Your stomach churns. You retch and heave but only succeed in bringing up bile. Sweat beads on your brow as you spike a fever. Your muscles ache with every movement. You’re wracked with hot and cold flushes as a sickness gnaws away at your insides.
Effect: This Tilt applies a general sickness to a character without worrying about the specific illness. For the purposes of this Tilt, a sickness is either “moderate” or “grave.” A moderate sickness, such as a cold, asthma, the flu, or just a bad hangover, causes a –1 penalty to all actions during combat. That penalty increases by one every two turns (the first two turns, the character suffers a –1 penalty, the next two turns the penalty is –2, and so on up to a maximum of –5 dice on turn 9). A grave sickness, such as pneumonia, heavy metal poisoning, or aggressive cancer, inflicts the same dice pool penalties as a mild sickness. In addition, however, the physical stress of fighting or even defending oneself from an attacker while gravely ill inflicts one point of bashing damage per turn of combat.
Causing the Tilt: It’s not easy to deliberately make someone sick. Sure, if you can get your hands on a vial of smallpox or deliberately use a disease you’ve got to make someone sick (a Breaking Point, especially in the case of grave diseases like AIDS), then you’ve got a reasonable chance. Some supernatural creatures have abilities that can inflict diseases on others. Aside from that, you’ve just got to expose your opponent to the sickness long before you fight and hope for the best.
Ending the Tilt: This Tilt reflects the effects of sickness as it specifically applies to combat. Outside of combat, use the existing system for diseases. The penalties inflicted by this Tilt fade at a rate of one point per turn once the character has a chance to rest, but any damage inflicted remains until the character can heal.