Diabolists and healing

[Rayven]

Is there a healing ward or rune anywhere that Diabolists use? One of the guys in my game asked me this, and I can't find one in any of the books I have.

[Library Ogre]

Is there a healing ward or rune anywhere that Diabolists use? One of the guys in my game asked me this, and I can't find one in any of the books I have.

Not yet.

[Rayven]

Sonofacrap!

[t0m]

Is there a healing ward or rune anywhere that Diabolists use? One of the guys in my game asked me this, and I can't find one in any of the books I have.

Not yet.

hmmmm

[The Dark Elf]

1st edition he can use the healing power circle.

2nd edition you should make one up if u like and post it here.

[Library Ogre]

I personally do not allow Diabolist characters to make up new wards; wards, IMO, represent something akin to runes, and are a subset of rune magic. Making up new wards is making up new words in the language of the Megaverse.

[Library Ogre]

Right. A character can't come up with new wards, IMO. A player or GM can, however, and have them put in the game.

I let summoners come up with new circles, though. It's dangerous and frequently stupid, but they can try.

[Natalya]

*i* don't see why a PC couldn't create their own wards, spells, circles, etc. (someone had to think of them!) *but* to be realistic, i do think they would have to be very high level (like 10+) and pretty much devote their life to it.

That said, it can be really cool in the campaign to come across something like this. It could be fun to work it into the story line.

For those who don't mind mixing in a little megaverse, why not use the spell creation section in TtGD? It's very comprehensive.

[Library Ogre]

Right, Rutger, but that's not "creating". That's "making a lost one work".

[Library Ogre]

If you come across a new symbol, your diabolist training kicks in, like a summoner with a new circle. (Mind you, in my version of the game, diabolists can use circles, but they can't figure them out... they have to be taught them.)

So, first you draw the symbol, while noting what the symbol seems to be made of. You already know most of the common ward components, so recognizing silver, gold, and quicksilver will be pretty easy. Exotic stuff like demon bone, unicorn horn, or the teeth of a left-handed Hytril named Mister Mxyzptlk is going to take a bit more work to figure out.

Once you've got your ward design, you need to figure out what it does, which involves setting it off and monitoring its effects. Have fun.

At that point, you have to figure out what the power words that would power such a thing would be. That's going to follow some principles, and your Diabolist special skills will come in handy here, but it's still going to be a process.

[The Immortal ME]

My view is generally that magic--and any other area of knowledge outside of the daily experience of the masses--in the palladium universe is predominately in a state analogous to the dark ages; i.e., with the fall of the of the great civilizations and the subsequent purges the vast majority of knowledge has been lost, and what remains is transmitted from teacher to pupil by rote recitation. There exists exactly zero understanding of what or how the subject actually works, be it wards or architecture. Furthermore, because teachers are sometimes outright fearful to transmit the full of their knowledge to their pupils (especially in magical subjects), persecution by laymen, general illiteracy, rarity and destruction of reference materials, &c., there is a general downward trend. This overall lack of understanding of what they are doing makes truly original thought rare. Where it does exist, it is dampened considerably by these handicaps.

While this doesn't necessarily preclude rediscovery, anything but the most explicit instructions would be onerous and extremely dangerous to reconstruct. Explicit enough instructions are likely to be nigh impossible to find; details deemed mundane at the time are undoubtable no longer so and the majority of references to other works are likely to be completely unresolvable. In a specific field such as magic, you will have introductory texts, and you will have technical journals without much in between. Introductory texts, while useful if you don't know what you're doing, may or may not be of much use to somebody who already has a grasp of the basics. Technical journals are almost impossible to read unless already knowing way more than I envision scholars of the day know and even more so when none of the supporting documentation is accessible.

I would say, unless you found a pretty bloody explicit manual, you run an extremely high risk of blowing yourself up, accidently summoning nasties, &c. while trying to reverse engineer it without really knowing what you're doing; or are looking at a pretty expansive quest and/or luck in finding all the supporting documentation for you to reconstruct any reasonably impressive magical effect.

Pulling it square out of your arse, like 5 ;-), is right out.

On the actual subject, I'm not sure about the applicability of a healing ward. Diabolists are very ... not about that. I can't find a good word for it. Their skills are almost completely antithetical to combat and personal physicality so I don't see a healing ward being particularly germane to their focus. That's about the best I can explain it.

In particular, I have reservations about the P.P.E. to HP converter. Usually when you charge a ward sequence you give it all the juice it needs to do its job. This paritcular ward would be discontinous in that regard. I don't like discontinuities. You might be able to be able to come up with a reasonable hack by making it some arbitrary combination of "mystic," "life," and "balance" wards if you made it institute a balance between P.P.E. and HP, for example. I don't see a particularly straightforward way to compute an equilibrium, though, so that isn't much of a consolance.

[Library Ogre]

As I've said, I do not see diabolists coming up with "new" wards. Figuring out old ones they come across, yes. That's a matter of applying their current knowledge to figure out how old things work.

"Well, it's made out of silver, and when I set it off, it slapped me with a fish. My guess is that it a ward of Trout Slapping, which would make the appropriate power words Acba yin Tharsis-mycn yin Lo-kum... though it might be Tao-bo, if, instead of instilling change, the trout-slap is supposed to represent the serenity that the trout-slapper feels after trout-slapping someone."

[Library Ogre]

You might or might not need to have an old/lost ward handy in order to replicate it. Merely the knowledge that such a thing is possible might be inspiration enough for an enlightened Diabolist to redo all of the original research and design, from scratch, and create a new version.

Assume for a moment that you are a Chinese poet. Not fully literate, but know a goodly number of symbols.

Now, you want to write "mirror", but you do not know the symbol which represents a mirror in Chinese. You know that there IS one. But you do not know how to write it.

How do you do this in a way that your readers will understand what you mean?

Now, assume that your reader is the Megaverse. It not only has to understand what you mean, but want to do it.

The original research for diabolism was done by the Old Ones, not by any mortal. Summoning is a different story... you're manipulating sets of symbols in a rough syntax, and power words in another, to create two simultaneous messages that form a single, coherent, narrative. With Diabolism, each symbol is individual; it's placed in a context with other symbols, but they must stand on their own.