I was reading a manga where in a world of mediaeval melee weapon combat, there was someone with the ability to transfer wounds.
Basically when there was a battle afterwards the side’s soldiers would get their wounds fixed up by getting a prisoner of war with healthy body parts and transferring the wounds.
In the manga at one point the ‘healer” had to stop fixing damaged arms because there were no more POWs with undamaged arms. Apart from the moral questions this raises, could Hermetic Magic do something similar?
I know there is a spell that tries to transfer fatigue. So maybe a wound might be transferred?
ReCo with requisite Cr and Pe to represent losing and acquiring a Wound. And maybe a Mu requisite because you are giving the two targets “properties” of each other. Though it might need to be a Ritual in order to make it stick. Which would make it too expensive for most used. But then again the total Wounds that the Group of 2 suffer is unchanged and continues on naturally, so escape Ritual requirement?
Not certain that all wounds are the same would apply if moving around the body.
A deep dagger gash to the biceps would be of different severity than to a deep dagger gash to the groin, or the stomach, or the armpit, or the eye, etc
Maybe "create an identical wound to this one on another person's body" then. Clearly helps build towards transfer, so a stepping stone to the breakthrough.
Considering the ritualistic nature of any momentary (=permanent) healing, I don’t think it is feasible with a non-ritual spell.
Creating a wound would follow PeCo guideline, eventually, with an +1 requisit to be able to equally affect animal. There is also the additional issue of having two targets: the one with the wound, and the one where the wound is going to be transferred, definitely not a traditional target, but we might look at teleportation spell since this is the closest of having to target (the one affected by the teleportation and the destination of the teleportation itself, embedded into the guideline of the spell).
It should definitely be a troupe discussion as there are too many things that are not standard or within hermetic theory. Breakthrough at least minor to design very new guideline.
My proposal would be a Creo(Perdo) Corpus ritual.
Existing guidelines:
CrCo 30 to heal an Incapacitating wound
PeCo 20 to inflict an Incapacitating wound
T: Ind, D: Mom, R: AC (+4). The wound could be used as a AC to the one who inflicted it, otherwise a regular AC will redirect to somebody else.
Final spell:
An Eye for an Eye, Cr(Pe)Co 55, Mom, Ind, AC (base 30, +4 AC range, +1 additional effect: inflicting a wound).
The spell heals any type of wound while inflicting the same one to another target with AC range.
Lower version exists, but are limited to specific type of wounds.
There are guidelines for transferring wounds, in RoP:I p 105, specifically within Incantation/Consumption, with base levels from 15 (light) to 30 (incapacitating).
House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky does wound transfer. The healer takes the wound on to herself and heals much faster than most people
For those who have not read the book. Do not read the rest if you care about spoilers.
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She teaches some trainees, and one of them thinks “Why take the wound myself?”. You can weaponise wound transfer as well. Why wait until after combat to transfer the wound to your enemies?
Keep in mind that it is not because it is possible with certain powers that it can be translated into an hermetic spell. And for me, wound transfer falls in this category.
I’ve been thinking about the same question recently, inspired by Lord of the Mysteries.
Since the Individual for Corpus is a human, ‘wound transfer’ can be achieved by a Creo and Perdo effect, but here the transfer is effectively just flavour - it’d be easier to just cast the two spells separately, and the perdo is just sadism.
I’d allow a minor breakthrough to invent a special CrPeCo guideline that can achieve healing via transfer a little cheaper (-2 mags?), and much cheaper (-4 mags?) if the wound is transferred to the caster (via sympathy with the martyrdom of christ).
As an alternative route, I’d suggest a major breakthrough that allows for Corpus spells to target individual wounds rather than people, just like how Imaginem can target individual species or individual images.
Then, a ReCo (wound) effect would be able to move wounds around, potentially to other people. Incidentally, PeCo (wound) and CrCo (wound) effects would equate normal CrCo and PeCo effects.
Because this would result in a way to achieve free(ish) healing, some downside should probably be implied - just as MuCo(An) geckomancy lets you regenerate quickly, but has major side effects.
I’d suggest either Taint as mentioned above or Guidelines with cost based on familiarity or similarity between Target and Victim - transferring a wound to friends and family might be much easier, making a practitioner of such spells inherently untrustworthy.
Either way, use of such spells would certain incur a negative reputation.
Sounds mechanically like ‘Miri’, an original Star Trek episode.
In ArM, there is magic to transfer bodily energy, iirc, and I don’t see why wounds would be different in principle. It’s open to rather parasitic or vampiric abuse.
