I'd missed that paragraph. That does make it sound like magic on eyes, not using eyes.
Hopefully this will be the last use of Trust Me. (Do I need to make more rolls?) Tasia will translate as needed...
[No, the rolls you've already done should be enough.]
A head appears over the side of the loft, and then the rest of a small boy. He climbs slowly and with exaggerated care down the ladder to the floor, and then collapses into a coughing fit at the bottom. Now that he's down, you can see that he's far too thin, and even after the coughing fit subsides he's breathing far harder than the minimal exercise he's just undergone would require.
Petrus shakes his head, then starts on a battery of tests and questionings. Through your translations, he learns that the boy has been like this for nearly two weeks, getting progressively thinner and with intermittant fevers. He gets the boy to cough into a cloth and inspects the results, frowning, then feels for his pulse. After a bit of persuasion, he carefully lets some of the boys blood, and inspects it closely. Finally he turns to you, looking grim.
"Diagnosis is easy enough - it's consumption. Caught from bad air from the local marshes. If he's not treated, it'll keep eating away at him until he dies. Treatment is going to be a problem, though - without better conditions there's not much I can do for him. If I had a dedicated infirmary back at the covenant, and could get him back to it, I might manage it, although even then it wouldn't be certain or quick. Moving him'll bring its own problems though, and not just for him. The bad breath of the infected can be enough to unsettle the humours of others. Down here the locals are mostly pretty much used to the local influences, although the young are more susceptible, and symptoms could just not have manifested yet - the incubation period can be several weeks. If we take him back to the covenant, and he's not kept very secluded, we could have most of our people ill within the month."
[This is probably a good time to mention I'm trying out the A&A disease rules. If you want Petrus to be able to treat him effectively, you're going to need to achieve a +1 living conditions modifier for the boy. Please also make a disease avoidance roll - Sta + living conditions modifier (+1 I think? Scott?)+ corpus form bonus + any spirit familiar bronze cord bonus + stress die (with the bonus from Vrahos, you shouldn't actually be in any danger unless you botch. 1 botch die. Petrus has a rather bigger problem).]
((Cool - not the disease but trying out the rules.))
((Tasia gets Sta 1 + Corpus 2 + Cord 6 + Roll 2x Roll 4 = 17 (or more for living conditions).))
Tasia tells the mother of the boy's consumption.
Tasia will position herself behind the boy so as to hide her gestures from the mother, placing a hand consolingly on his shoulder while gesturing with the other. Fortunately she won't need to speak. (I'm assuming she's had the couple minutes rest probably needed from earlier casting.) She casts as powerful a CrCo spell as she can to help the boy recover from disease. It's R:Touch and D:Moon. Providing +1 is level 5. Extra levels will go to increase the bonus. I'm guessing the Aura is a 1 here. (Sta 1 + Creo 5 + Corpus 7 - Aura 3 + darn...whew)/2 = 5, for a +1 if the Aura is only a 1. If she has an opportunity she'll try again before leaving: (Sta 1 + Creo 5 + Corpus 7 - Aura 3 + Roll 6)/2 = 8. If the Aura is only a 1 she'll spend 1 Confidence Point, bringing her total to a 10 - enough for a +3 bonus. She'll deal with Petrus later, after she's been able to talk to him and once they're in a safer place.
"Petrus, do you think you can heal this child if we bring him with us? Carrying him could be a problem, though certainly easier than trying to get him to walk. Convincing his mother could be a whole other matter..." What comes next depends upon Petrus's response.
Sorry, the notifications fritzed on me again. The village is a good-sized one, on the coast. Some of its inhabitants are fisherman, while others pursue the more traditional (for their culture) practice of herding.
Scott
I tend to agree with Chris here: Eye is a somewhat difficult range to pull off, as a result of which there aren't a lot of standard spells at that range. Sight or Voice as an attunement would worry me.
Scott
I took Healthy Feature twice as a Boon, but the party hasn't discovered the features in question yet.
I suspect, incidentally, that Viola is going to want to strangle Portia when she gets a hold of her.
Scott
You're in a village where Islam is practiced actively, and so, as Salutor noted, there's a Divine aura, probably level 1 (for a rural aura, according to RoP: The Divine). That would drop your total to 9.
Scott
Whoops. Forgot to un-round before thinking about Confidence. Yes, a 9. How high do I need for a +2 if 5 provides +1 and 10 provides +3?
Chris
Salutor is your SG here, but I would think you'd need a 10.
Scott
[I would have said that the house was in a strength 2 aura as implied by the main rules book, but looking at RoP:tD I see where MTKnife's coming from. Let's just say it's on the outskirts of the village and only has an aura of 1. You can recast the spell, but the bonuses aren't going to stack with each other (although they will stack with Petrus' herbalism). You need the full 10 for +3 bonus, and can't get the intermediate +2. {I think you already know this, but just in case:) They're also bonuses directly to recovery - they don't affect the living conditions modifier you need to achieve.
