Warning: This thread contains spoiler. If you are (or will be) a player in the Echoes of Heaven campaign or the Tainted Tears adventure, please do not continue reading.
First of all, I really like most of the Tainted Tears adventure, especially because it uses aspects of rpg I use very seldom. It creates a tension during reading, which is unique, even for EoH.
But I?m a bit concerned about the real-live association with the illness of Tannith. After the first time I read it, I felt very uncomfortable (I lost my brother and my mother to this illness and one player his father) I was sure to replace it, but after rereading, I?m not that sure anymore.
Is using this illness necessary or would it be possible to get the same effect and feelings with a ?normal? fantasy illness? Or maybe is the realism behind it what makes it that good? Maybe it is only me, because I have bad memories with this illness.
Defendi wrote something about it in his blog: http://finalredoubt.com/wordpress/?p=38
The paragraphs after ?It?s a truism of writing fiction??. I understand what he means, but I?m still not sure what to do.
What do you think about it? Do you have the same concerns?
It's a truism of gaming that Defendi and I have discussed many times that if something in a module would make even one of your players uncomfortable it's best to change it.
The power of the sickness is in the fact that the players assume she is on her deathbed as a result of the ordeal with smugglers, and it's a shock that she is actually sick and her fiance regrets saving her life.
So any other wasting disease would probably work.
It's a truism of gaming that Defendi and I have discussed many times that if something in a module would make even one of your players uncomfortable it's best to change it.
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Bad thing is that you have to play it before you can be sure :(
Ok, maybe it is not the type of illness itself, but I don't think I would have started to think so much about it if it would have been a fantasy one. Also reading what Defendi wrote in the blog, I think it COULD be that we all react different and more emotional on something we can imagine (or we expirienced) than things that just exist in our fantasy.
Looking at my players now I doubt any of them will have enough knowledge of the subject to really find out more than that it is a fatal sickness.
I'm not very familiar with the subject but don't you need rather advanced science to discover and identify such a disease in any case?
Technically I might have taken a little license calling it cancer of the blood, but I think I only did that in GM text. There's no reason that can't diagnose cancer in the bone marrow, we've been diagnosing cancer for 24 or 25 hundred years. The license was the connection between blood and bone marrow.
That was my reasoning at any rate.
Just did some researches and found out that cancer was indeed already diagnosed in the Ancient World (500BC), however this information was more or less lost during the Middle Age (at least in Western Europe). In this time most fatal illnesses were simply called plague and attended with cupping and bloodletting.
However this is Belkan?th not the Middle-Age. :-\