In Ptolus, the House of the Sacred Heat believes in the divine healing power of fire. They are not priests and they do not have truly holy magic, but their techniques “serve the needs of Ptolusites who cannot afford to pay a temple hundreds of gold coins to heal a wound or deal with an illness.”
This concept of fantastical healing lying somewhere between the naturalistic limits of the Heal skill and the magical extremes of divine magic has always been very appealing to me. Unfortunately, the purview of the sacred heat wasn’t given any mechanical definition. Without that mechanical definition, there’s no compelling reason for the PCs to ever interact with the Healers of the Sacred Heat. As a result, in a setting already teeming with activity, the Sacred Heat is a non-entity.
Reading through Reign t’other day, however, I found the esoteric discipline of Truil Bodywork. Greg Stolze describes this discipline, in part, by writing: “Some Truils argue, quite seriously, that bodywork functions by compressing a month’s suffering into ten or fifteen minutes. The bodyworkers themselves just roll their eyes at the jibe.”
Reign is built on the One-Roll Engine (ORE), so the pain-for-gain mechanics of Truil Bodywork don’t directly translate. But the basic concept was inspiring. Here’s the Healer of the Sacred Heat feat:
HEALER OF THE SACRED HEAT
Prerequisite: Heal 5 ranks
Benefit: The character gains access to the Healing Arts of the Sacred Heat. As long as they have access to an open flame, they gain a +2 circumstance bonus to Heal checks and they can also use any of the following abilities.
Burning Out the Poison: By using flame and heat applied to specific locations on the body, a Healer of the Sacred Heat can attempt to burn a poison out of a patient’s body. (Some ingested poisons will also require the patient to swallow specially prepared coals.) This treatments takes 1 round and deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage to the patient, but if the healer succeeds on a Heal check with a DC equal to that of the original poison + 5 the patient is completely cured. (They suffer no additional effects from the poison and any temporary effects are ended. However, the treatment does not reverse instantaneous effects such as hit point damage, temporary ability damage, and the like.)
Cooling the Disease: By using strategically placed flames or heat sources around a patient’s body, a Healer of the Sacred Heat can create a biorhythmic vortex which will draw heat out of the body. As the heat departs the body, it draws non-magical diseases with it. The treatment takes 10 minutes and deals 1d6 points of nonlethal damage to the patient due to the sudden chilling of their body, but if the healer succeeds on a Heal check with a DC equal to that of the original disease +5 the patient will automatically succeed on their next saving throw against the disease.
Cauterizing the Wound: With 10 minutes of work and a successful Heal check (DC 15), a Healer of the Sacred Heat can convert lethal damage to nonlethal damage equal to their margin of success. A patient receiving this treatment also suffers 1d6 points of additional nonlethal damage due to the strain placed on their body by the technique.
DESIGN NOTES
I’m tempted to add a “once per day per patient” limitation to Cauterizing the Wound, but I’m not sure it’s actually necessary. What do y’all think?
This material is covered by the Open Game License.
I’d say at a minimum, it needs something like ‘once per hour’. Unrestricted, it becomes the obvious way to heal the entire party to full after every combat (not necessarily a bad thing, depending on your group, but it does overpower magical healing fully.)
I like the flavor, and it does not appear to be unbalancing. Not everything in a fantasy setting needs to be ‘magic’, so this is a nice addition. Easy enough to port this to any of the elements or other material if that fits a campaign better. Nicely done.
I think you need to cap it somehow, assuming you’re not rules-smithing away most magical healing. Otherwise, with multiple attempts it’s pretty trivial to convert ALL damage to nonlethal damage. And nonlethal damage heals, what is it, 24x faster than lethal damage? Plus there’s the synergistic effects of converting only SOME damage to nonlethal (since magical healing removes an equal amount of nonlethal damage as lethal damage). If you have one of these guys in your party, any clerical-types won’t have to use nearly as many of their spell slots on healing, which will ratchet up their effective combat power.
You might be able to do something like make it take a significant amount of time (like 10 minutes, or more) to perform “cauterizing the wound.” That would at least make it consume a LOT of time if you are converting a lot of damage in this way, with a concomitant increase in chances of a wandering monster or something similar coming along and spoiling things.
I have been looking for non magical ways of dealing with healing and this is definitely an interesting one.
Maybe add to prerequisite “Abillity to cast spells OR use a spell like-ability”, so you would need at least some familarity with magic… or at the very least “Knowledge (Arcane) 5 ranks”, so that it is not quite so easy for characters without any magic to use the quasi-magic of this feat… on the other hand, this would defeat somewhat it’s purpose, I think. For me there’s just something wrong with a fighter learning this…
But Arcanists could make third rank healers, without stepping spellwise on the toes of a cleric. And a cleric with this feat would be great to have around even if all healing spells were already spend…
and I second the additional time modifier for cauterizing the wound.
Great stuff for thoughts, obviously. 😉
@Leland: Holy crap! I forgot to include the 10 minute requirement on Cauterizing the Wound! It was supposed to have the same time requirement as Cooling the Disease. I’ve edited the original post. (And this is why these ideas are “Untested”.)
Without that, there’s definitely some balance issues. With it, I’m conflicted on whether or not the issues you and Tialla are raising are features or not. It would almost self-evidently narrow the use of healing magic to tactical needs (instead of strategic needs), but how much of a knock-on effect would that really have?
My suspicion is that — for my campaign at least — it would mainly reduce the use of cure wands that are getting used. (My players mostly use spontaneous heal spells to deliver higher doses of healing during fights and then spam low-cost wands to “top themselves up” between fights. You’d still see those higher spell slots get chewed up by tactical healing needs, but at least some of the “top themselves up” stuff could be done at the more leisurely pace offered by a Healer of the Sacred Heat.) At the cost of sinking a feat, I’m not too concerned by that.
If it does prove problematic, an option would be to set the DC of cauterizing the wound to the amount of lethal damage a character has suffered. And/or on a failed roll, inflict 1d6 lethal damage instead of 1d6 nonlethal damage. This would limit the effectiveness of the feat explicitly to those who have received only minor wounds.
The thing about cauterizing is that it’s normally used to stop blood loss and disinfect an open wound, not heal. I’d think of cauterizing as something done quickly with a hot piece of metal to stop continual HP-loss bleeding effects. If you specifically want a healing action, why not something like the kung fu moxibustion we see in the Karate Kid remake?
Mechanically, maybe limit it by saying it can only be applied once to each character after each event in which they’ve received wounds, and the most it can ease is the amount of damage sustained in that event. The first rule would stop spamming, while the second would prevent ridiculous scenarios where characters poke each other with needles in order to stimulate more healing.
Also… why is the Cooling cure so musical? 😉
I like it! I’m playing a 3.5 game (after an absence from those rules of a few years) that i’m also helping the DM with work on some rules modifications. A primary concern for her is the lack of magical healing in our 1st-level party with no healer classes. We’ve toyed with several options of out-of-combat healing, and she would rather not hand out wands of CLW. With some fluff modifications (we’re not using Ptolus), I think this might fit the bill nicely. Very nice, thank you!
I would like this a lot better if it involved doing lethal damage rather than nonlethal. The idea of using fire to apply nonlethal damage just doesn’t feel right to me.
Other than that, the idea seems pretty cool.
i’m not totally sure what anyone would be so worried about, i like the idea of being able to use heal to uh, heal.
the idea that everyone chills out and gets mundanely bandaged up for a while so they’re sorta good as new is conspicuously absent from the game, i think, and needed rectified.
it’s not like it even necessarily heals an awful lot, you need to be like level 10 before you can reliably heal significant amounts of HP anyways.
Justin wrote in comment 6, “…an option would be to set the DC of cauterizing the wound to the amount of lethal damage a character has suffered.” That might actually be backwards — you might want the DC to be equal to the number of hp the target has. Thus, Cauterizing becomes a basic patch-up to get the character up and standing so you can take her to a “real” healer.
On the other hand, such a change would mean that the feat loses value over time — what’s the point in Cauterizing the Wounds of a 10th level fighter with his hundred-n-lots hit points? Woo hoo, you’re up to 20 hp!
One thing I’ve thought about a lot is having healing spells convert lethal damage to nonlethal damage for 3e., and doing away with the cure spells healing nonlethal damage – perhaps with the exception of if the character has no current lethal damage.
It has been a totally untested opinion on my part, but that always felt like a way to limit the total capacity of characters to suffer ad nauseum – even with the potent effects of healing magic, characters would eventually reach a point where they are just incapable of continuing without some time to rest – even if they don’t necessarily actually have the time or opportunity to stop and rest like they’d like.
I read the article after the update of adding the time requirement, so that didn’t seem an issue to me.
Maybe the feat could have an additional requirement that the user have some ranks in Survival, Knowledge (Nature), or any other skill related to fire. However, that would just be a “flavor” requirement since all of the uses, the feat name, and the referenced organization, are all flame-based.
A new way to add nonlethal damage to the game sounds fantastic, that seems to be one of the most missing functions from my read-throughs of the v3.5 core rulebooks. There are a few options, but most seem to be explicitly combat only – e.g., making an attack roll with the nonproficiency penalty.
Perhaps change the name of “Cauterizing the Wound” to something else, and add an effect that actually stops/reduces bleeding effects – like Confanity suggested the current medical use of what cauterizing is for. Perhaps even trading bleeding for lethal damage of that amount – it hurts, but it doesn’t keep getting worse!
What the new name for the renamed effect could be, however, escapes me. Everything that comes to mind like “Sweat it out!” either seems like it would be more appropriate to the poison or disease effects than the wound-related one, or isn’t related to heat.
I think that the 10-minute use timer and that the nonlethal damage accumulates for each use on each patient, is enough to balance out the benefits – especially if these are per-patient and per-use costs, and not like “long-term care” that can be used on multiple characters at the same time.