Writing Disease

Sickness in Siegmore's System is a worldbuilding tool first and a mechanical threat second. The Disease type (/Diseases/) stores period-realistic illnesses — viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi — with honest courses, diagnoses, and treatments.

Field conventions

• kind — virus, bacterium, parasite, or fungus. Pick the real one; it decides how it behaves (viruses jump between bodies, bacteria ride water and wounds, parasites need a host chain, fungi need a harvest).
• transmission — the practical answer: "the breath of the sick", "fouled water — it travels by bucket", "fleas off rats". Not person-to-person where history says so (Lockjaw, St. Anthony's Fire, Childbed Fever are NOT contagious — that distinction is dramatic gold).
• incubation — the hidden window. This is the field that makes disease a story: the peddler who left before the fever showed was here all along.
• symptoms — observed order of appearance, in healer's language, not Latin.
• course — the untreated timeline with real numbers ("dead in three days at the outside").
• diagnosis — how a healer tells it from its look-alikes (the salt-grains that separate measles from the pox; the clock-rhythm of the ague).
• fatality — rarely lethal / often fatal / almost always fatal. Reserve "almost always fatal" for the true killers: the Black Sweats, the Mad Sickness, Lockjaw.
• contagiousness — low / moderate / high / very high. High or very high contagiousness with low lethality (Red Measles) is its own kind of threat.

How diseases enter play

• Through wounds — the infection complications on injury templates (Deep Puncture Wound's lockjaw, sealed infections) can mature into named diseases. Use the disease file's incubation to schedule the reckoning.
• Through places — a fouled well, a siege camp's lice, a wet rye harvest. The transmission field names the culprit; fixing the source ends the outbreak.
• Through people — carriers with hidden incubation windows. One visitor, one shared cup, one bed.

Conventions

1. Prevention over cure — nearly every treatment line admits what history admits: the real cure is the boiled kettle, the washed hand, the drained marsh.
2. Survivors mean something: immunity is real (the pox, measles) and survivor-nurses are period-accurate and story-rich.
3. Keep the horror factual. The terror of these files is that they are true; don't add fantasy outrages on top.
4. Name them what a village names them — the Black Sweats, Gut Rot, the Living Death — with the medical truth underneath.