Diseases, Parasites and Symbiotes
Feel free to contribute your own…
Vecna’s Rot
It is said you get this disease from breathing in the dust from a dead lich’s bones.
First one of your eyes begins to get dry, then you see ghosts and spirits for a few days while enduring blinding headaches and then your eye rots out of your skull. While that pain is at its worst, you might not notice the slight throbbing ache that has set in to one of your hands. Eventually, that hand will fall off of your wrist and crawl away of its own accord to do as much mischief and evil as a hand can do or become the familiar of an evil wizard.
The only known cures are a blessing from a good priest, taking out the eye before it sets in or taking off the hand before it withers or finding a follower of Vecna and either helping them become a lich or telling them a useful secret.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/111694100408744715863/posts/GohMJfCRfv7
Eye Warts
When a Beholder’s vitreous humor gets in your eyes, if you don’t clean it out with clean or blessed water immediately, you will get Eye Warts. Bumps will begin to appear all over your body and after a few days, these bumps will sprout eyes.
This will give you + 1 forward on Discern Realities but armor will be difficult to wear (- 1 DEX when wearing any armor) and some say that there are spells that give evil sorcerers access to what your eye warts see.
Bahamut’s Lament, Tiamat’s Curse, St. George’s Disapproval or Hoard Hump
This is a STD that can be caught from dragons. The symptoms are painful, having to do with the dragon’s breath weapon and the patients’ sexual organs. The disease can be cured by a blessing from a priest of a draconic deity. The symptoms will be lessened by living in the climate most comfortable to the dragon from whom the disease was caught.
Chaos Wasp Infestation (assumes ownership of Johnstone’s Metamorphica)
When Chaos Wasp eggs are implanted in your body, make a countdown on your character sheet with six boxes, marked “Hatching”.
From time to time, especially during periods of stress, physical activity, or food consumption, the GM may call upon you to mark a box and roll 2d6. On a 10+, gain a random mutation: if negative, you may replace it with a random mutant feature. On a 7-9, gain a random mutation. On a miss, gain a random mutation: if positive, the GM may replace it with a random mutant feature.
When all boxes are filled, the Chaos Wasps hatch, emerge from your body in a bloody and grotesque display best left to the imagination, and fly off to establish a hive somewhere nearby. Make a Last Breath roll.
(For those without Metamorphica, use your own random mutation table and replace ‘random mutant feature’ with ‘minor cosmetic mutation’)
Iron Stomach
This is a stomach ailment often seen in adventurers who enter a mega-dungeon without a hireling, ranger or druid to help them find food in the underground eco-system, causing them to live entirely off of iron rations.
The symptoms depend on where the Iron Rations are purchased. Some induce diarrhea while others cause bodily functions to cease. The disease is easily cured by eating real food.
Just a name yet, ask questions:
Gold Fever
Does it have to do with gold coins, gold dragons or gold golems?
Coins, definitely coins. You get it when you don’t keep on the gold you own. Easy come, easy go just doesn’t work with this metal.
Blink Fleas
Exactly like normal fleas, except with the ability to blink. Makes it much easier for them to “jump” from host to host, and scratching is nearly useless. Annoying, but much like normal fleas they will occasionally become carriers of a more serious disease, which can present a serious problem.
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Flux Flu
Believed to be caused by excessive interplanar travel, flux flu manifests as nausea, headaches, a tendency to vomit forth strange anomalous objects or elemental matter or even occasionally small vermin or other creatures, and -1 ongoing for 1d6-CON days or until healed.
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Helmet Nautilus
Traditionally worn by the gladiators of ancient Samnis, and said to have inspired the shape of the masks worn by the Road Wardens.
When lured out of its den, it attaches itself to the face and head of a sleeping or drugged host, sliding its tendrils into the available orifices. After the bond is made, normal vision is gone, replaced by the creature’s magical sense of spaces and shapes, which includes things invisible. Also, there is no need to eat, drink, or breathe, as the host is sustained by the creature’s secretions. While the nautilus provides additional protection through its carapace (+1 armor), it shares the same HP pool as its host. Normal speech is likewise impossible, but the host’s intentions are communicated as the hum of the nautilus trilling deep within its chamber. This can be awkward in social situations (-2 Cha), unless other folks are into that (+1 Cha).
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Deep Realms Infection
When a mind-sucker with an octopus for a head attempts to eat your brain but doesn’t finish the job, your woe is not over. There is a chance that if the wound is not properly seen to and your humors are not set right that you could get a Deep Realms Infection.
These are infections that draw from your mind and connect it to an entity in the Deep Realms, where the mind-suckers’ species was born. The only known cure is to summon the entity that you have a connection with to your own plane and confront the creature but arcanists theorize that there are other ways to kill the infection.
The Reality Spins
Mild vertigo and nausea induced by traveling between planes with different physics.
The combination of the Nautilus and Deep Realms reminds me of a thing that happened in the last WoDu campaign I played in. I was a cultist of some cthuloid god and wore a dried octopus, looping its tentacles around my neck in a kind of fishy medallion. Unfortunately for me, it turned out the dried octopus was actually undead (only sleeping!) and would occasionally spring to life when in contact with sacred water or when it decided to feed on my cultist’s blood through its barbed suckers. Eventually it consumed his head and then the two were magically transformed into a single octopus-headed being, but that’s another story.
Benign Vrykolaviridae
Believed by some scholars to be a rare subterranean strain of the plague responsible for creating hemophagic undead, the only symptoms are a slight cold sweat leading to clammy skin and photosensitivity akin to a case of meningitis, with the caveat that it actually improves night vision. Often deliberately cultivated by night workers, dungeoneers and people too poor for candles.
Elemental Pyrexia
A powerful virus caught by travellers to the fire-related elemental planes. Victim sweats a thin, viscous fluid found to be remarkably flammable. Symptoms like influenza otherwise.
Someone in my game pulled a necromancer’s spirit back for a little tête-a-tête and then swept up his ashes for later. Marshall Miller knows who I mean and hopefully won’t point him to this thread.
Shawn McCarthy It’s like a meta grim portent.
Delver’s Back
Too much contorting and stooping through narrow passageways under maximal weight has finally done it’s work on you. Sprained muscles and tender bits cause your LOAD to be halved.
Rumours speak of certain elvish linaments that can ease the conditions temporarily but no permanent cure is known.
Most commonly occurs amongst those of higher level.
Weird Water
Contracted after having a near death experience on any of the fluid elemental planes.
Small amounts of water will spontaneously animate into tiny elementals in the sufferer’s presence. This most commonly occurs when taking a drink, giving the sufferer little choice but to spit up most of the water or be drowned by it.
Whilst under the effects of Weird Water, ration consumption is doubled and romantic dinners out are doomed to embarrassing failure.
A short fast in a desert region is generally recognised as an effective treatment against Weird Water.
Phage Grubs
Small maggots that burrow into flesh. If the flesh is dead, it will reanimate. This will cause detached limbs to twitch uncontrollably. If the reanimated flesh has a brain attached, it will go through simple habitual or instinctual routines with no interest in the world and creatures around them. If the flesh is alive, it quickly dedicates to a dry, stringy consistency and becomes animated dead flesh. If the animated dead flesh is torn or cut open, the grubs will fall out and search for more flesh.