What would be the best way to portray a black death scenario in a fantasy setting...

I was also thinking about having rampant undead infestations in heavily infected areas to mimic artwork of the event.

Keep in mind that cities will be hit the hardest since there's more opportunity to pass disease and it's harder to find/bury all the dead bodies. Don't make it any harder to magically cure than a regular disease.

As for monsters, most reptilians probably won't be affected. Trolls might be immune or resistant; research might discover a usable cure.

>A lot of D&D settings forget that the education required to become the equivalent of a cleric has historically been very rare and inaccessible.

That's pretty irrelevant since D&D isn't historically accurate in the slightest.

These are all retarded ideas.

Plus, I think of Neverwinter Nights - didn't they have a magic plague of some kind - It has been a long time since I played it - but I think the plague was some sort of god-curse, or divine effect, and so magic just could only do so much before failing out.

Care to justify the retarded ideas?

Are you opposed to magic casters being harassed because it damages their viability in a campaign?
It seems like an unrational - emotional - visceral response to an ongoing disaster - It's the same reason people loot and riot in disasters - people need to strike out at the situation - even if it makes it worse

As for the magic responding to the plague? Why not? There are living spells.
Or, you know, it matches the prompt that the OP gave. Specifically asks "how would you go about preventing magic from fixing the issue?"
If magic can't cure it - maybe have the people resort to actual heal checks - have there be a return to traditional doctoring and surgery and medical care and avoidance of magic. What about Psionics? Could they heal it?

About abstract red death like plagues. Why not? Aren't there deities of plague and disease? Nerull or whomever? Seems right up their alley. What about the vengeance of an angry god, like biblical plagues on egypt, killing all the firstborn sons? Mythology is full of this - both traditionally and in DnD.

So, what's your suggestion - or what are your complaints put more clearly?

Dragons created a genophage to take out all the humanoids - to wipe out pesky dragonslayers before they start, and to acquire their wealth.

Turns out that they've been doing this for millenia, whenever they feel that the bipeds have gotten too powerful.

Watch the Seventh Seal OP.

>Anything that isnt my idea is a bad idea

>Now your small infection is a FULL BLOWN TERMINAL ILLNESS - because you tried a cure light wounds.

Punishes players both for using abilities and roleplaying. It's also possible for the players to completely miss the connection and go on a multi-session arc curing/killing before curing/killing themselves.

>This could be fun because it would lead to rampant prosecution of spell casters of any kind

A populace would have to be really retarded to kill their cleric equivalents (who can heal and resurrect) and their wizard equivalents (who would be the best able to get to the root of the problem). It's like saying that people are going to throw all doctors in concentration camps if a virus spreads from hospitals.

>Make the source of the disease be a Planar entity or some shit, where magic can't affect it.

Gimping the players to the Nth degree and a death sentence for any PC that catches it.

>Anything that's a shit idea is a shit idea

ftfy famigo

there's nothing abstract about the red death; quite the opposite, it's personified as a tangible character

As an epidemic that can't be stopped. Magic might cure it, but a priest/mage/whatever can only be in one place at a time before they too succumb to it. It spreads just too quickly, obviously via your settings version of Jews, to be contained. Entire towns and cities are fucking graveyards. Even monster lairs and titanic beasts are vulnerable to it. Imagine a group of adventurers finding a dragon dead on its hoard, a yellowish liquid weeping from its orifices having breathed its last. They loot the place, but anywhere they go they find dead citizens, dead soldiers, dead nobles. It should feel like the end of the world, the apocalypse but for reals.

I did something like this in a game of WFRP, though it only affected children. And the Player Characters were the vectors, but didn't find out until it was far too late. They had unknowingly spread it to every village they'd passed through. There was a cure, but it was to be a huge hassle to even assemble the necessary components to bring it to a halt, let alone administer it.

Make it a fungal infection that feeds on magic. Most normal people will just get sick and die because the fungal flora takes over their body and feeds on their natural base level mana. Fucking Wizards and clerics and shit however get turned into monsters, who in turn control the corpses of the mundane victems. Thus you have a magic immune zombie plague

So the setting isn't allowed to have any difficulty and we're to assume that any and all players are retarded.

Sure.

