The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead, Volume 1

The Swarm [Disaster 2]
Impulse - To Make You Look Stupid

Those who have never had to escape from a swarm of the walking dead assume that those who could not were foolish or weak or, if the observer is an asshole, had it coming.  Intuitively, it does not seem like it should be that much of a trick to evade animate corpses.  They can occasionally lurch forward with some speed (more often, faster and for longer distance as the crystals that power them decay), but generally shuffle at a slower pace than that of an able-bodied person.  They have fairly weak senses and their instinctive reaction is to move toward anything they do sense, whatever it is.  You can't really call them stupid, since they would have to actually have some capability of thought in order to be characterized as deficient.  And yet.

The problem is that people don't understand how a swarm works.  It's actually pretty complicated, and I'm not going to try to explain swarming dynamics here, just that if someone drops a jar of angry wasps in a room, it's slightly harder to get out of that room without being stung than it is to evade a swarm of walkers.  They do seem to share senses as a group (individuals from different instances of animation seem to be able to link up without a problem, and if there are multiple animators, the line of authority gets muddy, so it's best, if you're planning on raising up some corpses, to be the only one doing it) and so what one notices, all notice.  What they notice, they approach, inexorably.

In game mechanics, The Swarm is a standard Gang-Up (or Force-Up, because if you're using the walking dead, you are buying in bulk), with the option that anyone who mentioned thinking that the dead would be easy to evade gets the Peril Panicked or Terrified as they find out how wrong they were.


The Terror [Hardship 2]
Impulse - To Make You Afraid

At first, this is not so bad. You should be afraid of the walking dead when they are walking, but this is a reasonable fear, something with which a person who is reading this is probably well acquainted and can overcome. Once individual walking dead run down their batteries, so to speak, things get a little trickier.

After a certain stage in the life-cycle of the dead, as the power in the implanted crystals starts to wane, certain changes become apparent in the individual corpses. Decomposition, previously arrested by the process begins to accelerate. This spreads quickly throughout the local walking dead, so that once one begins to decay, all the others do as well, regardless of whether or not they were made later or with greater amounts of crystal.

Around this time, the corpses also begin to evidence visible, if diffuse auras of purple-brown and rusty red light. This aura gets larger and more distinct as more individuals get closer together, and is the psychic component to a combined physical and mental fear assault. Mechanically, this is similar to Frighteners' Smelt it/Dealt it move, but Panicked, Terrified, Weakened or Slowed are the only Perils possible from missing.