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Dr TPK
2015-03-27, 03:09 PM
I'm trying to simulate the spread of contagious diseases in medieval setting.
In the matter fact, it's D&D 3.5 campaign, but absolutely NO magic is available (It's not the setting, it's simply a fluke in the current situation in the fighting).

At the moment, nearly 500 soldiers and a few POWs are inhabiting an abandoned large city, which is a ghost town. They have to stay there for 5 weeks. Refugees occasionally enter the city with army's permission. The city is ridiculously isolated from the outside world. There are some rats, lice and mites there, but not much.

What kind of epidemy I could get there, realistically? You don't have to pay that much attention to the fact it's a D&D 3.5 game. I just want to get a nasty and realistic epidemy there.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-27, 03:22 PM
If their water supply is contaminated with some kind of parasites they could all come down with dysentery.

Typhus seems appropriate, given the wartime setting. Incubation period is 10 to 14 days and the disease runs its course in about a week. Mortality rate is around 50%.

Geddy2112
2015-03-27, 03:56 PM
I am happy that you are adding disease and making it very visceral. I am somewhat saddened when a single fortitude save resists a serious bacterial agent, and even if you fail a quick cure and all better.

As maglubiyet said, waterborne(but could also be foodborne) contamination is gonna be the big one. Dysentary, Typhoid and Cholera or a combination. You could throw in listeria if they are eating rotten cheese or milk. These conditions can be prevented by boiling water and really cooking the food. Although dangerous, these conditions can improve with good care and time, so most of the otherwise healthy people won't die. You will have a widespread sickness and a general air of ugh. Now if you add in starvation or other immunocomprimisng factors...

If you want to really up your death count, you want leprosy, the plague, or tuberculosis. TB and leprosy can be spread by air, making them even more nasty. Leprosy is still around in armadillos, and you can have the plague on the fleas for the rats/mice.

A virus would also work with the close proximity. Smallpox, the flu, malaria, sleeping sickness...lots of good choices.

Beta Centauri
2015-03-27, 04:05 PM
I am happy that you are adding disease and making it very visceral. I am somewhat saddened when a single fortitude save resists a serious bacterial agent, and even if you fail a quick cure and all better. If that bothers you, it's simple enough to describe the character as still diseased and suffering, but in a way that doesn't affect them mechanically. Fortitude can plausibly represent coping with ongoing unpleasantness, as well as completely overcoming it.

I recommend reading The Great Influenza. I was stunned at how bad even a common disease could be, even in a relatively modern era. A sick person would board a healthy ship in America and by the time it reached England nearly everyone would be sick and many would have died.

Mr.Moron
2015-03-27, 04:32 PM
Realistic? Everyone roll a d%:

0-10: You're fine. Stop whining you big baby.
11-20: You develop a mild nausea. You're sicked for 1d6+1 days.
21-40: You become incredibly ill. Your character cannot hold food or water, every day is a hell. You are stunned for 2d6 days. If this value is greater 4, you die of dehydration.
41-60: You are struck blind and your wounds become gangrenous. For each of your limbs roll a 1d6. On a 4+ you lose that limb. For each limb lost a drunk with +0 medicine check makes a DC 18 skill check. If he fails you die.
61-80: A merciful god sees fit to end your life quickly. You die of organ failure after 1d3 days.
81-99: You are left paralyzed and unable to speak. These effects are permanent. Each day you are tended to by faithful companion, nothing happens. Otherwise your maximum hit points are reduced by 2d6+4 as rats, and birds nibble at your body. When your maximum hit points are reduced to 0 this way, you die.
100: You become gravely ill as per 21-40. However you manage to keep enough water down to not die of dehydration no matter how long you are sick. You are accused of practicing the dark arts to cheat death. Roll a DC 25 diplomacy check, on a failure you are nailed to a post and burned to death. On a success they allow you to live but cut off your hands - just in case.


Sum the 1s columns for each of your results. This is the % of NPC soldiers that similarly die. For each 7, 8 or 9 one POW is tortured to death to increase morale. For each 1 or 2, on refugee dies as the soldiers kill them for their food.

No fortitude saves allowed.

