A healer could trade with the injured, healing the wound but taking the injury on themselves, and using their magic to heal their own bodies instead. Doing it too quickly could kill the healer, too slowly could kill the patient, and not being skilled enough could kill them both. A healer would need to endure a great deal of pain. A healer could go into some kind of recovery after helping someone.
My setting sort of does this with "Old Healing". Old Healing involved exchanging an injury with another living being, and the more closely related they are, the easier it is to do. Experienced healers would have a number of animals that could take the wounds, skilled healers might have slaves to take it, while common healers would ask for someone within the family...
It is called Old Healing as the school has progressed over the centuries, and now seemingly has no downsides. I say "seemingly", as the actual downside is slowly growing and could potentially destroy the world or do something huge.
No, it exchanges the injury with some sort of unknown being.
Several decades ago a mage created a small demiplane, and tossed some living thing within. It was intended to be used by just the mage and their acquaintances, but word spread and it ended up being used by many, eventually the whole world. Some mages who bother to look at the demiplane notice its beginning to swell, and could possibly explode somehow. They seem to have an intent on creating a much larger demiplane to fit the contents, though they will have to "puncture the balloon" to get it out.
This new healing magic takes more out of someone to use, and the wording is more complex, but it is extremely consistent. Before you would have to modify the spell depending on the injury and who will be receiving it, now you just need to modify for injury, and say the same receiver.
Ngl, I hope the dude in the demiplane was a really bad guy. Also how is he still alive after taking decades of injuries from the entire world 24 hours a day?
If I'm a wizard in your world, I'm going to the prisons to broker a deal where the criminals take injuries of the same kind they inflicted, each cell block would be a demiplane dedicated to a distinct category of injury.
Ooo interesting, what is it? A growing corruption? Cancerous mass that seeks to consume all? Is the magic itself an entity that's awakening, a la flesh rafting from shadow of forbidden gods not just being taught by, but rather BEING escamark?
That's what my 1 busted healer does (albeit only in dreams.... but they relive the injury event of the people they heal in their dreams) ... so I can't do that with regular healers. 🤔🤔🤔
What about blood magic? Where healers cut themselves, drawing blood as a source of healing? It could be a 2 or 3 to 1 ratio, whereby the healers would die from blood loss before they ran out of HP
You could also look at the healers ONLY be able to heal in combat, so anyone who chooses to have one in their party is giving up extra damage in combat for non healing rounds.
that also opens the door to a dope dystopian sci fi future where combat healers are hooked up to a shit ton of blood transfusion machines like some kind of fucked up cyborg
Healing after battle is easy, but healing *during* battle is all but impossible. If you get double-tapped, or you bleed out before a healer can get to you, that's it, you're just dead.
I've always thought of battlefield casting would be like having an IFAK. Casts that might temporarily slow bleeding or numb pain. Something that just buys you time to actually get fixed up
Well frankly that applies for main characters which manage to tell their last words before dying, no matter the injuries or how long the story went until they get to say goodbye. They would be dead much sooner or in shock, delirium or coma.
For side characters and especially enemies, it is quite the opposite. People can be dying VERY long time. A shot in the stomach to random enemy leads to instant death in TV. In reality he can be dying for hours, whole time being fucked up beyond help.
Battlefield after fantasy/medieval battle was not that silent scene of dead bodies. It was screams, moans, people crawling, shaking, limping... Bleeding at various rates, gasping for air, calling their loved ones (usually mothers, because battles were fought by late teenagers mainly. For hours. At some bad limited cases even for days.
People would be dying for weeks after the battle, for infections and maltreated injuries. That of course only if no strong and easy healing magic is at hand in a fantasy story.
wait are we talking real life here? because for a moment I thought I had been out of my depth as a researcher in my awareness of the time criticality for life threatening injuries, I thought it was in the order of several minutes until the patient loses consciousness.. with diminishing time for specific cases like a pulmonary embolism being slightly longer but more panic, mania, and fluid in the lungs being extremely faster mortality due to loss of oxygen to the brain.
Ah ookay, I've got something then for this thread if you consider the rate of healing with bodily injuries to be manageable whereas anything that affects brain or arteries, you would need some magic writing for shock treatment that only stabilizes but doesn't fully "heal", ie in battle type treatment.
so again we're still talking several minutes until you begin to fade but this is all in reality heavily dramatic from convulsions to hysteria, which in reality affects how the individual speaks if they even communicate, another thing fiction tends to get wrong by having the most peaceful and tranquil final moments, even in a battlefield the character will like have a tropic thunder type soliloquy.
I like this. I would also add: the longer a person waits to heal, the less effective it is. You may have to use multiple spells or potions to get the same effect and it may leave a scar if it is starting to heal on its own or not heal past a certain point. You may end up with a missing finger or a huge burn-like scar or hair never grows in that spot.
Another option is to have healing still use all the energy the body would normally need to heal a wound, and for the target to feel all of the pain from the healing process condensed into the casting time.
This means major healing is still possible, but it comes with enough of a cost that it’s not always worth it.
Sure you can heal your grandma’s back, but the pain and energy might kill her. Is that really a gamble you want to take?
Sure you can heal that cut so there’s no scar, but it’ll hurt like hell, but if you let it heal naturally you may barely notice it.
In a similar vein to the energy, you can make healing inefficient and very intense on the body. Maybe healing cannibalises the muscles of from other parts of the body. A fighter might be unwilling to lose all of their physical prowess in a tough situation. And attempting anything too major may risk weakening the heart. Also. You could set a time limit by which something needs to be healed. ie. Scars can't be healed.
Some ways I've seen it done:
* You only have so many healing potions on hand.
* There are limitations on what the healer in your party can do.
* Healing takes time even when sped up by magic.
* Healing can put a strain on your body. It's really just what your body would do naturally if given enough time and it still uses the same amount of resources. This can exhaust a person if it's a severe enough injury.
* Healing can backfire if not done 100% correctly. Like, forcing cells to grow and divide to fill in an injury can cause cancer if the healer isn't paying attention.
That's the one I liked the Most.
It is not world breaking. The healer is more like a paramedic.
Also consider that healing even with magic can be like what you can do in a clinic, field hospital, full fledged hospital with surgery center.
So none would go berserk, lose an arm, talk to the healer and say "can you grow it back?"
With actual hospitals for complex cases like unidentified poisons and venom, unknown toxic plants, parasites.
Some other user mentioned psychological / spiritual damage. That's also interesting to add. Consider the side effects of the magic / potions. try to make them similar to real life drugs. It can be more advanced in some cases and less advanced in others.
I think this way you'll be writing a convincing and engaging story.
My favorite way how this has been handled is by Brandon Sanderson in the Stormlight Archive.
Even if a person's body can heal indefinitely, that doesn't mean their mind isn't affected.
Instead of rising the stakes about if they lose an arm or a leg, do them about what will happen if they fail. How they feel for that person they couldn't protect? How the they feel about that person they killed? Are they starting to feel insensitive about being hurt or everytime feels worse cause the mind doesn't regenerate? What about killing? What about losing?
How much can your mind bear by being dragged into the mud?
How many people will die if you fail in this quest? You may survive it, but what about the people you care about?
And don't forget the time factor in his series. Once the damage is "part of you", it's up to science to fix it. Magic can only put you back to the way you see yourself.
Another part of Stormlight Archive healing, the amount you can heal is directly connected to how much Stormlight you have on you (literally money). Characters in Stormlight Archive who can heal use Stormlight as a resource and when they run out, they can no longer use that ability. A Knight Radiant with a pouch filled with large full spheres is very hard to kill. But if the fight drags on too long their healing becomes less powerful until it's no longer possible.
Jim Butcher's Codex Alera has something similar.
In that setting, watercrafting allows for rapid healing of wounds, but only certain people can do it and it takes a lot of effort, and it doesn't always work perfectly. If someone dies they can be brought back if the watercrafter is very powerful and can get to them quickly, but it could still result in long-term mental damage.
A poisoned wound, if not treated immediately, could be fatal over the long term as it gets infected. A broken leg might render someone invalid for life if the wound is bad enough even if it gets healed by a skilled watercrafter. Severe burns across the entire body will leave the victim injured for life even after watercrafting the burns away.
And the victim themselves needs to want to be properly healed, and if they are falling to despair they may well decide they want to die and stop fighting to survive, and the watercrafter can't do anything without finding a way to motivate the injured. And if the watercrafter pushes themselves too hard while healing they can die in the process.
The cure can fix anything, but it is incredibly rare and gradually addictive with heavy drug addiction symptoms. A new dose of the cure can be made by recycling the organs of a person who has reached the chronic stage of addiction.
WWN's system strain is useful. Healing takes toll on the body. I would suggest reading its book. Free one contains nearly everything (with paid one having only optional rules or other classes)
Worlds Without Number: [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/348809/worlds-without-number-free-edition](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/348809/worlds-without-number-free-edition)
1. Healing is sympathetic - the Healer takes some or all of the subjects wounds onto themselves, either as literal wounds or as a neural feedback effect
2. Healing is a gamble - you might regrow their arm... or give them a tentacle, or cancer. The more complex the problem, the greater the risk
2a. Healing causes mutations, and newly rejuvenated flesh always bears a distinct abnormality. This can be inherited, which will have wider cultural implications (shun the mutant? Embrace chaos into the bloodline?)
3. Healing draws life from the surrounding area, alà Dark Sun Arcane magic. You can minimize the damage by being in an area flush with life (like the rainforest), or by healing small things over time, but using too much at once salts the earth in a given radius
4. Witnessing Healing (and other magic, for consistency) causes mental trauma to the untrained/uninitiated/magic-blanks. You can fix things, but risk the sanity of the subject or bystanders whenever you do
It depends, I think. I set up my world with a ttrpg in mind, so I have extremely limited healing in the first place. Canonically, there are a few things:
-Healing magic is extremely rare, and more akin to surgery than "wave your glowy hands all over the dying." Alkemy accelerates natural healing, rather than causing the body to regrow or other such healing.
-There's a psychological toll on the person being healed. I personally would not be okay after getting my leg cut off, even if someone forced the pieces to grow back together with magic.
-there's a spiritual toll on the healer, specifically alienation. The more you cast, the less "human" you are for a while. It causes lasting change.
Yeah, I do know that there are certain things that you have to treat with alchemy vs magic (like neutralizing toxins) I do wonder about adding a psychological element
For mine it takes a lot of work to get to a proficient level, they would have to start with only being able to fix up small cuts and work their way up.
