"An evolution of the bubonic plague, the sand plague targets living creatures specifically, infecting them and causing their skin to bubble and wart, and them to gain a horrible cough. Contact with a plague-infested individual infects the person who touched them, but the symptoms of the infection are not apparent."
"Early warning signs include: dizziness, loss of direction, and 'the feeling of thousands of screaming voices piercing your mind'. After a period of time, the infection grows in the afflicted, slowing their movement speed and causing the voices in their head to get progressively louder. At this point infection can be spread to another individual, though only through the blood (scratching or punching), and even then it has a low chance. After another, much shorter period of time, the disease evolves into its final form. The infected gain a shambling movement speed, and whenever they grab a non-infected individual, they cough on them and spread the disease through their spittle."
"This may all seem horrible, but the disease has one boone: As soon as the infected person dies, the disease vanishes from their body without a trace, allowing it to be moved safely without protective equipment."
"However, the most visibly disturbing quality of the plague is that it causes a strange reddish-brown 'meat moss' to grow over the walls and flooring of the station. The meat moss has no effect on a person, but dims the lights around the cluster and spreads when in the vicinity of an infected individual. Meat moss can be destroyed by the use of fire."
"In order to defeat the plague, multiple skin samples must be taken from the infected, who have to be alive for the virus to be in their system, before being analyzed (citation needed) by the virologist/CMO and medical staff if the virologist is not available. Once a vaccine is created and 'advanced' enough to combat and destroy the disease in a person without hurting them severely and is spread among the crew, the disease is exterminated. If seventy-five percent of the living crew is infected, the disease wins."
Ever play Pathologic? if not, do so. This game mode is based off the notorious 'Sand Plague' from that game, a disease that infects the nameless town the game takes place in district by district, killing hundreds of people daily. This 'adaptation' lessens the threat of the disease, but still makes it quite potent.
The round would start with, say, four people infected by the disease. They would be afflicted by the early symptoms (stopping to collect themselves, strange bouts of fatigue, and even stranger noises coming from seemingly nowhere (not ingame)) and would go along their daily lives until the disease evolves into its second phase. At this point, they can infect people by punching them, but their speed is slowed and they are visibly infected if you examine their mask-less face ('Their skin seems to pulsate and bubble!'). In exchange, they gain some stun resistance and brute resistance. Once the disease progresses to the final stage, they have their speed massively gimped, but in return get a large amount of brute resistance and become visibly infected and the ability to infect people by aggressively grabbing them, which is a instant infection versus punching, which would only have a chance plus get you beaten to death, probably. Stage three infected can't be tased, you need to disable them instead.
The infected can only talk in faint voices...like...this...
If you are infected, a message in red lettering flashes across your status bar saying "You feel like you've contracted something awful."
Infected are still considered human unless a changed law removes that status.
Recently killed plague victims emit a cloud of plague or two above/around their corpse. If someone steps through that cloud, they have a 50/50 chance of being infected. If you walk, you bypass the cloud completely. Plague clouds take three minutes to disappear, be them from corpses or meat moss. This is to stop murderboning of the plague victims, as slashing/beating one to death has the chance of causing a plague cloud to pop out RIGHT ON TOP OF YOU! Lasers and bullets are fine though.
Cargo can order 'cloth cloaks' which shield the wearer from one attempted infection, and if you ARE infected wearing them, they get stuck to you by your pus-squirting, sweat-stained skin, and cannot be removed until after the disease has left your system. These would cost only 10 supply points and not need any sort of ID to open, and come with five cloaks each. Cloaks fit into the exo suit slot, so you can still have backpacks/satchels/duffelbags on.
An upgrade to the cloth cloaks would be the 'heavy cloaks', which completely enshroud the wearer, stunt their movement speed like a hardsuit would, but can withstand FOUR attempted infections before becoming visually dirtied and rendered useless. Costs 25 supply points, and come with three heavy cloaks and three 'claw masks', which do nothing but look like bulkier plague doctor masks (because that's what they are). Also allows you to cosplay as an Executor from Pathologic so that's cool. Fits in your backpack slot. Claw masks can't be used as internals.
Meat moss can be spawned by an infected person, and as long as any infected individual is within four blocks of it (walls block it), it will spread, but they can manually spread it if they want. Meat moss dims lights and gives a slight speed decrease to whoever walks over it, but it mainly sticks to the walls, rusting them. Meat moss can also corrode lights if it touches them, making them barely usable (like, the block they're in has a little light, and the blocks around it have little to none) but not destroying them entirely (they still have to be replaced). The most dangerous thing about meat moss, however, is that it has a SMALL CHANCE of spawning a 'plague cloud', which, if walked through, cannot infect you. Imagine them to be flying wetted tiles, so watch out in maintenance!.
