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[jameson (ST)]

  Inspiration Strikes!
  
Intro. T.S. Elliot said it best ...

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

*cough cough cough*

ahem, sorry I seem to have picked up a little something.  Just a cough ... and some bleeding ... from the eyes ... maybe this is worse than I thought...
[end_news_blurb]
Issue #20: It's The End of the World - Part 2: Not with a bang but a whimper.

Of all the ways that we as a race might come to an end the most likely sometimes seems to be by disease.  It's not an unreasonable fear.  The Black Death, a.k.a. the bubonic plague, raged across Europe and Asia in the middle 1300s and wiped out some 100 million people (yes, that is right, and it may even be more) with estimates stating that the European population was reduced by between 30% and 60%.  In some countries that number may even have ranged up to 80%!  It took the continent nearly a century and a half to fully recover in population.  

Similarly the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic claimed some 50-100 million and reached nearly all corners of the globe. By contrast World War 2, accounted as the deadliest war in history, may have claimed fewer lives, with estimates between 40-70 million.

It's terrifying to think that the deadliest things on our planet are not nuclear weapons, but naturally occurring organisms.  Back in Issue #2 I wrote about using illness in games and how it could be used on a small scale to hamper the PCs and give them something of a challenge by way of being reduced in their own selves, but what of illness on the massive scale?
  
There's more than a couple works of fiction to mine for ideas and imagery.  Stephen King's The Stand goes all the way and all but wipes out humanity before it even gets going.  The TV film is excellent, I bet it's on Netflix.  Other sources to consider?  Zombies by disease in the excellent World War Z, an alien plague in [u[The Andromeda Strain[/u], and any number of adaptations of I am Legend.  Here on our own forums the game "Future Imperfect" has metahumans suffering from a virus which has been hinted at being a bio-weapon.  And Marvel Comics famously has the "techno-organic virus".  A personal favorite, available at no cost, is Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death".  

Plenty to work with.

As for how to use it in your game?  Well a pandemic with sufficient mortality that is highly transmissible can become a specter that chases the characters, a common cause and a common motivation: find a treatment and/or cure, avoid getting ill, or save a loved one (or even one's entire race.  Disease in its many forms can be applied equally well to games set in the modern era, the future, or the past, as well as science fiction and fantasy.  

Everybody can get sick even animate dead and animate constructs.  

An android could contract a computer virus, corrupting his source code and impacting the way he perceives his world and behaves, or a nanotechnology disease could tear at his mechanical innards as effectively as a biological one for a normal person.  Likewise a magical affliction could reside within the magic that binds a soul to a corpse.  Specialized conditions like this will probably play out best if they also effect normal characters or if all of the PCs are artificial or undead lifeforms.  

Of course the disease itself need not be the focus, but instead the catalyst of the setting.  The majority of The Stand occurs after Captain Trips has killed 99% of humankind.  The film "12 Monkeys" tells the tale of the survivors trying to stop the plague that nearly wiped us out (*spoiler* and causing it in the process)!  The famous Wild Cards series of books features a world were an alien virus (Xenovirus Takis-A, aka the Wold Card Virus) can give people super powers (aces), freaky mutations (jokers), or, more likely, kill them (the black queen).  In the wake of the Wild Card the super powered Aces have the power to change the world (for good or ill) while the deformed mutant jokers are prejudiced against and feared.  

    Plot Idea #1: It's in the Blood
What happens to vampires when a new disease presents itself that goes dormant in a living host but attacks the undead?  Depending on the setting this could become a huge factor in pushing vampires towards extinction, or cause vampires to consolidate their power and act openly in an effort to cull the disease from the mortal population.

Plot Idea #2: It's in the Magic
Something is making wizards and other magic users ill.  At first it seems minor enough, difficulty casting spells, and reduced ability to regenerate spent magic, but as time goes by the effects compound and rumors say that there are some who have died and come back as horrible creatures.  The PCs have to get to the bottom of this for their own sakes, as well as their kingdom's!

