Detoxification (sage ability)

Detoxification is an authority-status sage ability in the study of Medicine that enables the physician to reduce the effects of poisoning and other forms of toxic damage to the body through the application of diuretics, emetics, purgatives, anti-toxins and anti-venom.

To succeed in countering forms of addiction, the character must assemble one dose each of blue mass, four thieves' vinegar, wood alcohol and aloe vera per day; these things are described on the equipment notes page. Treatment does not remove the addiction outright, but interferes with its progress, reducing both the harm it causes and the rate at which it spreads through the body.

Poisoning

The physician is able to reduce both the amount of damage that poisoning causes and the speed with which the poison invests the body. Poison introduced through injection, such as by stingers, bites or weapons, is treated by constricting the affected part to slow circulation, performing bloodletting and administering anti-toxins. Poison that has been swallowed is treated through the use of an emetic to induce vomiting, or by administering a substance that will absorb the poison within the stomach and intestinal tract.

Through these measures, the physician may reduce the poison's damage per hit die and level by 1 point for every 20 points of medical knowledge possessed. Thus, a physician with 34 points of knowledge could reduce a woe to a distress, while a physician with 40 points could reduce the effects to a rueful.

Once treatment has begun, the patient is entitled to an additional saving throw. This saving throw is made without any modifying adjustment; reductions already applied to the poison's severity do not alter the roll. A successful save reduces the total damage to 50% of the maximum.

With respect to onset, the PME (potential maximum effect per round) is rolled every other round, rather than every round, provided the patient is resting and remains fully under the physician's care.

Treating Addiction

Once a character has acquired an addiction, that character will feel compelled to satisfy it on a daily basis, in an amount generally determined by the character background generator, which establishes which characters are liable to addiction under ordinary circumstances. Such a compulsion cannot be resisted merely by means of an ability check against wisdom or intelligence, because addiction imposes an automatic -18 modifier against the character's stats.

Other means must therefore be employed. As described above, each of the four anti-toxins reduces this penalty: blue mass and four thieves' vinegar by 2 points each, and wood alcohol and aloe by 1 point each. These substances must be administered by a character possessing the detoxification sage ability, or else they may cause either death by poison or blindness (50/50 chance of each), unless a save vs. poison is made (every time a non-skilled person attempts to administer these things). Aloe is excepted from this requirement; it may be administered by a non-skilled character, though by itself it is unlikely to prove of much use.

Checks against Substances

Once the medicine has been taken, the character makes a constitution check, improved by the modifiers given above. If the character's constitution is 12 or less, however, these medicines alone have no effect. When treatment is supervised by someone possessing detoxification ability, additional modifiers shown on the table may further improve the character's chance of success, but only if they are accompanied by the use of medicine.

Practice	Benefit
bloodletting	+2
cold immersion in near freezing water	+1
healing salve	+2
heavy restraints	+1
immobility or rest	+1
substitute constitution	+1-4

Bloodletting is explained under that sage ability. Immersion must be carried out in water between 30 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit, requiring a system shock survival check for the treatment to be beneficial; this makes it dangerous for characters with low constitution.

The ability includes knowledge of how to bind a character securely, which takes 13-18 rounds; unbinding requires 4-10 rounds, and the binding must be maintained for two hours at a time, twice per day, at unpredictable intervals, requiring the constant presence of a skilled attendant. Immobility means the character remains in bed for the entire day, without rising for any purpose.

If the physician possesses more than 60 points in medicine, they may temporarily provide the addicted character with 1 point of constitution for every four they're ready to sacrifice. For example, a physician ready to do without 12 constitution points could add 3 to a patient. This imposes a penalty of 4 constitution upon the physician, who suffers this loss for the latter half of the day when the treatment is given, recovering it after eight hours of rest.

Each successful day reduces the base penalty, beginning at -18, by 1 point, provided the character does not touch or recommit to the substance. Thus, after one successful day, the base penalty falls to -17. This process continues until the penalty is reduced to zero, at which point the character is fully detoxified and no further medical aid can be given.

Success

The physician must make two successful forms of sequence. In the first case, a total of 10 successful rolls must be made out of 15. This allows 5 failures in a given fifteen rolls; as a sequence is foiled by one too many fails, the earliest parts of the sequence are discarded in favour of a better chance.

For a full detoxification, to where the patient may be expected not to relapse, the last four rolls of the 10 of 15 sequence MUST be successes.