Fully infected have limited night vision (things appear a little dark when in pitch black but you can still see) in order for them to help surprise individuals. They can also not use their hands for things other than: hugging (has a minuscule chance of trying to spread infection but it can be done rapidly) and grabbing (consistently spreads infection when someone is aggressively grabbed).
Skin/tissue samples are needed to help create a vaccine, and you use one of two special machines called 'Diluters', one inside the CMO's office and the easiest to get, and one in the Viro's sex dungeon/lab, which take the skin samples and either:
A)Use them to make the current level, single-use vaccine (costs two skin samples for level one, one for level two and three, and none for level four)
B)Use them to 'level up' the machine (costs four for level one, five for level two, six for level three, and seven for level four; that's twenty-two total)
C)Eat two and go into crit from toxins in exchange for the disease being rid from your system (quite costly, I must say)
Samples can be taken multiple times from infected, hitting an infected with a scalpel, kitchen knife, or even rarely the glass shard can cause an infected to drop a skin sample, but the real meat is from killing one and taking three skin samples from one by butchering it (it doesn't destroy the corpse).
Vaccines:
Vaccine LVL. 1: Causes 15 brute to each of your bodyparts and 25 toxin damage but cleans you of the disease.
Vaccine LVL. 2: Causes 12 brute to each of your bodyparts and 20 toxin damage but cleans you of the disease.
Vaccine LVL. 3: Causes 10 brute to each of your bodyparts and 15 toxin damage but cleans you of the disease.
(FREE ONCE RESEARCHED) Vaccine LVL. 4: Causes 5 brute to each of your bodyparts and 10 toxin damage but cleans you of the disease.
Two tissue samples: Causes 5 brute to each of your bodyparts and 75 toxin damage but cleans you of the disease.
Diluters cannot be deconstructed or moved.
Bodies of the fully infected, if dragged without gloves, WILL infect you, no matter if you're wearing either of the cloaks. Wear those gloves, people.
Bodies of the infected after they're died and the infection has left their corpse after a short time period (five minutes sounds about right), they can be cloned. If you put them into the scanner before the disease escapes their body however, the cloner will not be able to scan them because of the amounts of 'errant brain activity' scattered across them. This is no ordinary plague. It speaks for itself.
Now, some of the more keen of you might have noticed that, "Hey wait, I can't immediately just eliminate the threat in a few seconds upon realization it's a plague round like I can on a blob, Hand of God, Cult, or etc?".
You can beat cultists and Hoggers to death. You can torch the blob as soon as you spot it.
But what if your enemy is incorporeal? What if it has no visible form?
"But wait, considering that we need skin cells, people will have to die!"
That's the point. People have to attack infected and risk being infected themselves in order to help save everyone else. Having an enemy that you can eliminate within five minutes of a round starting is stupid.
So what will it be, crew? Either flamethrower everything and cleanse the disease through fire and flame at the cost of massive casualties and one pretty pissed AI? Or use cunning and science to make a vaccine to administer through syringes (hopefully you have a few syringe guns laying around by now) aimed at the infected, and rejoice as they shrug off their rags and help you administer more of the antidote?
And remember:
You can't save everyone.
RULES:
1) Infected cannot attack other infected and cannot willingly aid the uninfected in creating a cure UNLESS they are only in the first stage of the infection. Once they hit the second stage they have gone slightly mad, and are more interested in spreading the plague than helping destroy it. Stage threes can't help either for obvious reasons.
2) Infected cannot kill people; the point is to have the disease take over the station, not murderbone everyone in sight because 'hurr durr I'm infected that means I'm a team antag now". No. Being infected means you have lost your sanity to the pain. All you want is to violently hug someone, but not kill them!
3) Because infected count still as humans, killing them counts as M U R D E R. Mercy-killing, maybe, but to an Asimov AI they are all still humans, as they are. Just because you got a cold doesn't mean you are suddenly the cold.
4) RUNNING AROUND SLAUGHTERING PLAGUE VICTIMS IS SHITTY!!! The best course of action would be to quarantine them and send in people wearing heavy cloaks to (violently stab) collect samples from them and return with said samples. Killing everyone would just leave plague clouds all over the place, which would in turn infect MORE people because they run through one, oh whoops I'm infected now, better go start to punch people as soon as I hit level two in my infection. If you see someone just killing every single plague victim, ahelp it.
I spent like 3 hours typing this out with my fingers essentially frostbitten. I will bump the FUCK out of this thread as I am super proud of all my work in it. I don't care if coderbus doesn't want to implement new game modes because they didn't make them, this one is unique.
IDEAS FOR CHANGES/EDITS ARE APPRECIATED!!!
