The Gaming Den

Megacities with millions packed together, interstellar travel's gotta bring greater threats of plague right?

In Frank Trollman's Asymmetric Threat there's touch-based magic so people don't shake hands, that came to mind after COVID-19 hit the planet hard.

Are there any existing scifi works that deal with a mass plague (bacterial, viral, man mad weapon etc.) in an interesting way or come up with interesting countermeasures, habits?

For a player driven story, RPG, the players getting bedridden for weeks isn't good for play though. But then how do you write the players being able to get by but the masses having trouble?

OgreBattle wrote:But then how do you write the players being able to get by but the masses having trouble?

They have cure disease spells in fantasy settings, or they aren't too poor to afford medicine in later settings, I guess.

Most "interesting" plagues in fiction tend towards zombies, and boring zombies at that, in my experience.

https://www.serialbox.com/serials/we-fl ... VKzkeGui1w

Its just a short story, but the basic premise is in a world full of viruses and bugs, science has trained your own bugs and such to fight for you and other duties ala symbiotic mode

As we mentioned in the review of Cyberworld, plagues are pretty common in Cyberpunk future histories. Games like Shadowrun and stories like Akira almost always have some big epidemic that wipes out a lot of people. But the weird thing about them is that they are hardly ever current and ongoing concerns. There's usually a big pestilence somewhere between twenty years in the future of when the setting was made and twenty years before the setting is set.

I'm not completely sure why that is. My best guess is that it's just a lazy cheat. That big pieces of the current and future demographics could simply be fudged away with 'I guess the pandemic changed those numbers.'

Near future science fiction that grasps with ongoing plagues are much rarer. Counterpart comes to mind, where the alternate world had a run in with a very severe influenza that killed hundreds of millions and now their society is completely different.

-Username17

It's hard to imagine a pandemic that kills virtually everyone, spreads easily, does so quickly, and persists indefinitely.

If the pandemic kills too quickly, if everyone isolates for a period of time, all the current carriers will die, and you won't have anyone to spread the infection.

If some people survive, they probably don't have to worry about that pandemic anymore (they now have the antibodies) so if 90% of the population died, the remaining 10% are basically safe.

If the pandemic mutates frequently, or you can't develop effective antibodies, it is possible to have a 'recurrent' plague, but that's not what we normally think of... In any case, with current technology/near future technology, it would probably be pretty easy to identify people who were contaminated before they showed symptoms and eliminate them. Having a 'medical check' every time you move from the dystopian slums to the wealthy area could be setting appropriate.

Certainly, a problem with fictional plagues is that it would be hard to get your audience to accept that the president of the United States sacked the head of an agency researching a vaccine because the head of that agency said that the president shouldn't tell people to drink aquarium cleaner. Or that the same president would nominate a labradoodle breeder with no economics or public health background to lead the government's response to the pandemic.

That would be too far fetched. For fiction.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: I'm not completely sure why that is. My best guess is that it's just a lazy cheat. That big pieces of the current and future demographics could simply be fudged away with 'I guess the pandemic changed those numbers.'

These settings also often have wars, natural disasters, worldwide computer crashes and pollution. While it's partly to fudge demographics (VITAS in Shadowrun especially, with its exceptionally high death rates in countries that didn't interest the authors but that would have been relevant otherwise) I think it's also to explain any other big changes and to make the future world look bleaker.

However, all these happened "in the past" because while we want the world to look bleaker, we want stories to focus on something else than all these cataclysmic events.

I've read the beginning of a Japanese novel called Virus. Apparently, it's about a virus that nearly kills the entire Earth population. I couldn't get very far because I'm not too fond of reading about everyone dying everywhere, so I can't tell you if it's any good.

There's Dominion Tank Police, where people have to wear oxygen masks when they do outside because of a "bacterial cloud" and general air pollution. But while omnipresent, it's just window dressing, with the plot mainly being about police in tanks blowing stuff up.

I started working on a couple of adventures specifically about plagues. One was for FATE, the other D&D, both with demonically created plagues. In the FATE one, the plague is a collection of diseases which primarily affect the wealthy, powerful, and actively reprehensible, while the poor and otherwise disadvantaged are primarily experiencing a "plague" which is relatively benevolent.

In FATE, since the magic is basically custom made for the game, I wasn't too worried about Cure Disease magic. The diseases were various sorts of karmic justice, so people who horded wealth experienced a sort of supernatural leprosy, where their body rotted away into their own valuables, falling around them; those who sexually harassed others saw the offending hand/eyes/etc rot away into pus, those who horded food would exude a sort of psychic field that drove others to attack and consume them, and people who removed the autonomy of others suffered a sort of extreme alien hand syndrome, where their own body would stop obeying them and attack them.

