Darkmoor’s Curse as Epidemiology
A way too in-depth analysis of Darkmoor’s monsters
Note: I am not a fucking doctor. I’m autistic with internet access. Also we’re talking about vampires.
What is the Curse of Darkmoor?
In game, the Darkmoor curse is a curse that turns people into monsters. It started thousands of years ago upon the opening of the Scholomance, and had since transformed Darkmoor into a deadly, dangerous world ruled by the House of Swords, House of Cups, House of Wands, and the House of Coins. Each house is inhabited by a monster type— Gargoyles, Vampires, Scholomari, and Werewolves.
What’s interesting is, intentionally or not, Darkmoor’s curse functions like a pathogen.
We need to define some stuff.
An Outbreak is defined by the CDC as a sudden burst of infections over a short period of time, in a specific location, to a target population.
The WHO defines a Pandemic as a worldwide spread of a new disease.
But for the sake of this analysis, we’re going to be considering the Curse of Darkmoor as Endemic. An endemic disease is one that sticks around long term. It has a predictable level of presence and has more or less “naturalized” to the environment it resides in. The curse is technically endemic because it’s literally 90 percent of the population. Which isn’t good, but technically…
The point being that these are all more or less stages of severity. An outbreak can become a pandemic. A pandemic can become endemic. That all is to say, by the time we reach Darkmoor, it’s too late.
Pandemic Influenza Severity Assessment
The Pandemic Influenza Severity Assessment is intended for use by Member States (MS) and WHO as part of their overall pandemic influenza risk assessments to improve preparedness and inform proportional response actions (Pandemic Influenza Risk Management guidance (PIRM)).
Pandemic Influenza Severity Assessments can also be used to improve the interpretation, visualization, communication of influenza data during seasonal epidemics.
Influenza severity is defined in terms of four indicators: transmissibility of an influenza virus, seriousness of influenza disease, morbidity and mortality and the impact on healthcare capacity. — who.int
A note: Darkmoor’s curse doesn’t exactly fit the definition of a virus. A virus is a specific type of infection. Because Darkmoor’s curse is a curse that turns you evil, it doesn’t really fit the definition of virus. The broader term is pathogen. Because we can’t exactly ask a vampire to spit into a Petri dish, we’re extrapolating everything based on symptoms, presentation, and how we observe the infection to spread and transmit. Basically, we’re about as clueless as a plague doctor here.
A second note: this assessment is for influenza. We’re going to use it to loosely define how bad Darkmoor’s curse is because it’s one of the most used tools (I think). A lot of it requires real numbers and probably like, an actual lab, so we’re gonna play the rules as accurately as I can get them but I am not a disease expert and I’m also not inside the Spiral. Clinical assessment and numbers are impossible.
The curse of Darkmoor has a reservoir— defined in disease control as the natural habitat of a pathogen. In real life, there are certain types of infections and illnesses you can only contract in remote or specific areas. Reservoirs are usually identified after a string of infections. They’re critical because they tell experts where to cut off the chain of transmission.
In the case of the curse, the reservoir would be the Scholomance itself. Unfortunately for the world of Darkmoor, the Scholomance became lost. The pathogen no longer needed it as its reservoir, and it became inaccessible, which takes out a critical piece of data that would be needed for curing the curse. At this point we’d probably define the population of Darkmoor as the reservoir, and the Scholomance as the origin. Darkmoor itself has already become infected, now the threat of potential infection falls onto the rest of the Spiral.
By the time the Young Wizard reaches Darkmoor, the curse is self-sustaining through host-to-host transmission. (A potential host being defined as an uninfected human. It seems like once you’re cursed to become one monster, you can’t be changed to another.)
As far as we can tell, there’s no incubation period for the curse at all. The infection is instant and total. We have one line that implies a newly infected may still be “struggling against the curse”, but that seems more psychological than biological, and even that phase seems to pass… pretty quickly.
Now the weird part is that the curse has four distinct presentations— the monsters of each House. And each presentation has a different method of transmission.
This is, frankly, not how anything works and is the point you kinda just gotta start nodding along.
In real life, the presentation of a disease mostly depends on strain, how well that person is able to fight off the infection, and their biology in general.
In Darkmoor… a vampire is a vampire is a vampire and a werewolf is a werewolf is a werewolf. We’re not seeing any werepires or schologoyles running around.
So the curse can’t be truly defined as one unified infection. We’d have better footing to define it as a pathogen with different strains or a group of related syndromes with a common origin. That common origin being the “curse” itself— a nebulous, vague magic-thing.
