Using clocks for Poisons and Diseases

Our time on this earth is limited, creatures.

How's that for a greeting?

I've been toying around with using clocks to make poisons and diseases a bit more interesting. My goals for this design were:

• Keep book keeping down: I'm lazy. I don't want much to track.
  
• Progression: I want poisons and diseases to be able to progress, adding symptoms over time.
  
• Simple Descriptions: I want to be able to write out a poison in a couple minutes max and have an easy reference list of what happens at each stage.
  

I thought clocks would be perfect for this! It lets diseases and poisons progress slowly, with different effects tied to different segments. You can do all sorts of things with the clock structure, like jump to further segments.

Each poison clock has a number of segments, a "tick time" which indicates how quickly the clock progresses and a list of symptoms at each segment. Each segment includes all symptoms on prior segments.

Generally, once a poison/disease is in someones system, it can only be cured with the correct antidote or curative magic, which removes the poison or disease and its clock entirely.

It's advised that the referee keep track of the clock, detailing only the symptoms to the player. Hopefully (if your players deal with getting poisoned often) they can start to recognize different poisons by their symptoms.

You could extend this idea to include specific cures that players can remember, but D&D type games usually come with catch all "cure poison" spells that should cover most of it.

This has yet to be playtested, but I plan on including this rule in further games of mine. If I remember I'll come back here and update this post :)

Enjoy!

Sample Poisons

Drow Poison
6 segments. Tick 10 minutes.

1: Target falls asleep. They can be shaken awake.
3: Target can only be awoken by antidote or magic.
6: Target can only be awoke by high level magic.

Malice
4 segments. Tick 1 hour.

1: Vision clouds, treat bright light as dim light and dim light as darkness.
2: Target is blinded.
4: Target is permanently blinded.

Slow-Acting Sea Snake Venom
6 segments. Tick 1 hour.

4: Fever
5: Sweating and dry mouth. Curative magic is only 50% effective.
6: Death

Wyrmblood Venom
8 segments. Tick 1 hour.

Each tick, the target makes a save against poison. If they fail, they lose 1d3 points of Charisma. If they succeed, the clock decreases by one point. If the clock reaches the 8th segment, the Charisma loss becomes permanent. If the clock goes below segment 1, the poison is fought off and Charisma returns at 1 per day. A target dies at 0 Charisma. Curative magic restores as many segments as the level of the spell.

Sample Diseases

Flesh Rot
4 segments. Tick 1 day

1: Skin peels
2: Skin reddens.
3: Skin decays, withering appearance. Disadvantage on Charisma checks.
4: Flesh withers. All damage is doubled. 

Dragon Plague
6 segments. Tick 1 day (3 days if consistently next to a warm fire).
Anyone within 5 feet of a Dragon Plague victim has a 50% chance every hour to catch the disease. Dragon Plague is part disease part curse, it can only be cured with high level magic.

1: Sickly cough which can spread the disease.
3: Extremely cold. Cold sources deal double damage.
4: Aching joints. Movement rate halved.
5: Blood thickens and turns black, showing through skin. Target cannot move.
6: Death.

Arcane Blight
6 segments. Tick 12 hours.

1: Victim becomes paranoid. Doesn't trust anyone.
3: Skin develops hard dark scale-like growths.
4: Hallucinations of team members plotting against victim. Paranoia heightened.
6: Victim transforms into a Nothic.