The Beast Fears Fire - The Walking Dead, Volume 2

The Plague [Ignorance 2]
Impulse - To Bring Forth Panicked Inhumanity

Researchers who look into the history and nature of the walking dead are going to find that most of their information comes from the Quercan (Orange Murren) people who dominate the eastern part of that country (and are the Murrens who are the ancestors of Murrenic Cricks, most of the actual Murrens you will meet in Crickton or bordering parts of Murren, etc.). They used to be a seafaring people like the Cricks, but largely fled inland when the old Oak Province finally collapsed from infighting among the oligarchs and the war with Pine Province. To this day, Crickish Sea Folk tend to dominate east and southeast coastlines of the continent, and very few Quercans ever put to sea.

Tellingly, the Quercans also provide most of the extant literature on the Other.

Quercan history relates that, at the dawn of the Provincial system, their former deities sold them as a people to gods who lived in the sea, whether out of celestial poverty, venality or disgust over the Quercans' inability to hold their land against the empire, nobody remembers. What Quercans believe happened after that was that the sea gods kept their peoples' souls sequestered in the afterworld created by water, preventing them from being reborn and using their energy for their own purposes. No one knows what those purposes were, but the consensus is that the sea gods either got what they wanted or what was coming to them. (Except that sometimes, they come back for Quercan spirits, particularly those of naughty children with exhausted parents...) Quercans believe that the motivating force of the walking dead comes from what is or was left of those spirits. This is a notion that benefits most from lack of competing hypotheses, but there might be something to it.

I bring this up now because there is some sort of guiding principle behind the walking dead, and one of the things that seems to recur with each instance is the notion that whatever this principle is, it tends to conform to expectations and beliefs about it. It can also lead people who are under attack by the walking dead to formulate notions about the instance or the walking dead in general. A lot of what is considered accepted wisdom about the walking dead appears to be manufactured by the animating principle behind them, and seemingly for the purpose of making the victims of an incursion their own worst enemies.

The most common misconception about the walking dead is that being wounded by the dead condemns you to sicken, die and rise up as one of them. This is not true, but try convincing people that, especially when you are the one who has been wounded (it's not easy). What does happen is that some of the crystal gets in the mouth of the dead and gets embedded in your skin. About half an hour later, you're likely to find painful little crystalline growths around the injury, and if you're very young, old or delicate, you might get a low grade fever. If you die at any point while these crystals are growing (it's usually 8 hours before they stop), you probably will rise as one of the walkers, though that's hardly certain. But infection with the crystalline growth is usually enough to convince someone to put a wounded person out of their misery or eject them from sanctuary. This is by no means the only common wisdom that the animating force will promulgate, but it is the most well-known.

One Bite and You're Hooked
When you or someone else in a Scene with the walking dead makes a declarative statement about them, face Ignorance
On a Hit, nothing happens. The dead retain their usual behavior.
On a Hard Hit, you can make a declarative statement about the limitations of the dead (Can't Climb, Allergic to Salt, etc.) which is true for this instance of the walking dead.
On a Miss, the Moderator gets a Hard Move which they can take at any time, based on either mistakes made by other characters in the Scene or new capabilities (Can Climb, Can Open Doors, Fast Dead). That said, they still cannot cause people to die and rise as walkers themselves with just a bite.