I assume that the knowledge of the incurable plague would be revealed to them early in setting, or dialogue. It would be hard to miss from a narrative point of view - when you visit the temples and there are crowds outside demanding aid, and the party gets inside and the clerics just shrug and say "We've done all we can"

I agree, it would be a dick move to surprise the players with that, but informing them before they do it makes it viable.

I don't think it would be mob lynchings of clerics/casters. It just seems like "Oh, they cured my family for decades and now they can't!? They must be hiding something." More of the rabblerousing and looting. Maybe steal the clerics potions if they won't share - sort of a situation. Unrest of a milder sort than mob murder.

As for the abstract plague - yes, it's a powerful and alien and unknowable force. But so are most BBEG. Their plans are unknowable until they get some intel on them. If they're a dragon or abomination - they they are equally alien and foreign. I don't think that the PCs would catch such a disease (just as the PCs ought not fight the BBEG before the showdown is ready) but use it more as a setting backdrop (apologies if this is too much plot armor - but it sets a setting)

The setting should not inherently make an entire subset of things in the game null and void. You should just go play a different game than D&D if you want to run a game about the plague. There is no place for what you described in D&D.

Reminds me of the World of Warcraft Hex from that epic raid boss. The one that became an epidemic.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

>go play a different game than D&D
user...

DnD is a kitchen sink.
It can run any kind of game.

It shines more for certain types than others - but ultimately, I think it's more decided by with whom you play being on the same page as the GM than by which system you play.

I don't see why this can't be done in DnD.

If not DnD, which would work better?
Dread? Gurps?

I've always wanted to make a campaign like Pathologic. Working on it slowly but surely.

What about low magic campaigns?
"If you don't want magic - don't play DnD???

What about Oriental Adventures?
"If you want weaboo - play BESM or Fate"

What about Ebberon ?
"If you want Pulp, play Spirit of Adventure?"

Why so exclusive?
Is DnD just for dungeon crawls? Try Hackmaster then. Or OSR

That's kinda what I had in mind. I remember starting before that happened, it was...a strange experience, to say the least.

Disease shouldn't feel like a foe you can fight, simply a thing you must weather through. Like an earthquake or a hurricane. Sure there are preventative measures like proper handling of the dead, washing your hands, not living in a fucking hurricane zone, but it's still a force of nature when it does come. The noble in his castle dies just as easily as the peasant in his hut.

Also, consider the standard DnD approach to a magical plague. A Literal Zombie infestation.

You CAN fight the disease - by killing and burning the infected. Now you have to face some heavy moral decisions - You have to face skill challenges to correctly Identify the infected.

If your game has social or political roleplay elements, then you'll get to weather the fallout of your decisions too.

user, as your future king I ORDER you to purge this city!

That adventure was for 3.5. It doesn't take into account how clerics can get Remove Disease as a 2nd level spell in Pathfinder.

It's extremely sturdy.
A simple "Cure Disease" won't get rid of it unless you use enough negative energy to badly hurt to infected patient.
You can't "Cure Wounds" afterwords, or the last vestiges of the disease leech off the spell to regrow.

Isn't curing diseases easier than ever in 5e with Lesser Restoration?

Spell casting allows for contraction of the disease.
You can Cure it, but each time you do you'll need to Cure yourself several times.
If you pur of curing it 'til you've gotten the rest of the community, you've risked reinfecting half the people who came to see you.

>"If you don't want magic - don't play DnD???
Yes. Playing D&D without magic is like playing Mage without magic.

>"If you want weaboo - play BESM or Fate"
Or Bushido (predated the original OA) or the L5R RPG (the other OA was in Rokugan).

>What about Ebberon ?
A good setting marred by a terrible rules.

So you're clearly an idiot then

The Sword of Truth series does it really well, basically have the plague originate as a curse. It's a biological disease, but instead of being genetically engineered in a scientists lab, it's magically engineered by a wizard.

So the only way to cure the disease is find the original magic formula that created it and deconstruct/dispel it.

Or just wait until it runs out of mana/power and withers away.

What's your endgoal here, OP?

Is the plague going to be cured (somehow?) by the players?

Are they doing something else unrelated to the plague and just so happen to be in the middle of it?