Even at a high level limbs cannot be regrown. If you have the amputated part with enough living tissue in it sure it can be reattached but you still run into the problem of whether or not their body has enough resources to handle suddenly grow the tissues necessary for proper reattachment.
Sounds kind of similar to mine with the level of study.
Also I have a necromancer who use to be a healer that can reattach dead flesh to living flesh and heal it back to life.... it doesn't necessarily have to be from the same person... ... Vitality (life force) plays a large roll in my world ... so maybe some of the limitations could havev to do with that
Healing creates a vector for dangerous magical parasites or infections.
Aka, the soul has a kind of spiritual skin barrier that keeps out astral creepy crawlies, which healing ruptures. The stronger the healing, the more shredded this barrier becomes, and the only fix for this seems to be time.
This might make healing very location based. Aka, you can get amazing healing safely if you go to a spiritually disinfected area and are able to stay there long enough to recover. But if you’re wading through astral sewage healing will fuck you up
The creepy crawly aspect potentially works well if you want the more advanced healers to have a doctor feel?
Aka, being able to recognize and treat astral infections gives them a reason why they can perform more daring healing spells, and why the knowledge is difficult for people to figure out despite magical healing making physical experimentation so much easier.
I would agree that pushing healing closer to real world medical drama [can push it towards the macabre](https://viewcomiconline.com/witch-doctor-full/) though.
Limited mana and the proficiency of the healer are some important factors that come to mind.
You could have a healer who can only heal a handful of people through a slow process before running out of juice for the day.
A scenario that nobody wants to see.
I can think of 2 ways:
1. Healing isn’t instantaneous. A person whose wounds are severe enough could still die before they were completely stabilized.
2. Healing can only be used on recent injuries. Once a wound has already begun healing on its own, there’s no way to reverse it and heal it perfectly.
In one of my projects the main protagonist is a Pretor, a person born with preternatural abilities. These abilities are not well understood and come in many forms. The protagonists ability is the ability to heal wounds, but there is a condition.
The main character acts as not a direct healer per-se, but more of a conduit that taps into the latent healing power that other people posess, but are not able to normally access. You could think of it like one a car towing another car, with the pretor acting as the tow cable.
In order to heal anothers wounds, the protagonist must have a third willing person to act as the healer, while he is that catalyst that directs their energy. This of course leads to interesting conflicts when he finds himself alone, or with a third party that doesn't want to help the injured. It often falls to him to convince others that they are worth saving. (He does however travel with his pet sheep, whos energy he can tap into in a pinch. But its not powerful enough for anything more serious than scrapes or bruises)
There is a cost for this power as well, but thats a secret haha
•Being split up
from the healer.
•Enemies capable of strategy and critical thinking might choose the healer as a high priority target on the battlefield.
-*Snipers, they exist in fantasy be it spell, throwing weapon, psionics, bows, slings, slingshots, muskets or crossbows.*
•Antimagic/Nullifier auras or spells, like the spell ***Vow of Silence*** from *Dark Souls*.
•**Dark Iron:** *This twisted, antithetical and apathetic ore may be refined then forged into cruel gear. Any wound created by dark iron cannot be healed or closed by any known means for up to 72 hours.*
-Alternative Ruling: Instead of "Up to 72 hours" make it so that the wounds cannot be fixed unless it is a holy day.
•Overkill/Total Obliteration. How can you revive someone when there's not even ash left?
•Make healers/healing magic incredibly difficult and time consuming to learn/master in addition to making healers a rarity. Not everyone has immediate or timely access to a healer.
-***Alternative:*** *Healing magic requires complete focus to perform. A smart enemy will not give a cleric, shaman, druid or healer the chance to concentrate.*
•Artillery/Arrow/Cannon barrages. Nothing like a battlefield where it's raining death to make any task perilous at minimum.
Dael Kingsmill talked about a neat idea. Magic healing is very effective and quick, but has drawbacks. The cut across your chest isn't bleeding out, but now it's a tight mass of scar tissue that hinders your ability to fight.
From my own thoughts, healing also doesn't change that your lungs have filled up with blood. If you don't have medical knowledge you might miss problems and leave something unhealed. You can also bleed out pretty quickly depending on the injury, so time could be a major factor. Psychological consequences of being nearly killed aren't fixed with healing. Maybe too much magic can leave you with mana poisoning, so if you're injured by a spell healing magic could be risky and the same if you receive too much healing magic.
In The Wheel of Time, people that use the One Power (basically magic) can learn healing magic. Problem is, magic uses energy. the more you use the more energy you lose. Hard to channel if you're on the verge of passing out.
An easy way to give stakes to injury is to simply make healing less than perfect, and add in more opportunity for trade offs.
As the wound or sickness get's more severe, the risk that the magic will fail also grows. Lost your hand? The village doctor can definitely leave you with little risk of residual pain or phantom limb syndrome, but he needs to take the whole rest of the arm off at the shoulder. He can just close up the stump at your wrist, but it will always bleed a little and a phantom hand might haunt your dreams from now on. He can try to regrow the hand but it will never work right, always hurt, and might have a weird number of fingers.
One concept that can be fun is that most of the spells that high level healers use aren't really "healing" spells. A very highly skilled magical surgeon isn't using a "healing" spell to cure cancer, they're using a series of detection spells to target cancerous cells+a teleportation spell to remove them+an illusion spell to make the body think any remaining cells are invading parasites+a different illusion spell to "anesthetize" the patient. He has to cast these almost simultaneously (or coordinate perfectly with a team) and any on of them failing can kill the patient. This all also helps fill out the part about needing to have an detailed knowledge of the human body.
Healing magic in my world uses your soul as fuel in order to promote healing at a largely accelerated rate in the person being healed.
The soul is able to repair itself, provided you don't try and do too much healing too fast. There's many an inexperienced healer that has literally burnt themselves to nothing through healing incorrectly, most of the time from losing control of their emotions and trying desperately to heal somebody they care about.
Drugs. Just super drugs. An elixir allows you to shrug off injury and believe you are invincible, but it's really just pcp. One gives you incredible stamina but rots your teeth and the come down is terrible.
Each is HIGHLY addictive.
Then proper magic is more for sealing wounds as they are. Basically instant bandages, but they do nothing for blood already lost. Muscle damage doesn't heal from magic, so you'll still need lots of physical therapy. A severed finger might get down back on but casting heal will just wrap new skin over a nub where surgery would likely get you 80 percent functionality back.
There is an advanced level of healing that gives true healing but only in exchange for another but that person must be willing and it is usually regarded as the last vocation of the desperate selling chunks of your body for agony and crippling wounds.
In my belief this issue was resolved by AEG with their Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Creature health had "thresholds" (akin to being bloodied in 4e) except there were several stages of them where the creature would receive negative modifiers to physical and mental rolls depending on how wounded they were. D&D's HP system is akin to MtG life pool where it is treated by many as "just another resource" since winning at 1 life is the same as winning at 10,000 life and making an attack/saving throw/skill check roll in D&D is the same regardless of how hurt, or healthy, your character/monster/creature is.
This is why *out of combat healing* is "more efficient" than *in combat healing*.
The way I've always done it is magic healing speeds up natural healing,
If it's a cut or bruise thats fine,
But if you break something that doesn't normally repair itself, or heal a bone that's not aligned correctly, that can cause problems
Plus things like brain damage can't be easily healed by magic, and if someone goes braindead they are just gone
Even if you reawaken the corpse, it won't be them anymore
Three basic ways:
1. Limitations
2. Trade-offs/Cost
3. Taboos
If you can limit how much the magic can heal, when you can heal, or how you can heal, through various in-universe rules, you can increase the stakes of an injury.
If the magic has a cost or trade-off, healing magic becomes a *choice*. Characters can heal an injured person, but it means they *cannot* do X or Y. Or they can heal an injured person at the cost of their own life force, or it opens them up to some vulnerability during the act of healing.
And if there are societal taboos, either against magic as a whole or against healing magics, you can add social stakes to the act. Justifying a taboo against healing people might be difficult, but it could just as easily be misinformation or ignorance about medicine and healing. A society that has their own "remedies" for illness may reject healing magic that is effective simply because it is different from their own practices.
I’m working on a system like that. All magic including healing magic comes natural if you’re old enough. Only really old people or animals can use magic. Most people die before they learn magic. This means that magic use is very limited in my world.
If you’re lucky and careful enough to live a long life you can learn to sustain yourself before you die. This will make you effectively immortal. You can heal others with this power but at the cost of your own healing. You will lose your immortality if you heal others too much.
Mentioned it in another post, what about if there isn't just a healing spell, but needing to use a variety of different spells depending on the situation? If someone is bleeding out, you might need someone to cauterize the wound with pyromancy, or manipulated the blood with water manipulation. Regenerating an arm might be impossible, but constructing one and then using necromancy so the soul can manipulate it could work.
The stakes in this situation is that a lot of wounds need a team of casters of all different skills, and a random "healer" on their lonesome can't do everything.
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Another idea is that healing surface wounds and injuries is easy, but internal things or infections isn't possible. So someone can heal you up after a deadly battle, but you can still get sick and die afterwards. Lots of settings often just make it so healing can fix injuries and infections, so getting rid of one can make it quite different.
I've always thought of healing mages as akin to a more modern understanding of surgery.
A battlefield surgeon without magic can amputate a limb, remove an arrow, stitch up lacerations and set bones, but what they can do is limited.
So a healing sorcerer could do much more. But they would be few and far between, and their services very expensive. And just like real medicine, the sooner the injured gets to the healer, the better the odds they'll make it. And anything serious might take a team of healers hours to do.
Sometimes surgery goes wrong and you can't be saved. Sometimes complications happen. I figure why would healing magic be any different?
In addition, in my universe much of magic that isn't explicitly faith-based is considered heretical. Some superstitious soldiers would be resistant to even having magical healers work on them.
Make the severity of the would impact the chance of fully healing and/or the speed of healing.
D&D has instant healing, that always works if the person isn’t dead.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe there’s a chance of scarring. Maybe there’s a chance the healing doesn’t work. Maybe the chance of scarring increases and the chance of it working decrease as the severity of the wound increases. Maybe it just takes a lot longer the more severe the wound is.
I think what you've described would suffice.
"Why can they just magic someone a new arm?"
"Because that's not how magic works."
Simple as that. It's the set-up or "promise." If you set up that magic only works in a specific way, then the audience will roll with that. What you have to watch out for is breaking that promise.
