User:ProphetPX/Xal'Anim (3.5e Campaign Setting)/Dangers and Diseases

Dangers and Diseases

Here are listed some of the various dangers and maladies of my strange, new world:

Diseases

• Dreadnought Plagues

(think of Ravenloft-type vile-damage, but carried-out as an airborne plague of germ biological weapons)

• Passions Of Light

"Passions" such as this operate as the opposite of sicknesses/diseases, so in some cases, you could call it a "good disease" (however nothing this good comes without drawbacks, as will be divulged much later). Character advancement paths, skill synergies, feats, abilities, even various statistics or certain magic rituals can actually become ACCELERATED or EMPOWERED (due to wild magic effects from the ring of the world) if a character is thus "infected").

Dangers

• Attitudes of Time

This is an insane malady, whereas unlike modern definitions or approaches to "manic-depressives" and those with Dissociative Identity Disorder (sometimes called "multiple personalities"), people here can suffer from "Time Attitudes" which incorporate facets of themselves from alternate timelines which shift in and out of their mind as fast as the ripple effect of the "dimensional seizure" takes place. This is very much like epilepsy, except much worse in the confused dementia sense that people can go completely insane from gradually nevermore maintaining a sure handle on who they are. Basically, people's entire identities wither-away faster than with Alzheimer's, except the focus of this is mostly on the confusion of Identity rather than so much on perception of their outward world.

• Dimensional Slides

Wormholes of seemingly random opportunity which sometimes are exploited by "dimension hackers" (ie: clans such as with Mindflayers, who are strong aberrant slave-traders whose reach has never exceeded their grasp). Other times, rifts may open here or there just from a mere galactic energy storm, and entire groups of people (and not a few homes, farms, and castles!) have also been known to be surprisingly "disappeared" and (in the cases of the slavemasters), abducted all at once, to "secure, unspecified locations" of those slavemasters due to such sudden, disastrous inter-dimensional calamities.