In any case - how to portray it- Death becomes an industry. Incinerators become city infrastructure - newcomers to the city are encouraged to buy a funeral plot, and a nice looking suit to wear.

Immigration is huge. During the Black Death, and also Measles and Smallpox, London was losing more than it's recorded population every year. The city still grew - because more and more people were coming in from the farmlands to work the cities - so you need an influx of fresh meat to replace the dead - In DnD, I'd suggest a gold rush, or some reason to get everyone to come to the city, despite the risk.

Sanitation is low. Sewers overrun - water is polluted. People are too busy to handle the hygiene of the city - and that aids the plague

>Is DnD just for dungeon crawls? Try [...] OSR
HEY!! We do Hex Crawls, too!

What is a Hex Crawl?

Everyone needs to take into account how plagues actually spread. The bubonic plague, for instance, spread via fleas and mosquitoes. So anyplace that has a shit ton of rats, cats, dogs, anything fleas can feed off of is going to have the plague.

So have the more educated individuals like the wizards and clerics and oracles and shit tell people the truth, "You need to kill off most of your livestock and pets, and then bathe the ones you do keep religiously in this holy water blessed by [insert god/goddess of healing] to keep yourself from dying." And then have the people either believe them, or go full, "HOW WILL BATHING MY FUCKING DOG SAVE MY FAMILY FROM A PLAGUE?!! ARE YOU A HALFWIT?!!!"

Also, take into account scam artists and street hucksters. People who will sell useless trinkets and CLAIM that they will prevent or cure the disease. But in reality they don't do shit, or at the most they simply alleviate the symptoms without treating it.

I'm not planning on the party finding a cure, The plague is more of a set piece to get some unique stories out of, and I'm thinking it will be set maybe into the second year of the plague and it is still spreading. And I haven't really thought about immigration I'll have to do some thinking on that.

>That's pretty irrelevant since D&D isn't historically accurate in the slightest.
D&D is a game, not a setting. It isn't hard to make your setting and say "oh yeah, clerics and paladins are super rare, there might be one cleric per 200,000 regular people generally working for large churches. Literacy is low and actually becoming a cleric or paladin is hard and while Paladins can cure the sick they are more concerned with dealing with the symptoms of the plague in the form of societal decay and disorder."

Bam so a country the size of France might have like 500 clerics and 1000 paladins across the entire country. The church is using the clerics to help consolidate its power using them to help the families of powerful nobles as opposed to wandering the countryside healing the sick. The paladins are more concerned with lynching bandits and people who loot the homes of families that have been killed off by the plague.

Those are some good ideas for the setting.

I don't think the players necessarily have to cure the plague, or even participate in events where the plague is front and center plot-wise. The plague can be something that just exists alongside whatever is happening in the game. It opens up tons of options for flavor in terms of characters, quests, roleplay, etc.

>A deadly, nigh-incurable plague that causes undead infestations
That's a zombie apocalypse, user. You're talking about making a fantasy zombie apocalypse.

Proceed.

Maybe rampant was too much it wouldn't be on the scale of a zombie apocalypse, undead would only be around mass burial grounds and maybe a few in slums that are heavily affected, most of the death will be the plague the undead should be considered a minor issue compared to it.

Don't be stupid. It doesn't need to be that extreme. Just have a generic necromancer or two secretly raiding the pits where the bones of individuals who died from the plague are thrown into after they were half assed cremated.

And then he takes those bones and cleans them up the best he can and assembles them into his collection of skeletons.

Here's a population idea.
War looms on the horizon. The king calls a draft - all able bodied men and women come to the capital to muster an army - So now you're swamped with population - and the plague happens.

Oh hey that's how the spanish influenza started.
cool reference bro

Goodkind gets a bad rap.

why the fuck is the capital city of denmark in germany

I'd be more worried about how the Pantheon and the Tower are falling into the sea.
Maybe the Paris Megasprawl will send help?

Much like in a real life apocalypse event, the only safe place is poland

...

>no one ever expects the spanish influenza

It's because he uses fiction to tell the truth. And precious little snowflake social justice plebs can't handle having their ideologies criticized.

Like the whole city with the magic bells? That's fucking spot on in regards to the whole educational system in the U.S. right now.

