The Great Hunger

While the Great Hunger certainly holds power comparable to the divine, to call it a deity wouldn't be quite accurate. The Great Hunger is many things. It is persistent, it is resilient, it is unfeeling, it is plague. The Great Hunger spreads like a cancer, unseen, across everything it touches. From animals on land and in the sea to plans of all kinds in all environments. From mortals, Imperials, Beastfolk, Lizardfolk, to even the gods, saints, and deamons they worship.
The Great Hunger holds no malice, no anger and seeks no revenge. It simply hungers and it will spread.
== The Hunger ==
None know when the Great Hunger began, which ancient plagues belonged to it, or who was its first victim. The oldest recordings that definitely identified the Great Hunger is a Human inscription of the The Age of Myth.
Since then, it has been plaguing all mortal and immortal races on Anu. It spreads through communities, through family, at first almost unseen until it suddenly flares up and turns entire regions into nightmarish hellscapes.
All things infected suddenly fall ill, coughing up blood and bile, infecting anyone who still remained pure. The infected then seem to almost explode, skin and flesh sloughs off as new limbs, maws, teeth, bones, eyes, and hair grows. Many victims get rooted into the ground, turning into Spore Trees, spreading the infection further, while others mutate and begin to either defend the new plague lands or go out to hunt and infect new lands. During its history, many plagues and other afflictions are said to be derivatives of the Great Hunger, most famously Vampirism and many other afflictions of the Sanguine Hunger.
During the Endtimes the Great Hunger was in constant competition with Morobar. Unlike the Great Hunger, the Umbral Lord didn't take control of those he had infected, rather he concocted new plagues and let them run wild on the mortal races of Excaria. Morobar's deamons and plagues clashed with the Great Hunger where they met and each infected the other.
By the end of the New Age, the Great Hunger had largely been eradicated by the Old Empire and its Gods. However, neither the Empire nor the gods were ever able to truly kill or eradicate the Hunger. For a while, instances of the Great Hunger's Plague Lands had to be eradicated by mortals and saints, which always involved great danger and cost. Eventually the Empire would use Replikants en masse, and while losses were still great, the Replikants were recorded to be much more efficient than their mortal counterparts.
By the time of the Era of Discovery and Settlement, instances of Plague Lands were rare and often quickly contained and burned away. The Great Hungers still persisted however and while no Plague Lands had ever appeared on Ferra many smaller instances of the Great Hunger were noted in individuals and settlements. Some Imperial Scholars estimate and warn that up to 40 percent of the Imperial population could already be unknowingly infected by the Great Hunger.
== The Plague Lands ==
Regions taken over by the Great Hunger turn into plague lands and become inhospitable to non-infected life. The air heavy with and thick with hyper infectious spores, the lands patrolled by monsters of the Hunger's making. Many types of Plague Lands have been recorded, each with their own characteristics and dangers. These often overlap and grow into each other.
=== The Blood Swamps ===
Filled with Spore Trees, the blood swamps are a dense network resembling a jungle. The Spore Trees fill the air with their spores and continuously bleed, flooding the area with infectious and corrosive blood. It is said that if a mortal steps into a puddle with just one foot, they will succumb to the hunger within minutes, even when wearing protective gear.
=== The Bone Caverns ===
The Bone Caverns exist mostly underground as an ever-changing labyrinth of narrow tunnels and impossible to navigate geometry. Its walls and floors are covered in serrated claws, teeth, and rock hard bone. One wrong step or an accidental scrape against a wall can create the smallest wound, which the Great Hunger uses to further the infection. Entrances can snap shut at a moment's notice, crushing or separating those foolish enough to venture in the caverns.
The caverns are stalked by slow but almost unstoppable armoured monsters of chitin, bone, and claw. While a party of adventurers can usually outrun them for a while, usually exhaustion, a second monster or a dead end spell doom for them.
=== The Squirming Wave ===
The Squirming Wave is not exactly a terrain. Rather, it's an enormous tidal wave of flesh, insects, monster and unspeakable horrors. It moves almost totally silently and can in an instant transform a landscape. Adventurers exploring the other Plague Lands often succumb to the Squirming Wave, unaware of its arrival and their imminent demise.
Category:Diseases