Good point! The guideline you’re thinking of is ReCo 15 Direct the flow of bodily energy, and the associated spell The Gift of Vigor (Core pg. 134).
Considering the (Lesser) Limit of Energy and the note on the spell, that ‘Magi have long looked for a way to restore their energy in order to cast more spells.This is the closest they’ve come.’, I’d suggest this guideline was the result of some manner of breakthrough.
Furthermore, the guideline relies on directing (Rego) a specific property of a whole body (Corpus) and I’m not sure a similar construction is available for wounds. A direct corollary might be achieved via the TCM concept of qi and blood, allowing for a transfer of recovery bonuses but not wounds.
There’s older online MUD games (DragonRealms, Gemstone) where the ‘healing’ classes took wounds from others and then healed themselves. It’s a really fun aesthetic.
Adding that sort of healing mechanic to a saga is a cool idea, but I also think it is not really in theme for Hermetic Magic in ME. A number of points-based games (ex Champions, Gurps) allow you to add limitations to powers or items to make them cheaper, Ars Magica actually makes them MORE expensive. Making a cursed sword that grants great strength but drives you berserk isn’t… easier than just the strength - it requires additional power to add the curse in. Making a magic lantern that only activates when those of pure heart touch it requires additional magical requirements woven into it. Making spells or items simpler is always easier.
Thus, healing a wound is easier than creating a wound and healing a wound at the same time. Hermetic Magic doesn’t SEEM to have a concept of ‘transferring’ wounds, not any more than you can ‘steal’ someone’s hair color, or ‘deliver’ someone your own fears to get rid of them - those are more often found in faerie or infernal, as was mentioned. The only real ‘transfer’ I found in the main books was the fatigue transfer, which is a rather unique spell.
I don’t want to stop you from exploring the creativity here, really. I’m mostly exploring my own thoughts on this idea and how I might apply them to my sagas. I think in my own saga, doing these sorts of transfers would be much harder than just doing the heal or the harm, because it’s just a more complex spell construct. The concept of wound transfer would be based around sympathetic connections, most likely, and all the rules associated with that… meaning it would probably be a more complex spell with a good penetration multiplier.
Additionally it would be very unbalancing. I mean lets set aside prisoners of war for a moment- lets assume you have an item that when you take a wound heals it for duration sun. At the end of the day you transfer the wounds to someone else who has rapid recovery and spells “tuned” so they don’t take warping that allows the wounds to heal faster. If they are risk for warping due to time you just transfer the wounds to someone else and let the healing continue. Allowing this would effectively allow instant healing and bypass all of the downsides.
I'm leaning towards the only way this could be done in hermetic magic would be doing it through infernal insight and tainting any resulting virtue or spell. But I'd probably at least consider a counter-argument from a player who wanted to launch a spell research project.
Magi of Hermes introduces a MuCo guideline - Level 5: Add or remove human body parts from the target in such a way that he no longer looks human. These parts are normally functional, although a spell may be deliberately designed so that they are not. The Target is Part, not Individual.
One of the spell examples involves the caster’s eyes floating off from his head (while remaining functional.) I’m wondering to what extent could a wound be considered “A Body Part”, and is there any route by which detaching the wound from the rest of the body in this way would be helpful for this line of inquiry?
It's a possible line of inquiry in some cases. Detaching an arm to replace a missing arm would make sense. But to do that with a wound, you have to get into the line of asking yourself what the wound is tangibly, something which is left more or less deliberately abstract by the system. If the wound is a deep cut, I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense to, say, remove the surface skin of a target to close your wounds. It doesn't really make sense for a concussion, or the aftereffects of a poison either. Surgery already falls under rego craft magic, and even rego craft instant surgery doesn't instantly heal the wound either. So, with the possible exception of flaws which may be easily compensated, chances are your discussions will lead you in the direction of life force transfer. That is, unless you really want to investigate in the direction of swapping your wounded arm/leg/chest with someone else's intact arm/leg/chest on a temporary basis. Which will at the least unsettle your average hermetic magi.
On swapping the wounded limb for someone else’s intact limb: creating a dead body is CrCo 5, much cheaper than the 15/20/25 for wound healing. Perhaps creating your dead body (CrCo ?) and swapping out limbs could allow for a cheaper approach to healing certain wounds.
A clever magus ought to be able to get a lot of mileage out of the term ‘corpse’. There’s no reason a CrCo corpse would be any more decayed or useless than the most recently (i.e. fully useable) dead.
Thus, the exact differences between attaching a CrCo’d fresh arm and, say, re-attaching your own recently severed arm could end up minutiae at best.