Disease in Blackmoor

In the latest entry of the Dungeons and Digressions blog, ze bulette talks about disease in D&D. The article mentions Supplement II Blackmoor as a good resource for information about this phenomenon. Sure enough, on page 52 of Supplement II, the following diseases are detailed:

• Grippe
• Bubonic Plague
• Cholera
• Malaria
• Small Pox
• TB
• Typhoid Fever
• Typhus
• Yellow Fever
• Adv. Leprocy
• Crud
• Spottet Fever

I am not aware of whether disease was a common phenomenon of Blackmoor campaigns. So far I have not seen any accounts from the original players mentioning it, nor does it seem like a particularly heroic element to a story. Still, the rules can come in pretty handy as can be seen in the previously mentioned blog.

Of course, it would be wrong autmonatically linking something to Blackmoor because of its appearance in Supplement II. Beyond Temple of the Frog, many authors contributed to Supplement II. Editor Tim Kask wrote the following on Supplement II:

"TotF was the only part of BM that was Dave’s alone. In fact, if the whole of the book were analyzed, Dave wrote the TotF segment, and I wrote about 65 or 70% of the rest. Gary  [Gygax], Brian [Blume] and Rob [Kuntz], and Terry [Kuntz], too, contributed the rest. Some of the ideas might have been Dave’s, but the execution, expansion and explanation were ours."


 So where does that leave diseases in Blackmoor? I guess that's up to you! :)





-Havard