The pages of the first part of this volume are covered with an exhaustive detailing of disease – partly its symptoms, but always the methods for its spread, and never a word about its cures.
The second part of the volume espouses the teachings of the Brotherhood of the Plagueborn. These cultists seek to achieve destruction and devastation through disease and pestilence. They promote the accumulation of filth, rot, and decay. They sneak contaminated foods into marketplaces. They steal bed linens of the ill and slip them into the beds of children. They dump filth into wells.
Their temples, it seems, are almost always found in the sewers, trash heaps, and waste pits of civilization. They lurk in the places where civilization breaks down into its foulest parts and then – like vermin – seek to spread that corruption and decay to every part of the world.
Deadly Carrier
Transmutation
Level: Clr 3
Components: V, S, DF
Casting Time: Standard action
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: InstantaneousYou render yourself immune to the effects of a single disease you currently carry within your body. At the same time, the disease becomes twice as contagious as normal. If the disease does not already have mechanics for contagion, assume that anyone spending at least 10 minutes within 20 feet of you must make a Fortitude saving throw (DC depends on the disease) or become infected.
DESIGN NOTES
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Like the Songsingers, the Plagueborn weren’t part of the Night of Dissolution conspiracy.
I’m somewhat confused by the question of why people join these chaos cults. They all seem to be promoting the same goal – destroy everything – for pretty similar reasons, and varying chiefly by preferred weapon and aesthetic, instead of representing a mixture of ideologies that all, for whatever reason, favor Chaos over Law. Is there something I’m missing? Do the chaos cultmasters have a lot of mind control, or diplomacy on the scale of mind control?
Iltumar’s story is probably a decent example – see https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/50874/roleplaying-games/in-the-shadow-of-the-spire-session-37c-iltumars-folly
@William, A personal favorite way that I prefer to explain it is the way that Robert j. Schwalb has done it in his own roleplaying game setting. The victory of chaos (chaotic evil) is inevitable, and so a good deal of chaos cults mistakenly beleve that accelerating/instegating that event will mean they will be rewarded/spared the results of said victory.