Strigon
2015-03-27, 04:34 PM
The thing about this setting is, mundane diseases (probably) won't be much more than a nuisance.
Think of a standard adventurer/PC, and look at their stats. By RAW, most of them could eat an arsenic sandwich with cyanide put on for a bit of kick without dying. So if there aren't any magical diseases, you'll either have to give up consistency, or give up lethality.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-27, 04:55 PM
The thing about this setting is, mundane diseases (probably) won't be much more than a nuisance.

He could add other challenges that the disease brings on. Like social unrest, desperation, crime. In combination it might get deadly.

Read about the Plague of Athens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Athens). Once people started dying the town went to hell. People figured they were going to die anyway so started doing crazy things.

Strigon
2015-03-27, 05:42 PM
All very good points, especially if he's going for a more in-depth, non-combat-centric game. (Which certainly seems to be the case)
Please use those ideas!

Beta Centauri
2015-03-27, 05:54 PM
Just curious: is the fun of this meant to be the kind of fun one gets out of making a model train and watching it run? Or is there some kind of a game involved, with ways to use cleverness and tactics to stay alive? Or something in between?

Also, I'd say it's reasonably consistent for the PCs simply never to get sick, as long as they're not deliberately trying to get sick. In any given epidemic, some people just never get sick for some reason. In game terms, it's not that they're not getting sick because they're special, it's that they wind up being special because they managed not to get sick. You could even have an NPC who seems like he's special, but who then gets the disease and dies in agony. See Kevin Spacey in Outbreak.

This way, you can still have the horrors of the sickness to all to see, but without having to mess as much with mechanics and simulation of symptoms.

Jay R
2015-03-27, 09:51 PM
I'm trying to simulate the spread of contagious diseases in medieval setting.

Tell us what the story purpose of the epidemic is, and we can tell you how to set it up. Without that, it's random effects without purpose.

Arbane
2015-03-27, 11:36 PM
Save vs. Cholera!

Dr TPK
2015-03-28, 01:37 AM
Tell us what the story purpose of the epidemic is, and we can tell you how to set it up. Without that, it's random effects without purpose.


Just curious: is the fun of this meant to be the kind of fun one gets out of making a model train and watching it run? Or is there some kind of a game involved, with ways to use cleverness and tactics to stay alive? Or something in between?

Something in between. I'm going to surprise my players by having an epidemic spread in this city, which definitely is the worst case scenario (lots of low-level NPCs with no cleric, no magical healing, in the middle of nowhere). Then I'm going to listen to my players what they are going to do about. A few ideas spring to mind:
1. "We will isolate ourselves with a barrel of beer and some iron rations" Will work, surely, but all the NPCs will hate them forever and there will be loads of consequences.
2. "We will go out and find a cure!" There's no place to go and it's obvious, but they could do something crazy and I could pour lots of random encounters on their necks with treasure and all. When they come back empty-handed, a majority will love them because at least the PCs tried.
3. "We will help the soldiers and stop the disease spreading!" Okay, I'm listening. What you have in mind? Let's roll some dice, shall we?

Summa summarum: I throw something to the players and see what they do. If it's boring and they don't react, I will just have lots of NPCs die and that's it. A decent effort with creative ideas will save some of the NPCs. What these ideas could be? I have no idea.

goto124
2015-03-28, 04:58 AM
Don't surprise the players.

Especially with disease.

Have the players encountered disease in other games before? What's their attitude to such things in campaigns?

The last paragraph... actually interesting since it doesn't affect the PCs directly.

Dr TPK
2015-03-28, 05:07 AM
Don't surprise the players.

Especially with disease.

Have the players encountered disease in other games before? What's their attitude to such things in campaigns?

The last paragraph... actually interesting since it doesn't affect the PCs directly.

Thank you but with all due respect, I will certainly surprise them. I always surprise, that's what I do. Asking me not to surprise them is like asking me to stop breathing.

Jay R
2015-03-28, 07:13 AM
OK, makes sense. Then you want a disease that has some ability to spread, but I wouldn't roll for PCs to get it if it's fatal. (I might roll some dice each time they encounter somebody, though.)