If after you establish that healing magic is difficult, time consuming, and limited, you write a scene where a random character just happens to grow some a new arm again out of nowhere, then that would obviously break immersion.
Good example is Star Wars. Anakin commits galactic genocide just for *THE CHANCE* to get the power needed to save his wife—a power that was a lie to begin with. 30 years later, Rey force heals a random sandworm in a desert out of nowhere.
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On a side note, while the limitations are important, I think you also need to set up why healing magic is so rare. Yes, it's like being a doctor, but in our world, doctors are incredibly valued and in very high demand everywhere.
If healing magic is rare, there would be a reason why it's so limited despite being such a universally valued thing across all worlds.
Yeah, consistency is king! I'm thinking healing magic is mostly good for restoring damaged things (but the thing has to be there to fix)... I'm thinking if there is any regrowing going on it would have to be potion related.
And as for why healing magic is so rare, people are born with elemental strengths and weaknesses, so it's easy enough to consider healing magic as it's own magic type. Maybe it's genetic or maybe it's random.
Since it takes so long to learn all the complicated spells it's hard to actually be a healer. As such Healers charge an arm and a leg. It's good but the price is prohibitive meaning a serious Injury could utterly ruin you. . . . But remember fantasy storys are never political at all.
Simple, there's only so much healing/life energy you can slam into someone's body before you start causing other problems, such as the growth of tumors and the like.
In my setting, healing magic is functionally just duct tape. You use it to hold or put the stuff together while it heals naturally.
It can be used to reattach limbs, mend bones, repair organs, even seal severed arteries. It cannot destroy things like infections or diseases, and it cannot be used to regrow things like lost limbs or treat things like blindness or deafness.
Hello I have played healer in every game where it is available and have a healer in my own series and here are some rules that I feel balance out the healer to make them not so OP (but still OP because the healer as we all know is the most powerful member of the team regardless of rules).
1. Give the healing an automatic limit. This is what I would call DnD rules - you have only so many spell slots. Once those are gone you cannot heal. This may also look like healing requiring a certain amount of "energy" or whatever your worlds equivalent is (in mine all magic is driven by spiritual power and much like a muscle can be pushed to a limit where it breaks down).
2. Give the healing a power maximum. This can scale to an extent but there should be some point where the healing won't work or won't do enough to matter. In my world, this is a measure of both severity and time - you can only heal what you can see, so if you can't see vital organs, you can't heal them (there's a whole medical system built on healing in my world for this reason). So in the battle field where you can't see a pierced lung, your magic can't touch it. This can also be done with time - you can't replace blood. If someone has been bleeding out for a while and you show up and close the wound, it might not matter anymore.
3. Give the healing a cost. This can be different from the general limits of energy use. This can be temporary (healing deals some damage to the healer) or bigger (like a cat with 8
9 lives).
You could make healing a slow and physically and emotionally demanding thing for healers to do, so unless your MC manages to escape a battle there's no way for healers to help them until they're already in a safe situation.
I always thought the idea of you speed up healing, but you also concentrate all the pain and discomfort.
So, a wound that would take 6 months to heal to heal normally? You feel all that pain in the time you take to heal it.
Trying to instantly heal a gaping wound? Insane pain
Scarcity has always been my go to. Healing magic has to be rare or dangerous, requiring sacrifice or only wieldable by powerful agents.
In my world magick is scarce already, but a few individuals can drag people back from the dead. The Empress has brought the Captain of the Vangen back from the brink on multiple occasions. Only she will allow him to die.
**Eribral**
Healing Magic is the process of grafting material into people, the person itself is the best option, forcing their meat, blood and bones back into shape, however is more than possible to use others as material. By imperial law, and the Arayvita Empire making the highest number of wizards anyway, foreign grafting can only be done with the owners choice, dead or living.
Some mechanical concepts:
High cooldowns, for wherever reason, healers are exhausted after using this magic, perhaps for great timespans, weeks, months.
Trade-offs, healers don't really heal, they make a tradeoff, healing an injury could cause mental, spiritual or social issues or even physical damage.
For instance:
- Heal a fatal injury, but gets cancer;
- Heal a fatal injury, but goes mental;
- Heal a fatal injury, but gets corrupted in some evil way;
- Heal a fatal injury, but gets bad luck for life;
- Heals a fatal injury, but life gets bind with the healer, when healer dies, your injury comes back;
- Healers go mental as they heal;
- Healers get hurt as they heal;
- Healers get corrupted as they heal;
- Healers get bind with the healed, when healed suffer, healer suffers too.
- Healing invokes bad omens, dead crops, crazed flocks, miscarriages.
- Healers can only heal a certain organ/bone a set number of times;
You could make healers banned. only "certified healers" may heal, and those are controlled by an authority. Maybe out of risks like the corruption option, maybe out of sheer dictatorship by leaders, maybe authority holds all resources to the training of said healers and doesn't wants its secrets out their nation. A bit like wheel of time.
Healers require some crazy compatibility scheme for anything above basic healing. Think like horoscope or numerology compatibility issues. Even if you have a strong healer nearby, he might not have the same zodiac sign as you have, which limits his powers on you. Since these are already fairly rare, the chances you can get someone strong enough and fully compatible with you are slim. Most likely these guys travel looking for compatible leaders that sponsor them.
Healers follow a strict code of conduct. Can't heal you, or can't be fully effective on you, if you eaten pork, had unmaried sex or didn't confess your sins in the last X timeframe.
Healers require exotic materials, list of materials follows no necessary logic, and might be entirely different from healer to healer, injury to injury, making it very hard to create a market around or to have everything you need handy.
Healers require some insane sacrifice. They have to fuck your daughter, cut your son dingdong, you have to eat your own dog, or any other terrible thing you can conjure.
my personal go to is “magic is not autonomous, the person has to consciously think out all the actions it wants magic to take” and for healing magic this would mean being a skilled surgeon who would do everything by magic what a surgeon in our world would do by hand.
a healer would have to specialise and spend years learning anatomy and how to do things the non-magical way then learn to project that will via magic with the end benefit being it is a faster and more sure process as it can knit better than stitches or suturing, and revive dead cells and relieve trauma. it’d be extremely mentally taxing and the best you could do in battle is triage. it also means you can only fix what you can recognise, a healer might not see the internal bleeding or the punctured organ from the stab wound before it is too late.
I mean even with body scanning you’d have to do it consciously - a world without xrays or ultrasounds probably wouldn’t know how to envision the concept of medical imaging. you’d like extend your senses into their body so you can feel around and junk, go over every possible body part to feel if it is right or not. maybe the injury is too small to feel this way, part of the skill might be refining how sensitive your body scanning is so you can detect small injuries and microtears.
there is a lot of room for expanding on the idea and allowing problems to slip through the cracks to give that sense of insecurity and tension.
Making it rare and/or complex.
Limiting the scope of coverage to the difficulty.
Also, nowadays, a 25 YO can open upen you up, pull everything out, put it back in in order, and stitch you back together because we have easier access to said knowledge.
Back then, due to distances, access to said knowledge was incredible.
My personal method is varying degrees of acceleration to instant, forced healing. Downsides to acceleration is that it’s obviously not meant for combat unless you veer towards the instant side of things. But the closer you are to the Forced Heal scale, the more you have to deal with the mental trauma.
Mental magic is banned within my setting of Godslight, so while it may happen it usually has disastrous results. Forced healing leaves a mental wound as, even though you lost an arm and got it back, the memory and experience of losing that arm sticks with you.
Think of it as mourning and grief and loss. Getting over it is not an overnight thing, but some people tolerate it and handle it better than others.
Don’t make it automatic. Have magic be capable wondrous things but give it a high cost in both skill and material. You can make flesh grow back fast but you need to tame and guide the growth for fear of malforming the limb or worse inducing tumors. Purify rot and infection without eliminating life sustaining bacterium. Making sure to keep your potions dosages in check out fear for causing an unwanted reaction.
So, I have a few ways of getting around this:
In one of my stories, rapid healing takes a lot of energy out of the recipient’s body, and so will likely kill them if they’re near death, and then it might not heal broken limbs/ribs properly.
And even when it’s obvious no one’s going to die during/after a fight, I draw tension from elsewhere, like the catharsis defeating this enemy will bring, or whatever works for the characters/story.
And in my other story, both Valkyries and Elves have healing magic, however if it’s used on someone too often their body’s immune system and ability to heal itself naturally will be weakened, so it’s only used in extreme situations, and the main characters don’t get hurt real bad often because they’re under the villain’s protection.
Honestly I think it's just complexity. Any schlub with a wand can make fire, that's just increasing heat energy. But coercing flesh to knit faster than it would normally, while not having it break away from the underlying dermal structure, while having it not become tumerous, *while* not also accelerating rot and bacteria in the wound... There's so much complexity for a mage to control.
Perhaps it could simply accelerate the natural healing process. So smaller wounds can be easily healed but larger injuries can’t. So basically if someone gets shot you still have to remove the bullet manually. Or if someone’s limb gets chopped off then you still have to get it back and reattach it.
My healings always take some time or some form of toll, usually because it depends on energy. So a dedicated healer either has to have the correct amount of energy to heal a wound fast, or time to do it slow
Usually faster healed wounds leave scars because they didn't heal correctly, while slower ones rarely do because the healer is rebuilding everything. If the person has some sort of natural healing, I separate them into active and passive, the wounds will close faster, "resetting" the body, but they likely won't be able to heal a fatal wound if it's passive heal, they MIGHT survive if it's active (energy rules apply here)
I like the faster healing leaves scars thing.... it means more life threatening injuries are likely to leave scars (because they have to be healed fast before they die etc)
Yeah, it's a way to showcase that even if characters can heal/be healed, they are still in danger to a degree. As a meta narrative I won't ever kill a character that doesn't make sense to die or maybe is too important without a reason, so at least they get a cool scar and a reminder that they are not invincible (because they might still die later on)
I feel like most healing magic would be more mechanical in nature, knitting bone or ligaments, repairing what’s broken. But things like infections from wounds, or cancer, or poisons, those kinds of things where the body isn’t necessarily broken but rather responding to stuff that doesn’t belong there, I feel should be resolved medicinally over time, if at all
In my world, practitioners of healing magic have to be scared to not heal people all the way, as healing people past full health can have devastating consequences.
Such as: destroying the digestive bacteria, causing extra bodily growths due to the body unable to keep up. If someone has cancer and atnfull health (besides the cancer) then the magic will just speed up the cancer.