The other thing I'm going to say is that it's going to be difficult to hide the fact you're casting (or at least, doing something) using standard gestures just by turning your back - you can either make a stealth roll to try to do it, or you can do it easily using subtle gestures.
Another question: does one actually round spontaneous magic totals? I know in Ars Magica when you do round, it's always(?) up, but I can't see anything saying you round at all in this case. It makes some difference for fatiguing, and quite a lot of difference for non-fatiguing.]
Petrus shakes his head again.
"If I had a proper sickroom I might be able to do something for him, ma'am, but the only thing squashing him into a room in the house back at the covenant is going to achieve is infecting everybody else. He's certainly not going to be able to walk - he'd be lucky if he makes it out of the village. If we can get him wrapped up warm, though, it shouldn't be too dangerous to move him - maybe we could get someone to take us up in a boat again?"
He glances slightly pointedly at himself - whilst the boy is fairly small, he's a small man himself, and beginning to age.
I'd been going off the fact that the standard modifier for magi in a spring covenant was +1 (+0 for everyone else), and assuming that the healthy feature was on top of that. Of course, in this case everything is currently slightly complicated by the fact that we've all just come from other covenants (and in most cases just spent a while on board a ship).
I assume that you round up, but the difference of a point in either direction isn't usually that important.
Scott
If you want to treat him as well as a magus, yes, though that will be costly--and as Petrus himself noted, things aren't really set up yet for proper living.
Scott
Sorry, I was meaning for the living conditions modifier for Tasia rather than Petrus (A&A says that recovery in a dedicated informary is also enough to get a +1 living conditions modifier and of course, there are other, potentially expensive, ways to achieve it as well).
It makes more difference for non-fatiguing spontaneous spells - it's the difference between being able to cast a level 3 spell with a casting total of 11 or 15.
Well, +1 is better than nothing. Yes, I knew they wouldn't stack. I know it won't save him. I'm hoping to keep him alive a little longer to give us a better chance at treating him.
OK. Subtle gestures. The second try will accomplish +1 without Confidence.
I did a pretty thorough search a while ago. The general rule is always round up. Let me check my past posts. Here it is.
To Petrus Tasia says, "If the mother will oblige then, we will transport him as you suggest and thus attend to our part of the bargain. Back at the covenant I can cast a much stronger spell to help him recover. I can also acquire some supplies for you. But while we're here I'm afraid we are both quite limited."
After Petrus's reply, Tasia speaks to the mother. "Ma'am, our doctor will have trouble helping your son here. While we cannot have the boy walk to where we are staying, we could potentially transport him there, where the doctor could help him better. We would need to bundle him up warmly and get someone to help take him by boat to make the travel easier."
[There's a number of posts in that thread, though, that say that they don't round at all for spontaneous spells - just say that if it's half a point under the target, there's no rounding involved and it's still under.]
His mother (you suddenly realise you have no idea of her name) looks at you, and you can see hope and suspicion war in her eyes. She's watched her son waste away these past two weeks, and the thought of watching him die, knowing perhaps she could have saved him is almost unbearable - yet will her son truly be safe alone with these strangers? She didn't quite like the look of the boatload yesterday, and there were always those strange rumours about the last lot who lived up in the ruins...
She clutches Juchin to her.
"Is that really necessary? He's so sick - he needs his mother. I know it's a bit of a walk - perhaps we could find space for your doctor here, close to the boy?"
[If you're going to keep trying to persuade her, give me an appropriate comm + social skill roll. Take a +2 bonus for having got a good Folk Ken roll - I may give additional bonuses/penalties depending on your arguements. If asked, Petrus will be firm that no, he really does need a proper medical space.]
Er, I really should have said I assume you round to the nearest whole number.
Scott
Yes, there are a number of posts that say people play that way. None of them could back it up in the book, so there are no posts that say that not rounding is RAW. (Just specifying here.) I'm fine either way. I'm so used to rounding I just did it by habit.
Tasia asks Petrus "If we were to acquire medicines you need, could you treat him here? His mother seems quite loathe to part with him, and I'm not sure things would go better were she to come with us and see the rest of us."
Petrus frowns.
"It's not just a question of having the ingredients to hand, although that's part of it. He's got a significant excess of phlegm. I can rebalance that to an extent by feeding him the right herbs, and if it were a milder disease, that would be enough. In this case, though, I'm going to need to bring more to bear - the right diet, a proper fire, the right amount of exercise...I could go on. Here, some of the influences he's going to be exposed to are going to be actively harmful. I suppose if you could get them to put aside a dedicated building I could probably manage something down here, but I doubt they have one available. All that said, ma'am, where are you planning to put the boy if we get him back to the covenant?"
He seems to be carefully not commenting on the mother's likely reaction to the magi and ex-lepers of the covenant.
I think we probably are getting down to "how does Scott want it to work in this saga?"