But, since each House infects differently, let’s go down the list.
The first and most clean of the bunch would be the vampires and werewolves. Their transmission method is easy, classic, and very gothic: the bite. That’s pretty clean. The curse in this case is transmitted through saliva on broken skin. That would be direct contact through blood. Think zombies— you can stand in the same room as them and theoretically be fine, and even get into a skirmish, but one bite and it’s over. By scientific understanding this would imply that any internal contact with a vampire or werewolves’ blood/spit would turn you, but we can’t test that because it never happens in game and it’s also gross.
Gargoyles and scholomari seem the “safest” in terms of how easy it is to get infected. There’s one line from Commander Ak’toh that implies it’s possible for a human to become a gargoyle, but she seems to laugh about the idea of “ascending a human” to their ranks. Either the gargoyles are elitist, have no desire to transmit, or it’s simply not possible and she assumed the Wizard (who was disguised at this point in the story) was lying to a human in order to get them to go along with their plan. (She didn’t know, of course, that the human the Wizard was talking about was themselves.) That implies the variant carried by the gargoyles can’t be transmitted. You’d usually call this a “low transmission rate” but it’s unclear if it’s genuinely impossible or if gargoyles just have no desire to do so.
For the scholomari, their method is… kidnapping little girls and teaching them to be cruel, and then dunking them in a bog. Okay.
So, listen. There is no disease on Earth that can only infect you if your vibes are rancid. I’m really not sure what to do with this one. What does make it interesting, though, is that the scholomari depend on the Black Lagoon to infect others. Which means that at least one variant of the curse is still dependent on a reservoir. Kinda.
Despite all this weirdness, the curse managed to cover the entire world. I’m going to attribute that to the fact that its initial outbreak stage was near instant. As far as we’re aware, the Scholomance opened, and there was barely any time to react before most of the population transformed.
We also know that the House of Cups is the smallest house, so even if they’re able to transmit as easily as the werewolves, they don’t. I’d theorize that most of the stragglers from the initial point of outbreak would have actually been taken out by the werewolves— they’re uniquely dangerous and uniquely able to transmit the curse because they can present, at least visually, as uninfected.
Now that we’ve talked about how it’s spread and the likelihood of infection, how severe is it?
Broadly, the WHO defines this as how sick a person gets when they contract a disease. Now, in real life, when someone becomes infected with something, how bad it is depends on that person’s biology. In the case of the curse, the outcome is the same for every case. This is really bad.
In real life, a variety of severity tells us that biology has an effect on outcome. Some people can resist infection, others might become sick, and some might even be asymptomatic. This all depends on the immune system of the infected, their age, prior exposure to similar pathogens, and even just plain luck.
The fact that Darkmoor’s curse has the same severe outcome in every case implies that there is no such thing as natural immunity or resistance in humans. (Now, the Spiral does have other species, but we can assume it doesn’t matter if you’re a dog or a human or a lizard or a mouse.)
Vaccination builds on the body’s natural ability to recognize infection and fight it off. If everyone is being totally and wholly infected every time, that means no such antibodies exist in humans. While this wouldn’t make a vaccine impossible, it would probably make developing one very very difficult. You would have to make a harmless version of the curse to teach the body how to attack it, and if it doesn’t have any idea how to attack something like it… well.
Ignoring the fact that the Spiral doesn’t seem to have broad access to technology that exceeds that of the 1920s, the fact that there doesn’t seem to be the existence of natural immunity isn’t a fun hint…
It doesn’t matter how healthy you are, or if you have been infected and cured before. If you come into contact, you are going to get infected.
Something important to note is that the WHO separates seriousness of disease from mortality rate. The curse can have a very low mortality rate (it actually increases lifespan, on a technicality,) and a very high seriousness of disease.
The seriousness of the curse can be explored by two things that we can look at: physical changes, and mental changes.
In every variant of the curse, physical changes appear to be drastic and extreme. We do have an issue that we are seeing video game models that have all been modified off of a base, so finer details are lost, but we don’t need them because humans turning into furries is kind of enough evidence.
Infected seem to share three traits regardless of the variant they contracted: overgrowth (broad term that defines growth in adults that can be explained by an illness), slowed aging, and increased physical strength.
Outside of an increase in height, which can happen due to a number of causes, every other symptom here is kind of… fantasy nonsense, and it doesn’t tell us a lot.
That’s about where the similarities stop between the variations.
I’m going to skip the broad definition of neurobehavioral changes, because how diseases affect someone mentally is a bit complex and I’d like to just lay everything out individually.
We have the most evidence for what vampirism is like compared to the other houses, so I’ll start here.
