A strange illness

[Joël of the FoS]

... I just read about is ossyfying muscles, turning the poor person in pain. What an awful thing! Thankfully, it's very rare.

Scan of the back of a victim of this disease: http://www.cyberpresse.ca/apps/pbcs.dll ... CPACTUEL03

This horrible rare disease can however, inspire a necromantic spell - anybody ever heard of a spell turning muscles to bones? What would be the ingame effect of it?

Joël

[Fuzzball]

There's a class ability that liquifies bone...but I can't think of anything that turns muscle to bone.

If I were making one I'd give the target a fortitude save and the effects would be a loss of speed (as Slow) or Dexterity damage.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

Here's another website that mentions such a disease. (Oddly enough, I was looking at that site just the other day ... go figure. )

http://www.collphyphil.org/virt_tour/museum_9.htm

[Brandi]

Here's a picture of a skeleton of someone who died from FOP (the disease name, short for Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progessiva):

http://www.vamp.org/Gothic/Images/images/fop.jpg

I scanned this long, long ago from a calendar of images from the Mutter Museum of Pathology.

[Spiteful Crow]

Wouldn't it just be a transform flesh to stone spell, except it leaves a nasty skeleton instead of a statue?

[Fuzzball]

I think he intended only a partial transformation. It's only the muscles. It wouldn't have to be all the muscles either. Turning just a few into bone would be quite painful and impose penalties on...something...


The disease is basically calcification of the muscles. There is one D&D creature that does that. The Gravecrawler (MMII p118) "causes flesh (living of dead) to harden and clacify, turning slowly to stone." Anyone in the area must make a Fortitude save every round or suffer 1d2 points of Constitution damage.

[ScS of the Fraternity]

This disease ios certainyl close enough to the crystaline disease and the other Dread Diseases.
I once read of a similar disease in this really crappy novel. Genetic engineering had created microbes to synsthesize plastic - but these microbes could not be controlled and ran havok throughout Africa. As a result, all non-vacinated people were endangered.
Plastic nodules began growing inside of people's bodies, and eventually all that would remain would be twisted bodies, perfectly preserved in plastic.