The final entry in the journal of Dianna Fremont, a graduate student in the Academy. Her body, along with the journal, was found in her apartment after the neighbors complained about the smell.
---
 |
| This guy. Never around when you need him. |
Lost the last of my fingernails yesterday, and last night the skin from my elbow to my fingertips came off in one piece like a thin glove. My face feels loose, but that might just me my imagination. I hope it is. The wig itches. Where is that damn doctor?
How it fits into a game
I've never found sickness in games particularly interesting, so I'm going to take a stab at making it tonally relevant to the kinds of games I like to run, and then I'll write a simple system that will give the players some interesting choices around sickness.
First thing: no magical maladies. It can interact with magic in some way (and one of the examples I give will), but the reason I would use sickness in my game is to prove that magic isn't the be-all end-all of weird stuff. If detect magic returns a positive result, that defeats the purpose. Sickness doesn't come from The Beyond or The Void or however you explain magic in your game, it comes from right here, and guess what, it can still ruin your day.
And that's what I think can be tonally interesting about it. Weird fiction is about the unknowable outside force that rests entirely beyond human comprehension, and getting sick is decidedly not that. Weird horror tends to play up how powerless and inconsequential we are in the face of something so far beyond us, so sickness in those games should accentuate that by being something the players think they understand in a way that feels dangerous and gross even though it's almost entirely predictable.
Better yet, the players should be choosing to put themselves in this situation. The players should have every advantage. They should understand what's happening to them and why and how to make it stop, and they should still feel uncomfortable and weird about it.
In fiction, these illnesses are intentionally designed and their victims are often infected voluntarily -- there's some feature of the disease that's desirable. Alternatively, some illnesses could be beneficial to those around the infected, but not the infected themselves, like perhaps one that slowly turns the body into an immobile drug factory? That wouldn't be taken voluntarily, though, so I don't really feel the need to write rules for it in this post.
So here are the rules
Each illness has an effect, a symptom, and an incubation period. The effects are good. This is what makes sickness not boring, because it gives the players a pro to weigh against the cons. It means the players have interesting choices to make and information to base those decisions on, which is basically the whole point of the game.
The symptoms are bad, though. These are the parts of being sick that the players will usually think of, things like coughing, vomiting, or growing too many hands. At first, they aren't as bad as the effects are good, but that will change, because...
...the incubation period determines how quickly the symptoms get worse. It also regulates how quickly the effects grow, but the symptoms should outpace the effects. I'm going to keep it simple for my examples, but this can be expressed however you want: a fixed number of days, d4 days, every time the player says the word "sick," whatever you want, really.
All of that together means that the player gets to try and time their infection to hit that sweet spot -- when the effects are greatest and the symptoms aren't intolerable -- when they most need it.
Note that the characters can't flip these on and off at will. They can choose when it starts, and they can choose when they take the cure, but they can't switch between the two. Getting the illness in the first place should be expensive, difficult, or both, so stopping and then starting again shouldn't be easy.
And here are some examples
 |
| It was hard find pictures for this post that weren't vomit inducing. |
Effect: Rapid healing.
Symptom: Mutations.
Incubation: One week.
TBH is a general-healing illness designed to cause more rapid tissue growth around wounds. In game terms, this means wounded characters recover heath points at a higher rate, depending on how much HP they are missing. Above three-quarters HP, they regain 1hp/turn, above one-half it's 1hp/minute, and anything below that takes 1hp/hour.
After the initial incubation period, roll up a random physical mutation from your favorite such table (with some chance of no mutation) every time the character's health drops below three-quarters, as their cells multiply out of control. For each time a further incubation period passes, roll an additional mutation when the character drops below three-quarters HP. Also, heal an additional HP each increment (for example, after three weeks have passed, the fastest healing will be 3hp/second, and three mutations will be rolled below three-quarters HP). Curing the disease will halt the healing and mutations, but any existing mutations are permanent.
Bentham-Waters Crystalline Encephalopathy
Effect: Extra spell slots.
Symptom: Rigid spell slots, then intelligence loss.
Incubation: Three days.
Bentham-Waters is caused by a unique form of prion that is capable of holding spells for the subject. As it spreads through the brain, though, the infected proteins start to form crystalline structures. In mechanical terms, the player gets extra "crystalline spell slots," but also loses flexibility from their normal spell slots, and eventually suffers brain degeneration.
Regardless of how your system handles spell preparation, spells in these slots have to be prepared at the beginning of the day, and all the slots must be prepared with the same spell. Further, for each extra crystalline spell slot the illness provides, two of the character's regular spell slots are crystallized, and must also be prepared with the same spell as the other slots.
Each time the incubation period passes, gain another crystalline spell slot and crystallize two previously uninfected spell slots. If the character has no more uninfected spell slots, lose a point of Intelligence instead.
Bonus spell slots are equal in level to the highest spell slot the character has, and regular slots are crystallized starting at the highest level and working down from there.
If the character is cured, lose all bonus crystalline slots and return all regular slots that have been crystallized to normal. Any lost Intelligence is permanent.