Vampires show emotional blunting, hyperphagia, (a sensation of always being hungry,) and possibly some type of circadian rhythm disorder? It’s hard to tell if they sleep during the day because they burn in sunlight, or if their circadian rhythm is altered upon infection.
Something kind of important: emotional blunting doesn’t mean “bad person” or “lacks morals” or even that vampires can’t feel anything at all. It just means that the parts of the brain responsible for emotions are running low. We see vampires angry, amused, prideful, scared. They clearly still feel.
What’s most likely happening is that the reward centers of their brains have been hijacked. Feeding releases feel good chemicals, and when you combine that with emotional blunting, it causes a drastic change in behavior. We do actually know that vampires can live off a fairly small amount of blood. That implies that drinking and drinking blood like we see in Strigoi’s fight is a compulsive behavior, not that they actually need that much blood.
It’s not that the curse turned the vampires evil, exactly, but when the brain’s reward center gets hijacked in this way, chasing those feelings becomes a priority. Basically, a vampire doesn’t really realize drinking people is wrong because it feels correct on an instinctual level. Couple that with social reinforcement and later industrial difference. (See the literal people farm in the Mortal Plain,) and it becomes a non-issue. Do you think about the chickens in your nuggets, or are you happy because you have chicken nuggets? Exactly.
As for why they need to drink blood? Hematophagy is a real diet that some animals actually do have. Mosquitos, ticks, fleas, they all drink blood as their only source of sustenance. But there’s no pathogen in reality that can cause someone to have entirely different dietary needs. The closest thing I can think of is Alpha-gal Syndrome— a condition where being bitten by a Lone Star Tick can cause an allergy to red meat. So the fact that the diet of vampires changes so drastically is a little bit fantasy nonsense. The curse would have to alter their entire inner biology and the way they process food. Vampires have mosquito guts, I guess. Okay. Sure.
From a pathogen standpoint, though, making the infected blood-feeding does help with transmission. Theoretically, they would be creating a new infected every time they feed. That being said, we know the House of Cups is the smallest House, so either the compulsion component backfired, and the host usually dies of blood loss before the infection can take, or the vampires industrialized too fast. If you’re slaughtering and presumably using some kind of method to extract the blood from a human and distribute it among the House, you’re probably not infecting that human.
So the good(?) news is that we have a slight real world analogy for this one, and that would be the rabies virus.
Rabies causes similar neurobehavioral changes in infected animals, with one key distinction being that it is one hundred percent fatal. A small PSA that you need to go to the doctor ASAP if you ever have any contact with a bat.
A quick note: Hypertrichosis is the term for growing hair all over your body, which I guess werewolves would technically have? I’m putting it down because it’s technically a “symptom” but there’s really no diagnostic way to say “you’re a dog now.”
Like vampires, werewolves aren’t just altered physically, they’re also suffering from neurobehavioral changes. Also like vampires, there is evidence that they experience some form of emotional blunting, but unlike vampires, that blunting seems to be less severe, but only because of their other symptoms. They also seem to possibly have a disordered circadian rhythm, but it might be more chaotic than the vampires’ nocturnal nature, since we see them in the daylight.
Werewolves are shown to, while willing to fight their own, also have intense loyalty and fixations on their “pack”— this is actually something that happens in real life. In parasitology, it has been observed that parasites can alter social bonding instincts, both producing withdrawal and increased affiliation.
Hunting and being “wild” with their preferred groups seems to be the werewolf equivalent of the vampires’ desire to drink blood. Much like the desire to drink blood, this could have a transmission advantage, especially when you take into account their compulsion to remain with their “pack”. This could produce a desire to “hunt” for humans, which increases their pack. That’s two reward centers being hit at once, and both of them further the pathogen’s goal of spreading.
We actually see this in the Howling Lands. Lord Barghest wants to infect the Wizard, but so did Strigoi. What’s different is that he also is willing to invite the other Outsiders, even infecting one of them. He doesn’t want to eat them. (Though we should note, diet changes do appear to be present here too, we just don’t have as much detail. We can assume werewolves probably exclusively eat meat.)
Of course, Barghest is an outlier. Most werewolves present with very low impulse control, which actually might be disadvantageous to the pathogen. Werewolves are otherwise perfect carriers, but their sense of long term planning has been completely shot.
So Gargoyles are interesting because they don’t seem to have much in the way of transmission, and outwardly they don’t appear to really be… that altered. They’re remarkably stable and more capable of insight than the other houses seem to be.
