Pestilence: The Book of Disease (Revised) by Justice Mora is a role playing game supplement published by Fat Goblin Games for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. As such, it is covered by the Open Game License and some parts are considered to be Open Game Content as a result.
The supplement is available as a 19-page PDF from DriveThruRPG for $3.41. One page is the front cover, one the front matter, half the Contents and one the Open Game License.
The Introduction explains that this is an updated version of one of Fat Goblin’s earliest works, with rules updated and polished and a new section added.
Disease explains what a disease is, then looks at physical diseases and mental diseases. Each of these has a standard format that the diseases in the supplement use; as physical diseases can be contagious, these have more components than mental ones.
Stages of a Disease explains that some diseases are more complex and have different stages, with the disease having different ailments at each stage. Each stage of a multistage disease has its own stat block. It also explains that multistage diseases are harder to overcome; a saving throw at, say, stage two, only moves the character back to stage one, and each stage of the disease requires its own casting of cure disease.
The diseases are then described. There are twelve different diseases, all physical though one isn’t caused by a virus, with one to three stages.
Plagues has variants of diseases that are in the form of a plague; they are related, but different. There are rules on how to convert an ordinary disease into a plague. This is followed by rules on how to alchemically create a plague. Finally, there are three plagues using the rules, with one example of each of the three different types of plague from the new rules. Two of these are based on diseases in this supplement; the third isn’t and looks like it may be completely new.
Pestilence: The Book of Disease (Revised) in Review
The PDF is bookmarked though not as thoroughly as it could be. The Contents cover the major sections. Navigation is okay. The text maintains a two-column format and appeared to be mostly free of errors. There are a couple of stock colour illustrations. Presentation is okay.
This provides new rules for making diseases more dangerous in a fantasy setting, where so often a magical cure can otherwise easily get rid of them for characters, if characters can’t shake them off easily enough anyway. Multistage diseases in particular are nasty, plus the additional rules on plagues and how to create such mean that characters could end up having to deal with a, possibly artificially created, plague running through a country. Pestilence: The Book of Disease (Revised) can be found by clicking here.
Leave a Reply