Disease in the Blackmoor Supplement

[oakesspalding]

Arneson has a nifty piece on diseases at the end of Blackmoor. He would later expand it slightly in the first issues of Pegasus.

In most ways, it's much better than the treatment of diseases in the 1979 DMG.

But here's my question: The disease table in Blackmoor has a column labeled "% to Catch":

Grippe: 5%
Bubonic Plague: 1%
Dysentery: 4%
Cholera: 2% . . .

And so on.

What does "% to Catch" mean?

Per month?

Per season?

Per exposure? (Though that couldn't be right since if you're exposed to Plague, you presumably have more than a 1% chance of getting it.)

Per visit or encounter with a particular place that hosts the disease, such as a swamp? Arneson writes, "The existence and/or location of disease is determined by the referee." So does that mean that the referee just decrees, say, that there is Typhus in the Great City (or not)? If so, the chart says that you have a 6% chance to get it. But that just pushes the question back (per week? per month? per season? per year?).

Any ideas?

[foxroe]

My gut tells me it should be per exposure, much like how a giant rat causes disease in later works (don't think it's mentioned in OD&D - could be wrong).

Perhaps the low percentages were chosen so that they could be multiplied by the number of exposure sources? Maybe the percentages would make more sense if the communicable nature of the above diseases were known (I'm uneducated in the matter)?

If a PC survives exposure I would presume that they have established the necessary anti-bodies to fend off the disease for the moment, so I would stop making checks (maybe make another check if they return to the source?). Dunno.

Edit: I don't really use disease checks myself. I just have players make poison/death saves if they were particularly stupid/uncautious around obvious sources.

[aldarron]

Good question. I think foxroe is basically right though. I checked Arnesons disease article in Pagasus 1 which has much of the same material. The "catching" chance only occurs in certain seasons or environments (like winter or the tropics or a siege). Dysentery "is brought about by eating local the food and drinking the local water". So I think anytime characters find themselves in the right conditions the check should be made. How often is up to the Referee. In the Pegasus article, for example it gives a 2% chance of catching tuberculosis but says there is a 10% chance of catching it if exposed to someone with the disease.

[oakesspalding]

Yes, I suspect that's what Arneson means, too, but I find it annoying. It's like saying, "there's a 20% chance of encountering a wandering monster, you know, if it's wandering around."

Also, if you're in a Plague area, there's a much greater chance than 1% of catching it, unless it's 1% per day or whatever, but in that case the "chance to catch %" for all other diseases should be lowered.

The plague wiped out 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe's population in only a few years. But that's an average across all communities. In some areas, most people died, probably in a very short period.

[havard]

Realistically though, the plague is not really that contageous nor all that lethal. It is just that the lack of hygiene and lack of understanding of how disease worked in the medieval world that the plague would have such dramatic results.

I dont have any good explanations to the percentages, but I think I would rather use Saving Throws IMC.


-Havard

[oakesspalding]

Aug 3, 2017 5:37:18 GMT -6 havard said:

Realistically though, the plague is not really that contageous nor all that lethal. It is just that the lack of hygiene and lack of understanding of how disease worked in the medieval world that the plague would have such dramatic results.

Man, with the greatest respect, I've recently been reading up on medieval medicine and diseases, and I have to totally disagree with you on a few of those points.

As always I could be wrong.

I mean, of course everything has to be looked at against the background of poor hygiene, but that greatly magnifies the effect of most diseases, not just Plague, but that's the context we're talking about. You take a disease where all you need is a flee bouncing from a rat to you, or (with pneumonic Plague) a victim merely breathing on you, and then within a few days or (with pneumonic) a few hours you're dead, and that's pretty harsh.

Entire monasteries were wiped out with literally no survivors or one survivor (lucky guy). Half of the cardinals in Avignon perished in a season, etc. Yes, poor hygiene, but many of the victims were wealthy and living in conditions of peace. While obviously malnutrition didn't help, unlike some other conditions, the Plague wasn't a "famine disease" that thrived only in, say, famine or siege conditions.

As for the science (and I'm not being critical of you, here), I have a huge amount of respect and sympathy for those guys. They knew very well it was contagious, and so they tried (mostly vainly) to do all the things that reasonable people would do based on that knowledge - wall yourself up in your house, flee the area, ban ships from docking, etc. What they didn't know (and how could they?) is just how contagious it was and how it could be carried. If you wall yourself up in your house, the fleas can get in anyway. If you flee the village for another village, chances are the Plague is fleeing with you, you ban ships from unloading but only after a few rats already made it through, etc.

The things they got wrong were things that didn't really matter from the point of view of prevention or cure. So it was supposedly caused by a conjunction of planets. For all the difference it could have made, they could have believed it to been have been cooked up by the Mongol equivalent of the CIA. Yes, some believed that it was a punishment from God, but (at least in the Christian West) that didn't stop them from doing what they could (based on their limited scientific knowledge) to avoid or fight it.

The thing is, WE don't actually know or have answers to many of the most obvious questions - what proportion of the Plague was bubonic vs. the other even more lethal types, why it burst out from central Asia when it did, why it never really came back after the early 18th century, what proportion of the population actually died - the 1/3 to 1/2 figure is "accepted" based on a few rough and ready guesses but no one really knows - what proportion of the population was immune or resistant as opposed to just being lucky, and so on and so forth.

Life in those days was tough for a million reasons. Just making it past the age of eight already meant that you were a "lucky survivor", even in the best of conditions. But, man, reading about that thing that swept through in only a few years just makes you want to cry