Hi there everyone. I've been mulling over a concept for an RP for a while now. A few years ago, I read The Plague by Albert Camus; shortly afterwards, I played Icepick Lodge's masterpiece, Pathologic, which is fortunately being re-made, but which nonetheless inspired me despite its clunky gameplay and poor visuals. If you haven't caught on, both works study the effects of a plague---in the case of The Plague, a cholera epidemic, and in Pathologic something much more insidious---on the inhabitants of a town/village.

And thus I come to my question. Could a similar premise work in an RP? I've always been afraid of the dreaded "railroading", and I feel like a plague-centered story could be the ur-railroad. The player, at least as I've imagined, would be bereft of the their requisite agency---it would be totally up to the GM to dictate the course of the plague, who dies, who lives, etc. In a sense that might add to the hysteria, but I think it would also take away a lot of the fun. However, discussing all of the forthcoming events of the "plot" would take away from the mystery (as the central "theme" or "goal" of the RP would be to discover the origin of the plague, and, potentially, cure the inhabitants of the village).

I am, as I should mention, not by any means an experienced GM, so I apologize if this question seems easy to answer or trite! To those more practiced GMs, how best would you handle this situation?

The setting I have in mind, by the way, is somewhere in Russia---possibly Siberia, the Caucasus, or anywhere east of Lake Baikal, and with a heavy admixture of folklore.

Railroading in itself is not a wrong technique per se, what matters is the fact that your players didn't notice it. Any smartly executed 'railroaded' plot is indistinguishable from a dynamically evolving scenario, because the fact that you want the RP to go a certain direction stays within your head and your head only.

Having a goal and working to it is not a bad thing.