Is there an illness that is fatal for adults but harmless to children?

The closest thing I can think of is polio, but that one is only harmless to outright infants-- it can mess you up permanently by the time you're into grade school if not earlier.

Consider mumps.
Painful but no lasting damage in children, can cause sterility in adult males that catch it!
In any fantasy setting you can adapt that to be more lethal to adults and effect both sexes, possibly by tying it to levels of growth hormones within their body.

Ageing

>I don't know what Shingles is

Kind of.
Adulthood I'd say.

I know people I hate and I would fucking never hope they get Shingles.
I suffered immensely.

Well you cant get shingles untill you have chickenpox

Also a moot point since theres a vaccine for both these days thankfully

Depends on setting.

Schizophrenia

>getting Shingles
>when you can get Dhoubles

Have you tried not playing D&D?

Imagine 3 demons/spirits.
One tortures you puncturing you, one uses an hot blade, another an ice-cold razor.
They alternate their strikes to make them unpredictable. Sometimes one at time, sometimes the three of them, and the order always changes.
This is shingles.
And pray is on the side of the body and not on the eyes.

I've endured yellow fever, chikungunya, a really painful extraction of a hooked-root wisdom teeth that angled itself just right on the x-ray to make the doctor think it's just a straight normal root, and recurring flu, and I think that's quite horrible.
I think chikungunya came close. It's like the devil's arthritis mixed with rheumatism, but on every bone on your body.

Adults exposed to chickenpox for the first time can die from it. People that suffer from shingles suffer, but they don't die from it.

Hepatitis A can kill adults and in children symptoms are often too mild to be noticed.

Coxsackievirus. Nonlethal in pretty much all cases, but when it infects an adult can result in loss of balance and coordination for weeks.

Love.

Responsibility

Civilization. Makes it a lot easier for kids to grow up, but robs the adult once he's grown.

None of you idiots said Spanish Flu? Most deadly pandemic in history killed healthy young men but kids and old people would survive.

>getting sterile
>somehow that is a bad thing

>not wanting to pump women full of your spawn

Lol fag

Taxes.

But why?
No seriously, why. I have something that did this in my setting and I want to know how it could work.

Not a doctor, but I think it had something to do with their immune system overreacting. Kids have weaker immune systems, so the overreaction wasn't as deadly. Cytokine storm, IIRC...

BRB checking that to make sure I'm not talking out my ass.

That's just because kids /can't/ be diagnosed with schizophrenia because nothing's reliable and their brains aren't done cooking yet.

Holy shit I was mostly right:

"There are several possible explanations for the high mortality rate of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Some research suggests that the specific variant of the virus had an unusually aggressive nature. One group of researchers recovered the virus from the bodies of frozen victims, and found that transfection in animals caused a rapid progressive respiratory failure and death through a cytokine storm (overreaction of the body's immune system). It was then postulated that the strong immune reactions of young adults ravaged the body, whereas the weaker immune systems of children and middle-aged adults resulted in fewer deaths among those groups.[11]

More recent investigations, mainly based on original medical reports from the period of the pandemic,[12][13] found that the viral infection itself was not more aggressive than any previous influenza, but that the special circumstances (malnourishment, overcrowded medical camps and hospitals, poor hygiene) promoted bacterial superinfection that killed most of the victims typically after a somewhat prolonged death bed.[14][15]...Modern analysis has shown the virus to be particularly deadly because it triggers a cytokine storm, which ravages the stronger immune system of young adults.[23]

In fast-progressing cases, mortality was primarily from pneumonia, by virus-induced pulmonary consolidation. Slower-progressing cases featured secondary bacterial pneumonias, and there may have been neural involvement that led to mental disorders in some cases. Some deaths resulted from malnourishment."

More on "cytokine storms" in next post...

>Extinction of humanity
>"Why is this bad?"

>>Extinction of humanity
>>"Why is this bad?"
Well, why is it?

"CRS occurs when large numbers of white blood cells, including B cells, T cells, and natural killer cells, macrophages, dendritic cells, and monocytes are activated and release inflammatory cytokines, which in turn activate yet more white blood cells.[1]

This can occur when the immune system is fighting pathogens, as cytokines signal immune cells such as T-cells and macrophages to travel to the site of infection. In addition, cytokines activate those cells, stimulating them to produce more cytokines.[7]...Symptoms include fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, muscle and joint pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, rashes, fast breathing, rapid heartbeat, low blood pressure, seizures, headache, confusion, delirium, hallucinations, tremor, and loss of coordination.[1]

Lab tests and clinical monitoring show low blood oxygen, widened pulse pressure, increased cardiac output (early), potentially diminished cardiac output (late), high nitrogen levels in blood, elevated D-dimer, elevated transaminases, factor I deficiency and excessive bleeding, higher-than-normal level of bilirubin.[1][6]"

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytokine_release_syndrome

Because as far as we are aware, sentience is vanishingly rare in the universe and might even be unique to Earth.

It would be a shame for all that effort over billions of years to give self-awareness to water is wasted over your pointless hedonism.

Possibly some forms of cancer since they generally become more common as you grow older.

>Only Kills young men, the elderly and the very young would survive
What a fucking convenient disease to strike DURING The Great War. Has Kansas created anything of worth?

Anyone read the book "the girl that owned a city"? Reminds me of that.

Shit, that would be a good campaign setting. Enacting martial law by controlling the food supply.

old age

ayy the childer setting returns I am actually in the process of fleshing it out. Not sure how i will implement it into an rpg yet/ what system i'll use but I love it.

Schizophrenia was originally called juvenile dementia.

*Sapience
Sentience is probably just as common as life
Its thr thinking part not thr feeling part that might be a bit rsre

So it really was pig flu but we survived pig flu because as shitty as mexico city is claimed to be it's got a really well designed water system, an excess stock of food and relatively large living spaces compared to 1920's europe.

If that shit had hit in NJ instead half of North America would be ded.