>bad things happened in the past
>bad things stopped happening
>people who were victims of bad things in the past but aren't victims anymore become educated and take on roles were they educate other people
>use their educational roles to guilt trip the fuck out of any person not descended from past victims over crimes that happened hundreds of years ago

This is how you get intersectionalist feminists as college and university professors using womens social studies to brainwash generations of social justice warriors who believe every man is a rapist, (I wonder what would happen if someone asked a feminist if even Martin Luther King Junior was a rapist, and if #KillAllMen means he deserved to die? LOL) and that all men need to die. But especially White Cis Hetero Men.

In his novels that city wound up with an entire caste of people who were basically slaves in everything but name. It was even illegal for them to read and write. All because the people who are currently in charge of the city are the descendants of those educators who successfully pulled of the greatest propaganda scam of all time. And managed to convince an entire race to "give up their privilege".

Lost my comment.

Communication breakdowns

As the sickness gets going - you'll lose communication in the city - to a certain degree. In modern times - people swamp the phone network after a disaster - it gets overloaded.

Now that happens with magical communication and letters.

Maybe letter couriers refuse to march into "sick zones". Maybe the quarantine prevents them from entering areas. As the postmen get ill and their workforce drops - demand keeps rising as businesses which rely on messages need more supplies to handle the disaster. Standing troops need orders to keep the peace. Families write to sick relatives to inquire to their health.

Speaking of quarantine - boats. If it's a harbor - ships come in, and get locked down - Can't leave and spread the sickness - better wait it out. Now sailors are angry - because their boats and cargo and only source of income is seized - so there's a near riot right there. And more boats keep coming in, because they don't know the town is sick until after they arrive. Or boats show up to find their "lost" boats.

Quarantine zones - Make it like East Berlin and West Berlin - heavy walls, and armed guards - you can only cross if you have proper papers saying you're clean (and that's hard to come by)

Border jumpers are viciously prosecuted for their treason and damage to the public safety.

Morale plummets - standard industry and jobs slacken.

External to the city - communication drops off too - Nations see the city as "going dark" and may come to investigate. What if they think it's sieged, and come with an army? What if they villagers fear that army, and think that they'll be purged? Now you have a powder keg of tension.

Food gets scarce - because guess who stops coming to town? The farmers - they aren't going to the city - people are dying there. Also, they might not be let in with the heavy guarded gates.

The Spanish Inquisition arrived after a 1 month notice.
To give the Jews enough time to rat out their neighbors for reduced punishment.

Most of the Northen UK is underwater. . .
Global warming?

What the fuck happened to the iberian peninsula?

Thank you!

This reminds me of 2nd Ed DnD random encounter tables!

I'm going to read this over!

I thought I was fucking crazy, I can hardly find a good review for Goodkind anywhere and was wondering why.

I did like that city. Yknow what I didn't like?

Blood of the fold. Ugh.

>Don't make it any harder to magically cure than a regular disease.
In most DnD settings this means the plague is a non-issue. The plague reaches a city, and a handful of clerics and paladins cure the disease overnight. Any new cases are cured by the paladins and clerics.

>Punishes players both for using abilities and roleplaying. It's also possible for the players to completely miss the connection and go on a multi-session arc curing/killing before curing/killing themselves.
Players should be able to work around flaws that weaken their classes. A plague adventure is retarded in conventional DnD because the solution is obvious (everyone be a cleric we will wander around curing every village and town we pass through). Beyond that the players should be able to pick up on the relation between magic and the disease fairly easily if you leave hints such as a town known for its magic users being hit particularly hard, a powerful cleric suffering from the worst symptoms they had seen despite supposedly having the means to cure himself effortlessly, etc. If that fails you could eventually have some character just mention the potential link between magic and the disease.
>A populace would have to be really retarded to kill their cleric equivalents (who can heal and resurrect) and their wizard equivalents (who would be the best able to get to the root of the problem). It's like saying that people are going to throw all doctors in concentration camps if a virus spreads from hospitals.
When shit goes south people panic, often in illogical ways. There is a reason people tended to historically throw the Jews under the bus when things went horribly wrong. They are a minority who have strange practices and do things the common man doesn't understand.
>Gimping the players to the Nth degree and a death sentence for any PC that catches it.
Or you know the players could treat the symptoms until a cure can be found or whatever.

