Healing the sick hasn’t always been the bailiwick of formally educated doctors armed with a battery of surgical implements and medical databases. Ancient cultures sent their sick and wounded to a spirit medium who communed with the divine and used that knowledge to soothe pain and heal illnesses. The role of the healer might change — be it priest, wise woman, or witch — but the function remained the same. Healers used a combination of physical remedies and spiritualism to heal those in their care and to keep the community in good health.
The modern Path of Healing is a fusion of magic and ancient curative techniques. Hedge Magicians who have mastered this Numina Path can break a fever in moments or heal traumatic wounds to the body through spiritual means. The Medicine Knowledge is required for this Path to be effective, along with cultural elements, such as meditation, prayer, singing, massage, or other techniques.
Healing can exhaust a Magician during the process, and such healers often suffer for their incredible sensitivity and compassion. Should the player botch the healing roll, the character catches the ailment or withstands sympathetic damage from wounds.
With Storyteller permission, a player may take the Path of Healing as a Psychic Numina Path instead of Hedge Magic.
Modifiers: +1 difficulty to perform for healing oneself, +1 difficulty if the subject is unwilling, +2 difficulty to perform healing in a stressful environment (such as combat, while being interrogated, while trapped in a burning building, etc.)
Cost: Varies
Duration: Varies by effect (see below)
Practitioners of the Path of Healing may examine patients with but a touch to instantly diagnose ailments, learn the nature of injuries, or discover genetic defects. Each success achieved on the activation roll provides additional relevant medical information.
A Hedge Magician with this level has a rudimentary control of her patient’s body and can stimulate the healing process. She can instantly cure sprains, severe headaches, flu, or minor infections without difficulty. With the expenditure of a Willpower point and a successful roll by her player, the Hedge Magician can touch a patient to mitigate the pain of wounds or cure communicable diseases. Such illnesses include the common cold, flu, or even STDs. This level of the Path does not cure serious maladies such as cancer or heart problems, however.
Each success achieved on the activation roll negates any dice-pool penalty arising from wounds from which the subject suffers for 10 minutes.
The Hedge Magician is able to heal broken bones and alleviate chronic but non-life threatening illnesses (such as arthritis, kidney stones, or asthma) with a single touch. Bashing and lethal damage wounds heal twice as fast as they normally would with the healer’s ministrations, and without infection. The Hedge Magician can also induce a healing trance state to prevent bleed-outs or other medical trauma from killing a patient before proper surgery can be performed.
Using this power requires a successful roll and the expenditure of a Willpower point.
The Hedge Magician can stop and heal almost any injury with a single touch.
With the expenditure of a Willpower point and a successful roll by her player, the Hedge Magician can instantly heal a single level of bashing or lethal damage on a patient. Each additional success gained from the activation roll heals one additional level of bashing or lethal damage. Healing lethal damage in this manner comes at a price, however. For each level of lethal damage healed, the Hedge Magician suffers from a dizzying migraine for an hour that causes all dice-pool rolls made for the Magician during that time to incur +1 to their difficulties. The player may spend an additional Willpower to ignore this effect for a scene, however.
The human body holds no mysteries to a Hedge Magician who has mastered this level of the Path of Healing. She can cure chronic and acute illnesses (such as cancer, AIDS, or strokes), remove genetic defects, or cleanse chemical addictions.
Such treatment is difficult for the Hedge Magician and requires that the patient be under constant care for some time. The exact length of the treatment and other requirements should be determined by the Storyteller, but they should generally be one quarter the standard recovery times for such cases.
Such sympathy comes at a cost to the body, and the Hedge Magician may suffer a +1 to +2 difficulty increase to all non-Healing related dice pools during the period of convalescence, as determined by the Storyteller. This need not be applicable for all uses of this power, only those that involve healing of the most debilitating of diseases or the most crippling of dependencies.
In addition, the Hedge Magician can overcome the effects of supernatural trauma upon the body. With the expenditure of a Willpower point and a successful Manipulation + Medicine roll (difficulty 8) by her player, a practitioner can instantly heal aggravated damage on a subject. Each success gained on the activation roll heals one level of aggravated damage.
The cost for healing such damage similarly comes at a price, however. For every level of aggravated damage healed, the Hedge Magician suffers a level of painful sympathetic bashing damage. The sympathetic damage cannot be healed via applications of this Path (whether by the Hedge Magician suffering the sympathetic damage or another healer).