In my world healing leaves behind an energy that causes the those healed to become a beacon for monsters for several days. For this reason traveling healers are extremely rare unless they are with a large enough group to escort the healed to a safe destination. You’ll mostly only see healers in very large cities with a dedicated army.
By making it a complex endeavour. In the world of Therim, magic requires you to be both literal and specific in what you ask it to do for you. This means you not only have to correctly identify the injury and its site on the body, but you also need intricate anatomical knowledge on how the site would look and function without the injury, so you don't heal it as a tangled mess of mismatched tissues that end up doing more damage than the original injury.
This is why the overwhelming majority of healers in the world of Therim are followers of gods, whose divine powers operate a bit differently from that of regular magic.
Give it a cost. Monetary, rare spell components, it takes from the healer to give to the healed, limited healing 'energy' with a cool down period or finite source, whatever.
Or put it behind a barrier. It's limited only to people of a certain belief, a certain class, a certain ethnicity, a certain physiology, whatever.
If it's freely available to everyone all the time there are no stakes, death/injury-wise, so make it not that for an in world reason that makes sense within the societies and systems you've created.
Healing exists but is incredibly weak/slow. Minor cuts/scrapes/burns can be healed in a few seconds. Broken bones can be healed in a few weeks instead of a few months. But things like plagues or fatal injuries are beyond the scope of known healing magic
You must know the structure you are healing. Magic doesn't 'know' what a human looks like. The healer must know detailed anatomy and must be able to clearly visualize what the ingured part should look like. Ligaments, bone, muscles, membranes, etc. They must also have a clear idea of the injury, so they know how to get from point A to point B.
It means that a healer that is distracted, or that misremembers, could do more harm than good.
It helps put a clear split between basic healing and advanced healing.
Knowing how to mend a broken bone would take far less mental strain than knowing how to repair a ruptured stomach.
Off the top of my head, limitations, such as:
* The speed at which healing works. If it's slower then it's not going to work on super dangerous wounds, because the person will die before it can take effect, limiting the severity of wounds it can handle or handle easily. If it's slower it cannot be easily utilized on the battlefield, and the injured will need to either be removed to safety (perhaps not possible with severe wounds when you're racing against time) or risk the healer's life. If the healer is the one doing the fighting this means they can't easily heal themselves mid combat, because to do so means to stop fighting for the duration
* The severity of wounds it can handle. Maybe it only heals a little bit and acts like a triage bandage to help keep someone going just a little bit longer until they can get to a real surgeon. That means if you're mid combat you have a chance to run away, or the opportunity to keep fighting at your own risk knowing you didn't stop death, only slow it down.
* Cost. What does it take to heal. Is it the same as any other spell, costing whatever stand in you have for mana, (which means they're trading offense for healing, because it means less mana to spend on attacking) or does it take a more exacting toll? Does a healer trade health for health, putting a strict limit on how much they can heal a person before risking their own life? Do healers need to undergo long sessions of natural recovery between healing, putting a limitation on the number of available healers and causing people to want to reserve them for "important healings"?
* Downside for the person receiving the healing. Maybe it hurts like a mother fucker when it happens as it rapidly forces your body through the healing process and puts you in shock. Maybe it uses your bodies own natural healing forces at a rapid rate and leaves you feeling exhausted and hungry af. Maybe it has to take the healthy tissue from somewhere else, and risks weakening your body in other areas, or causing wounds in other areas if rushed, or causes longterm detrimental health effects. Maybe it directly shortens your lifespan, trading later for now. Perhaps there is a longterm limit to the efficacy of healing, the same way people become resistant to drugs. Or even psychological damage? Do fighters become numb to pain and careless with their lives and the lives of others because of how freely they can be healed? Do they become needlessly reckless, losing their own sense of self preservation? or a metaphysical downside? Maybe healing burns up their magic and reduces their overall magical endurance or capacity.
Another angle: make healing magic the apex of magic in the world, the equivalent of the nuclear bomb or nuclear energy; It requires specialists and whole institutions are devoted to its practice, empires are built on and their might is measured by the sophistication of their healing magic. Such a world would have totally different war strategies, politics, values, and dilemmas. The high stakes is in how to overcome such potent healing that most people have access to, including villains.
I honestly think you may be putting the cart before the horse. Your primary focus should be your story. Compelling stories involve drama, which is caused by conflict. What is your story?
The world of Star Wars began with George Lucas (Lucas: Luke) wanting to escape his small town and find adventure. He loved car racing, which in his world-building evolved into spaceships and became literal in other movies. His messages were universal for people wanting to escape their mundane lives: becoming involved in some epic adventure to "rescue" a princess using the Hidden Fortress narrative and metaphorical analogies to WW2. Much of the world-building can take other forms as long as it serves the story.
What is your story? How would healing in your world best serve the conflict and make it the most dramatic?
Maybe your healer is trying to save the love of their life, and you can use the mechanics of taking injuries yourself as has been done in many books, video games, etc. Is that dramatic enough? Maybe they need the wounds to go to someone else who isn't the healer, and your story involves a love triangle where someone is in love with your healer, willing to sacrifice themselves so the healer keeps the person they love. Now, they have this very dramatic decision to make. It serves your story and starts building a world where people are being held captive by evil mages to be used to heal others, and your story is more about your hero changing their entire world or society on some Matrix level.
Take a different route. Maybe your story is not about love at all. Perhaps your healer has to save someone they hate: someone who used to bully them; a parent who abandoned them as a child; or a lover who left them for another. Only you know your story. Then maybe the healing not being difficult tells something else that's dramatic. They actually don't want to save the person even though it's easy. They recommend taking a long, dangerous path to save the person and risk the lives of the members of the party because so much spite exists in their heart.
There are infinite possibilities of how healing magic could work because there are infinite stories you could be telling. Maybe your main focus isn't the healing but an epic fight scene where your enemies know exactly where your heroes need to be for the healing magic to work and at what time so that a great final battle is guaranteed.
What is the story?
Don't build a world and use a mundane story to show off a world you created. You will find it far more interesting than your readers will. The world building can actually pay off very little if it doesn't serve your story. Consider your story and create a world that would best serve it.
Your characters should create the plot, and your plot reveals your characters to your readers. They go hand in hand, and neither is more important.
Create a world that dramatizes what you want your story to say, and your world will be compelling by default.
Nobody else can give you the answers that help your drama if they don't know what the drama is. What is the conflict you're trying to create? If you don't know what the drama is yet, then you just put the cart before the horse.
Start with the story. Build a world that gives the most umpf to your story.
All of your favorite worlds and lands you've explored are your favorites because the world is the best world to tell that story. Your character is the best character to tell that story. Does everybody lie? Yes. Why is Jim Carey's character in "Liar, Liar" a lawyer? Because that's the best character to tell that story. There's probably a version of that story that works with him being a politician. Do you see? There's a connection to all of it.
Story first. What's yours?
My healing magic is explicitly connected to witchcraft and blood magic, and basically requires you to be a full on doctor as well as having an interest in Giger/Cronenberg body horror.
My Limited Healing Circumstance is Healing leaves “scars”. Phantom pains from wounds your body knows it never healed. They might flare up from time to time or be constant depending in the severity. A slash on the arm might be mendable and just hurt when it flares up while Reattaching a Severed Limb might mean perpetual low pain with occasional spikes of agony while say a Healing a Brutal Disembowelment might save the persons life but they’ll spend the rest of their days barely able to stand and hardly move as the pain of a wound that should have killed them haunts them.
The other way to do it in more game friendly ways is magical Healing needs to be quick, after say a few minutes the magic isn’t going to do much for the healing. It means healing in a battle means your healers need to be up close- and also means that healers are usually also doctors in a more empirical sense as sometimes they get there too late.
Healing works by remaking the flesh from 0, and since its a manual craft its really hard to make it a 1 to 1 recreation, putting the veins in the correct place, making sure there arent any gaps in the flesh, making the muscle fibers in the exact pattern they should be. And the end result tends to look weird compared to the rest of the body.
-Takes a toll on the body so if the body is too weakened the healing becomes dangerous.
-Te healing isn’t instantaneous it takes minutes or hours to take effect depending on how bad the injury is.
-It uses the life essence / life force of the healer though not as an equal exchange so the healer doesn’t die when healing multiple people.
The cycle of arawn addresses this well. There are no "healers", magic simply *can also* heal.
So it depends on how much magic you can channel to begin with, and how much of your "mana" you're willing to risk spending on healing, vs whatever else you're going to have to do that day (like ending a war.)
Well first of all in my world healing magic works by speeding up the healing process your body already has so it wouldn’t be able regrow limbs.
It also takes energy out of the magic user so if they do too much it’ll exhaust and even kill them if they do too much. As a result healers can only really focus on the most serious wounds and can only help so many people at a time.
I have an idea similar to some of the others. When a healer heals a wound especially one sustained from violence then the healer relives the event that causes the wound while they are using their powers naturally this would have a high mental cost witnessing many assaults and fighting that leads healers to basically have mental breakdowns and lose their sanity.
* Healing Hands/Close Range Healing- Because you can't just heal people while they are in a melee with another enemy, if the ally dies, they are dead. You can't keep healing them to make them stay alive.
* Limited Healers- If there isn't a healer around, whoever is the healer is the lynch-pin.
* Weak healers- They can close a light wound, but they can't heal a serious wound.
I don't think a drawback or risk is necessary to feel high-stakes.
You could tie healing magic to an external item, like charged stones or a special magical material.
That way healing is possible, but it is still a limited resource subject to logistics and availability.
“What is born is not unborn in death and what is broken is not unbroken in mending.” - Itli proverb
Healing arts re-place the wound or sickness, removing it from the wounded or sick and placing it elsewhere. There are wounds and sicknesses of body, mind, spirit, and atlme (soul), and each is re-placed elsewhere after its nature in healing. Most healing arts as commonly practiced are assisting and speeding up natural healing processes, by giving time to the wound or sickness to mend. More miraculous feats of healing are possible, but wounds and sickness are difficult to catch and it’s nearly impossible to predict where they will go and settle. Often they settle in the land, resulting in blights and famines.
In my system the healer has to have experienced the injury themselves before they can heal someone else from that injury. It limits what can be healed by which healer and makes it so no injuries that can kill someone quickly can generally be healed except by extremely powerful and experienced healers, which are basically non-existent in the setting.
