Medicine

Life is fragile, but you know how to stitch it back together—sometimes with herbs, sometimes with hope.

The Medicine skill is the art of mending the broken, treating wounds and illness alike, whether in the chaos of battle or the quiet of a sickbed.

As your mastery deepens, so does your ability to diagnose hidden ailments, perform intricate procedures, and stretch dwindling supplies. At its pinnacle, the skill reveals the mind’s troubles—addictions, frailties of the spirit. And in those final moments, when death reaches out, the most skilled healers can pull a soul back from the brink.

Skill Perks

(25%) Ability: Field Medic: Using bandages, you can heal others during combat. Total amount healed is determined by skill and bandage quality.

(50%) Ability: Triage: Unlocks the ability on the Patient Diagnosis Menu. instantly heal the most severe injury at the expense of rendering another untreatable (so it must heal naturally, or get worse, which will turn a new injury to be addressed later)

(75%) Ability: Taper: Unlocks the ability on the Patient Diagnosis Menu. When patient has been diagnosed with a Chemical Dependency and is suffering from Withdrawal; can apply a drug type to the patient they’re addicted to which removes the withdrawal effects and does not add to their addiction meter, allowing them to let the addiction metric decay a bit without affecting their stats.

(100%) Ability: Stabilize: Unlocks the ability on the Patient Diagnosis Menu. When a patient is dying, you can stabilize your patient to stall the dying condition for an extended period. If the lethal injury is addressed in that timeframe, the afflicted player will survive.

Healing in Combat

At 25% skill Field Medic becomes available from the Abilities Menu. This takes concentration, and bandages, to accomplish.

Diagnosing & Treatment

Begin by acquiring a stethoscope, which is craftable via Engineering.

A doctor's read on a patient depends on that doctor's own skill, traits, and current mental state.

WARNING: Sharing screenshots of health or skill readouts with other players, in Discord, voice, or in party chat, is considered metagaming and against Server Rules. Doing so will zero the offending character's medical skill. Unreliable narration is a part of compelling roleplay, and you will need to prove or disprove a doctor's assessment in game, not by sharing screenshots to circumvent roleplaying trust.

Tapering & Addiction

Drugs & Addiction

Sanity & Psychological Traits

At 100% skill, a doctor can deduce a patients mental state. Due to the limitations of the period, There is no medical treatment for Sanity

Adaptation Traits

Medicine in Roleplay

The year is 1896, but medical knowledge is locked to what was published before 1890. If an idea, treatment, or term wasn't published before then, your character shouldn't know be using it in their roleplay.

That leaves room for both progressive and regressive doctors. Germ theory is promising, not settled fact. Antiseptic practice caught on in some surgeries and got ignored in others. Mental illness is broadly sorted into antiquated terms like neurasthenia, hysteria, melancholia, or plain moral weakness. Addiction is largely classified as a failure of willpower, not a disease.

Think about how your character learned medicine. Formally trained enough to know germ theory? Or just picked it up in the trenches, knowing a clean wound healed better? A plain search like "1880s terms for PTSD" or "Victorian opium habits" will turn up the real language doctors and patients used at the time to further enhance your roleplay.

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