This is the ability to heal, repair and restore. Healing is also the power to hurt or alter a patients body. While not very useful in combat, it certainly allows a little weird surgery.
Backlash varies by effect, but generally will do the reverse of the desired effect to the sorcerer and not help the target.
Heal Effects
Antidote
Formulate potions to neutralize the effect of toxins in the body, before they take effect. Difficulty is the Potency of the poison. If the skill check exceeds the Difficulty, the poison is negated. See Poison.
This effect also works against the lingering effects of Corruption. In this case, Difficulty is the Powers Action Value of the creature that did the corrupting.
Cure Disease
Difficulty varies depending on the severity of the illness. Strange and/or weird diseases are generally harder to treat.
| Illness | Example | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Lesser ailments | Common Cold | 5 |
| Serious illness | Pneumonia | 10 |
| Physical disabilities | Cancer, Chronic heart illness | 15 |
| Mutations | Aids, Mad Cow Disease, The Black Death | 20 |
Nasty Arcanotech biohazards cause diseases of at least Difficulty 15.
In a Backlash, the sorcerer contracts the illness she is attempting to heal. If the sorcerer is tying to cure herself and suffers a Backlash, she infects a friend or loved one, usually one nearby or recently encountered.
This effect is also used to remove Paralysis and Disease.
Fertilization
Cast on people or animals to make them more likely to conceive offspring. The GM makes a special check the next time the subject engages in activities likely to lead to procreation, adding your Magic and the lowest of the partners' sorcerer's Constitution scores to an open roll. If the end result is 10, the female partner conceives. If the end result is 15, animals get larger litters and human subjects will have twins or even triplets.
If conception is normally impossible, such as between different species or within the same sex, the roll is still made, but with a penalty of ten. If the prospective "mother'' is normally unable to bear children (perhaps because "she"' is a male, or sterile). Bringing such an odd offspring to term requires much care and effort.
Heal Wounds
Make a Sorcery task check and subtract the Action Result from a wounded person's total Wound Points. This costs a Magic point, but can be done as a standard three-shot action, and done repeatedly. You can even heal several people at once for a single Magic point, tough each will be healed less, per the normal multi-target rules. You can also heal all in an area with a diameter equal to your Magic at the cost of two magic points, but in this case you heal each of them half as much. See Supernatural Healing.
Stabilize
You can Stabilize(Rules/DeathTest.html#stabilization Rules/DeathTest) someone who has failed a DeathTest, saving them from the reaper. A backlash forces the sorcerer to make a DeathTest against a difficulty equal to the difficulty of the Stabilize(Rules/DeathTest.html#stabilization Rules/DeathTest) test.
Immortality
The holy grail for Western alchemists was the ability to transmute lead into gold; for Chinese alchemists it was the secret of immortality.
With this effect, you can reverse a year's worth of the aging process in yourself or others. Difficulty is the actual age of the recipient divided by 5. In a Backlash, all benefits from previous Immortality effects reverse themselves; if the recipient is past normal life expectancy, he dies. This seems like more of a problem for the recipient than the sorcerer, but recipients usually make arrangements for servants and allies to slay sorcerers incompetent enough to blow their immortality checks.
Weird Surgery
The healer can alter a patients body by adding parts from other creatures. This can be a form of living prosthetics, or weird experiments to create hybrid forms. Some healers perform this effect simply by warping the victim's body, an exceedingly slow a painful process, that may leave the victim mad. The patient must of course be totally helpless or cooperative for this lengthy process to be possible. Adding human parts normally has no effect beyond weird appearance. Adding animal or inorganic parts may change some attributes or add some abilities, but attempts to gain new abilities usually end up as tragic failures. Adding parts from supernatural creatures is difficult, the target may well die, but turns the target into a supernatural creature.
Except when used by the GM as a plot device, a player character target must purchase the appropriate attributes or Schticks resulting from weird surgery with experience, or the operation fails.
Cauldron of Life
It is possible co create life from scratch, though this takes great time and effort. The embryo must be carefully grown for months, but the benefit is that it will be a complete and whole being in the end. This fascinates some sorcerers to no end, and many monsters are if fact the results of sorcerous experiments.