D&D 3E/3.5 Plague and Pox

[Samloyal23]

Do you use diseases in your campaigns? Are there good non-magical cures and treatments? Do you deal with all of the consequences of pandemics? Is there proper sanitation and hygiene in your campaign setting?

 

[Greenfield]

Ironically, the main campaign theme for my current 3.5 campaign is a plague, an influenza-like affliction modeled after pneumonic plague. We decided on this months before we ever heard of corona virus.

Remove Disease works, but if you read the world builder guidelines for 3.5, a city has to be of substantial size before there's likely to be a Cleric who can Remove Disease, and a pneumonia-like disease as virulent as the plague simply spreads faster than said clerics can remove it.

Smaller cities are just sort of screwed, so they have to resort to quanrantine and burning the bodies ala the Black Plague.

Most of the things covered under the Contagion spell or effect develop so quickly that they're easy to spot before they can infect anyone else.

Our goal in the game is to track down the people behind it (there always has to be a bad guy, of course), and deal with him. So long as he and his forces are out there the plague will continue to spring up "randomly".

The in-game impacts of the plague are similar to the real world ones: As farm communities are dedimated, food production falls. As craftsmen, miners etc fall ill, the supplies of finished goods, and even many raw materials, dries up. With ports closed, and/or ships arrive with the entire crews infected, trade drops to near nothing. As cargoes need to be burned along with the plague ships that carry them, wealth is destroyed.

It's ugly, which is exactly the way it's supposed to be. A good, dark, gritty campaign setting.

Sucks that it isn't much in terms of escapism right now.

in any case., my game's on hiatus until I can arrange to virtualize the whole thing. We'll see how that works out.

 

[Samloyal23]

Ironically, the main campaign theme for my current 3.5 campaign is a plague, an influenza-like affliction modeled after pneumonic plague. We decided on this months before we ever heard of corona virus.

Remove Disease works, but if you read the world builder guidelines for 3.5, a city has to be of substantial size before there's likely to be a Cleric who can Remove Disease, and a pneumonia-like disease as virulent as the plague simply spreads faster than said clerics can remove it.

Smaller cities are just sort of screwed, so they have to resort to quanrantine and burning the bodies ala the Black Plague.

Most of the things covered under the Contagion spell or effect develop so quickly that they're easy to spot before they can infect anyone else.

Our goal in the game is to track down the people behind it (there always has to be a bad guy, of course), and deal with him. So long as he and his forces are out there the plague will continue to spring up "randomly".

The in-game impacts of the plague are similar to the real world ones: As farm communities are dedimated, food production falls. As craftsmen, miners etc fall ill, the supplies of finished goods, and even many raw materials, dries up. With ports closed, and/or ships arrive with the entire crews infected, trade drops to near nothing. As cargoes need to be burned along with the plague ships that carry them, wealth is destroyed.

It's ugly, which is exactly the way it's supposed to be. A good, dark, gritty campaign setting.

Sucks that it isn't much in terms of escapism right now.

in any case., my game's on hiatus until I can arrange to virtualize the whole thing. We'll see how that works out.

It sounds like you stole the plotline from the news...

 

[Don Durito]

My Scarred Lands game has followers of the titan of pestilence Chern as the current villains planning to unleash a plague upon the city of Mithril.

Not quite sure whether I should continue with that line...it may actually be cathartic!

 

[Samloyal23]

Does anyone have rules for things like hygiene and the effect of sewer systems on contagion?

 

[Greenfield]

It sounds like you stole the plotline from the news...

Yeah, it's scary, but we came up with this last September, before anyone had ever heard of Corona Virus. Still, maybe if we pretend it's all curable with a glass of orange juice, then reality will copy us again? Maybe?

 

[Celebrim]

I do have diseases in my game world. I have never made them the focus of play before, however.

Medicine is in many ways more advanced than the modern world. However, what perhaps isn't as advanced as the modern world is education, industrialization, mass production, and so forth. As such, medicine is custom made (or performed) by highly trained specialists and is expensive.

Clerics can cure diseases but as noted above, there aren't enough of them to really deal with an epidemic, and additionally merely curing a disease in an epidemic doesn't do much good, as the person ends up without immunity and is often reinfected. Diseases can however be exorcised and thus banished from a region, but this is considerably more dangerous and difficult process outside the ability of the average cleric.

Hygiene and sanitation are to the best of medieval European standards, which is actually surprisingly good. Roman baths and bathing lasted into the medieval period and the practice tended to migrate into Northern Europe as economic standards improved. The really unhygienic period in Europe was the early modern, as bathing fell out of favor during the black death (and was deemed unhealthy). Most large cities in my homebrew will have aqueducts or viaducts, bath houses, and a sewage system of some sort.

 

[Samloyal23]

But how do we quantify something like hygiene in game terms?