The main advice I have is for some of the PCs' ideas to work, at last to prevent the spread of the plague.

You also need to decide if modern germ theory is active in your world, or if medieval ideas are. The cure might be bleeding, for instance.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-28, 07:43 AM
I'd take a real-world disease and call it something different, like the Crawling Aches or Redspot Fever. That way you won't get any meta-gaming where the players just look up treatments online. Maybe mix and match symptoms from a couple of different diseases too, if you're worried that will happen.

Dr TPK
2015-03-28, 09:54 AM
I'd take a real-world disease and call it something different, like the Crawling Aches or Redspot Fever. That way you won't get any meta-gaming where the players just look up treatments online. Maybe mix and match symptoms from a couple of different diseases too, if you're worried that will happen.

I was thinking about taking all the stats of the Filth Fever, giving it a longer gestation period and have some NPC call it typhoid fever. The NPC might be right or wrong, depending on the amount of metagaming or BS the players try to pull off.

TheCountAlucard
2015-03-28, 10:02 AM
One fun thing about cholera (fun for games, I mean, very little is fun about cholera IRL) is that it does a decent job of perpetuating itself; it most typically springs up when someone defecates in the water, and one of the disease's symptoms is uncontrollable diarrhea. It's gonna be extremely hard to rein in the disease if they can't help continuing the cycle of contaminating the water supply.

Even if this outbreak in particular is caused by some evil jackass with a magic scroll of Contagion or a malevolent water-spirit or whatever, even defeating the thing that caused it may not help.

Beta Centauri
2015-03-28, 06:38 PM
Summa summarum: I throw something to the players and see what they do. If it's boring and they don't react, I will just have lots of NPCs die and that's it. A decent effort with creative ideas will save some of the NPCs. What these ideas could be? I have no idea. Sounds like fun. Good luck.

LibraryOgre
2015-03-28, 11:03 PM
If you can track down a 1e DMG (Osric, the retroclone, might have these rules, too), there's rules for how likely someone is to acquire diseases or parasites, based on the situation they find themselves in, along with a bare-bones description of different types of maladies (separated by system affected and whether they're chronic or acute in nature).

Keltest
2015-03-29, 01:52 PM
Personally, I would suggest making up a disease of your own. That gives you far greater control over how nasty (or not) it gets for the players and NPCs, as well as heading off a bunch of metagame potential in advance. You want it to be lethal, and there are a bunch of interesting ways you can make that happen. Perhaps it inflicts madness and hallucinations, causing friends to think that they've been replaced by monsters. It also lets you pick how it spreads. Is it airborne, is it in the food or perhaps spread by contact with contaminated fluids (for example, that puddle over there by the only well in camp that every third person steps in regularly).

It lets you decide what you want to happen and make conditions to fit that rather than the reverse. As a DM, that is something I generally strive for in scenario creation.

Edit: I also highly highly recommend that you establish that the characters either do not have to worry about the disease for one reason or another, or make it preventable enough that they aren't going to be dropping dead between actions. Save or Suck is fine if they can reasonably avoid the conflict, but when the premise is "You could legitimately die at any moment. Make a saving throw." then it will seriously curb their enjoyment. A common tactic to that end an old DM of mine used was to have different players make random saving throws, and then not describe either the results or the cause of the save. Maybe someone tried to cast a spell, or maybe you fought off the disease. Maybe nothing happened and the DM is just teasing you to keep you on your toes.

Rainbownaga
2015-03-29, 04:11 PM
You also need to decide if modern germ theory is active in your world, or if medieval ideas are. The cure might be bleeding, for instance.

This is an excellent point.

Personally I find it jarring that a world based on Aristotle's elements uses modern germ theory.

Why not allow Miasma to be the real reason for the disease, or an imbalance of the four elements.

Even if it's not what "actually happened" in the middle ages, it's what they thought happened. Have a doctor claim something "silly" like they need to spray perfume and open windows. Maybe he's right.

