Disease as a spirit

I have been considering switching to Mythras and Classic Fantasy (a variant of RuneQuest) for some time, since I feel it is a better fit for my campaign setting than the idiosyncrasies of D&D. Among other things, Mythras is based on the premise that the fantasy world has fantasy physics as opposed to D&D operating on the premise that the fantasy world operates like modern science describes the real world with magic crudely tacked on. For example, Mythras treats disease as a spirit rather than a pathogen. More information below the break.

In the real world, diseases were once thought to be caused by evil spirits. In a sense this is true because now we know diseases are caused by microscopic pathogens. In a fantasy world, there is no reason why disease spirits cannot be the underlying cause of disease.

There are some unfortunate implications, of course. In real life, prostitutes were believed to have sexually transmitted infections as a punishment for their immoral behavior. However, this is not strictly the case: disease spirits are just as amoral as pathogens in reality, not a punishment for immorality.

The only difference here is that there would be unified rules for treating disease, rather than separate rules for mundane and magical healing. Which is how I prefer things.

Research links

• http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/magic/antiscience.html
• http://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-glog-diseases.html
• https://faustusnotes.wordpress.com/2011/08/31/scientific-inquiry-in-a-magical-world/