“You don’t feel the dose when it hits you. No sting, no burn, just the same stale ship air and blinking consoles. Then a few hours later your cells remember what the star did to them, and the Long Burn starts. In this line of work, you don’t count exposures—you count how many more Yoms your marrow can afford.”
In Starfall, radiation sickness is the slow, invisible price of living too close to the stars, the Rift, or negligent bosses. It’s a family of related diseases caused by ionizing radiation that corrodes cells, shreds DNA, and eventually collapses whole organs if the patient survives long enough to notice.
Disease Categories
Disease Type: Natural, Exposure Affliction
Disease Susceptibility: Contracted through secondary exposure
Disease Lethality: Lethal
Disease Visibility: Internal-to-Malformative
Disease Enfeeblement: Mild-to-Lethal
Disease Acuity: Acute
The Burn That Keeps Spreading
Void medics call it “the Long Burn”—not the flash of a flare, but what happens afterward when the body realizes it was hit. At first it’s just fatigue, a sour stomach, maybe hair feeling “wrong” under the fingers. Then bloodwork starts to look like static, and the patient’s Yom balance quietly tips toward debt they can’t pay off.
Starfall clinicians distinguish four broad grades of radiation sickness:
Mild – the spacer’s tax: cell damage, fatigue, and queasiness that most working‑class voiders accumulate over a career of thin hulls and sloppy bosses.
Severe – heavy exposure from unshielded EVA, bad shielding, or sleeping too close to a leaky core; vomiting, serious exhaustion, and “rad flu” that floors even hardened crews.
Extreme – catastrophic exposure from a containment breach, reactor accident, or standing in the wrong place during a Rift surge; burns, massive hair loss, internal bleeding, and rapid systemic collapse without advanced care.
Incredible – what happens at ground zero: the kind of dose you take from a direct hit in a flare corridor, sabotaged Metronome, or improvised radiological weapon. If you’re still conscious an hour later, the medics call it a miracle and start drafting a case study.
Most frontier clades and Inner Sphere unions use plain terms—“light dose,” “bad dose,” “terminal”—but every spacer understands the underlying truth: radiation sickness is cumulative, cruel, and indifferent to rank.
Origins
Eventually discovered by each space-faring race as they discover the invisible hazards of interstellar travel
Causes
Exposure to cosmic radiation, reactor leaks, Rift anomalies, or dirty munitions sets the initial disease and DC, based on the hazard’s intensity
Symptoms
hours or days of fatigue, nausea, and eventual tissue failure if untreated
Diagnosis
Doctors talk about three overlapping processes:
Cellular Fallout – radiation shatters DNA and proteins, triggering apoptosis or leaving cells mutating in place. Blood and gut tissues go first because they divide fastest.
Immune Collapse – white blood cell counts crash; infections that were trivial a week ago become lethal, and even basic shipboard bugs can kill.
Systemic Breakdown – blood vessels and internal linings tear, hair falls out, and organs start to fail; patients leak from places they shouldn’t.
Cure
Mild cases resolve with rest, chelation meds, and routine spells. Severe and above require advanced magitech—metabolic purges, targeted regeneration, or literal time‑backed corrective care from Chronologist‑aligned facilities.
Pathophysiology: What the Disease Does
All four versions of Radiation Sickness model ionizing radiation as a poison disease:
Onset represents the delay while damaged cells begin to fail and the immune system panics.
Stage damage reflects acute cell death, hemorrhaging, and organ stress; the sickened condition captures the crippling nausea and loss of appetite that make normal functioning impossible.
At higher severities, later stages add escalating damage and eventually a terminal stage (death) if the disease runs its course.
Encounters
Session #: <Session(s) the disease was encountered, and how it affected the campaign>