Unusual Apocalyptic Blights and Plagues

[D20ragon]

I'm looking for things more on the mundane side.
Mundane in that I'm just not interested in overtly magical illnesses, (no changing into insects or melting into olive oil) though having the disease be subtly magic is certainly fine. Essentially, I'm designing an end of the world disease scenario for a fantasy game I'm running, and apart from the usual "contagious madness/death" disease, I'm a little stumped. The only thing I can think of at the moment is a plague causing infertility, which could be interesting thematically, but I'm curious to see what ya'll have to say. Essentially the disease should be a little out of the ordinary in terms of its effects and/or the way it applies said effects, while still being able to cause the collapse of a society.

[Ravens_cry]

The plague causes brain damage that results in the victim in being content, and even happy, in their circumstance. No matter what, barring absolutely deadly conditions, especially in acute incidents, and even then the reaction is less than typically expected.

[RFLS]

I'm going to talk myself through stuff for a second.

So the main requirements are that it be a) unusual, and b) catastrophic. Unusual rules out insta-death, madness, and undeath (also ruled out by magic). For it to be catastrophic on a societal scale, it needs to target something that society depends upon intimately. Checking out Maslow's Hierarchy rq. Using anything from the bottom tier requires that some people just be flat-out immune to it. Clothing and shelter aren't something you can target with a disease. Sexual instinct is something you've considered. Targeting sleep just leads to the aforementioned insanity. Food is something that's hard to target - we have a lot of different ways of getting food. Water's a little easier, but still runs into the same problem. Air is something worth considering. Aaand...everything after that is for person, not society.

So if it's something in the air it's pretty easy for it to be omnipresent. So that means it's wide enough to have an effect on society as a whole. What happens if you have something airborne? What sort of omnipresent thing could cause the collapse of society? Base assumption is that everyone is close enough to biologically human for it to be irrelevant. Apart from the basics listed above, society relies on....communication and resource management. Resource management is pretty hard to target (see food and water). So how do you target communication? Communication relies on the ability to understand each other and the ability to retain information acquired from the interaction.

So what if you had an airborne disease that caused moderate to severe inhibition of long-term memory formation? It wouldn't prevent people from learning base survival skills (muscle memory, etc), but it would mean that the things we rely on as structures people agree on for society to function would just...fall apart. It's not fatal, so it's a successful disease (it's not killing its hosts), and it doesn't require that some percentage of people be immune for it to be worth considering.

[BWR]

Here are a few ideas.

[Dalinale]

A widespread 'immortality' curse could lead to rather stressful situations; the sick, wounded, and elderly do not die, although they age and suffer from their wounds, with no magical aid seemingly able to subvert whatever is occurring. While there might certainly be great expanses of calm, mostly worried people, hedonistic movements might break out, disenfranchised groups might revolt en mass without having to worry about things like 'hunger' or 'health', while battlefields of those who should be dead continue to groan and grunt. Healing magic becomes in demand more than ever before, no matter how dubious, and those who would normally die from afflictions of the mind simply do not. And, of course, there are those high-minded individuals who think that this is a opportunity, not a curse, and that they can work with it with a brighter future for man in mind.

And, of course, anyone outside the area of affliction might be prepping their armies for war against the eternal-living.

[Kaptin Keen]

Dying crops will kill everything. Poisoned water will kill everything. 'Poisoned' air also. Darkness will freeze the world and kill everything. Light will heat the world and kill everything. Droughts will ruin a lot of things, but might leave sunbleached city states and sorcerer kings.

You could have explosive growth of vegetation, which might not kill everything, but end human civilisation. There's a book, but I forget the name. Some super shubbery with poisoned barbs grows wild (magic feeds it, and humans are idiots), ends the world.

Anything that grows out of proportion can potentially destroy the world - rats, for instance. It's all very nice that you can kill thousands with a single fireball, but if they breed even faster than you can explode them, you're still screwed.

The Eldar died to a plague of lust.

Really, most things can end the world. It's frankly surprising nothing has so far. Unless you're a dinosaur.