In the D&D one, the plague is pretty ubiquitous and being actively spread by demonic agents. So, sure, you could get a Cure Disease spell cast on you, but it doesn't prevent you from contracting the disease again. In fact, it's a supernatural disease spread through miasma and moonlight, as well as its victims, so while you can get it cured, it's very likely you will be exposed again. It also speeds up the incubation of the diseases Festering Hatred and Misery's Passage from Book of Vile Darkness. Those who are infected have a cumulative nightly chance of becoming a special variety of lycanthrope that spreads the disease. Basically, I was cognizant of the fact that disease can be easily cured in D&D, and created a plague that didn't really care about that.

Are there any existing scifi works that deal with a mass plague (bacterial, viral, man mad weapon etc.) in an interesting way or come up with interesting countermeasures, habits?

Shadowrun had VITAS and Bobbies Ghoulapocalypse from a Crop Duster.
Also, the stupid nano plague.
Not sure if you meant that?

OgreBattle wrote:Are there any existing scifi works that deal with a mass plague (bacterial, viral, man mad weapon etc.) in an interesting way or come up with interesting countermeasures, habits?

Well, you've already played Death Stranding. That's the first that comes to my mind of a mid-plague setting. Most other works I know of have zombies as a stand-in for disease.

One thing I thought of in my heartbreaker was an alchemical development that strengthened healing potions but spread a contagion with more and more stocks of potions and alchemy labs becoming contaminated.

A cyberpunk setting could have all sorts of novel vectors like organ and cyberlimb replacement, designer performance drugs, net countermeasures that reprogram the victim's body to start expressing a gene that poops out the virus, etc.

But I really like the contaminated healing angle as it seems like it should be universally scary to adventurer types.

Doesn't Eclipse Phase have some really nasty shit that can infect your morph AND your brain? I remember one time I woke up on a space station and the nano-replicator there just... turned itself on and started operating. As I immediately suspected, there was a virus in the station's computer and I met my old body in the escape pod on the way out, all taken over by some fucked up nano-fungus.
And then I killed myself with a lot of guns and blew up the station (and my PC) after making sure the other PC was able to get away. I felt very paranoid.

I haven't played Eclipse Phase but read the wiki on it. I think there's a super nanomachine thing that will take over your body and that's the main reason Earth is avoided.

Yeah Death Stranding is a great reference... though it's on the 'magical' end with a ghost haunted wasteland. Kinda reminds me of Nausicaa. Nausicaa's got straight up nature-is-poisonous and giant monsters.

Perhaps 'wandering plagues' can be used to create a war environment that's smaller scale as large troop movement is expensive to protect and vulnerable to infection.

I'm fairly certain EP has a multitude of awful, horrible ways to get sick, all of which make me queasy IRL. I don't have the book and I never liked the game much, so I hope someone else can back me up on this.

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:I'm fairly certain EP has a multitude of awful, horrible ways to get sick, all of which make me queasy IRL. I don't have the book and I never liked the game much, so I hope someone else can back me up on this.

This is Correct on all counts.

-Username17

Oh, I forgot about that. I wonder how much they've changed in the new edition? I'll have to ask my friend.

The two biggest changes are simplified character gen (instead of point buying with 1000 points, you pick from options off of lists, then point buy with a much smaller number of points) and the distribution format (instead of just putting free PDFs up on the internet and soliciting tips, they sell it on drivethrurpg but let you share it with anyone you like, except that they'll send you a sternly worded letter complaining if you post the pdf out there for free, despite that being completely legal according to the license).

I, uh, meant the horrible alien viruses, specifically. Apparently there's one where you vomit up mini-replicas of yourself that create a hive and randomly attack people? That's the kind of shit we should be talking about. I wonder if the replicas can also transmit the virus?

Seriously?
That sounds hillarious to me o.O

It's something straight out of Looney Toons until you actually think about vomiting up a writhing ball of naked mini-Stahlseeles.

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.

My friend wrote:there's an EP published adventure where a character with this virus catches and eats all the mini-clones he vomits up. wild shit

oh great he sent me a picture of it, too

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:It's something straight out of Looney Toons until you actually think about vomiting up a writhing ball of naked mini-Stahlseeles.

Only the vomiting part is vile to me.
I hate vomiting and i have not done so in years by now.
OK, the mini-me's would be fugly, but eh . . i have to deal with that in myself already so meh . .

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