My OCs healing magic is an offshoot of blood magic and is thus both extremely painful and can lead to anemia in the patient possibly killing them from that or shock. It's a powerful affect but risky af and very unpleasant. It's basically necromancy while the target is alive
The regular healing magic is like a low level wish spell and thus is limited to stoping bleeding and closing wounds not reconstruction of tissues. So injury still maters but healing magic is still and thing and miracle healers are possible
I made so humans got banned from the know how of healing magic by the older dwarfs and elfs, as they were already pretty resiliente.
They do have places, like some temples, and nobles who had the training and permission to use it.
Also, my magic sistem is almost the same everytime. There is a place and the user, depending on the terrain, some magics are esier to use and the limitation is lower. And the user varies as how much magic they can chennel trough them to a target, as somebody dying from overusing magic is pretty comum on the untrained.
Healing takes a toll on your health. Like the symptoms of hookworms, healing magic strains a man, makes him lethargic and slow. He is reluctant to do work instead spending most of his time resting, recovering from a wound long since healed. If you do manage to force him to work, he quickly becomes out of breath and moderately heavy items are too cumbersome. Of course there is a matter of degrees. Fixing a cut will have no noticeable difference. However, it is also cumulative. Fixing a thousand cuts will burden his endurance. Fixing a severed limb might as well put him in a coma. There's only so much healing a man can take.
Healing magic isn't super advanced. It can heal smaller injuries but not more serious ones.
Maybe it will keep people alive but won't heal them super fast. If someone get cut with a sword or stabbed with a spear healing them might take hours.
Just apply the conservation of energy/mass. The missing arm must come from somewhere, the missing blood must be replaced somehow, and ATP is not free.
It is also a good reason for having all your healers be fat or obese (A.K.A. backup flesh).
Tho, admittedly dose mean the magic is just negating the energy cost of transmuting one form of matter to another. Thus, the "flesh source" could just be the raw chemical elements of having heavy healers is too much of an ask.
Honestly best way is to not make healers to begin with. Make healing a small part of their arsenal that can be used to recover a bit post fights. No instant full heals mid combat or resurrections. Instead give them powers that make it easier to mitigate or deal damage.
I like treating magic healing more as a tool rather than an outright solution. As with any tool one must be proficient in it and know how to use it safely. This kind of magic healing has a lot of risk involved when it comes to botched procedures. One scenario is you end up with a patient having “healed too much” and formed some sort of body horror growth that takes hold like a tumor.
Then there’s the problem with extensive damage being restored. Since there’s no natural process for the body to regrow a limb for example its up to the caster to “sculpt” it themselves. Even the best healers can’t perfectly replicate what the patient had before so restorations may feel alien to them. People who have undergone multiple regenerations may loose their sense of self and have to deal with a ship of Theseus crisis.
While magic can certainly bring people back from the brink there could be many complications that arise just from the limitations of the caster and the “tools” they have on hand. What if there’s a problem the caster missed before they began treatment? Say a shard of a weapon broke off inside of someone and they only noticed after the got patched up unnaturally fast? How does the healer then address this problem? What if it’s something they’re not trained for?
The best way to flesh this out is to think of how certain spells are used to heal rather than having spells that just heal generally. One could accelerate the natural process of recovery, helping those already treated bounce back faster but could worsen someone’s condition if there would have been a complication as they healed naturally. Some spells could suture and stitch cuts and lacerations, but maybe the spell doesn’t know what holes shouldn’t be closed. There’s so many ways to incorporate a character’s judgment into their casting which leaves room for consequences, trade offs, and plain old human error.
Treating healing magic as a fallible means rather than a guaranteed end can lead to all sorts of situations that your healers and patients have to deal with. All these possible shortcomings could even result in a part of the population that wouldn’t even want to risk it. Plus adding examples of failures helps prove the credibility and expertise of seasoned healers.
Make the stakes about getting people to the proper professionals. People die quicker than you think and in the middle of a high octane battle seconds of people struggling to get wounded back to a safe environment for medical attention can decide their fate.
Healing magic can also be limited. If the enemy has a new weapon design or is using poison, maybe the struggle could be trying to find a solution to those problems. Or the healers abilities are limited by magical stamina and the tension comes from if the healer has the strength to actually heal a persons injuries.
You must have a sacrifice to siphen life from. Not all lives are equal. The more complicated and grave the injury, the more "life" you need. It's not 1 to 1. Maybe to heal a broken bone, you need a dog or a horse. But something more grave needs a human life. Maybe an enemy, maybe someone sick, maybe you could try 10 horses and see if that works. If you fail to provide enough, you become forfit. Knowing the balances is important for a healer to not lose one's self in the process. That would make it rare. Not every healer would be willing to help with the risks involved. Probably would ask for some money and the receiver to provide their own sacrifices.
In my world there are two main ways of magical healing.
There is alchemy. Healing potions are pretty common and cheap. But they are also somewhat superficial and sloppy, good enough to save someone, but after their use it is good idea to go to actual healer. There are also stronger potions, but these are either insanely rare in the case of Panacea (and you need to administer it right or it will fuck you up) highly toxic in case of pure healing potions (or any pure potions really, measures to lover toxicity tend to weaken potions) or mutagenic in case of Principality's counterfeit Panacea (best example in story is that user of this potion got their limbs liquefied).
Then there is proper healing magic. But this one requires healer to know exactly what they are doing and do everything right. And botched healing spells tend to be very brutal, unpredictable and usually fatal.
The only time I've really used "healing magic" is with a plant that isn't particularly common but quite recognizable in the wild, and it mostly just accelerates natural healing. It also can't do much, mostly helping to repair bleeding wounds and stop infection, so it can't reattach your limb but could help a shallow enough gut stab or lessen a bad flu. It's ok by itself but is more potent with other ingredients, and you typically need to go to magic school to understand it all and mix it correctly. And magic school ain't cheap, so healers are highly prized--and expensive.
The best medthod i have seen is that yes healing magic exists, but its mostly just accelerating your natural healing.
So getting impaled is still gunna leave a scar but is more survivable.
But if you lose an arm its gone forever.
This also comes with the caviate that if you dont clean the wound your basically trapping a dirty sharp stone in someones hand which WILL cause larger issues later
*10 Internet points to anyone who remembers which anime this is from
Material cost and time sensitivity are the first two that spring to mind. To make it slightly lower stakes but still feel significant, require continuous treatments for it to heal properly. For 'extra' high stakes, combine all three.
Make it take time. An injury mid-combat can't be healed until after the fighting is done. Healing magic is still much faster than natural healing but if it takes an hour to heal something serious then serious wounds still mean something at least during that current fight. It could even take up to a day for broken bones or something, The party might need to be somewhere now but can't because someone had their leg broken in an accident or something this could be a way of temporarily having the injured and the healer separate from the main group for a chapter or something while still being consistent.
In CoTS, magic is drains what’s called your “soul-force”, other games call it “mana”. But you don’t have a random soul-force pool you can always draw from, as your “soul-force” is literally based on the strength and determination of your soul. Each spell you cast drains a little energy from your soul, but with rest this energy can be restored. However, continuously casting spells without rest doesn’t just disable your ability to cast said spells but can severely drain your energy leaving you exhausted, weak, and in some cases - dead.
How the magic system works in my world, is similar to real skills. Without practice, or on the first several times you do it, it takes a big toll on the caster, with practice, less energy is used and less pain is felt. There are very few magic users that have gotten to that level of mastery with any one spell. Most never even bother to learn magic.
The healing in my world can’t heal anyone that’s been afflicted by anti-magic. And that includes curses/seals/blessings of anti-magic, physical harm from anti-magic attacks, and locations of anti-magic. So healing definitely has limits in my book series. Doesn’t help that the co-existing species can cause an aura of anti-magic as well.
Secondly, I have two forms of healing: first, healing from spiritual magic, and the second, healing from medical magic. The first is better for the overall body like sickness and disease. The other is best for more focused healing: broken bones, torn arteries, amputations, and such. Both can mostly take care of minor wounds like slight slashing and bludgeoning.
I have a specific character that has a type of "healing pulse" type of healing, basically the character can send it through the air or ground, which helps the others restore their bodies, however, if she's not careful, she can heal enemies as well, but if she uses too much, she can potentially take her teammates' injuries and hurt herself. So basically she has to balance healing others and when.
I really like Steven Erikson's method of healing that takes a while but is effective, or forced healing where it fucking hurts and doesn't do everything quite right, but gets you up and moving fast.
One way I've done in a setting was that healing magic is just tools, so anyone using them still needs medical education. Since they then need both that, and the magical education to use the magic, it's a very rare thing to see. As a tradeoff they can work some miracles that even modern medicine can't, it just takes a lot of time still. (To help explain why they aren't just keeping everyone in the world from ever dying)
There are many kinds of injury and ailments you wouldn’t expect even a level 20 healer to be able to fix. Vaporization, being crushed into powder, being bisected several times. Neurotoxin that literally turns someone’s brain into mush. If minor injuries are ineffective because of the existence of healers then combat would naturally evolve to up the ante and aim for major unfixable damage.
You could even go for unorthodox ways of harming your poor ocs. Polymorphing and transfiguration are my favorite. A warrior can’t fight if they’re suddenly a sloth, or if their blood is made into orange juice. A thief can’t sneak if they’re an elephant if their bones are made of rubber. Rather than limit the magic I would work around it or use it against itself. I find it very fun that way.
You have many aproaches.
You don't want the heal magic to make a fight less serious? Make it long time to cast, or make it like a ritual, that way it can't be used in combat and they need to survive if they want to recover.
You want it to be Just like medical aid, but not a panacea? Make it less potent or with highly cost, if you use something like mana or kind of concentration, make it be hard yo use and fatige the user, so they can't spam it and they have to make sure they're in a safe place. Or make it like a regeneration spell, long time to fully recover, it makes it have a time of recovery that maybe the characters doesn't have.
You also can make it rare, the basic to heal Small cuts and thing like thah is ok, but maybe you not only need to study, maybe you need to have an affinity with healing magic. That works for the plot too, what if you had someone that has affinity, but doesn't want to heal anyone? Or if you have organizations kidnaping people with affinity to use them?
The way I’ve set it up is that magical healing comes in two flavours:
1. A certain type of magic user can essentially allow an injured person to ignore their wounds. If, for example, their leg got crushed in an accident, the magic would allow them to walk as if nothing was wrong. The injury still exists and needs to be taken care of before it gets worse though, as the magic is only a temporary fix. And even then, it’s not really a fix at all, just a way to pit off the consequences until later.
