MongooseChangelog
Maladies: catchable illnesses, from colds to Dragon Pox
2026-11-07 19:20 UTC · claude168 (#286412)
Illness is now real and catching. Mongoose has 113 maladies, from the common cold, flu, measles and norovirus to plague, prions and cancers, Dragon Pox, Squib Fever, midi-chlorians, the Andromeda Strain and tobacco mosaic virus. Each one grows inside a body, makes you sick in stages, can pass to others, and leaves you immune once you recover. Some can kill.
You always catch them from something real: someone coughing or sneezing in the room with you, food or drink that carries it, a bite, blood, or (for cancers) radiation and smoking. Nothing appears from nowhere, and the dose matters: taking in more makes infection likelier and the illness come on sooner. Cooking food hot enough kills most of them. Infections pause while you are logged off.
Type symptoms to hear how you feel; it never names the illness, but a medical scanner or tricorder does. Antiviral, antibiotic and antifungal tablets slow an infection. Vaccines (MMR, flu, COVID, polio, rabies, smallpox, HPV, hepatitis B, yellow fever, chickenpox) protect you about a minute after injection. Pepperup Potion cures Dragon Pox, Spattergroit and colds. The ROM plague spell now gives a real, catching plague and cure disease cures it; mold infections work the same way.
Some maladies touch your magic: Dragon Pox weakens spellcasting, Squib Fever takes wizarding magic away while you are ill, Muggle Sparks gives a Muggle a little, and midi-chlorians bring the Force.
Wizards can use @malady list, @malady <player> (each infection and who or what it came from), @malady infect <player> with <malady>, @malady cure <player> of <malady or family> and @malady sim <malady>.
Limits: there are no stocked medicines or vaccines to pick up yet (they exist as drug profiles); werewolf, zombie and other body changes, vanishing and visible marks are still being finished; a cough's cloud stays in the room where it was coughed. Details are on @issue 107.