Every so often a plague breaks out somewhere in Aldawyn, spreads from region to region, and burns itself out. Only one runs at a time, and most of the year there is none at all.
Expect one or two outbreaks a real year. An epidemic is running about a seventh of the time, so the rhythm is roughly:
~6 months quiet ──▶ ~1 month of epidemic ──▶ ~6 months quiet ──▶ …
While one is running, no other can begin. It has to burn out first.
An epidemic starts in a single region and moves outward only along borders that can be crossed, the same crossings an army would use. Where mountains or dense forest close a frontier, disease does not pass either.
That makes some places far safer than others:
a region with four open borders is infected roughly TWICE as often
a region with two as one with two
The most dangerous places to live are the crossroads, the well-connected heart of the map. The safest are the far corners reached through a single narrow frontier. The ent lands in the north are the clearest example: everything beyond Bor Proxis is reached through that one region, and the ent capital is the least plague-touched place in the world.
Once a region has had the epidemic and recovered, it cannot catch it again while that outbreak lasts. So a plague burns through a neighbourhood and then has nowhere left to go, which is usually what ends it.
No two outbreaks are alike, and that is the point:
| A typical outbreak reaches | 7 or 8 regions of 25 |
| It never leaves the first region | about 1 in 6 |
| It becomes a serious crisis, 20+ regions | about 1 in 9 |
| It reaches every region in the world | about 1 in 100 |
| It lasts | around a month, sometimes twice that |
So most outbreaks take a corner of the world. Occasionally one takes nearly all of it, and those are the ones people will remember.
Each infected region eventually recovers on its own. A region stays infectious for a few days at minimum, so an outbreak is never snuffed out the instant it begins. When the last infected region recovers, the epidemic is over. Every region becomes susceptible again, ready for whatever comes next. The next plague may carve an entirely different path.
Standing in an infected region is the only way to catch the plague. It cannot be caught from another person, and nobody can carry it across a border: the disease travels as the map moves it and no other way.
| You catch it, standing in an infected region | 1 in 10 each day |
| An illness lasts | around 10 days, and never fewer than 3 |
| Being ill costs you | 30 health a day |
| Recovery leaves you immune for life | 7 in 10 |
The roll is once a day, not once an outbreak, so a fortnight standing in an infected region is far more dangerous than a day of it. And once you have it, standing in an infected region does nothing further: you cannot catch it twice.
Infection is decided against the map as it stood yesterday. A region that falls to the plague today infects nobody standing in it until tomorrow.
That one day is the only actionable fact in this chapter:
the chronicle says the plague reached your region
│
└──▶ you have one day before the first roll against you
│
├─ leave, across an open border, for 10 health
└─ or stay, and eat better than you were
Nothing warns you. No message arrives to say the ground you are standing on is dangerous. The chronicle records every region the plague spreads to, and the world map has an epidemic layer that shows you where it is; joining the two is your job. If you are playing in a region near an outbreak, watch them.
Thirty health a day is a full day of living: a day's work, a training and a border crossing come to exactly that between them. So an illness spends the day you would have spent, and what you can still do depends entirely on what you eat:
| food | health a day | left after the plague takes its 30 | what that buys |
|---|---|---|---|
| q1 | 50 | 20 | work and flee, but not train |
| q2 | 100 | 70 | everything, and barely noticed |
This is where the quality of your food starts deciding something. On the poorest food, being ill means choosing between the day's wage and the road out. On anything better, a plague is an inconvenience. See Food.
Health cannot fall below zero, and zero means what it already means: you cannot act until you eat. The plague does not kill you by draining you.
Being ill makes you likelier to die of your years, and that is the only way it can kill you at all. It multiplies the chance the age curve already gives you by one and a half, so how much it matters depends entirely on how old you are. Across a whole illness, for a human man:
| age | chance of dying, well | chance of dying, ill |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 0.1% | 0.2% |
| 40 | 0.6% | 0.9% |
| 60 | 3.2% | 4.8% |
| 80 | 17.2% | 25.2% |
A plague shortens an old life and barely touches a young one. At twenty it is a rounding error; at eighty it is most of a percentage point on top of a risk that was already serious.
Because of that, a death while ill is recorded as a death while ill, and the world does not claim the plague killed you. Look at the eighty-year-old row: of the 25.2%, 17.2 points were there anyway, so only about a third of deaths while ill are the plague's doing at all, and nothing can tell which third. Your record says the condition you were in and leaves the conclusion to whoever reads it.
Recovering usually leaves you immune, and immunity is for the rest of that character's life. It is not lost when the outbreak ends, and no later plague can touch you. Roughly three in ten recoveries do not confer it. Immunity is a private trait: you see it on your Account, and nobody else sees it at all, while the illness itself is public for as long as you have it. See what you carry.
Note the asymmetry with regions, which all become susceptible again when an outbreak ends: a person remembers a plague and a province does not. Immunity does not pass on, either. It belongs to the person, so a new character begins susceptible however many plagues the one before them survived.
An epidemic is world news, so every stage of it appears in the chronicle for everyone: where it emerged, each region it spread to, each region that recovered, and the day it died out. Long after an outbreak has ended you can still read how it moved across the map. See the chronicle.
Your own illness is not world news. Catching it and recovering from it appear in your own record and nowhere else, and nobody else can see that you are ill. Nothing is written for the days in between: there would be ten entries an illness and your health already tells you.