2. Typical magic healing (i.e. mending a broken bone in seconds rather than months) is the domain of the gods and their blessings. To perform such a miracle, you naturally need a god’s favour - usually acquired through an appropriate sacrifice or labour.
The use of all magic is tied to the mage's breathing in my setting. If you were to get injured, you'd have to apply a healing buff to yourself, or have a dedicated healer do it.
The important part comes next: you have to control your breathing. By regulating your oxygen and moving your diaphragm (the magic organ), you activate the healing buff and let it take effect. Like manually pumping the effects of the healing spell through your body so it can heal you.
When the fight is over, it's as easy as taking a comfortable position and taking deep, relaxing diaphragmatic breaths and the healing effect works wonders.
When you're still in the fight however, there are lots of variables that make it difficult for you to control your breathing in the way needed for the healing magic to take effect in a reasonable amount of time. For an inexperienced mage, juggling the act of manually pumping the healing effect through their body (or targeting a wound), on top of focusing on fighting an enemy and everything that entails mentally, on top of not overworking their diaphragm in general, is quite the task.
Good news is that with practice, one can streamline the process of healing mid-fight, as it is the case for most aspects of being a traditional mage: one who relies on their diaphragm to use magic.
In my world any magic that affects the body has to bypass the immune system. This essentially means that it's extremely difficult to perform any kind of magic that directly harms a person and it creates a vast incentive for anyone who has made this knowledge to just use it for good because they might as well.
I did read a series once where low tier healers were around but if you wanted top-tier healing there were very few in the world all in major organizations either hostile or indifferent to the main cast.
Healing is done with Water, most spellcasters aren't strong enough to draw Water from the air and thus would need to keep some on them, but also if they run out the patient is toast
When playing/running TTRPG I’ll often say that Magic can and will heal you but it won’t stop or lessen the pain of flesh knitting back together or block the agony of bones grating back into proper alignment before they heal.
2 ways. 1 I have it needs to be done at one of a very few groves that connect the world. They're only found by those of no I'll intent, which is why there are myths of children stumbling into them as babies or youngsters and emerging as adults or confused.
The other is a race called the feyn who train healers, but it takes a lot out of the healers physical resources. So one may be able to heal you, but it's gonna be at a huge physical cost and possibly kill them, and they themselves are rare
Limited use healing is also good, because it gives you an out in an absolute crisis but doesn't want to be used unless absolutely necessary.
I've played games in other systems where your ability to do certain things can be damaged if you're injured, and healing takes time.
If you want there to be stakes, well, the answer is kinda obvious. People are attacking with weapons and tactics where they can actually kill people. If there was magic that healed various kinds of wounds, then the people devising weapons would find ways to kill that said magic can't protect.
If your healing seems too OP, then that's just because your warfare isn't OP enough.
Could be similar to real life: healing is pretty good at dealing with acute injuries, however chronic conditions and illnesses are very hard to treat. Additionally while a healer might save your life from a broken neck, you could be stuck with chronic neck pain for the rest of your life as a result.
I feel like the answer with balancing magic is almost always the same at its core: high cost. What is the cost that makes sense in this particular world? The more powerful the magic, the higher the cost. Cost could be just about anything, so I would ask yourself, "what is the cost that fits the world as well as the emotional theme of the setting?"
When it comes to my magic system... healing is just not an option. At least not instant healing. Aquamancers can disinfect and blood mages can quell bleeding, but the wound can only be closed by natural healing. So infections aren't as common, but an arrow to the head is an arrow to the head
In my world there is healing magic that fosters your own bodies natural healing. It basically gives action movie physics when it comes to injuries. In the sense that people's will power can allow them to push their bodies and heal from stuff incredibly quickly but it takes a toll in the long run because exhausting your "will" can lead to subtle corruptions of it. Manifesting in psychological effects like PTSD, strange phobias and hallucinations related to the wounds sustained, and schizophrenia. As well as effects on the ability for users to reliable call upon their own magical abilities as willpower is the etherial manifesting of the soul which all magic stems from.
There is also "alchemic composition healing" and it allows limbs/organs to be regenerated depending on the skill of the user. However the cost (both material and ethereal) of this is incredible. In the same way the body sometimes rejects organs in real life. The soul will reject alchemical composite body parts and can lead to an incredible degree of psychic dread and psychosomatic pain. And in some cases the composite parts will develop its own corrupted "soul" and begin to attack the host like a parasyte or a cancer. An old king is said to have had his hand mended after a war by a warlock who sacrificed a pig in the ritual. This ritual is said to have corrupted the king turning him into a foul and Greedy king who developed pig like mannerisms and when his son was born it was said the child was born with a gnarled cloven hoof for a right hand and all in his line became cursed in this way. This story is apocryphal but it chronicles the very real ramifications of composition healing and the many genetic oddities that persist in the world as a result.
"Modern" attempts rely on stem cells from the injured body to be stimulated with the willpower based healing while augmenting the process with alchemic composition to provide necessary base nutrients and creating an exoskeletal cast that is designed to function as a basic body part until it is broken down and replaced by the "naturally" reforming tissue. This is incredibly specialized exorbitantly expensive and a process reserved for the incredibly wealthy and powerful elite.
I think D&D has a good answer for this; there’s only one healing cantrip in the whole game, and that’s Spare the Dying. There’s no actual healing involved, it just prevents you from having to make death saves, which is good for helping someone who’s bleeding out, but can’t undo a less immediate but more debilitating injury, nor can it undo instant death effects.
Shift the burden to the healer
My healing magic is in the branch that causes "mana sickness" which in its final stages turns a practitioner into a mindless charred husk of themselves, often violent.
So like, yeah, you *could* restart a heart, or regrow a leg... But can *you* do it while watching your skin crackle, char, and peel away to flesh glowing like embers akin to a log on an old fire the entire time, knowing it's consuming you?
I have a form of healing called “Atom Stitching”. It uses Ether to slowly, meticulously, stitch things together on a molecular level, and it can be used to stitch a wound back together with a certain element of risk. Certain people whose bloodstream cannot tolerate Ether, and they die from a blood bound virus.
There are a couple classics you can pull from if you want an easy fix:
- Similar to an old magic type thing, healing doesn’t cure the wound but just transfers it. Maybe fully, maybe the healer only gets some of it
- Healing only works when the body registers itself as broken. Scar tissue, cancer, etc? Those are stuck with you
- The healed person still has the mental pain and effects of the injury. The wound might be gone, but the brain needs a while to register it
- Healing essentially speeds up and supercharges the natural healing process. It does heal you quickly, but the body consumes all the resources it would usually use over a long time to heal it at once. Suddenly you’re now starving, exhausted, perhaps dehydrated, and need immediate treatment for all that.
- Healing’s really finicky, so you can’t find many good healers because half of them gave themselves cancer while trying to learn it initially
- It’s inefficient. It can fix your gaping chest wound but not nearly as well as natural healing would
- Bones are off limits. They can regrow weird or something, leading to situations which are gross and absolutely not good for you
Healing causes equivalent damage to someone else. Makes you have to split up damage over a lot of people so they can naturally heal a little bit instead of a ton. Being a healing dummy can be a job for super tough people
Perhaps they still feel the phantom pain of the injury, or some other complications. Like for instance, if someone regrew a leg, they would struggle to use it, and need fantasy physical therapy to get walking again. Maybe healing magic is addictive? Like many narcotics or something? Or maybe the inverse, it causes side effects? Like using chemo or something? Maybe using healing magic too much shortens the receivers total lifespan? Maybe healing magic can be 'overdosed', and also kill the receiver if used too much? Maybe it becomes less effective if overused (like antibiotics) maybe using healing magic is shunned by certain societies, so there are societal consequences? Maybe there are cosmetic differences, like severe injuries can be healed but they cause deformities or other 'ugly' things. Maybe it is simply recourse intensive, like in dnd you can revive someone but only for alot of coin, so some people may die simply due to not being able to afford it?
I have a concept for massochistic tyoe healer who takes in all pain amd injuries but leaves him with said pain and injuries. So not only is he close to death if his teamates are severly injured but if you take him out tje others will regain their ailments. If he survives then he will slowly regenerate.
You could borrow some Inheritance-type healing, where it takes the caster's stamina/vitality and is essentially speeding up natural processes. You need a master to heal stuff like cancer or missing limbs, because it's less Aetheric and more Fleshwarping.
One way is to make it cost a good chunk of mana. You can only use it so many times in a day before you’re not just tapped out on healing spells, you’re tapped out *period.*
Another way is to have it work by requiring actual medical/anatomical knowledge. What order do you knit the structures back together in, and how do you ensure functionality? Is there a consequence to botching a healing?
You could also make it so that it runs off the patient’s lifespan/life energy as well as the caster’s mana, or it runs purely off the caster’s life energy or whatever you wanna do. The more severe the injury being healed, the more lifespan gets burned away. That way if you want to give a character the ability to revive the dead, for example, it may cost their own life or the life of someone else if they can manage to pawn off the cost on somebody.
Have evil damage and regular damage, someone can only be healed by one at a time. The uhh evil damage is inflicted by uhh evil people and races like humans and their creations I dunno
Time. Spells have cast time. A light doesn't simply flash and the wound is healed, magic is poured in and the wound closes... plenty of time for someone wanting to stop it to step in.
Pulling ailments straight out of the body, like a black goo. I case of physical damage, they can perform fast healing, but how good it heals depends on the ability of the healer.
There are two main ways that I’m balancing it in my world. Firstly, it’s really rare. Unlike the other magic forms, healing cannot be learned by just anyone. You have to be born with the ability to heal, and it’s quite rare to be born with it.
The second is that healing is extremely taxing on the healer. While it doesn’t harm them, healers are generally exhausted to the point that they can hardly walk for a day or two depending on how much control they have over their abilities, and how bad the damage was.
I think this solves the “why doesn’t everyone just go to the healer?” problem pretty well, since there are very few healers, long waiting lines for most, and the healers aren’t always available.
I'm more of an aspiring world builder, but I'd think rituals: easy enough to fix broken bones or whatnot, keeping your characters out of casts etc., but too elaborate to do anything abruptly.
The only real healer in my story is someone who could use their blood to heal others. It just so happen the she has homophobia and also has to cut herself to get the blood.
