Standard diseases in most roleplaying games are often quickly detected and easily cured with low-level spells. Pathfinder Unchained disease rules as well as the Horror Adventures disease rules can be useful for making more dangerous diseases. The following is an example of a disease that is more challenging and is especially suitable for investigative horror roleplaying games.

Over the last year, in the logging town of Kingswood, several children and livestock had gone missing. Search parties have turned up nothing.

Recently, a logger heard the sound of children laughing in the woods. He followed the laughter deeper into the woods, and the laughter led him to the ‘Millstone.’

The ‘Millstone’ as locals called it was a disk of granite thirty feet across and three feet thick, its top engraved with a peculiar rune. Where it came from, who knows? The scraeling? Some older people? Why was it here? What purpose did it serve? Nobody knew but the place was said to be haunted and so locals shunned it.

Approaching the site with caution, the logger noticed a massive tree-fall, perhaps from that violent thunderstorm last year. The fallen tree had struck and shifted the stone—only an inch—enough to reveal a deep hollow space in the ground beneath it.

While approaching the stone, the logger glimpsed something in the trees, pale, tattered, and translucent, like a shed skin, flapping in the air like a ragged flag in the shape of… a deer? Who ever heard of a deer shedding its skin?

Suddenly, he felt a stinging pain in his arm as something brushed against it. Instinctively, he recoiled and turned to see a translucent tendril reaching towards him from the hollow beneath the ‘Millstone’.

The logger ran in terror back to town, unaware that he carried with him the Hollowing Curse.

The Hollowing Curse

A strange disease inflicted by the flying polyps imprisoned beneath the earth. It turns its victims into buoyant translucent lavender husks of alien cellular composition, phasing in and out of existence. The swiftness of the onset of the disease can destroy an entire town or city in little time, but this also mercifully keeps the disease from spreading to distant populations.

Type: Disease, contact or inhaled; see text

Save: Fortitude DC 20, see text

Frequency: 1/hour

Effect: see text 

Each hour, the victim must make a DC 20 fortitude save. If the victim succeeds, he remains at the current stage. If the victim fails, he moves to the next stage. Cure Disease potions and spells or successful Heal checks to treat the disease only cause the victim to remain at the current stage.

Only electricity can reverse and cure the disease, but this may also kill the victim. Any amount of electrical damage that would be inflicted on the victim grants a new saving throw, this time to reverse the disease by one stage.

Disease Track

Stage 1:

The victim has contracted the disease, and can spread it to others by contact, but no symptoms have appeared in the victim yet. If the victim contracted the disease by contact, the skin may have a translucent lavender patch where contact was made.

Stage 2:

The skin of the victim is now pale, lavender, and translucent. The victim suffers the effects of the sickened and fatigued conditions, sweating profusely as moisture is purged from the body and cells and organs begin their alien transformation.

Stage 3:

The victim gains partial invisibility and phasing (20% miss chance, 20% drop any held object). The victim also suffers from confusion. This is a side-effect of the extra-dimensional phasing of portions of the victim’s brain and nervous system.

Stage 4:

The victim levitates unless held down. Infection is now by both contact or proximity (10 feet) when injured, as the vital functions of the victim now rely on gases rather than fluids.

Stage 5:

The victim gains a fly speed of 60 feet and vulnerability to electricity. 

Stage 6:

The victim is no longer confused but instead becomes homicidal (effectively a chaotic evil NPC). The victim can concentrate to become fully invisible, gains a +5 deflection bonus to AC and a +4 resistance bonus on Reflex saves.

Stage 7:

The victim is permanently transformed. He no longer suffers from the sickened, fatigued, or confused conditions, but is now a chaotic evil NPC. His creature type changes to aberration (air).

The logger, or what was the logger, drifts on the cold evening breeze away from the town and back through the forest to the ‘Millstone’. Overhead, the pulsating husks of children laugh and dance on the wind, moonlight shining through their now alien forms. From the one-inch hole beneath the stone, a tendril oozes lazily, caresses the logger’s strange new form, then whiplike snatches him down into darkness.