Virus Overview

The magical viruses of the misty dread realm are unseen killers. Like natural viruses, they sleep until they touch living cells, then wake and spread through the host's body. They harm their hosts in three ways: overwriting the tissue with their own pattern so the original dies, driving the tissue into frantic, painful overgrowth, or warping the mind rather than the body.

They began with Orsolan Vey, an old and bitter wizard whose wife died bearing their sixth child. He ignored his children yet demanded near-worship from them, and grew crueler with age, forbidding them to marry or study under any master but himself. At last they poisoned his food. Vey had been brewing potions meant to infect the surrounding domain so that he alone, holding the cures, could rule it. Knowing death was near, he cursed his children and drank all six. When they crept up to see the result, one touched his changed body and it collapsed into choking dust. They fled, each now carrying one of six viruses: shadow, psionic, phobia, combustion, petrification or crystal.

These viruses are too small to see, even with eyes of minute seeing, and detect invisibility misses them because nothing magical hides them. Detect magic can reveal them where they are dense, as in an infected person. Symptoms, usually fever and irritability, begin within 24 hours, but each strain has its own signs and few healers know them. If the patient is isolated and stripped of magic, detect magic may make infected skin glow a faint, sickly yellow-green, in carriers as well as the sick.

The wandering seers know the signs well and have potions said to cure the sick, though they rarely share them with outsiders. They are resistant but not immune, treat their own promptly, and lost many before finding their cures.

Each virus has a dormant and an active state. Touching the dormant form risks infection: the victim saves vs. spell at -2 or contracts it. Someone who succeeds must then save vs. death magic or become a carrier, unharmed but infectious through touch, saliva or any direct contact until purged. A single carrier has emptied whole villages.

Once active, a virus dies instantly outside the body, so a sick person cannot pass it on, but it never stops attacking until the host dies. It then goes dormant, making every corpse dangerous to touch.

Wearing a periapt of health or a similar item prevents both catching and carrying them. Cast by a healer, cure disease or dispel magic kills every virus, dormant or active, in a 15-foot radius; purify food and drink and dispel magic can stop infection by clearing dormant viruses from an area, but neither helps anyone already sick.

Heal destroys any of these viruses if cast before death. Cure disease is reliable during the first day; beyond that its chance falls 10% per 12 hours (90% at 36 hours, then 80%), and by the seventh day it cannot help. Each priest gets one attempt, though another priest may try.

Absorb disease, a psychometabolic devotion, can cure them, but the psionicist must make a power score roll or catch the virus, unless somehow immune. Suspend animation halts the disease for its duration. Complete healing does nothing against their magical nature, though other powers may affect particular strains.

The experience value listed for each virus is awarded for curing, or helping to cure, a victim.