I'm confused about how to play Blood Veil in 7DttG. With the Anniversary Edition, there's no Cure line on the disease stats. So it would seem like once you've contracted the disease, it's inevitably fatal unless you get magical healing. You can make your daily Fortitude saves to delay the loss of CON and CHA (although they get progressively harder with each failure), but ultimately you're screwed.
Is this the intent? If so, it would seem like the death toll would be far higher. Assuming that the vast majority of citizens have a Constitution that gives them (at best) a +0 Fort, then every person who is exposed has a 75% chance of contracting the disease, and a 100% chance of dying from it, unless they have the money to buy a cure. Even then, recovery from the disease doesn't confer immunity, so they're just as likely to be exposed and infected again (and again).
It would seem like at the end of the day, they only people left standing would be the 15% of Varisians who have natural immunity.
What am I missing?
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If left untreated, blood veil kills the average human in 7 days.
Basically, I wouldn't worry about it because it sounds like anyone infected that goes untreated is expected to die. This also makes it a lot scarier. If it really bothers you, change it so someone infected is cured aftr 3 consecutive successful saves.
-Skeld
I guess what bugs me is that the AP as written talks about the plague "burning itself out" with only 5000 casualties. But the disease sounds more like a Walking Dead scenario - few survivors and LOTS of dead.
Also, I know that if my party is having to cast Remove Disease on a couple of themselves every day or so, they're going to also wonder how anyone could survive this.
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Also, I know that if my party is having to cast Remove Disease on a couple of themselves every day or so, they're going to also wonder how anyone could survive this.
I think that proves how desperate the situation is. The heroes have resources available to them (spell casting) that the average citizen does not. That's also why finding a cure should be such an incredibly important mission for the heroes.
-Skeld
So keep in mind that the rules for PCs are not the rules for the universe. They're an abstraction to simulate how things work for the players, but for the most part don't cover all instances. It's not covered, for instance, how PCs would respond to medical treatment to blood veil because medical treatment takes time even for normal diseases that you'd encounter regularly as a PC, and this is an especially virulent illness that would take a long period of bed rest. The wealthy and nobles would be able to afford a qualified physician who could treat them for the illness, with all the necessary precautions to avoid it spreading. The middle class would at least be able to stave it off. We can actually even see that the Soldados, when Brienna contracts it, can get some basic medical treatment.
In this way, the blood veil would do exactly what Ileosa intends it to do. The poor and lower middle class, by and large, die horribly, with few survivors. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if the PCs somehow let blood veil run rampant without stopping it like the campaign assumes they do, it would necessitate modifications to Escape from Old Korvosa, turning it from an isolated but still populated pocket of the city to a ghost town. But one of the first rules of deadly diseases, if it's too deadly (which blood veil is) it will eventually burn out from lack of people to contract it.