We’re on a bit shakier ground, but bear with me here:
Insight is actually a term I’m kind of borrowing from psychology, but it’s defined as an awareness of one’s own condition and the nature of that condition. While the Houses are aware that they are infected, in a sense, they’d be defined as having low insight because they don’t recognize that the curse is a problem. They understand that they have changed, but they believe these changes are positive. They aren’t capable of missing their emotions, though they understand the emotional blunting has happened.
With gargoyles, at least with the main example we meet, Commander Ak’toh, they seem to possess more moderate insight.
They still believe that the curse is positive, but they also are both more flexible than the other Houses, and are also more rigid. Gargoyles are perfectly capable of both learning combat methods from the other houses, and are also willing to adopt methods of magic from other worlds— utilizing the cantrips from Pigswick to track criminals.
That being said, they seem to have a sense of moral rigidity, and are the most devoted to order-keeping. Their priorities seem to lie in keeping Darkmoor from falling into chaos, which is… weird as a symptom, but there is kind of an explanation?
Certain infections can cause inflammation in the brain, which has been known to cause personality changes, compulsive behavior, and less flexibility. This isn’t the same thing as the hijacking of reward centers like you’d see in vampires and werewolves. Behavioral rigidity can be caused by a lot of different things that happen in the brain, to the point where I can’t really take a specific guess.
What’s interesting here is that there doesn’t seem to be a way for gargoyles to transmit their variant of the curse. Or at the very least, they have no desire to. If that’s true, then almost every gargoyle out there is one of the original infected.
Usually, during an initial outbreak, the weaker variants of a pathogen die off. People get better and they build natural immunity, others might fight the variant off on their own, and that strain dies. But the curse doesn’t exactly kill the host, at least in body. (Metaphorically… eh?)
Considering that’s the case, gargoyles are still around. They’re not growing in numbers, but in terms of diseases, they’re kind of an… evolutionary dead end. This sort of makes sense if you think about the common traits of the curse: distance from your emotions, stagnation, increased strength, and rigidity in their given nature. Gargoyles have all of those, but they aren’t arranged in such a way that produces a desire to transmit. They do serve an important social function within Darkmoor— they keep order in Graveholm— but pathogens aren’t smart enough to aim for that as a role.
Essentially, they’re a low-transmission endpoint. There’s nothing for the pathogen to “do” so it just kind of… hangs out in the host.
Biologically I have no explanation for “doesn’t need to eat” and “turns to stone at night”. That’s just magic.
So this is where the curse of Darkmoor stops even remotely looking like a pathogen and starts being the Narrative again.
Hair loss is, technically, a realistic symptom to have, and is actually maybe the most scientifically likely out of everything we’ve discussed. Hair loss can happen for a number of reasons. I guess.
That all being said, they are kind of a good example about how an infected population presenting with neurobehavioral changes would inevitably start to change and restructure their social reality.
The Scholomari are dependent on external factors to spread their variation in ways the other Houses aren’t. They need two things: the Black Lagoon, and… human girls.
They spread by teaching a child to be cruel, and then… dunking them in the Black Lagoon. They do this with the belief that one of them will be able to rediscover the Scholomance, which they revere greatly. They believe good is bad and bad is good.
It’s very difficult to tell if the “symptoms” the Scholomari present with— loss of empathy, cruelty, an obsession with harmful ideation— is actually a result of their variant or social conditioning. Honestly, the implication does seem to be that the infection won’t take until the child has been properly “trained”, so there’s no real meaningful separation I can find.
But, this does move us into our next segment.
The PISA (remember that?) does actually cover the impact a pathogen has on society. At least, it did under an older framing. According to my understanding, that’s been narrowed to just healthcare capacity. Safe to say, there is no healthcare in Darkmoor. (For the curse or otherwise, apparently.)
Actually, not only is there no healthcare, but there doesn’t seem to be much of anything. Society exists, but it’s fragmented. The werewolves live in the woods, not homes. We can assume the vampires live somewhere nice outside of their district in Graveholm. The gargoyles seem to only live in Graveholm. The scholomari seem to just wander the Lagoon.
The curse of Darkmoor’s main symptoms do include stable neurobehavioral changes. While humanity in reality has never encountered a disease so encompassing that it causes us to entirely restructure the way we live life in this specific way, it’s not a crazy leap to suggest that once a majority population undergoes a change in behavior, the society around that population restructures itself around the altered drives of the population.
Each House has a distinct neurobehavioral profile, often conflicting. Outside of Graveholm, the Houses don’t mingle, and it’s because of these conflicting drives. Graveholm was only stable because these conflicting drives led to an unsustainable amount of conflict.
