With the release of Horror Adventures, there have been a lot of interesting concepts to mull over and new rules to consider incorporating into campaigns. Most interesting to me, is the new disease material. The book contains brand new diseases as well as templates that can be applied to a disease to make it more lethal, virulent, or pretty much anything you could want from a disease.
Seeing this new material gave me an idea for plague scenario that I could run in one of my campaigns. With that being said, there is no precedent in any source book I have access to for how to handle a large scale plague on Golarion so... I turn to the forums.
The major question I pose to you is this: "How would magic fundamentally change a quarantine scenario?"
For more specific details: This event will be taking place in Magnimar, therefore, there are 5 major religious orders/tamples in the city (Abadar, Iomedae, Desna, Erastil, Calistria) with the potential for numerous smaller ones. There is a school of arcane magic as well as numerous environmental factors within the city, such as the cliff that breaks the city into parts and the river that runs through the middle of it, all of which should be considered. The disease in question has an onset and frequency of 1 hour. It spreads through contact and builds up anger in people, increasing odds of spreading by encouraging fighting and physical contact while slowly killing people. The average person is likely to die within 5-7 failed saves. The disease is "new" which is to say this is it's first appearance in the setting so people won't know what it does immediately or how to deal with it.
If you were in charge of setting up and maintaining the quarantine with these details in mind, how would you do it? What steps would you take, and by extension, what steps should I take as GM?
The major question I pose to you is this: "How would magic fundamentally change a quarantine scenario?"
This little bugger is your biggest problem. If the settlement has access to the Planar Binding spell or the Planar Ally spell with a lawful good deity then they have access to limitless-use Remove Disease. If it weren't for this guy (and others like him, although he's the lowest HD) then plagues would just be a matter of putting the DC a little high for the resident clerics. For sufficiently large cities, though, it's basically not doable because this guy can just try-try-try again until he succeeds on the caster level check. Choral Angels are only stopped by plagues of DC 29 or higher, which is totally unreasonable for most campaigns.
If you only have mortal clerics with limited use abilities, though, then it depends heavily on how many clerics capable of casting remove disease are present in your settlement, relative to the total population. As well, if the DC of the plague is particularly high many of the Clerics who can cast remove disease may struggle to do so and limit the number of people they can cure per day.
Let's take a rough estimate of how many sufficiently-powerful clerics there are. As a general rule of thumb, I hold to the 1/2 rule; 50% of the population is 1st level, 25% is 2nd level, 12.5% is 3rd level, 6.25% are 4th level... which means 6.25% are 5th level are higher. That's about 1000 people in Magnimar. What percentage of these are Clerics (or other classes with remove disease)? Well, there are 11 core classes, and if we presume these are the most common classes in Golarion then we can generously presume Clerics are maybe 1 in 15 people (we'll presume everyone 5th level or higher has PC class levels). This gives us (generously) about 66 Clerics of 5th level or higher total. Then when you consider that most of these will only be 5th or 6th level and will struggle to make the caster level check, you realize that collectively they may struggle to cure even 100 people per day. They're still miracle workers, but they're not enough to stop a sufficiently virulent plague on their own.
If you were in charge of setting up and maintaining the quarantine with these details in mind
If the plague is already established in the city then a quarantine on its own wouldn't be very effective. It could still be used as part of a larger plan, but on its own it won't solve the problem.
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Unless all 16K+ in the city are willing to stand in line for days, and none of them are re-infected, the summoned creatures are still not a fix. Will -definitely- help though.
Assuming the creatures are willing even to accept "cure everyone" (or an equivalent) as their one task. And that they don't feel it beneath their dignity (as mentioned in the spell). That leaves aside the several thousand gold per day for each one you have to pay.
All that aside though, to the OP however, I would say you should read Seven Days to the Grave from the Crimson Throne AP.
Unless all 16K+ in the city are willing to stand in line for days, and none of them are re-infected, the summoned creatures are still not a fix. Will -definitely- help though.
While I agree that completely expunging the plague would still be difficult, the ability to very quickly treat hundreds if not thousands of patients per day would quickly contain even the most aggressive of outbreaks and keep the city operating normally. A plague with very few casualties just doesn't provide the same urgency and desperation to the narrative.
Assuming the creatures are willing even to accept "cure everyone" (or an equivalent) as their one task
This isn't actually a problem; both the Planar Ally and Planar Binding spells are explicit on what is required to compel the service of the outsider. For Planar Binding all that is needed is a successful opposed charisma check, but it does come at a higher risk. For Planar Ally there is a set price; it's 500 GP material components plus 1,000 GP per HD for 1 day of service per caster level, but is halved for non-dangerous tasks and halved again for tasks that fall within the creature's ethos (and possible reduced to free at GM discretion). So at very worst you're paying 2,500 GP for 11 days of service, or 227 GP per day per angel. While expensive, this is well within the affordability of a large city. And if you're a Sorcerer with a high charisma modifier and are okay with a bit of risk on the side you can haggle them down to zero.
And that they don't feel it beneath their dignity (as mentioned in the spell)
I'd view it as unreasonable for a GM to declare that a relatively lower-ranking Angel believes helping the sick and desperate to be beneath their dignity. These are beings of pure cosmic good being asked to help a city being ravaged by a deadly plague.
If you don't like Planar Ally or Planar Binding then by all means get rid of them from your table. However, if you are going to allow them (and by Pathfinder RAW they exist) then you have to be sensible about it. And sense dictates that good-aligned angels are probably going to be extremely sympathetic to a request to aid the sick.
Oh, and to be clear that doesn't mean that a crafty GM can't create "ramifications" for overuse of planar binding or planar ally, but that doesn't prevent it from solving the immediate plague problem. I ran a plague adventure about a year ago, and I hand-waved the plague as being resistant to divine intervention so good-aligned outsiders were incapable of curing it by any means. The local high priest had already tried Planar Ally when the party arrived; the angels couldn't actually help, and now he was contractually roped into helping them on their quest while still stuck with the plague problem. It worked fairly well, although I generally dislike "it just doesn't work" GM fiat and it bothered me that there wasn't a good way around that.
Read book 2 of Curse of the Crimson Throne. It goes into some detail on how plagues and diseases work within a city, especially one with Remove Disease being a thing.