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Add the humble tick instead of rabies. Plenty of nasty (but generally not lethal) diseases you can get from them, and it's not unlikely to get bitten running around in woods and fields.

btw: what would it take to diagnose the diseases without a lab or some test? food poisoning / dystentery / cholera is pretty close when it comes to symptoms.

Fodd poisoning could also include diarrhea.

Ticks? Absolutely! My sister in law wirks for the French forest office and she is very serious about removibg them, for the reasons you stated. AGL roll to remove it properly (I've had to do it with a tick remover). Very cold winters will reduce their numbers, though.

Serious question: is this good gaming material? Personally I can't find anything remotely fun or gratifying about gaming out checking for ticks, or contracting a fatal disease with no cure -- but maybe some people differ in that opinion? Genuinely curious.

I can on the other hand see some fun to be had with situations where the characters come across, say, a plague camp. They need answers from someone inside. Or maybe someone in the group feels obligated to provide care. Drama and danger!

Hello Omnipus,

I would have suggested it if it were not good gaming material, in a ... different way. This will force players to spend time and resources gathering useful items (alcohol / vinegar to use as disinfectants, plants you can use for ointments, even soap - to avoid lice and other parasites that can transmit debilitating diseases, or are simply painful - & pots to boil water, etc.), realistic risks of infection / gangrene will lead players to think twice before getting into a firefight or even a knife fight, and the more dangerous diseases can be scenario material: finding rabies vaccine within 30 days will be .... interesting. Likewise, for base building, having a pharmacist and the requisite equipment to make basic medicines (disinfectants, pain killers, parasite killing drugs ...) will be a HUGE bonus. Of course, the Referee should be careful not to make the game only about diseases, but they should always be lurking in the background. Other narrative arcs can include delivering precious medicine to a settlement / military unit, tracking down the source of fake, contraband medication (there are still some pharma plants operational in Southern / Eastern France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain ..... but does the stuff you bought come from one of these?), helping a community build / fix whatever water purification system they use .....

Serious question: is this good gaming material? Personally I can't find anything remotely fun or gratifying about gaming out checking for ticks, or contracting a fatal disease with no cure -- but maybe some people differ in that opinion? Genuinely curious.

I can on the other hand see some fun to be had with situations where the characters come across, say, a plague camp. They need answers from someone inside. Or maybe someone in the group feels obligated to provide care. Drama and danger!

I dunno...there could be a great gaming arc if one of the characters is bitten by a rabid animal and has 30 - 45 days to find an ampoule of rabies vaccine before they succumb. I can just imagine the look on the players' faces when the character in question fails their stamina check and the GM tells them they're infected. Now roll 2d20 + 20 for the number of days, and get them to start ticking off the days. I reckon that would make for awesome gameplay over the next few sessions!

Fair enough! The issue to me is that if you fail, the consequences -- dying of a disease -- are not fun. But then again, that's true of everything and this is a game about very elevated risk! I just transcribed the whole Mental Trauma table and was thinking "whew, a lot of these are painful." But they can be cured, with time and talent and luck.

I dunno...there could be a great gaming arc if one of the characters is bitten by a rabid animal and has 30 - 45 days to find an ampoule of rabies vaccine before they succumb. I can just imagine the look on the players' faces when the character in question fails their stamina check and the GM tells them they're infected. Now roll 2d20 + 20 for the number of days, and get them to start ticking off the days. I reckon that would make for awesome gameplay over the next few sessions!
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That was my idea .... I actually stole the idea from a very old anime series (called Lady Oscar), but it can work beautifully in T2W. You could also have an important character (or child of ....) being bitten and the PCs tasked with finding it, and bringing it back. Rabies should, however, probably not be a routine encounter, probably because of that. So the "rabid dogs" will become "aggressive dogs", and only on a 10 on 1d10 will it be a rabid dog (and then, you have to allow the PCs an observation / healing roll to spot that the animal is not behaving normally: excessive salivation, wobbly legs ....).

Best,

Nicolas

[...] Many groups will abandon the badly wounded or sick to assure their own survival, and no one will waste their limited supplies on a badly wounded enemy.

Amputations will become common as the last resort.

Grim times indeed.

Welcome to the pre-WW2 field medicine of the feldshers, barber surgeons and (more recently) and primitive healthcare systems inventions such as the barefoot doctors of China.

I see "country-roaming doctor with bodyguards" as a very valid campaign concept for parties playing T2K.

The thing is, Rabies, even in a war ravaged Europe, will be extremely rare ...

Yes, even historically rabies is not a big killer and certainly not a plague like choler etc. can become. Rabies is a shitty way to to go, hence the prominence in medical literature across the centuries, but it's not a sickness that spreads out through a population or becomes endemic (because fatality is practically 100%).

Additionally, by the mid-90s rabies was already very rare in Central Europa, with 855 cases in Germany in 1995, down from 6,800 in 1980. The most prominent animal to bite humans and transmit the disease was the fox. A separate problem is the European Bat Lyssavirus (EBLV), and bat rabies is still very much a thing. The dangers for humans are the same as with classic (so called: terrestrial rabies). It's rare for European bats to bite humans however and as such, rabies should be a rare encounter in T2K.