Plot Idea #3: It's in the Machine
Nobody know's how it works, or where it came from, but space sector 13 has been crippled by a virus that seems equally capable of infecting man and machine.  It all started with an innocent archaeological dig on a dead world, but now it threatens all of known space.  It can spread by touch or by any electrical system (and even as data).  How do you quarrantine for such a disease?  What caused it?  And why do its victims show signs that the virus is attempting to change them into something else? And what is that something else?

What about you all, how would you use a plague, pandemic, or global outbreak in a game?  

Previously On Inspiration Strikes!

•   Issue #1: The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas ...
• Issue #2: I'm Sick of This!
•   Issue #3: Making Your Own Inspiration
• Issue #4: It's Electric!
•   Issue #5: Revisionist Character History  
• Issue #6: That's No Moon.
• Issue #7: The Big Game(s)
• Issue #8: TurboSwine!
• Issue #9: The Emerald Death Cap
• Issue #10: Do I Know You?
• Issue #11: Do I Know You? - Part 2
• Issue #12: Do I Know You? - Part 3
• Issue #13: Recipe for Disaster
• Issue #14: Everything on Sale, All Sales Final
• Issue #15: Take a Vacation, Do a Side Quest
• Issue #16: Variations on a Theme
• Issue #17: The Inspiration Strikes Back!
• Issue #18: Planet Hell
• Issue #19: It's The End of the World - Part 1: Hot, hot, hot!
    

[jameson (ST)]

This was meant to go live with today's date but I messed up somewhere.

Anyways, enjoy.

[SalmonMax]

This is great stuff, and I just wanted to throw in a couple of related ideas.

1) Social byproducts: It's thought that the Black Plague was a contributing factor (if not necessarily THE contributing factor) in the decay and eventual fall of the feudal system in Europe. The top-heavy feudal system requires large amounts of peasants and serf workers to supply the nobility and keep them propped up. There has to be so many, in fact, that their lives are cheap, so they can endure hardship and harsh punishment without reducing productivity. By practically wiping out the peasantry, the Plague "added value" to the survivors by simple market formula. Supply went down, demand stayed high, value increased. Suddenly lords couldn't afford to just savagely put down revolutions...they had to try to avoid them in the first place, or they'd be starving. The reduction in the power of the lords created an opening that was neatly filled by craft and trade guilds...which in the past the feudal nobility would never have allowed to take shape.

This is true not only of disease, but any major shift in population. Things are rarely even. Plagues hit poor and underprivelaged worse than rich and isolated. But what do the rich do when all the people who make their beds ad cook their food are gone?

2) Mutation: Not in the victims of the plague, but in the plague itself. One of the things that keeps pathologists up at nights is the terrifying speed at which microbes evolve. Subjected to what is to them the environmental pressure of antibiotics, strains of disease are appearing after less than a hundred years that most antibiotics can't touch. Compare that to the thousand-year plus evolutionary cycle of most larger organisms, and the problem is clear. And that's not the whole of it either. A disease that requires physical contact to spread might suddenly become airborne. In Andromeda Strain, this tendency of microbes to mutate was actually used as a kind of Deus Ex Machina to give the story a happy ending...after the fast-shifting virus had given everyone a massive scare.

In a fantasy or supers setting, this mutation factor could combine with magical or super physics, resulting in true terrors!

[Stargaizer]

In EarthDawn, magic is a part of everything (from spells to Adepts swinging sword), and they've taken a variation of this.  Magic comes from the Astral Plane, but that's is also where the settings big baddies (Horrors) come from.  The Horrors have 'tainted' or 'polluted' Astral Space to the extent that casting 'Raw' (unfiltered/unmatrixed) magic can kill you or worse.

In the Wheel of Time, the male half of all magic was tainted to the point that any male that used it would eventually go mad.

Not exactly what you were talking about, but in a similar vein at least.

[Dawn OOC]

Dead Rising, bitches!  

[Dave ST]

Is this the part where all the DR players are supposed to flash gang signs and shout "Dead Rising bitches!"?

[Bond]

*flashes a gang sign*

DR fo' life, yo!

[Mr Fox]

DR OG in the hizzouse!

[Drage]

Dead Rising, Baby.

[Dawn OOC]

Aww, you guys are the best.