>how would you go about preventing magic from fixing the issue
No need to remove healing magic or make it backfire, that's for sure, even when using D&D rules.
I'll sum up a few RPG StackExchange threads I read about back when I tackled the question of disease vs casters in medieval fantasy.

A 13th century type setting has about 1 member of clergy per 40 population, and 1 priest per 25-30 clergy (that's 1 priest per 1000-1200 pop, which about equals 1 priest per town).

Assuming the priest is the only member of clergy with levels in Cleric, only they can cure disease in their town. (After all, not every worshiper can call upon their god's powers!)

And for this, they'll need to be level 3. So even if level 3 clerics are as common as level 2 and level 1 clerics, that's 1 disease-curing person per 3000-3600 people.

Additionally, disease-removing spells are extremely limited unless you're an even higher level cleric... those are rare.

No matter what level, all clerics are limited by their spell slots, so they won't necessarily heal the sick faster than the plague can spread. Not to mention they've got to take care of the wounded too! What if there's a fire?

And of course, as points out, isolated or faraway communities will have a much harder time magically curing the plague.

>It's because he uses fiction to tell the truth
It might also be because when people read a fantasy book they expect a fantasy story and not critical commentary on today's society.

I'm not even all that against Objectivism as a philosophy, and there's many things I agree with Rand on (even though I have many things against the official Objectivist movement and don't care much for Rand as a person), but I still can't stand reading Goodkind.

>Like how would you go about preventing magic from fixing the issue
How many mages are there in your setting who can cure diseases, and how many people can they handle in a day?

>And precious little snowflake social justice plebs can't handle having their hatred for moral clarity answered with swift and deadly steel.
FTFY

Do it tonally. Remind your players early and often to take basic disease prevention, even as just things they mention characters doing.

Then given them a fair amount of plot armor against plague as long as they don't go digging in it and continue your campaign in your now much more gothic and horrifying setting,

The streets are empty, people in some towns are outnumbered by the dead, with no hope of burying all the lost.

Low level/dead adventurers are common when young survivors with no family and no future figure the horrors of the adventurer life cant possibly be worse than the plague in the cities and villages.

Happiness is a past tense concept for most people in the setting. A plague world is very grey even in broad daylight and human life is cheap in the face of epidemic.

addendum. If they go around digging in plague dens, or taking flesh wounds against rats and what not, the character gets sick and dies. Pretty much period. A very tough dwarf might live but odds aint good.

Once players take care though it just becomes a setting, and a rather interesting one. Id recommend using it that way, to set the tone. Abandoned "dungeons" could just as well be castles that are now dead save for long knawed and dessicated dead, and whatever defenses they set in their absence/their restless spirits.

>MFW Blood of the Fold are basically Black Lives Matter
>"YOU ARE EVIL AND KEEP OPPRESSING US WITH YOUR EVIL WHITE MAN POWERS. NOW LET US PUT YOU IN YOUR PLACE AND BE FUCKING GRATEFUL FOR IT. IF YOU AREN'T GRATEFUL WE WILL KILL YOU AND BURN EVERYTHING YOU LOVE TO THE GROUND."

This is so fucking stupid, Lord of the Rings was basically Tolkien writing about his son fighting in WW2. The elves, dwarves, and humans all banding together was all of the different real world countries banding together to fight Nazi Germany. Orcs are Nazis. Sauron was Hitler.

And yet the vast majority of people fucking love LOTR, even the movies, including the prequels with Smaug. All despite the fact that at the time (and to a certain degree still is) a critical commentary on politics/society.

> (You)
>And precious little snowflake social justice plebs can't handle having their hatred for moral clarity answered with swift and deadly steel.
>FTFY

I like you user. I like you a lot.

Also, this often gets overlooked - but all those cure spells take reagents, or at least a gold-cost equivalent. They literally can not afford to cure everyone - and even if they had the money to, their stockpiles of reagents would run dry fast unless they prepared for exactly this.

WWI you pleb, LoTR was written mostly before WWII had happened.

In DnD 3.5, the answer was E6.

