Suppose you have a situation where someone is known to have a fungal infection, but the community isnāt willing to kill them. They donāt see it as all that harmful, and are willing to try and accommodate the fungal npc. (P.S. if the person wasnāt actively a threat, my PCs would generally be unwilling to kill a fungal NPC too, so this is hardly a unreasonable position)
Well, one way of handling the situation would be to treat the fungal infection as a more mundane disease, and just start providing the settlement with anti-fungal meds (or better yet give them a book teaching them to make their own). Not to harm the infected dude, whoās clearly past the point where meds will cure things, but for everyone else. After all, if the NPC is purely passive, the infection acts more like a slow acting flu in the earlier stages, and providing meds is similar to giving people a flu shot to prevent infection. So you can stop further infection in its tracks by just having everyone else take their meds every once in a while.
If the NPC still has free-will and is actually trying to help, then their problem is solved, and they are no longer a risk to the community. And if they donāt have free will - or are sufficiently deluded to spread the fungus to the unwilling anyways - they theyāll eventually try something and get caught, giving sufficient reason to take more drastic actions, like quarantine, exile, or execution. Quarantine might be interesting, as it could spawn a quest where they start converting the section of the base they are quarantined in into fungus, and the player has to fight a bunch of fungal monsters and finally kill the NPC.
You could actually have two questlines here. One where the NPC has free will and actually wants to help, and another where the NPC either does not, or is simply delusional. And they would look identical up to a point where the active one is forced to act openly. With one ending up with the NPCs death - and a somewhat fungalized section of camp - while the other ends up sending the player chasing after rumors of purifier to finally cure the infection.
