Hi everyone!

Recently, I started a new session with my players. All humans, no CSM, everything was fine. Then, one of my players lost a character through repeatedly dying (killed by a powerful psychic attack, killed when one of the players tried to pilot a shuttle without any Skill related to flying and rolled 100, possesed by the Graeter Daemon) and rolled a new character, this time a Nurgle follower.

And this is where the fun begins, to quote a well-known movie. We quickly realised that in RPG, Nurgle is really overpowered when it comes to pleasing their God. For example, a Nurgle follower may just drop a drip of his blood into the space station water filtration system and suddenly everyone is infected. Even if they shut it down immiidately, water is already tainted and they have a lot of problems getting fresh one in space. Let's not even talk about other things he can do (bullets with his blood on them are propably immidiately Toxic, hell, propably his breathing can infect everyone around). He could just walk around the Hive for a few minutes and start a plague that's virtually unstoppable. I highly doubt normal medicine can cure stuff they have inside them, and definitly it can't cure every single one of them, and I'd guess that drip of his blood contains diseases no one heard about in this part ofthe Galaxy, or bacteria from, let's say, thousands of years ago and eveyrone who knew how to cure them died.

We decided that he's not infecting everyone around by simply being there (if that was a case, no one would ever travel with a Nurgle follower no matter what), but still, it seems like a really problematic ability.

Any ideas?

Just because he is a follower of Nurgle does not mean your player is instantly a walking plague cauldron. Unless you have exposed him to some warp based pathogens i would say the only things he is contaminated with would be from whatever unsanitary things he is doing and those should be totally treatable, especially as the player is not immune to them yet.

o'course once he earns a mark of Nurgle this is sure to change and it would be fitting to have him blessed with some of the more nasty things old papa has cooked up.

But the moment he gets Mark of Nurgle, we're back to square one.

Why? Whit the Mark he does not get any of the plagues from the Lord of Flies...

Only if you as the Gm grant him/her.....

Nurgle is a Father figure this not means he give away his blessings for free to the unworthy masses....

I'd also argue that the degree of effectiveness of those plagues is based on the degree of immediate corruption/chaos influence in the vicinity. If the veil between the material universe and the immaterium is particulary thin, it will be far easier to get plagues of a much higher caliber (such as through unholy rituals by a chaos cult).

In case the warband ends up in a place where everything seems to be very grime and the people are borderline depressed or even in a state of despair, the influence of Nurgle can be easily manifested since it uses that environment as a feeding ground. Those powers will be very potent and easily called upon. If the opposite is true, it will be much harder to see anything on a massive scale and with the same potency.

At least this is how I picture it.

One could also argue that the ancient machine spirits aboard an orbital station could detect said bacteria and maybe even activate emergency "purification" protocols..