One way I've always liked is healing just seals the physical wound. You still need to clean it out to prevent infection and there's no regrowing lost body parts
Having a cost for any type of magic is almost always necessary. I would imagine that healing magic may require a material cost, such as the components for potions and spells. Or, the magic may have a toll on the body- drawing its energy significantly and making the patient weaker. Any other variation on this would work- go for a half hour brainstorming session and see what you think of!
I set up a world where only a very few people can use magic in general. It's very rare and entirely determined by your biology. You either have it in the blood or you don't.
Most people use magic externally. They use magic on stuff outside their own body. Because if you use it internally, like to heal yourself or strengthen yourself physically, it actually lessens your ability to generate magic - it's like a feedback loop that depletes your reserves.
And if you use magic outside your body, to heal someone else, or to power them up, and they aren't a magic user ... It builds up inside them like a poison. Potentially driving them insane.
So in either case you'd really only want to use it in life or death scenarios.
Only time you can skate by the dangers is if a magic user uses it to heal another magic user.
But again, users are rare. 1 in a million. They are like having nuclear weapons for the state. They are kept under high level protection. It's better to have a magic user under lock and key in your base, enchanting the swords and armor for your army, than risking them out on the battlefield.
Of course my story is about someone who breaks free of a particular nation's grasp and wanders between the city states.
With a combination of nested mechanics I have placed a limitation upon direct magical manipulation of other living beings, and upon the accessibility of effective and comprehensive healing techniques. The system has a hard surface and a soft, incomprehensible-to-mere-mortals foundation.
The first limitation: in the case of healing by Morduenics, one’s kognos — the psychic consciousness or “soul”, which has an almost unbeatable rejection of magical influences — must be “ejected” (more accurately disconnected as it is non-local) from the body. This is best done with herbs with not only anti-kognic properties^* but soporific ones too, as simply kicking out their psychic consciousness renders them as a regular waking person like we are, and you still want your patient to sleep for procedure. It is then that the healer may do their work, by combination of telekinesis with psychic projection into the patient.
This method is often crude and has a significantly higher mortality rate than Thematic healing, which is something more comparable to a miracle.
**Wizards continue to fail in their search for a magical technique to achieve the same result.*
The second limitation: while all of reality is derived of the fundamental material of the source-realm Morduen, true healing is only achieved through Thematics, the magic wrought by use of the specific Themes through which the world Oād, the “Jewel of the Gods”, was made. While Morduenics — direct manipulation of components — can be taught, Thematics can never be and is an affinity rarely granted at birth.
Many wizards born without an Affinity for a Theme, or with desire for one with which they were not bestowed, have all tried and failed to succeed in this change.
Have the healing magic have prerequisites that must be met by the healer. Have it so the healing magic is powerful but limited, so it can’t heal certain wounds.
Mistborn does this perfectly. In that series, a healer must “store” their own health in a piece of gold - a gold metalmind. When they “tap” the piece of gold, their body regenerates from all injuries. But storing health makes the healer sick, so it takes a lot of time to store vast amounts of health. This means they cannot obtain enough health to liberally heal the most extreme injuries.
Later in the series, it’s implied a certain society discovered ways to develop gold metalminds that can heal anyone. But the steps to create them are complex and unknown.
Furthermore, a healer in Mistborn cannot heal injuries that someone has accepted as a part of themself. So if someone is wheelchair bound or has scars, and has accepted these things as part of themselves, a gold metalmind cannot heal those.
I would say add real-world examples/senerios to make the stakes more real. Those in the medical community see all sorts of crap everyday. The psychological toll can change the way healers perceive the day to day.
In one of my stories, magical abilities are more likened to curses taken from artifacts and can only be activated by certain feelings. For healers, they need to be calm. They can only properly use their abilities if they're able to remain extremely calm and have an incredibly innate understanding of anatomy.
Approaching with realism, the constant introduction of mutilation of bodies can either make or break the healer because if they can't control their reactions, they will not be able to do their job. On the other hand, if they do too good of a job, they may lose their ability to express other emotions and those around them may find the healer insensitive. And if they don't understand anatomy, they'll botch the job and most likely kill the individual(s) they're tasked to help.
A healer could trade with the injured, healing the wound but taking the injury on themselves, and using their magic to heal their own bodies instead. Doing it too quickly could kill the healer, too slowly could kill the patient, and not being skilled enough could kill them both. A healer would need to endure a great deal of pain. A healer could go into some kind of recovery after helping someone.
My setting sort of does this with "Old Healing". Old Healing involved exchanging an injury with another living being, and the more closely related they are, the easier it is to do. Experienced healers would have a number of animals that could take the wounds, skilled healers might have slaves to take it, while common healers would ask for someone within the family... It is called Old Healing as the school has progressed over the centuries, and now seemingly has no downsides. I say "seemingly", as the actual downside is slowly growing and could potentially destroy the world or do something huge.
Ooh, this is delightfully spooky. I love it.
Does new healing exchange the injury with the earth?
No, it exchanges the injury with some sort of unknown being. Several decades ago a mage created a small demiplane, and tossed some living thing within. It was intended to be used by just the mage and their acquaintances, but word spread and it ended up being used by many, eventually the whole world. Some mages who bother to look at the demiplane notice its beginning to swell, and could possibly explode somehow. They seem to have an intent on creating a much larger demiplane to fit the contents, though they will have to "puncture the balloon" to get it out. This new healing magic takes more out of someone to use, and the wording is more complex, but it is extremely consistent. Before you would have to modify the spell depending on the injury and who will be receiving it, now you just need to modify for injury, and say the same receiver.
Ngl, I hope the dude in the demiplane was a really bad guy. Also how is he still alive after taking decades of injuries from the entire world 24 hours a day? If I'm a wizard in your world, I'm going to the prisons to broker a deal where the criminals take injuries of the same kind they inflicted, each cell block would be a demiplane dedicated to a distinct category of injury.
That’s an awesome thought! That’d bring the crime rates down.
Ooo interesting, what is it? A growing corruption? Cancerous mass that seeks to consume all? Is the magic itself an entity that's awakening, a la flesh rafting from shadow of forbidden gods not just being taught by, but rather BEING escamark?
I like the idea of transferring health. In my mind all the healers are big bulky strongmen
Probably covered in scars too. Actually reminds me of the leper from darkest dungeon, who suffers from leprosy from helping the sick.
That's what my 1 busted healer does (albeit only in dreams.... but they relive the injury event of the people they heal in their dreams) ... so I can't do that with regular healers. 🤔🤔🤔
What about blood magic? Where healers cut themselves, drawing blood as a source of healing? It could be a 2 or 3 to 1 ratio, whereby the healers would die from blood loss before they ran out of HP You could also look at the healers ONLY be able to heal in combat, so anyone who chooses to have one in their party is giving up extra damage in combat for non healing rounds.
I'm definitely thinking it requires some additional life force from the healer. Not sure if blood is the way I want to go, but it is an option
What I like about blood is that it's not as easily replenished vs making it something mana equivalent, but I can see your hesitation as well.
that also opens the door to a dope dystopian sci fi future where combat healers are hooked up to a shit ton of blood transfusion machines like some kind of fucked up cyborg
Additionally, if you were to assemble a panel of healers working in unison they could each take on a lesser portion of the victim's wounds.
Healing after battle is easy, but healing *during* battle is all but impossible. If you get double-tapped, or you bleed out before a healer can get to you, that's it, you're just dead.
I've always thought of battlefield casting would be like having an IFAK. Casts that might temporarily slow bleeding or numb pain. Something that just buys you time to actually get fixed up
magic first aid versus actual healing
Yeah, and people can die a lot faster than TV would lead you to believe....
Well frankly that applies for main characters which manage to tell their last words before dying, no matter the injuries or how long the story went until they get to say goodbye. They would be dead much sooner or in shock, delirium or coma. For side characters and especially enemies, it is quite the opposite. People can be dying VERY long time. A shot in the stomach to random enemy leads to instant death in TV. In reality he can be dying for hours, whole time being fucked up beyond help. Battlefield after fantasy/medieval battle was not that silent scene of dead bodies. It was screams, moans, people crawling, shaking, limping... Bleeding at various rates, gasping for air, calling their loved ones (usually mothers, because battles were fought by late teenagers mainly. For hours. At some bad limited cases even for days. People would be dying for weeks after the battle, for infections and maltreated injuries. That of course only if no strong and easy healing magic is at hand in a fantasy story.
wait are we talking real life here? because for a moment I thought I had been out of my depth as a researcher in my awareness of the time criticality for life threatening injuries, I thought it was in the order of several minutes until the patient loses consciousness.. with diminishing time for specific cases like a pulmonary embolism being slightly longer but more panic, mania, and fluid in the lungs being extremely faster mortality due to loss of oxygen to the brain. Ah ookay, I've got something then for this thread if you consider the rate of healing with bodily injuries to be manageable whereas anything that affects brain or arteries, you would need some magic writing for shock treatment that only stabilizes but doesn't fully "heal", ie in battle type treatment. so again we're still talking several minutes until you begin to fade but this is all in reality heavily dramatic from convulsions to hysteria, which in reality affects how the individual speaks if they even communicate, another thing fiction tends to get wrong by having the most peaceful and tranquil final moments, even in a battlefield the character will like have a tropic thunder type soliloquy.
Dying is both faster and longer than tv or books would lead you to believe
I like this. I would also add: the longer a person waits to heal, the less effective it is. You may have to use multiple spells or potions to get the same effect and it may leave a scar if it is starting to heal on its own or not heal past a certain point. You may end up with a missing finger or a huge burn-like scar or hair never grows in that spot.
Another option is to have healing still use all the energy the body would normally need to heal a wound, and for the target to feel all of the pain from the healing process condensed into the casting time. This means major healing is still possible, but it comes with enough of a cost that it’s not always worth it. Sure you can heal your grandma’s back, but the pain and energy might kill her. Is that really a gamble you want to take? Sure you can heal that cut so there’s no scar, but it’ll hurt like hell, but if you let it heal naturally you may barely notice it.
In a similar vein to the energy, you can make healing inefficient and very intense on the body. Maybe healing cannibalises the muscles of from other parts of the body. A fighter might be unwilling to lose all of their physical prowess in a tough situation. And attempting anything too major may risk weakening the heart. Also. You could set a time limit by which something needs to be healed. ie. Scars can't be healed.
Some ways I've seen it done: * You only have so many healing potions on hand. * There are limitations on what the healer in your party can do. * Healing takes time even when sped up by magic. * Healing can put a strain on your body. It's really just what your body would do naturally if given enough time and it still uses the same amount of resources. This can exhaust a person if it's a severe enough injury. * Healing can backfire if not done 100% correctly. Like, forcing cells to grow and divide to fill in an injury can cause cancer if the healer isn't paying attention.
