Plagues in cyberpunk and space opera's, maybe fantasy

[Stahlseele]

So... the whole thing is vile and fugly, then?

don't you use your filthy logic on me to make something hillarious horrendous to me! <.<

[OgreBattle]

Going through the FrankTrollman Eclipse Phase review... (dang I didn't know it was over a decade old, it felt rather new and fresh) not much is talked about how exactly the plagues work in the setting or mechanics...

A lot of it 'feels' quite similar to magical plague, mummy rot, Ilithid body horror, so I guess scifi and dungeon crawl fantasy doesn't really do plagues all that differently.

Now on D&D's cure disease... a question I have about that is what kind of setting it should encourage. If being a cleric means you can remove any mundane disease, then it seems pretty ethical for a community serving cleric to stick around any town that needs it.

It also creates an interesting situation where an Evil cleric can be a pillar of the community and spread Evil worship by removing or inflicting disease at will.

[Username17]

The plagues in Eclipse Phase weren't super well fleshed out in the original book. I don't actually know if they've been much expanded upon in the last decade or so, because I haven't kept up with line. You can get infected by the TITANs and that's bad and it can overwrite your body or your sense of self or both, but exactly how it works is not super clear.

But the main idea is that there are things you dare not touch, but also things you don't dare share information with.

Now on D&D's cure disease... a question I have about that is what kind of setting it should encourage.

The Remove Disease spell is much more effective than anything I can do. But the scalability is hot garbage. A fifth level cleric can only treat two people a day. Two patients a day would be a very slow day for me. That doesn't normally happen.

The closest modern comparison would be the personal physicians of the rich and powerful or like the team doctors of sportsball teams. Ridiculously expensive and specialized doctors who have an extremely small client list for whom they provide extremely impressive service. It's kind of the exact opposite of "medical care for the masses" and it's extremely unlike the kind of Nightingale wards you might imagine when "religious dedicated medical providers" come up.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Now you've got me wondering about the logistics of clinics with regular doctors, clerics, and healing wands. I'm not going to pretend like I know anything about this compared to most of you, and a wand of Remove Disease is stupidly expensive, but presumably you'd only use the wands and spells for the immediately terrible cases that regular medical professionals don't have the time or equipment to handle?

Would any of this be possible if there was an infrastructure in place for all this magical healing to be subsidized in some way?

[LR]

Remove Disease would probably be used for cases like Drug-Resistant TB where a Divination-boosted Healing check just isn't up to the task. More useful spells would be those like Detect Poison (a cantrip!) for instant tests of patients with rapidly declining conditions, Divinations that give you X-Ray Vision or let you reroll important surgical checks, and generic boosters to Wisdom and Healing. Intensive Care is going to be surgeons with supernatural Heal checks doing Trauma Center anime battles with disease and actually clearing out the 'effluvial motes' or whatever they're calling pathogens.

[angelfromanotherpin]

In GURPS Technomancer overuse of Cure Disease spells has created bacteria with heightened Magic Resistance.

[Blicero]

In GURPS Technomancer overuse of Cure Disease spells has created bacteria with heightened Magic Resistance.

Is it only technomancers that can cure disease, or can mages do it as well?

[angelfromanotherpin]

In fact it is only mages who can do it, although technomancers in that setting are a kind of mage rather than a separate thing.

[Longes]

Outer worlds has a plague going on in the first planet that you visit and technically has a longer term issue with drug/medicine addicts who take to much of a medicinal substance, get addicted to it, and go violent over time.

Outer Worlds' "plague" is actually just scurvy, caused by them eating nothing but fake canned fish.

I can't believe no one in this thread mentioned Pathologic 1 and 2. These games hit the nail on the head in regards to a pandemic - the leaders play political games, squabble with each other and obstruct you when you are inconvenient, the doctors are overworked and don't get the resources they need, the people are panic buying and ignoring all medical instructions.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Pathologic isn't super well known, most people aren't into Russian medical despair simulators.

[Blade]

Pathologic isn't cyberpunk nor space opera and not exactly fantasy either.
But the first one was definitely a flawed masterpiece (I haven't played Pathologic 2 yet)

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Pathologic is also a story-driven singleplayer video game.

[Longes]

Pathologic is also a story-driven singleplayer video game.

So are Death Stranding and Outer Worlds.