Berenger
2015-03-29, 04:50 PM
In the case of immune player characters: They could have survived the disease during their childhoods to develop some degree of immunity. This would also be a way to give little, half-remembered hints for different cures that were tried out during that outbreak ("I had to drink this bitter tea made from strange, smelly leaves. I felt somewhat better the next day." - or "We had to lie in the snow to draw out the fever, but I do not think it helped."). Also, the disease may not affect all species in the same way ("ultra deadly vs. orcs & half orcs, but elves & half elves are mostly immune", for example). This way, some or all characters could know about their "plot armor" (should this be deemed desirable).

Sith_Happens
2015-03-29, 05:11 PM
(lots of low-level NPCs with no cleric, no magical healing, in the middle of nowhere)

Remove Disease is a 3rd level spell and Lesser Restoration (to reverse the symptoms) 2nd anyways, not really the sort of thing your typical besieged-away-from-home army is going to have nearly enough access to for it to make much of a difference.

The important part is, how many people are there with a Heal bonus of at least +X, where X is the DC of the disease you plan to use minus 10? That, along with what if any techniques the PCs and/or NPCs use to try and keep the disease from spreading, are going to be the main factors determining how bad things get. Now, if I just left it there someone would pop in and claim that you only need a few competent doctors to cover all 100+ people because the check only takes ten minutes... What that hypothetical someone would be forgetting is that you have to make the Heal check at the time the patient rolls their Fortitude save, and who knows what time that is for any given solider (and it's sure as hell not going to be the same for all of them).

Dr TPK
2015-03-30, 06:35 AM
Thank you all for your advice! The epidemy was a success. The PCs acted very differently and the situation made them really think and fear for their characters. Like I said, it was filth fever renamed as typhoid fever. It scared the living **** out of everyone. I think the element of suprise was huge since my players know me well and I have never dabbled with diseases.

The pseudodragon PC spent most of his time outside the city and he didn't have any hair, so the body lice ignored him. No fever.

One of the PCs locked himself to his quarters, which he was able to done since he was an officer. He was slowly starving to death, but the pseudodragon PC brought him a fish (yes, a fish per day) and water every day so he survived. He fought off the body lice constantly, day and night. No fever.

The paladin PC spent his time using his heal skill to save the sick. He became everyone's favorite.

It's sort of sad to award XP to the paladin for surviving the epidemy since he's immune, but he shouldn't be punished for having class abilities.

Beta Centauri
2015-03-31, 11:42 AM
Thank you all for your advice! The epidemy was a success. The PCs acted very differently and the situation made them really think and fear for their characters. Like I said, it was filth fever renamed as typhoid fever. It scared the living **** out of everyone. I think the element of suprise was huge since my players know me well and I have never dabbled with diseases. Glad it worked for you. Were the characters actually at risk? That is, was the players' fear for their characters justified?

Milodiah
2015-03-31, 11:55 AM
I've never been a fan of the D&D DMG diseases, personally. It's not such a big deal normally, because I'm not (usually) zapping my players with cholera every time they don't specify they boil their drinking water. But then you realize that those diseases are the choices for the Inflict Disease spell. So now, if you go by RAW and don't do a fair bit of embellishing, your cleric's disease attacks are essentially just stat-drain attacks, which seems boring to me.

So, after a bit of houseruling, one of my players (a Tiny-sized Fairy Cleric of St. Cuthbert, Destruction Domain) is smacking people with Combat Dysentery.

Anyway, on-topic...I've always felt that diseases are one of the things that made the middle ages what they were, and which D&D cut out intentionally and unintentionally via magic and saves. If you get sick, you visit the local cleric, and boom, it's gone, no side effects, hopefully no charge, unless you visit a priest with the Being an Ass domain. So, I've started giving some of the more virulent strains spell resistance, akin to antibiotics-resistance diseases are beginning to develop in the real world. You hit a germ with the same attack 100 times, kill 99.9% of it each time, you end up with the cumulative 0.1%'s becoming pretty terrifying. So even if there were magic in your situation, there's a chance it could be a resilient strain.

Dr TPK
2015-03-31, 12:29 PM
Glad it worked for you. Were the characters actually at risk? That is, was the players' fear for their characters justified?

They certainly were! Most of the body lice were carrying "delayed" filth fever (typhoid fever). All went by the book. The final Fort save by the sorcerer to resist the disease was 12, and the DC was just that...