RPG Again?

I just talked to Ben Frederick, and I was rattling off and mulling over some of the old RPG ideas I'd had, talking about getting a group together and running a game of something or other. He seems stuck on that old Days of Madness game, but talking it over made me think of a few other ideas I wanted to get down...

1.) Horizon. A horror-movie event-- zombification, deadly virus, etc. is happening... on the opposite end of the country. And it's coming. Nothing has happened where the players are, but they have to deal with the panic, resource runs, and the question of what to do in the meantime.

I was hot on the idea at first, but I don't really know how to flesh it out. Perhaps it would make a decent static story, but it lacks the ever-important forward-moving goal that has to be there to have a good RPG.

2.) Transformation. This one, I think, has potential. If you're following my Facebook, it's the one I came up with while I was on the shitter.

It's a bit of a twist on the old possession/mass dead rising idea. There is a communicable disease (or something that acts similarly) that makes people succeptible to takeover by a spirit of the dead. Unlike more "horror" genre takeovers, this is not a violent process-- the transformation is little more than a change in personality, and the spirits are caught just as unaware as the host. However, the transformation completely (permanently... ?) overrides the host's personality, and the body becomes completely controlled by the spirit. The spirits come from all walks, and may have been the eternally tormented, the eternally ecstatic, or those who merely think they just died a moment ago.

The world of the game should explain a reason for the transformation, and a reasonable cure, although this does not need to be simple, and the facts need not be easy to find.

Although the spirits are not inherently malicious, a bewildered dead person brought to life in someone else's body still presents clear problems, as with any sort of immediate personality change. Some may leave their dependents for their own goals, some may seek revenge or take advantage of their anonymous lack of responsibility, and some bewildered ones may just stumble off into the street wondering why it's not 1902.

Key conflicts have a wide range of possibilities-- putting down a gang of riotous, hell-raising former-dead, helping a wronged spirit find justice, the conflict of having to re-kill one person to save another (extra points if the original "host" was a real bastard, and the occupant was a far better person). The effect should be solvable or reversible, and a major goal, of course, is not "catching" the disease and transforming yourself.

[Optional] Along with the problems of transformation, the presence of the spirit has a wasting effect on the host body. If a way to revert the change is not found, then the host body dies.