Sure, Remove Disease does exist as a spell but :
a) it's a 3rd level spell
b) it cures you, it doesn't make you immune

If casters are rare to begin with and that only the most powerful casters are can cast 3rd level spells only once or twice per day, you know that magic isn't the answer to large scale problem.

Especially with diseases : you might cure a small village, only for it to be contaminated by the next band of travellers.

As for monsters, it depends how isolated they are from civilized areas.
Your average red dragon can very well sleep through the whole plague.

Whatever, it was still just as much of a critical commentary of real world society as the Sword of Truth series.

Therefor the personal opinion of that user is entirely bullshit.

People can and do love the Sword of Truth series, otherwise the author would never have been able to publish it to the degree he has. Hell, it even had a TV adaptation at one point.

It's just a bunch of special snowflakes getting assblasted because nobody is allowed to criticize their political beliefs, not even in fucking fictional high fantasy novels. And thus they shit up the internet over it.

>Lord of the Rings was basically Tolkien writing about his son fighting in WW2
No. That is just what stupid people read into it on their own because they think that a story must be an allegory to be meaningful.

It's even dumber when you consider what Tolkien had to say about allegories. The guy HATED (er, cordially disliked) that shit.

Lewis' Lion!Jesus really triggered tolkien hard didn't it?
Also he did not believe in the mixing of mythologies

I would give players the ability to heal individual people but they'd be fairly limited to how many people they could actually save, they're only a few people and the epidemic is bigger than they are.

>Also he did not believe in the mixing of mythologies
He got mad as hell when he saw the American cover of LotR.

>I wrote . . . a short hasty note . . . to this effect: I think the cover [of the new paperback edition of the Lord of the Rings] ugly; but I recognize that a main object of a paperback cover is to attract purchasers, and I suppose that you are better judges of what is attractive in USA than I am. I therefore will not into a debate about taste -- (meaning though I did not say so: horrible colours and foul lettering) -- but I must ask about this vignette: what has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why a lion* and emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs? . . . .

>The guy HATED (er, cordially disliked) that shit.
Any rational human being would. Allegorical readings of fiction is a passtime better suited for aborted fetuses than thinking beings.

What about fables?
Short fiction that actually is meant to be taken as an allegory (to the reader's life) such that they learn a lesson from it?

The moral taught in those is only ever interesting (if at all) from an historical perspective, that is; as in what we can learn about the society that originally told those stories through what they attempted to teach.

Preventing magic from fixing it isn't that hard and there are at least a few approaches, I'd go for miasma. There is bad, pestilential air everywhere, even after being cured the subject is still susceptible (or actually more susceptible) to infection. That adds interesting twist: while lots of healers could possibly try to contain a smaller epidemic, the more paranoid aristocrats will pay/demand that the healers stay by them and ensure his survival. Because the disease saves it's progress, so to say, and eventually it'll finish damaging your organs and kill you.

As for monsters I'd make them all mutated or carriers, lore explanations aside it'd make gameplay more varied and hopefully interesting.

Wow. I actually really like that cover. It's a really interesting depiction of the evil and ugliness of Middle Earth, contrasted with the goodness and beauty of that world. It's also vague enough to provoke the reader's imagination - and good God I'd rather readers were encouraged to come up with their own mental images of Middle Earth, instead of relying on the movies to do it for them.

>I actually really like that cover.
Are you by chance American?

I like allegories - when used well.
I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, because doesn't everyone like everything when it's done well? Of course.

But I think that most allegories tend to be either

A) Very heavy handed, and very preachy, and in this, they come off as condescending and belittling of the intelligence of the reader - acceptable when the target audience is children, and less so for adults.

or

B) Very loose and vague "allegories" that are nebulous insubstantial "high art' wankery. They could be interpreted a million ways, and so therefore offer no lesson, and exploring them is a labyrinth of pointless convolutions.

That all said. If the allegory is brief enough to get to the point, offer a different viewpoint on the topic than the default, or somehow catches the attention, it can be done well. So, it's a matter of pacing, and descriptiveness.

Make us visual something, but be direct and don't waste reader time on inane filler.

>The Sword of Truth series does it really well
The Sword of Truth series does nothing really well.

What you're describing is just another flavour of "Remove Disease doesn't work on it". The exact McGuffin you need to solve the quest doesn't matter.