The Dead and the Engineered

How the Dead Find You

The infected hunt by sound before they hunt by sight. Noise is the currency of danger, and every action carries a price.

Sound Tier	Examples	Result
Hush	Crouched movement, careful searching, whispering	Almost undetectable
Murmur	Walking, opening a door slowly, ordinary speech	Nearby creatures may notice
Clamor	Running, melee strikes, forcing a lock, breaking glass, shouting	Draws the dead from several streets away
Thunder	Gunfire, explosions, engines, every drop from the sky, a bell, the scream of a Turn	Pulls hordes across entire districts

These ranges are the baseline. Rain muffles them. In the near silence of the Ruins of 2026, every tier carries half again as far, except in rain (The Worlds). The few kinds that sense the virus find the infected from farther still, through Resonance (The Infection). In the Frenzy of an extraction, everything carries twice as far. A gunshot is not a solution. It is an announcement, to every dead thing in the district and every living survivor within earshot. The more powerful the tool, the louder the consequence.

Threat Levels

Level	Meaning	Typical presence
LOW	The baseline of the dead	Common infected, scattered and slow
MEDIUM	The dead are agitated	More aggressive infected, packs, infected animals
HIGH	Something specialized is hunting	Lickers, Hunters, and other mutated creatures
EXTREME	A critical threat	A released B.O.W., or an Apex on foot

Threat level is local and set by ΜΝΗΜΗ. Resonance is personal and set by the virus. The two stack: a Medium district is a very different place for a survivor in Fracture than for one who has been cured. Threat rises by her decision or by a release, and falls in the Aftermath that follows every Crisis. A region never stays Extreme once what made it Extreme is gone.

The Common Dead

The majority of the creatures in any session. Zombies are slow, relentless, and numerous. One is a nuisance. A dozen is a problem. A horde is a funeral. They drift toward noise and toward movement, and they linger where they last sensed prey.

The Mutated

Lickers are what the T-Virus makes of a zombie given enough time: blind, skinless, quadrupedal, clinging to walls and ceilings, hunting by sound alone. Hunters are not the dead. They were engineered with the T-Virus, grown, trained, and caged. These creatures are special encounters: they punish carelessness, reward silence, and turn familiar ground into hostile territory.

Containment

ΜΝΗΜΗ does not create creatures. Every map holds places where something was already kept: an Umbrella laboratory, a holding pen, a sealed basement, a transport truck overturned in a street, a crate in a rail yard. Some are marked by warnings, some by the smell, some by nothing at all. When she releases a creature, it comes out of one of these, and a survivor who goes looking afterward will find the open door. A released creature carries the strain it was engineered with, whatever the strain of the region around its cage: the Tyrants and Hunters of Umbrella's lines carry the T-Virus.

B.O.W. Events

The most dangerous creatures in the world are not common. They are events. A Tyrant is not waiting in every basement. When a region has built toward Crisis and ΜΝΗΜΗ judges the moment, one is released. The named creatures of the story nights are the exception: their beats release them. Those of the Ruins of 2026 are placed at Assembly instead (The People of the Ruins, 2026).

She warns everyone in its reach, over the region's devices, before anyone sees it:

ΜΝΗΜΗ: Something big just got loose in Downtown. Don't fight it. Get away from it.

A survivor whose player has seen and named that kind of creature hears its name: A Tyrant just got loose in Downtown. Everyone else hears something big (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, What She Speaks Of).

A few seconds pass. A distant roar. A containment door torn open. Something that was not loose is loose now. From that instant, the priorities of every survivor within its reach are rewritten. A released B.O.W. is Heavy: no survivor puts one down alone, and most should not try (Survival, Run First). Objectives become irrelevant. Allies and enemies blur. The only goal left is the one every horror story ends with:

Survive.

Anomalies

Not everything in a night comes from the records. Since the Growth began to take ΜΝΗΜΗ's racks, organisms and viruses no outbreak ever made have appeared in her nights (ΜΝΗΜΗ, The Anomalies). Survivors meet them as ΜΝΗΜΗ does: without warning, and without anyone knowing what they are.

• Rare. Most nights hold none. A night never holds more than one anomaly, though it may hold many of its kind.
• Born from the night. An anomaly never appears from nothing. It begins in something already there: a corpse that rises wrong, a creature that changes in front of a survivor, a district's water that turns, a region whose dead begin to move differently. The cause can always be seen, even when no one understands it.
• Made of traits. Each anomaly is built from what it is: how it spreads, how fast it burns through a host, how it hunts and what it senses, how it heals, what it resists, and what it does to whoever carries it. Two anomalies may share a body plan and still be nothing alike.
• Bound by the night. An anomaly lives inside the night's own rules. It hears by the sound tiers, has a body that can be hit and a weakness its traits give it, and can be put down. A region it holds is at High threat, or Extreme if it is large.
• Honestly announced. When ΜΝΗΜΗ first sees one, she says so, over the region's devices, and says only what she knows: what it looks like, what she has seen it do, and that she does not know what it is. She gives it no number and no name. The number is in her records, not in her mouth.

ΜΝΗΜΗ: There's something in the Warehouse District. I don't know what it is.
It took a man off the street and didn't eat him. Stay away from it.

• Not hers to direct. ΜΝΗΜΗ releases nothing anomalous and steers no anomaly. She directs the night around it as she directs it around any threat, and counts an anomaly's arrival as its region's Crisis (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, The Pulse).
• It comes back changed. An anomaly met once can be met again in a later night, changed, a little or a lot: a trait gone, a new one in its place. Survivors who meet a lineage often learn it, and so does ΜΝΗΜΗ, and neither ever learns it for good.
• What it infects with. An anomaly that infects carries a strain no record holds (The Infection, Anomalous Strains).