The Plague of Darkness by Gustave Dore

The Kingmaker Campaign I am running has finished book five of the Adventure Path. Looking back at some of my older posts here at The Iron Tavern it looks like we started book five in mid-December. Given the holiday schedule, not too bad to be moving into book six by early February.

The players have now waged mass combat against a threat to their kingdom which they handily turned aside. In addition they made an attack on a city that they believe were behind the attacks.

The most notable event during the siege was the druid unleashing the bubonic plague upon the city just prior to their infiltration. That ran its course for longer than they would have liked with some rather significant casualties within the city and even some spreading to the countryside around the city in question.

As the GM I tried to play out the effects of the plague in a manner that made it have significant consequences without being mean about it. So I looked over the disease in question and figured out the DC needed to avoid contracting it and the necessary number of saves to cure. It had a pretty respectable DC, which didn’t seem like it would bode well for the common folks in the city with a DC that high and the need to have two consecutive saves to cure it.

Another player with much more of a math mind than me helped me make some very rough, ballpark statistics on an appropriate percentage of death amongst the people that contracted the plague. For our approximations we split the types of people into commoners and experts, elite commoners and experts and warriors and then elite warriors. With a generic fort save modifier for each of those groups in mind the player in the group worked up his math magic and came back with some numbers.

First the very rough numbers on how many people would contract the disease if exposed to it.

• Commoner: 16 in 20
• Elite Commoner: 14 in 20
• Expert: 16 in 20
• Elite Expert: 14 in 20
• Warrior: 14 in 20
• Elite Warrior 12 in 20

Already it looks like the plague will spread pretty quickly. Next was to figure out about how many folks would die of the plague and if they were not receiving much if any aid – magical or otherwise. Those very rough numbers came out looking like this:

• Commoner/ Expert: 40.96%
• Elite Commoner/ Expert: 16.807 %
• Warriors: 11.7649%
• Elite Warriors: 2.79936%

Not a good day to be a commoner or expert!

It obviously did not take long for the characters to realize the gravity of the situation. Once they realized the plague was starting to spread and quickly they sent much aid to the city in question. They actually reacted pretty well. They had wands of remove disease sent, anti-plague medicine and boosted the ranks of healers in the city rather significantly. This was all in addition to a quarantine of the entire city enforced by the armies they happened to have around it.

So next up my math minded friend made some assumptions about the amount of healing and aid available and came up with a much improved death rate when factoring in the assistance.

• Commoner/ Expert: 24.01 %
• Elite Commoner/ Expert: 7.776%%
• Warriors: 1.5625%
• Elite Warriors: .16384%

While the commoners are still having a rough time of it, their odds of survival definitely increased.

Those numbers are all very, very rough and in a rather large ballpark. There were many variables we did not fully account for and possibly overlooked. But they sufficed for a quick work-up to help establish the large ballpark to play in.

Tomorrow night we make the transition from book five to book six. We typically handle kingdom activities on a set of message boards I maintain for the group. So many months have gone by in kingdom time, buildings and walls have been rebuilt and the kingdom treasury is nearly overflowing with wealth due to the magic item economy.