Saturday 28 March 2020

d20 diseases

The best entries from Wikipedia's list of fictional diseases, fucked around with and compressed into a useful form. Just posting about plague for no reason at all.
  1. Hanahaki Syndrome. Flowering plants take root in your lungs. You start coughing up petals and eventually suffocate. Only cure is for someone to fall in love with you. The plants' roots can be surgically removed, but then you lose the capacity to fall in love ever again.
  2. Macondovirus. You can't and don't have to sleep. Your eyes glow like a cat. Gradually you lose your identity and your understanding of the world, leaving you an autonomous drone that exists only to labor. Probably a metaphor.
  3. Stripes. Paints your body with colourful stripes that alter their hue and pattern according to the things people say about you. As the disease advances it starts to fuck about with the shape of your skin, covering you in shifting conversation-dependent waves of feathers or fungus. Kept at bay by eating a fuckload of lima beans.
  4. Carnosaur Virus. Makes you pregnant with a flesh-eating dinosaur fetus that will tear its way out of you on reaching maturity. With a good doctor you could have a C-section and raise a little baby raptor of your own.
  5. Malignapterosis. Makes you sneeze, break out in spots and experience violent temperature fluctuations. Actually a transformed wizard hiding out from his enemies. The virus is relatively harmless, but the wizard's enemies want to kill you to force him out.
  6. Say The Opposite Of What You Mean Disease. Does what it sounds like it does. Painless but infuriating.
  7. Protomorphosis Syndrome. Makes you "de-evolve" into a caveman, then a monkey, then a rodent, then a lizard, then an amphibian, then a little blob of cells. If it's not stopped you merge with the oceanic all-consciousness of the time before time.
  8. Bonus Eruptus. Makes your skeleton try to jump out of your mouth and run away. You can stop this from happening by carefully negotiating with your skeleton, arranging to drink more milk, respect its autonomy, let it make decisions sometimes, etc.
  9. Dave's Syndrome. Drives you into a frenzy of destruction whenever you're exposed to temperatures in excess of 31C.
  10. Electric Flu. Characterised by facial redness, sparks coming from the cheeks and uncontrolled bursts of electricity that lethally zap anyone who's standing near you when you sneeze. Spread by magnetic fields.
  11. Geodermic Granititis. Fools the central nervous system into calcifying bodily tissue, eventually turning you into a pile of rocks. Also known as cobbles. Makes you very hard to kill before you die.
  12. Ghost Sickness. Contracted from prolonged proximity or intimate contact with ghosts. Causes hallucinations, chills and fear, making you terrified of everything you encounter. Cured by vanquishing the ghost that gave it to you.
  13. Head Pigeons. Makes a pigeon nest on your head. Highly contagious.
  14. Holovirus. Transmitted via radio waves. Often caught from intimate contact with holograms. Endows you with telepathy, telekinesis and hex-vision while draining your life force and driving you insane.
  15. Mono Orangosis. Makes you unable to see, hear, smell, taste or touch anything orange. Technically means you can walk through orange walls - however, just painting them orange won't work, as you'll walk through the paint and hit the brick.
  16. Polywater Intoxication. Makes you sweaty and horny and incapable of controlling your impulses. Fun to have. Possibly turns you into a swashbuckler, or makes you get naked and run into a blizzard.
  17. The Suds. Bleaches your skin and makes you cough up soap bubbles. Otherwise just a cold.
  18. Worrywarts. Covers your body in ugly green warts and makes you incapable of making decisions. Cured by touching the horn of a wartmonger and chanting a special incantation, which transfers all your warts to the wartmonger's body.
  19. Angel Toxicosis. Gives you crystalline wings and super-hearing, strength and vision. Slowly removes your ability to taste, sleep, cry, feel pain and talk. Ultimately you give up your heart and your memory before turning into a beautiful, highly infectious angel statue.
  20. Radical-6. Causes you to experience time at a 40% slower rate. This is so annoying that you kill yourself.

4 comments:

  1. I see Zim, Pokemon, Dr. Who, and Star Trek.

    Electric flu actually sounds quite gameable.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I see that fucking children's book, Tales of Symphonia, and Zero-Escape.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What are the chances we'd do this so close in time to one another? https://unlawfulgames.blogspot.com/2020/03/strange-diseases-picked-up-while.html

    ReplyDelete