Identify Clean Water (sage ability)

Identify clean water is an amateur-status sage ability in the study of Forester, which allows the character to ascertain that naturally occurring water is safe to drink, largely though observation, odor, testing a bit of the water against one's tongue and the appearance of the surrounding vista. For convenience sake, the purity of the water can be judged on a purity scale of 1 to 20. A table for the meaning behind each rating is listed below. Most water that is found in nature will come from one of these sources:

• Clear, flowing water will most likely have a purity rating of 16 to 20. Most dangerous impurities will be in the form of mining run-off or animal disease which is transmitted into the water from defecation.
• Slow moving water will contain silt and will tend to have a rating anywhere from 5 to 17. The most dangerous impurities are naturally occurring diseases, such as black water fever or cholera, proliferating from detritus or defecation somewhere upstream.
• Clear ponds are spring-fed water bodies that may contain algae and will have a rating of 12 to 20, depending on the surrounding terrain and vegetation. A mountain tarn with a rock or sand bottom will be purest, while a prairie or forest pond without much silt will be least pure.
• Clear lakes are defined as water bodies that are fed by rivers; they will have a rating of anywhere from 10 to 18; like clear ponds, this will depend on terrain and vegetation.
• Stagnant ponds and lakes will have suspended silt, detritus and growing algae, with a rating of 1 to 11. This includes freshwater stagnant marshes.

Purity ratings are as follows: