There’s now a cure for Dragon’s Dogma 2’s dreaded pawn pox Dragonsplague: mods

rockpapershotgun.com:

Behind its DLC microtransactions, Dragon’s Dogma 2’s most divisive element is arguably Dragonsplague, the pawn-infecting sickness that your AI companions can catch while questing online and may eventually drive them to murder entire settlements’ worth of NPCs.

The pawn pox is thankfully fairly rare - I’m yet to encounter it in my 40-odd hours of playing, despite sending my pawn far and wide to rack up badges online - but it’s a key part of the game. Your pawns will occasionally remark on the rumoured threat, noting that it can cause the loyal followers to lose their senses - realised most starkly in the chance of your faithful warrior/wizard/ranger/whatever filling up one of the world’s in-game morgues with the residents of a town.

What makes Dragonsplague especially jarring for some players is that it can be difficult to spot - glowing red eyes are a telltale sign, and players have started gifting rotten food with pawns as a warning that they’ve caught the murder-ick. Still, if you’re not gazing lovingly into your followers’ eyes on the regular, you might fail to spot it in time.

While I’d argue that it’s all part of the game as intended - especially in a game that doesn’t hesitate to autosave its single save slot after every event, good or bad (RIP, the person I failed to save from an assassin) - and shouldn’t be touched, you may feel differently as you dutifully gather wakestones to try and repopulate a friendly village slaughtered by a red-eyed pawn.

If that’s the case, there is now a cure for Dragonsplague: mods! As spotted by VG247, several modders have come up with ways of making Dragonsplague a bit easier to track - or getting rid of it entirely, if you prefer.

For the former, there’s the distinctly unsubtle Dragonsplague Counter mod, which sticks a big red number from 1 to 10 on your pawns’ heads to indicate their current level of infection. (Red eyes manifest at 7, if you’re wondering.) While a glowing red number plastered on their forehead is about as far