Hello fellow Pathfinders,
quick rules question regarding zombie-diseases, example being the well-known Ghoul Fever:
Do you have to die specifically from the effects of the disease in order to come back as a Ghoul? The wording in the disease mentions this fairly specifically:
A humanoid who dies of ghoul fever rises as a ghoul at the next midnight.
Also, I noticed that in a few Adventure Paths (no spoilers don't worry), people have attempted to commit a quick suicide to allegedly prevent their unwilling reanimation as a ravenous undead.
Think Dawn of the Dead or Walking Dead, however, where those infected basically come back as soon as they die, regardless of whether or not it is the actual disease that eventually kills them.
How would you rule it?
The effects of the disease, as you quote, state that the victim must die of ghoul fever in order to rise as a ghoul. That means that suicide would prevent it.
Now everything beyond this point is just speculation to justify the rules. Logically we could conclude that ghoul fever is a kind of prion disease that needs to completely take over the system before killing the host in order to reanimate them. In this case, the host dying early would make it so the body is no longer a hospitable environment, killing off the disease like the parasite it is before it can fully gain control of the host.
It's very clear that RAW you can commit suicide to prevent coming back as an undead, and I would run it as such.