[Anymage]

Just working off your thought of infertility. Is the goal to be post-apocalyptic, to be caught up in the apocalypse as it happens, or is some long-term crisis without an immediate impact acceptable?

Because as a random, off the top of my head thought, turning all humans into obligate carnivores would be pretty rough. Between rendering the vast bulk of our food stores useless and being a much less efficient source of calories, it'll cause some appreciable shakeups. At the same time, though, cities wouldn't become wastelands overnight if that happened.

[JellyPooga]

Kill the bees.

The bees go, flowers go unpollinated.

Flowers go, other insects starve.

Insects die, small birds have nothing to eat.

Small birds go and their predators go hungry.

And so on, up the chain.

In a few short years, what started as a weird lack of humming, buzzing bumblebees, turns into a famine.

---

Some other possibilities (some looking beyond a disease scenario);

- A self replicating technological wonder or weapon of war. Aka; the Skynet apocalypse. Also a possibility by making a disease that grants telepathy, but also enforces a hive-mind mentality; perhaps a well-intentioned mage came up with the process and rolled out "production" before realising the consequences. The infected start seeing others as inferior, their combined intelligence being the obvious evolution of the human race; assimilate or die (resistance is futile?).

- A plague that robs the senses, one by one, but otherwise leaves the body unharmed. (Ripped from the film Perfect Sense)

- The ooze-pocalypse. Someone has opened a Gate to the elemental plane of fire and thrown in some brown mold. The powers that be are keeping it in check on the other side, but here on the Prime, the encroaching mold is threatening to engulf...well, everything. If nothing is done, the ambient global temperature will drop drastically from the vast fields of mold and herald a premature ice-age.

[inexorabletruth]

Rusty and Co. have a few clever ideas on diseases with templates.

Multi-headed Dire Undead Weremeasels with an Air Subtype sounds like a rough way to go out.

[Segev]

Infertility leads to aging population and slow dying out.

The Egyptian plagues targetted food and water.

A plague of D&D puddings gone out of control could be pretty disastrous.

Inspired by Halloween, a plague of child-stealing monsters that can be fooled by disguising the children as other monsters would have society-warping effects.

[Donnadogsoth]

In my Gamma World game there were these nameless black sluglike creatures that knew where your large veins and arteries were, and would burrow into your skin and effectively create a blood shunt for your blood vessel: the blood would come out, move through this contained vessel in the slug, and then go back into your body. Nothing about the creatures hurt you, it just created a big external vein. And, of course you can't cut the thing off or you'll bleed to death.

[Dalinale]

Infertility leads to aging population and slow dying out.

The Egyptian plagues targetted food and water.

Inspired by Halloween, a plague of child-stealing monsters that can be fooled by disguising the children as other monsters would have society-warping effects.

Backpacking off this, instead of the 'usual suspects' for a apocalyptic scenario, involve the Unseelie fey, who have marked the planet for death for reasons likely arbitrary but easily justified by them. This could involve both a not immediately threatening infertility plague, along with outbreaks of horrible nightmares, but also crop blights and water shortages; all of these problems could be solved by powerful individuals, but small villages vanish every day and the cities are wracked with reports of infants being replaced with straw dolls and horsemen of unknown origin being sighted in the hinterlands. These problems get worse and worse until populations start collapsing and travel between villages becomes almost impossible.

[DeTess]

The plague causes brain damage that results in the victim in being content, and even happy, in their circumstance. No matter what, barring absolutely deadly conditions, especially in acute incidents, and even then the reaction is less than typically expected.

Depending on the campaign, this can be far more scary than any deadly plague. Seeing people just stop caring can be an extremely scary thing without having as obvious a cause as a plague of rats or people coughing their lungs out.

[RFLS]

Depending on the campaign, this can be far more scary than any deadly plague. Sering people just stop caring can be an extremely scary thing without having as obvious a cause as a plague of rats or people coughing their lungs out.

And then a small percentage receive the opposite effect - they become rage-filled murder machines.