Sword Plagues & Plague Swords

 

by Inoue Takehiko

Plague Sword

There is a certain kind of sword, found at the sites of recent battles or the ruins of subterranean dungeons. They protrude upright from decayed corpses, sometimes two or three blades clustered together in the ribcage of a never-buried soldier. The hilt twists skyward invitingly, inviting the bold to take up arms. These are the plague swords.

A plague sword is supernaturally sharp (+1 magic sword) yet brittle, losing its edge to the point of worthlessness after only a few cuts. When a plague sword breaks, slivers of the blade fly everywhere like tiny glass splinters, burrowing into any exposed skin within 5’. This deals no damage, at first.

Those cut by the sword collect metal slivers in their skin, only perceptible as a slight subdermal itching sensation. These slivers migrate along the nervous system to the host’s spinal cord, where they coalesce and form a tumor. The tumor then grows over the course of months, becoming hard and raised from the skin, accompanied by a sharp pain in the chest. Most hosts die from punctured lungs or an impaled heart. A rare few wake up one morning to find the blade poking through their chest.

If you cut open the tumor, you’ll find the hilt of a blade. At first, it’s little more than a runty dagger, something a trained surgeon or wizard could excise with time and caution, but with time it will grow into a full-fledged broadsword.

Plague swords feed on their host(’s corpse) until they attain full length. They grow hilt-first towards the sun, like iron flowers with glinting leaves. Then, they go dormant, waiting to be drawn in battle by a desperate knave and spread their seed once more.

 

by Pavel Kolomeyets

Sword Plague

Metal can get sick, which usually manifests as rust. Just as animals can catch many different kinds of diseases, so too can metal contract many different types of rust.

Common or lesser rust is not very contagious, and most commonly spread through water. It’s a slow killer which can degrade metal over many years, but can generally be cured with proper treatment.

Blue rust is to normal rust what the bubonic plague is to a really slow-acting cancer. Highly contagious and fast acting, blue rust can eat through a sword in seconds and spreads from item to item by touch (it’s also mildly airborne). When a patch of blue rust eats enough magic items, a blue ooze may form, and then you’re really fucked. 

Blue Ooze
HD 7  Armor none  Pseudopod 1d6
Move 6  Int 0  Morale 12
Special Oozy, Blue Rust, Feared by metal

Ooze creatures can crawl up smooth walls and through gaps as small as 1” wide. They take half damage from piercing attacks. They are immune to acid, but salt burns them as acid.

Any metal object a blue ooze comes into contact with contracts blue rust (magic items get a Save). Each round of combat, blue rust spreads from an item you are holding to the nearest item in your inventory. Items afflicted with blue rust break after one use, or after dealing/receiving any damage. A magic item consumed by blue rust transforms into a 1 HD blue ooze.

Metal fears the blue ooze the way human beings fear tigers. All attacks by metal weapons are made with disadvantage; swords will swing wide to evade the ooze, arrows will veer to safety, and ball bearings/caltrops will roll away from it as fast as they can.

Metal sings, albeit at a frequency we cannot perceive, and when it does it sings not for itself, but for its immortal God-alloys. The voice of metal echoes hymns of an ancient era before the sword plagues. Metal sings because it is praying for forgiveness, deliverance from a world of pain and suffering and rust.

better ditch that sword y'all
Sir Bedevere y e e t s Excalibur into a lake