Diseases in EarthDawn

Here are some simple disease rules, written to accompany the Blood Healer discipline. They are basically a modified version of the existing poison rules.

Diseases are treated in a similar manner to poisons. Each disease has a set of characteristics which determine the chance of catching it, the time needed to recover and the effects:

Spell defence:

As with poisons, each disease has a spell defence against which most tests for contagion and recovery are made, though many diseases have a bonus to their spell defence once someone's contracted them.

Contagion:

If a character is exposed to a disease s/he must make a Toughness test against the spell defence of the disease. Listed here is a practical criteria that describes "exposure": close proximity such as combat or social conversation, touch, eating meat of diseased animal, exchange of bodily fluids etc.

Onset Time:

As with poisons, there's an onset time before the symptoms and effects begin to show.

Recovery:

Listed here is how often you can roll to see if you recover from the disease, as opposed to recovery tests to heal damage inflicted, and whether the disease gets any bonus or penalty to it's spell defence for resisting recovery tests. Some maladies run their course very rapidly, and so a penalty may change after a few days. Tests to check for disease recovery only begin after the symptoms appear, and use the standard Recovery Test step. Some diseases a patient does not recover from naturally, and these have no recovery time.

Effects:

Quite a lot of these really. Common effects are: damage inflicted per time period; extra Wounds that cannot be healed until the character recovers from the disease; and step penalties to some actions from various symptoms ie nausea to Dex actions, delerium to Perception step, rashes to Charisma step etc. Penalties to all actions are best dealt with by Wounds if your using the optional wound rules. Some diseases may cause death after a particular period if the victim doesn't recover first, but these are rare, and I prefer to deal with this using damage dealing diseases.

Symptoms:

How a you or a healer can tell what disease you've contracted.

Optional Rule: Immunity. If you ever make an Excellent success or better to resist or recover from a disease, then you've developed immunity to that strain. Add +10 steps to all all future tests against the same strain of the disease, and a lower bonus to related strains. Many diseases confer immunity automatically once you've recovered.

Note: The diseases given here have a very high chance of contagion compared to real world diseases. The intent is that the GM introduces these diseases only when he wants them to affect the party, rather than to imply these diseases are rampaging through Barsaive. If the GM wants to use more mundane chances of contracting disease, a fumbled (Rule of 1) Toughness test should be the requirement to contract diseases.

A couple of example diseases:

Cadaver Grunge

A nasty case of the 'flu

[Return toRules | Return to Blood Healer Talents]

These rules were written by Graeme Lindsell (lindsell@rschp1.anu.edu.au) and Robert Stehwien (rstehwien@oocities.com). They are based on the standard poison rules of EarthDawn. We wish to thank David Henry (dhenry@plains.nodak.edu) for useful comments on these rules.