osr blog

The plague infested village of Taddapani from Steve Jacksons Sorcery!
Illustrated by John Blanche

As I have been working my way through revising and editing the ad&d 2e rules I finally have come to one of the few sections that were in the first edition of the game but excluded from the second. Diseases. As with many things, when I came into the hobby (late 4e to early 5e) I was dissapointment in how diseases were treated by the rules. There was mention of getting them but they were easily cured and largely ignored.
This is similar to how 2e handles it except without the easily cured part. The books mention diseases but there is no mention of the chance of getting them, what they do and how to cure them. I don't doubt that diseases were excluded because they were part of the, lets say insanity of the rules of 1e, Where every character had a 2% chance to contract a disease any given month.

These diseases
1. made a character entirely unplayable for at least 2 weeks
2. brought on permanent penalties to ability scores that could only be cured via the wish spell.
3. Had a 12% chance or higher of outright killing your character within 1d12 days of contracting it.

That being said, the underlying system was not bad, and I have rolled on those tables in my own ad&d 2e games when characters are exposed to contaminates such as undead or vermin. Most memorable was a player who decided to snort the crushed up horn of Zargon and ended up in a coma for 2 weeks.

My solution

After reading through the Ad&d 1e section and the Hackmaster 4e section on diseases I have come up with the following.

3 Tables depending on where you were exposed to the disease. Enviorment, Monster or Consumption. Because it would be strange to get an ear infection from a rat biting you in the leg wouldn't it? Likewise eating spoiled food isn't very likely to cause diseases affecting your bones while rooting around an old diseased corpse or swimming in unknown waters can affect just about anything.

Accute vs chronic

Accute afflictions last for 2 weeks at the most, whilst chronic afflictions last until cured. A -1 penalty is applied per week afflicted and this penalty is removed upon being cured or recovering.

Severity

Mild afflictions max out at a -3 modifier to an ability score

A severe affliction maxes out at a -5. If one reaches -5 from a single affliction they can only recover 2 points upon being cured.

Lethal afflictions has no limit, a character dies when an ability score reaches 0.

Permanent losses

If one reaches -5 from a single affliction they can only recover 2 points upon being cured.

As for the monthly roll from 1e, this still applies but ONLY if a character has eaten low quality or clearly spoiled food. This is included for multiple reasons.
For one, its realistic. If you eat funky food from a cheap establishment you'll get sick. Secondly it encourages players to act in the way their character would. If there is no penalty to eating the cheapest of food or no rewards for eating expensive foods players will resort to the cheapest option. Thirdly, it acts as a useful money sink to keep the player characters motivated to adventure and get more money.

The character sheet

I have added to the character sheet a "Resist disease" stat. So that characters with a high constitution will get sick less often, but also as a reminder that diseases are a part of the game and shouldn't be ignored.