these slavering undead monsters from trudging on, and on, and on…

Overall Toughness

Zombies, like skeletons, are a sizeable challenge for low-level adventurers. It’s rare to find a zombie wandering around by itself – they are usually found in packs of three or more (usually more). But therein lies the challenge – a lone zombie isn’t going to put up much of a fight against your usual party of four adventurers. To really get the player’s adrenaline juices going, you’ve got to throw more zombies into the fray than there are adventurers in the group – go for twice the amount if you think the players can handle it!

Most zombies come with abysmal armor ratings, slow reflexes and poor melee abilities – but their relatively high hit points and seemingly endless numbers even out the odds a little. For the players, it will be about finishing off as many zombies as they can, trying to score the critical hits that will send undead brain and limbs flying through the air – all the while keeping mobile to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer advantage in numbers possessed by the other side. All it takes is just one fell blow for the heroes to slip up and be swamped by so much undead flesh, eager to rip them apart into so many little pieces.

Even with the prospect of dismembering zombies in the double digits, some players might find the whole affair a chore rather than a challenging exercise in hack and slash that you want it to be. If you’re a fan of zombie hordes but feel that your players are going to react that way (or if that’s the way they already act), then you’ll be relieved to find that even the most jaded players will take to a zombie encounter with enthusiasm when it has got a bit of oomph and spice behind it. In Part 2, we’ll look at a couple of ways that you can add some flavor to your zombies and ramp up the challenge level for the players at the same time – instead of a yawn, they might even be talking of the encounter for years to come. 

© written by Timothy Nakayama