In the absence of a cure, and in the absence of insight into the true effects of the curse, Darkmoor’s society reorganized itself around both the conflicts between the Houses, and each Houses’ individual drives. With no alternative and no outside intervention to break the loop, the only thing left to do was to make themselves as comfortable as possible.
Unfortunately, that comfort meant indulging in the very urges and drives that the curse imposed upon them. A vampire drinks blood because it physically can’t ever feel full and needs to try, a werewolf hunts with the pack because the adrenaline and comradeship of the hunt is all it finds worthwhile. Gargoyles can’t just relax because they feel as though their one purpose is to preserve their society. The Scholomari are in a bog.
What we see in Darkmoor is the logical endpoint— a society that rejects the tyranny of sympathy.
That’s why it’s endemic. Society might have collapsed at first, but the thing about societies is that they don’t stay collapsed. When tragedy persists, people do too. They build workarounds, infrastructure. They reorganize and keep going until the hardship is folded into normalcy. In that way, the monsters of Darkmoor are still very much human. They didn’t stay in the apocalypse state forever.
I wanna note that I didn’t write this analysis to be like “people who suffer from illnesses are monsters and suck!” I just wanted to explore the science behind pathogens, how they affect societies, and how diseases affect people. I definitely don’t think the pathogen framing is the thematic lens you’re supposed to see Darkmoor through, I really do think it was more of a coincidence and not an intentional choice on the writers’ part. The real intention of Darkmoor’s story was probably to talk about how important understanding and kindness truly is. I think ultimately by the end of Darkmoor there’s a good argument to be made that you’re really supposed to see the monsters as victims— victims who have caused harm, but victims who deserve help. The Outsiders’ deserve their world back, and it’s not a bad thing that the monsters might be cured someday. And I hope this has actually strengthened that argument.
Bonus Round: How Do You Fix It
So the Broken Branch has a cure and they’re working on perfecting it. Awesome.
Unfortunately, running around and randomly curing people isn’t going to work. Also unfortunately, all the House lords have been deposed. The Wizard really left Darkmoor in a pickle.
There is actually some insight I can give to cap this all off.
The first trouble is that there’s a lack of infrastructure. The Broken Branch can’t just grab a skyship, a giant mist machine, a megaphone, and just fly over Graveholm screaming “MUTATIO MORTALIS!”
I mean, they can, and they probably will, because they’re kind of like that, but it won’t fix the problem. Entirely.
The first order of business is going to be securing the Outsiders’ safety, and from there, building outward.
For a while, it would probably look more like triage/improving the lives of the humans already uninfected.
Think field hospitals, outreach programs, they’ll probably need farms, because they’re about to have a lot of cured humans and no infrastructure to supply food to all of them.
Unfortunately for Velma, they might have to show up in the Black Lagoon. I’d imagine the Scholomari have more schools and more lagoons out there, and I’d imagine rescuing those kids would be a high priority. That’s a hostage situation and that comes first.
The smart option to me would probably be to outright destroy the Scholomance. It’s the origin point of infection, after all, but that could be infeasible.
Marching into something like Graveholm would be last.
The ideal ethical goal would be to not make it a fight and convince the monsters to take the cure voluntarily. That means weeks, possibly months, possibly years, of rapport building, negotiation, and proving that a mortal life is worth living. It’s gonna be a hard sell, especially to longer lived vampires who will just hear “die in three days” because their sense of time is messed up.
The CDC advocates for the least restrictive measures possible when it comes to quarantine. Darkmoor might not ever be fully “cured” in the conventional sense. It might look more like monsters agreeing not to attack humans. It might look like negotiations and compromises. It will definitely look like years and years of boring work.
…And eventually someone would probably get the megaphone.
The unfortunate thing is there’s no way to talk about what wholly curing Darkmoor would look like. It’s a messy bundle of consent and harm and weird existential implications of the end of immortality, and there’s a reason Darkmoor ended with a “someday” as the answer. There’s no good answer for “these vampires are killing and hurting people and they depend on it to live and they don’t want to be cured to not have to do that anymore”— it’s just bad. It’s a really bleak situation where even the idealistic ending of “yay we made a cure for the Bad Thing!” Just opens up another can of worms of logistics and scale and “is it okay to help someone without their consent?”
And we all saw Lucy Easton. She was cured, and she was okay with it, but the cure was imperfect and she died for it.
So… yeah. Darkmoor is bleak and so are diseases.
…I mean, eventually you’ll probably get moms complaining that if your kid is furry, you need to keep him home from school.
