Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #170 - Plague Masks
Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !
I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀
Image generated by AI in Wombo.art
The prompt this week is - Plague Masks
Renaissance European plague doctors are iconic with their waxed linen robes, hats, gloves and glass-goggled bird-beaked masks. Modern science mocks them for their strange appearance and their belief that plague was transmitted by bad-smelling air. But the reality is that their outlandish outfits may actually have provided good protection. The robes, gloves and hats would protect from fleas and prevent direct skin contact with infected flesh. But best of all, the masks were amazing. The goggles protected the eyes, while the beak had two small breathing holes at the far end and were stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs like mint, thyme, lavender, juniper and various others. Most of the ones used had antiseptic and/or anti-bacterial properties, as well as acting as a filter trapping bacteria before the wearer could breathe them in.
Tell me a story from your fantasy or sci-fi setting of a way to interact with disease that has nothing to do with how it's really transmitted ! What is the disease, how do people think it passes from person to person, and how is it really transmitted ? What do people do to counter it ? What superstition or belief is it based on ? Does it work, and if so, how ? Or (for those of us who play D&D) how does disease work in a world where Cure Disease is a low level widely available spell ?
Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.
This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.
Guidelines
I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....
- Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
- Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
- Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
- Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
- Prompt replies can be any length.
- AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
- Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.
Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:
It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.
People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah
If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