Source Player Core pg. 201
The quarantine pod hums with recycled air. Your patient lies behind transparent bioplast, skin mottled with infection, breath shallow and irregular. You've been here for eight hours—monitoring vitals, administering antibiotics, adjusting environmental controls to slow the pathogen's spread. This is your third shift this week. The disease shows no sign of breaking.
This is Treat Disease in Starfall Galaxy.
It's not the heroic moment of saving someone from death's door. It's the exhausting, unglamorous work of keeping them stable while their immune system—natural or augmented—wages war against an invisible enemy. It's rationing medicine because the next supply shipment won't arrive for weeks. It's explaining to desperate families that you're doing everything you can, even when you're not sure it's enough.
Treat Disease is the downtime activity that allows trained medical practitioners to assist diseased creatures in fighting off infections. Unlike the immediate interventions of Administer First Aid or Treat Wounds, treating disease is a marathon—eight hours or more of sustained care, repeated over days or weeks as the patient navigates the disease's stages.
In Starfall Galaxy, where Rift-tainted pathogens mutate unpredictably, ancient plagues resurface from derelict ships, and bio-engineered viruses serve as weapons of corporate sabotage, the ability to treat disease is as vital as the ability to pilot through Rift-Space. This activity doesn't cure diseases outright—it grants bonuses to the patient's saving throws, giving them a better chance to fight off the infection naturally.
Medic treating disease-infected patient in Starfall Galaxy quarantine facility
Who Treats Disease in Starfall?
Disease management spans every level of Starfall society:
Guild Pathologists: Chronologist-trained specialists who study temporal disease vectors and Rift-mutation patterns
Commission Health Officers: Bureaucrats administering mass vaccination campaigns and enforcing quarantines
Ship Medics: Lone practitioners on isolated vessels, often dealing with outbreaks far from any medical station
Frontier Healers: Self-taught practitioners treating diseases with names they invented themselves
Street Clinics: Underground medics treating the uninsured and undocumented in Inner Sphere underlevels
Corporate Medical Teams: Well-equipped professionals whose services come with binding contracts
Treat Disease Trained
Treat Disease Trained
Requirements You’re wearing or holding a medkit.
You spend at least 8 hours caring for a diseased creature. Attempt a Medicine check against the disease's DC. After you attempt to Treat a Disease for a creature, you can't try again until after that creature's next save against the disease.
Critical Success You grant the creature a +4 circumstance bonus to its next saving throw against the disease.
Success You grant the creature a +2 circumstance bonus to its next saving throw against the disease.
Critical Failure Your efforts cause the creature to take a –2 circumstance penalty to its next save against the disease.
Non-Combat Applications and Narrative Uses
Treat Disease creates natural downtime drama:
Outbreak Scenarios:
A ship's crew is infected—do you quarantine and risk crew morale, or try to continue the mission?
A station locks down for quarantine—supplies dwindle, tensions rise, conspiracy theories flourish
A planet-wide epidemic strains medical resources—who gets treatment first?
Investigation Hooks:
Unusual symptom patterns suggest bio-weapon or Rift-taint rather than natural disease
A disease that should be extinct suddenly reappears—who released it, and why?
Patients respond to treatment inconsistently—is someone sabotaging the medicine?
Economic Pressure:
Treatment requires expensive antibiotics or specialized equipment
Insurance won't cover "experimental" Rift-taint therapies
Black market medicine might be counterfeit or contaminated
Cultural Conflicts:
Religious groups refuse certain treatments
Guild protocols conflict with local customs
Quarantine enforcement becomes authoritarian oppression
Societal Impact in Starfall Galaxy
Quarantine Economics: Entire economies revolve around disease management. Stations near Rift zones maintain permanent quarantine facilities. Medical supplies are strategic resources, hoarded or traded like ammunition.
Guild Gatekeeping: The Chronologists' Guild and Commission Health Authority control access to advanced treatments, pandemic response protocols, and research data. Guild certification determines who can legally practice medicine—and who gets prosecuted for unauthorized healing.
Class Disparity: Wealthy citizens receive cutting-edge treatments in sterile med-bays. The poor rely on overworked street clinics with expired supplies. Disease becomes a class marker—visible symptoms signal poverty and lack of guild connections.
Rift-Taint Stigma: Survivors of Rift-taint infections often face discrimination. Some mutations are permanent. Others leave psychological scars. "Taint-marked" individuals may be barred from certain jobs, guilds, or settlements.
Preventive Measures: Vaccination is mandatory on Commission Core worlds but spotty in the Frontier. Some communities reject vaccines due to conspiracy theories or past corporate abuses. Others desperately seek them. Black market "vaccines" range from genuine smuggled doses to dangerous placebos.
Adventure Hooks
The Quarantine Ship: A passenger liner arrives at station with half the crew dead and the rest infected with an unknown disease. Station authorities order the ship destroyed to prevent spread. PCs aboard have 48 hours to identify the disease, treat survivors, and convince the Commission to delay execution—while the pathogen continues mutating.
The Cure Conspiracy: A virulent plague sweeps through Frontier settlements. The only effective treatment is controlled by a single corporation charging extortionate prices. PCs discover the corp engineered the disease—do they steal the cure, expose the conspiracy, or find an independent solution? And what happens when corporate enforcers come hunting?
The Chronologist's Apprentice: A dying Chronologist offers to teach PCs advanced disease-treatment techniques (Master or Legendary proficiency) in exchange for retrieving research data from a quarantined station. The station's automated systems are still active, the quarantine is still necessary, and whatever killed the original research team might still be there.
The Rift-Plague Experiment: An NPC ally is infected with a Rift-taint disease that grants them unpredictable powers—but is slowly killing them. A rogue scientist offers experimental treatment that might cure the disease or stabilize the mutations permanently. The treatment is illegal, painful, and has a significant failure rate. What does the ally choose? What do the PCs recommend?
The Medical Supply Heist: A shipment of antibiotics destined for an epidemic-stricken colony is "lost" to pirates—who turn out to be desperate colonists from a rival settlement facing their own outbreak. Both colonies need the medicine. Neither can afford to share. The Commission doesn't care. PCs must decide who lives, who dies, or find a solution nobody's thought of yet.
The Weight of Eight Hours
Treat Disease represents the unglamorous reality of medical practice: the slow, exhausting work of supporting a patient's immune system through the darkest hours of infection. You don't perform miracle cures—you grant a +2 bonus to a saving throw and hope it's enough.
It's monitoring vitals through the night while the ship hurtles through Rift-Space. It's explaining to a scared family that you've done everything you can. It's rationing the last doses of antibiotics and hoping the supply shipment arrives before they run out. It's watching patients die despite your best efforts, and returning the next day to treat the ones who remain.
Disease doesn't care about heroism. It cares about time, resources, and whether someone with medical training is willing to sit beside you for eight hours and help you fight.
The galaxy doesn't offer guarantees. But sometimes, a +2 bonus is the difference between survival and another body in the void.
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