Sneeze Worthy Devices

Diseases, magical or otherwise are a bit of an underused device in my gaming circles. Besides the albino vampire were-tiger most of us don’t become infected with anything. To me diseases don’t offer anything terribly interesting to the game, unless it provides some interesting boon to the character or stat bonus why should I be that interested?

Disease as a Plot Device

It’s a common enough theme, pick your disease afflict random towns people adventures fix it. Almost any plot hook can be designed around the simple premise. So how can we spice it up a bit? First let’s change who it’s afflicting. Let’s make it a rich woman’s dog. It’s been having stomach problems the poor thing and she wants you to look into it. Now let’s give it an interesting diagnosing method, like you need to inspect the pet’s fecal matter to figure out which disease it is. Turns out after diagnosis it’s a rare disease that causes the organs of the inflected to fight each other to the death, and whoops turns out your players just got infected. Some simple modifications to the age old plot device have increased the interest in the events and made them more personal.

Disease as a Character Device

Quirks are a staple of most games; pick a weird quirk about your character in order to differentiate from all of the other long sword wielding fighters in the land. So what if you gave the character some functional disease? Make them a carrier of variation of influenza that only causes a mild fever and a head ache. Any person they come in contact with will likely come down with the disease. It rarely kills anyone but the character begins to notice everyone around him keeps getting sick. What measures would they take to start preventing it?

Like many hooks and devices disease is what you make of it. Either be it a character device or a plot device it can hook characters in for many stories. Either way I’ll be trying it out in my next campaign.

What is your favorite disease to use on your players?