What are diseases in your settings?

[DMH]

Microbes, evil spirits, a funky form of magical prions (not so much mad cow, but how prions reshape their host's body) or something else?

 

[sckeener]

I think I use all those generalizations in my game. It just depends on the NPc/Culture.

Now my favorite diseases are the ones left over from wars. In my campaign, at the beginning of the world Slimes and Fungi duked it out. Some of the diseases from that war are left overs from that age.

 

[el-remmen]

Well, magical diseases vary widely in their manifestations, though they are generally either a god/fiend's creation/curse.

More mundane diseases are caused by miasmas - various foul gases trapped in swamps and other fetid places that when occasionally released travel invisibly through the air to be breathed in by the weak-lunged.

As like draws like, these gases tend to settle in other fetid or dirty places, like among the poor of crowded cities, or battlefields strewn with rotting dead.

There is no such thing as germs.

 

[DragonLancer]

Magical diseases might be plague spirits, curses or punishments from the gods.

Otherwise a disease is just as a normal disease.

 

[jdrakeh]

Objectively, they're exactly what they are in our world -- the result of viral, bacterial, or microbiotic infection. That said, I often have backwards cultures attribute illness to demon possession and/or spiritual influence.