Horse Physiology (sage ability)
A limited study relating to animal physiology, allowing for the maintenance and restoration of health in horses. This includes treating illness and preventing the effects of poison and magical attacks. Physiology in terms of the game should be treated as more of an art than a science, since even by the middle of the 17th century, many veterinary practices continued to be traditional rather than the result of experimentation or examination.
Each part of the study describes a useful procedure, developed chiefly by horse breeders who did not have easy access to spells and magical cures. It should be noted that while in the real world, bloodletting is a practice that offers little aid, in D&D this practice can easily be reimagined as something effective in the treatment of animals injured in peculiar ways. This is in no way less credible than the game's invention of magic.
A character with this knowledge is able to do the following:
- Improve the restoration of hit points lost to horses that have rested. Up to one horse can be aided per 5 knowledge points possessed by the character. Thus a character with 37 points could help up to 7 horses. Each horse attended with this skill will heal as though possessing 2 hit dice higher, with an increase of 2 additional hit points healed per day of rest.
- The character is able to bind a horse's wounds more efficiently; if the binding is done carefully, in three rounds, the character can restore 1 hit point of damage that was caused by the wound before binding.
- Diagnose & treat a farmyard disease. The character will only have knowledge of treatment and diseases that affect horses.
- Proper knowledge of restoring a horse that has not been properly limbered after it has become physically exhausted, a curative process of doubling the horse's diet and rubbing the horse's muscles/treating the horse's tendons for a 24 hour period.
See Horseback Riding
