For your good health
Bezoar
Power: Significant.
Effects: Bezoar’s are useful in healing and counteracting poisons. Each bezoar has a Bezoar skill rating from 10% to 99% (roll two dice and high flip-flop, or chosen by the GM).
Healing
To utilise a bezoar’s recuperative magick, it must be placed within arm’s reach of the injured party. The mechanics are the same for most of the effects: the bezoar’s rating is rolled in conjunction with any medical assistance and the best (most helpful) roll is used. A bezoar can only make a Bezoar rating check once every day.
The bezoar’s magick assists the medical personnel treating the injuries (UA2 pg 58). Roll a Bezoar Rating check and it compare to the medical personnel’s results and choose the best out of the two.
Convalescence
When a person is convalescing, successfully roll the Bezoar Rating and choose the highest result of the two dice and add that to the normal 2 wound points per day gained through slow healing.
It is possible for the bezoar to effectively help even the most incompetent unprofessional assistance up to a point; a bezoar’s magick cannot help if the person treating rolls a Bad Pair or a Fumble, the injured party takes the standard damage from the botch job. If the bezoar’s check fails, even badly, it just stops working but it does no damage.
It is important that although the bezoar is magickal, its ability to heal is best served by using it concurrently with medical care and technology.
Description: bezoars are small calcified bits of organic material called trichinas. They are found in animal and sometimes human stomachs.
They are accreted over time to form hard lumps which range from smooth pebbles to spiky mats or balls of hardened hair. They can be the size of a pill to a closed fist. Most tend to be dull-coloured but occasional samples have different colour variations.
Bezoars were worth more than their weight in gold during their day which was a long time ago. The small, pill-sized variety of bezoars where swallowed at the onset of symptoms; while the most effective were made into jewellery such as brooches, necklaces and rings so they could be kept about their owners at all times.
It is unknown if bezoars are naturally magickal or created by lost rituals. Perhaps only one in a thousand trichinas is powerful enough to function as bezoars, but only fringe occultists tend to keep track of these things.
What you hear:
A certain, brass-band reinforced and ornately jewel-decorated bezoar in the possession of the British Royal Family and is speculated to still be used by them today (under the guise of ceremonial tradition). Haven’t you ever wandered why the late Princess Diana’s suicide attempts always failed or how her anorexia seemed to stabilise…?