D&D 5E Give me your best diseases!

Tinker-TDC

Explorer
Got a friend running a game in a pestilent land and she asked me for the worst diseases to fill the place with. I've got the ones in the 5e books and a few of my own, but what are your best homebrew diseases?
 

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MiraMels

Explorer
Start with the "Sewer Plague" from the DMG. Adjust the save DC to taste. Now add a rule that says "if you drive off this disease with magic, you can catch it again. But if you catch this disease and recover from it on your own, you'll never catch it again."

Then make anyone who isn't immune or already carrying the disease save against contracting it at the dawn of each day.
 

Eltab

Lord of the Hidden Layer
I built a 4e Skill Challenge around curing yourself of a disease/poison that began when you took a cursed version of a Certain Little Blue Pill. (Potion of Extraordinary Endowment) The cure was to eat an XL meal of aphrodisiacal foods (which I never described in any detail). The fun part consisted of trying to locate ingredients and prepare them correctly.

Athletics - you have to do something physically challenging, such as climbing half-way down a cliff to collect bird eggs from a nest.
Streetwise - Somebody else in town fell for it too, and has a supplier on the sly. Locate the supplier.
Nature - Find the RIGHT mushroom, not the near-lookalike poisonous mushrooms
Endurance - (final check only) Hard: Eat the meal in one sitting. Medium: As Hard plus you prepared yourself all day by not eating, exercising, &c to build up hunger. Easy: As Medium plus you eat the meal in several courses over several hours.
NOTE: If you succeed at the Hard Endurance check (and only the Hard check) you get a +2 bonus to all social skills while in town, as word of your prodigious feat spreads.

The effect of the 'disease' was purely fluff, but you could use a level of 5e Exhaustion.
 


Caliban

Rules Monkey
Swine Flu - the longer the disease persists, the more you start resembling a humanoid pig. (Ears and nose change shape, grow a small tail, skin coloration changes, gain weight, eventually grow hooves.)
Bird Flu - as above, except you take on aspects of a bird.

This may be same disease, and may be how some "animal men" races came into being.
 

Satyrn

First Post
Give me your best diseases!
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