Progression and End States

The following system presents progression tracks for diseases and poisons that cause the victim’s situation to become increasingly worse.

When a victim is first hit by and afflicted with a disease or poison, they immediately suffer the effects of the first step down the progression track. For diseases, this is latent/carrier; for poisons, it’s usually weakened. This replaces the affliction’s normal effects (such as exhaustion), though many afflictions still produce additional symptoms. Truly deadly diseases and poisons might cause the victim to start further along the progression track than normal.

All effects from disease and poison tracks are cumulative.

Most afflictions also have an end state — a point at which the disease or poison has progressed as far as it can. Once an affliction has reached its end state, the victim keeps all current effects (but doesn’t suffer further effects) and the affliction makes no further attacks. By default, each disease and poison track has an end state of dead, but some afflictions have less severe end states, and others might progress only to a certain intermediate state at worst, allowing victims to continue to defend against attacks.

In general, whenever an affliction hits a victim with an attack, they move one step further down the progression track, gaining the effects of the next state and keeping all previous effects, until they reach the end state. If they are afflicted with a disease, they move one step back toward healthy whenever they fulfill the conditions in the disease’s Recovery entry (usually by being missed by one or more attacks). Once they reach healthy, they are cured. Poisons work differently — fulfilling the Cure condition removes a poison from the victim’s system, but they remain at the same step on the track and recover gradually. (Treat a poison that has exhausted its duration in the same way.) For every day of bed rest (or 2 nights of normal rest), a victim recovers one step; this recovery is doubled as normal by Medicine checks, and tenacious poisons might require a longer recovery period. Usually, protection from poison or lesser restoration immediately moves the victim to a healthy state on the respective track, and a heal spell will work for both. However, once the disease or poison has reached its end state, only a more powerful spell such as miracle or wish can remove it.

Some diseases and poisons cause the same effects as a condition (such as poisoned) or render characters paralysed. Effects that modify or remove those conditions (such as immunities) do not apply; only effects and immunities that help against diseases or poisons apply, as appropriate.