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Benepractice

In order to prevent great harm, you must cause it.

This ritual allow the generation of a magical panacea that can totally cure any ailment of the body or mind that current medical science can treat.

The only catch is that the ingredients for this miracle cure must be stolen from a legitimate course of treatment. The other catch is that the final product is highly specific, it will only cure one type of illness.

In order to get one dose of this, you would need to steal one years worth of treatments from a patient. In the case of drugs, you have to keep the drugs themselves, and in the case of surgery you must not perform any useful function during it, and keep the instruments you used. A cure can also be made from the treatments which were denied to a patient if the patient dies before a year is out, so long as the practitioner has never granted them real treatment (so a Benepractitioner cannot really try to cure someone until it is obvious they are doomed, and then quickly switch tack to make the panacea).

If the patient is aware of what you are doing, double the time, so it requires two years of treatments. If you yourself are the patient, you must double the time again, requiring four years of treatments.

Every Benepractitioner must have some form of medical credentials, even if they are near worthless. They must be a dentist, doctor, chiropracter, something that means they have recognition from peers and that they have patients.

When you have all the required ingredients, simply place them in a pot of water, and bring it to the boil, and allow it to cool. The first person to drink the water will recieve the benefits of the panacea.

The nature of the miracle cure is related to the nature of the ingredients. A few examples:

To restore a shattered kneecap to full working order: One years worth of pain medication and antibiotics, and the surgical instruments used in knee surgery.

To cure cancer: One years worth of pain medication and chemotherapy, and the surgical instruments used to remove a tumour.

To change gender: One years worth of hormones, and the surgical instruments used to perform sexual reassignment surgery.

To end manic depression: One years worth of lithium.

As one could imagine, the effects of going without this medication for a year would be devastating, possibly even fatal for the subject. And if you manage to convince them to agree, the torture will last twice as long. The advantage is that the miracle cure will still work on the subject, if they have lived to take it.

At first I though of making a whole adept path out of this concept, and maybe I still will, but it always boiled down to stealing medication to build up a powerful miracle cure, so thinking up a whole charging/taboo/random magic scheme seemed superfluous. As it stands, this is more useful as a background to an NPC rather than a power for PC’s, like my Cheating Death: Jet Set and Lifer rituals.

One thought on “Benepractice

  1. Damned Scholar says:

    This strikes me as something that could be a great trigger event for a group of characters centered around a hospital. I might actually have to steal it if I start a pre-trigger event game.

    Reply

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