Is mummy rot so bad?

[Pigkappa]

I'm a DM and I'm building a nasty dungeon for a level 4/5 party. Since there's (at least) a mummy in the dungeon, I tried to search "mummy rot" using Google and I found out that many people consider this disease really dangerous.

Since it doesn't seem to be so bad to me, I think I didn't actually understand how it works.

It should work this way if I got this right:

1)The mummy hits you.
2)You roll a DC 16 Fortitude check. If you succeed, you are fine. I you fail the following events happen:
3)You take 1d6 con and cha damage after 1 minute.
4)Each day, you will have to roll a DC 16 Fortitude check or suffer 1d6 con and cha damage.
5)Any healing spell will require a DC 20 caster level check to work upon you.
6)To remove the disease, you need a remove curse or break enchantment spell succeeding a DC 20 caster level check.

This disease does seem kinda annoying, but I don't think it's really likely that someone in the party will die due to it. Even if the party can't cast remove curse or break enchantment, if there is a Druid or Cleric in the party he can prepare a lot of lesser restoration spells to slow your Constitution drain. If someone in the party can make a good Heal check, he can treat the disease and easily beat the DC 16 check.
Being almost unable to be healed by spells is annoying, but a DC 20 check isn't really hard to succeed and the major problem is about in-combat healing, which isn't required so often anyway.

Unless the characters are very low level (less than 3) or in the middle of a desert, this doesn't really sound so bad to me.

[Sinpoder]

Well it is not that bad for an adventuring party..... but I have to admit I once had a guy that was infected with mummy rot and he touched everyone and soon the town was dead because most of them were commoners and then he looted the entire town.

[Pigkappa]

Uhm... A character with mummy rot can spread the disease just touching other people?

[Yukitsu]

DC20 means you have a 25% chance for the day, and that 25% chance also applies to the restoration effects. It's very easy to get killed on a day that the character has this disease, unless you had remove curse and remove disease prepared in particular, since D6 con, and an inability to heal that character means any combat is going to be very risky.

If the party can chill in a rope trick, and only 1 guy contracted it, you can recover before it kills the guy, but outside that situation, it can definitely lead to character deaths.

[some guy]

Well, mummies are CR 5, if a level 5 party fights one, those DC 20 caster checks might be more difficult to make. Not impossible, but difficult.
A character inflicted with mummy rot will probably have some wounds already and will have less hit points because of the Con damage. The character might need to wait a day before a restoration or remove curse is cast upon him. During that wait, he might very well die.

And mummy rot spreads via contact, that might be bad.

Edit: also, mummy rot isn't directly removed by Remove Disease. Imagine the cleric preparing Remove Disease, casting it and then learning it doesn't work. If that level 5 cleric has a wisdom of 15*, it's his only level 3 spell (and remove curse isn't a domain spell), they need to wait for the next day.

*If you play with 4d6b3 stats, it can happen.

[ericgrau]

The defenseless town of all commoners wasn't already taken over by an orc army / local crime / anyone with an actual societal structure, army,police force, etc.?

If the PCs have access to any reasonable town they can pay an NPC cleric 150 gp each for remove curses until he passes his caster level check. Then another 150 gp for remove disease. Or have the party cleric do it if they have one. A DC 20 caster level check to heal does make emergency healing a big problem and between battle healing difficult. That adventurer may be better off staying out of combat until it's fixed. The stat drain seems like less of an issue unless it's a long trip to town, but ya a 3rd level cleric can delay that.

[Saph]

To get rid of Mummy Rot, you need someone who can cast Remove Curse and also Remove Disease.

At level 5, the classes capable of doing that are Cleric, Archivist, Cleric, and Cleric. If you have an Archivist or a Cleric, you STILL might die if you get unlucky on the CL checks. If you don't have an Archivist or a Cleric . . . well, do the math. :smalltongue:

(This happened to us in our Seven Kingdoms campaign. We survived it, but only because we were level 10 - one level lower and we'd have lost half the party.)

[Asheram]

*sighs* Looking through the DMG to the best of ones ability to see if Mummy rot can be transfered between humans. But since it says nothing about that, just that it is transfered by physical contact, one must assume that it can be transfered just like a traditional disease.

[Claudius Maximus]

It certainly can be a big problem in some circumstances. I had a level 4 party out in the wilderness and the cleric contracted it from the mummy "boss." He was continuously down several spell slots and had a hard time making the checks with only a 20% success rate. Eventually they had to find a legendary enchanted sprig to clear it.

It obviously wouldn't be such a problem if they were in civilization, or were higher level, or highly optimized, but these things aren't always the case with a CR 5 monster that frequents remote ruins.

[Pigkappa]

Yeah well, now I can see how this can be a problem in a dungeon with 18 potentially lethal encounters for a non-optimized party with no cleric, considering they have to reach the end of the dungeon quickly because an evil ritual is going on (that is, the later they arrive, the stronger the BBEGs are).

Oh well, nobody has died yet in this campaign, and there's always a first time :smallbiggrin:.

[Coidzor]

Well, if your only fullcaster is a druid it can still get pretty bad as your only defense are 2nd level spell slots full of lesser restoration and hoping that your heal skill checks are good enough to cover the party + animals.

[Pigkappa]

He does have an HCW wand with 45 charges though, and there's also paladin who can help with the healing (Lay on Hands should work fine even with Mummy Rot).

[ericgrau]

Mummy rot is a powerful curse, not a natural disease.

Curses aren't necessarily transmitted like diseases, nor are unnatural diseases. So can non-mummies transmit it? I dunno. This could be read as "no" because it acts more like a curse or "depends how you fluff the supernatural disease thing".

[CockroachTeaParty]

To get rid of Mummy Rot, you need someone who can cast Remove Curse and also Remove Disease.

At level 5, the classes capable of doing that are Cleric, Archivist, Cleric, and Cleric. If you have an Archivist or a Cleric, you STILL might die if you get unlucky on the CL checks. If you don't have an Archivist or a Cleric . . . well, do the math. :smalltongue:


Well, an Artificer could do it, too. It would just cost him some money, as well as time.


Yeah, mummy rot is bad news. Really sucks if you are on a boat, months away from civilization.

Reason #345 why you want a cleric in your party for Savage Tide...