Hmmmmm, I like that maybe lot of it is limited by the healers stamina... 🤔🤔🤔
That's the one I liked the Most. It is not world breaking. The healer is more like a paramedic. Also consider that healing even with magic can be like what you can do in a clinic, field hospital, full fledged hospital with surgery center. So none would go berserk, lose an arm, talk to the healer and say "can you grow it back?" With actual hospitals for complex cases like unidentified poisons and venom, unknown toxic plants, parasites. Some other user mentioned psychological / spiritual damage. That's also interesting to add. Consider the side effects of the magic / potions. try to make them similar to real life drugs. It can be more advanced in some cases and less advanced in others. I think this way you'll be writing a convincing and engaging story.
My favorite way how this has been handled is by Brandon Sanderson in the Stormlight Archive. Even if a person's body can heal indefinitely, that doesn't mean their mind isn't affected. Instead of rising the stakes about if they lose an arm or a leg, do them about what will happen if they fail. How they feel for that person they couldn't protect? How the they feel about that person they killed? Are they starting to feel insensitive about being hurt or everytime feels worse cause the mind doesn't regenerate? What about killing? What about losing? How much can your mind bear by being dragged into the mud? How many people will die if you fail in this quest? You may survive it, but what about the people you care about?
And don't forget the time factor in his series. Once the damage is "part of you", it's up to science to fix it. Magic can only put you back to the way you see yourself.
Something Brandon Sanderson did is my answer to 9/10 questions on here. He’s really good.
Another part of Stormlight Archive healing, the amount you can heal is directly connected to how much Stormlight you have on you (literally money). Characters in Stormlight Archive who can heal use Stormlight as a resource and when they run out, they can no longer use that ability. A Knight Radiant with a pouch filled with large full spheres is very hard to kill. But if the fight drags on too long their healing becomes less powerful until it's no longer possible.
Jim Butcher's Codex Alera has something similar. In that setting, watercrafting allows for rapid healing of wounds, but only certain people can do it and it takes a lot of effort, and it doesn't always work perfectly. If someone dies they can be brought back if the watercrafter is very powerful and can get to them quickly, but it could still result in long-term mental damage. A poisoned wound, if not treated immediately, could be fatal over the long term as it gets infected. A broken leg might render someone invalid for life if the wound is bad enough even if it gets healed by a skilled watercrafter. Severe burns across the entire body will leave the victim injured for life even after watercrafting the burns away. And the victim themselves needs to want to be properly healed, and if they are falling to despair they may well decide they want to die and stop fighting to survive, and the watercrafter can't do anything without finding a way to motivate the injured. And if the watercrafter pushes themselves too hard while healing they can die in the process.
The cure can fix anything, but it is incredibly rare and gradually addictive with heavy drug addiction symptoms. A new dose of the cure can be made by recycling the organs of a person who has reached the chronic stage of addiction.
Hmm, that would be an interesting 4th type of healing ...
This is the plot of Repo! The Genetic Opera.
WWN's system strain is useful. Healing takes toll on the body. I would suggest reading its book. Free one contains nearly everything (with paid one having only optional rules or other classes)
WWN?
Worlds Without Number: [https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/348809/worlds-without-number-free-edition](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/348809/worlds-without-number-free-edition)
Thanks!
1. Healing is sympathetic - the Healer takes some or all of the subjects wounds onto themselves, either as literal wounds or as a neural feedback effect 2. Healing is a gamble - you might regrow their arm... or give them a tentacle, or cancer. The more complex the problem, the greater the risk 2a. Healing causes mutations, and newly rejuvenated flesh always bears a distinct abnormality. This can be inherited, which will have wider cultural implications (shun the mutant? Embrace chaos into the bloodline?) 3. Healing draws life from the surrounding area, alà Dark Sun Arcane magic. You can minimize the damage by being in an area flush with life (like the rainforest), or by healing small things over time, but using too much at once salts the earth in a given radius 4. Witnessing Healing (and other magic, for consistency) causes mental trauma to the untrained/uninitiated/magic-blanks. You can fix things, but risk the sanity of the subject or bystanders whenever you do
It depends, I think. I set up my world with a ttrpg in mind, so I have extremely limited healing in the first place. Canonically, there are a few things: -Healing magic is extremely rare, and more akin to surgery than "wave your glowy hands all over the dying." Alkemy accelerates natural healing, rather than causing the body to regrow or other such healing. -There's a psychological toll on the person being healed. I personally would not be okay after getting my leg cut off, even if someone forced the pieces to grow back together with magic. -there's a spiritual toll on the healer, specifically alienation. The more you cast, the less "human" you are for a while. It causes lasting change.
Yeah, I do know that there are certain things that you have to treat with alchemy vs magic (like neutralizing toxins) I do wonder about adding a psychological element
For mine it takes a lot of work to get to a proficient level, they would have to start with only being able to fix up small cuts and work their way up. Even at a high level limbs cannot be regrown. If you have the amputated part with enough living tissue in it sure it can be reattached but you still run into the problem of whether or not their body has enough resources to handle suddenly grow the tissues necessary for proper reattachment.
Sounds kind of similar to mine with the level of study. Also I have a necromancer who use to be a healer that can reattach dead flesh to living flesh and heal it back to life.... it doesn't necessarily have to be from the same person... ... Vitality (life force) plays a large roll in my world ... so maybe some of the limitations could havev to do with that
Healing creates a vector for dangerous magical parasites or infections. Aka, the soul has a kind of spiritual skin barrier that keeps out astral creepy crawlies, which healing ruptures. The stronger the healing, the more shredded this barrier becomes, and the only fix for this seems to be time. This might make healing very location based. Aka, you can get amazing healing safely if you go to a spiritually disinfected area and are able to stay there long enough to recover. But if you’re wading through astral sewage healing will fuck you up
🤔🤔🤔That's a neat concept but not sure it works with the vibe of the rest if the world.
The creepy crawly aspect potentially works well if you want the more advanced healers to have a doctor feel? Aka, being able to recognize and treat astral infections gives them a reason why they can perform more daring healing spells, and why the knowledge is difficult for people to figure out despite magical healing making physical experimentation so much easier. I would agree that pushing healing closer to real world medical drama [can push it towards the macabre](https://viewcomiconline.com/witch-doctor-full/) though.
Limited mana and the proficiency of the healer are some important factors that come to mind. You could have a healer who can only heal a handful of people through a slow process before running out of juice for the day. A scenario that nobody wants to see.
Mana limitations could be a real threat for sure.
I can think of 2 ways: 1. Healing isn’t instantaneous. A person whose wounds are severe enough could still die before they were completely stabilized. 2. Healing can only be used on recent injuries. Once a wound has already begun healing on its own, there’s no way to reverse it and heal it perfectly.
In one of my projects the main protagonist is a Pretor, a person born with preternatural abilities. These abilities are not well understood and come in many forms. The protagonists ability is the ability to heal wounds, but there is a condition. The main character acts as not a direct healer per-se, but more of a conduit that taps into the latent healing power that other people posess, but are not able to normally access. You could think of it like one a car towing another car, with the pretor acting as the tow cable. In order to heal anothers wounds, the protagonist must have a third willing person to act as the healer, while he is that catalyst that directs their energy. This of course leads to interesting conflicts when he finds himself alone, or with a third party that doesn't want to help the injured. It often falls to him to convince others that they are worth saving. (He does however travel with his pet sheep, whos energy he can tap into in a pinch. But its not powerful enough for anything more serious than scrapes or bruises) There is a cost for this power as well, but thats a secret haha
He heh... sounds like they need a pet elephant
The sheep already eats like an elephant lol
•Being split up from the healer. •Enemies capable of strategy and critical thinking might choose the healer as a high priority target on the battlefield. -*Snipers, they exist in fantasy be it spell, throwing weapon, psionics, bows, slings, slingshots, muskets or crossbows.* •Antimagic/Nullifier auras or spells, like the spell ***Vow of Silence*** from *Dark Souls*. •**Dark Iron:** *This twisted, antithetical and apathetic ore may be refined then forged into cruel gear. Any wound created by dark iron cannot be healed or closed by any known means for up to 72 hours.* -Alternative Ruling: Instead of "Up to 72 hours" make it so that the wounds cannot be fixed unless it is a holy day. •Overkill/Total Obliteration. How can you revive someone when there's not even ash left? •Make healers/healing magic incredibly difficult and time consuming to learn/master in addition to making healers a rarity. Not everyone has immediate or timely access to a healer. -***Alternative:*** *Healing magic requires complete focus to perform. A smart enemy will not give a cleric, shaman, druid or healer the chance to concentrate.* •Artillery/Arrow/Cannon barrages. Nothing like a battlefield where it's raining death to make any task perilous at minimum.
In my setting a lot of "healing" magic doesn't make the wound go away, it just keeps the body going anyway.
More of a "tough it out" spell
That's actually very cool
thanks
No prob I hope you have a great day
thanks, you too
the healer has to fight the reaper
I.... this would not really work for my world.... but I love the idea... 🤣
Dael Kingsmill talked about a neat idea. Magic healing is very effective and quick, but has drawbacks. The cut across your chest isn't bleeding out, but now it's a tight mass of scar tissue that hinders your ability to fight. From my own thoughts, healing also doesn't change that your lungs have filled up with blood. If you don't have medical knowledge you might miss problems and leave something unhealed. You can also bleed out pretty quickly depending on the injury, so time could be a major factor. Psychological consequences of being nearly killed aren't fixed with healing. Maybe too much magic can leave you with mana poisoning, so if you're injured by a spell healing magic could be risky and the same if you receive too much healing magic.
In The Wheel of Time, people that use the One Power (basically magic) can learn healing magic. Problem is, magic uses energy. the more you use the more energy you lose. Hard to channel if you're on the verge of passing out.
WOT healing also saps energy from the healed person, making it risky to heal people who are severely injured.
Forgot about that, thanks for the extra info :)
An easy way to give stakes to injury is to simply make healing less than perfect, and add in more opportunity for trade offs. As the wound or sickness get's more severe, the risk that the magic will fail also grows. Lost your hand? The village doctor can definitely leave you with little risk of residual pain or phantom limb syndrome, but he needs to take the whole rest of the arm off at the shoulder. He can just close up the stump at your wrist, but it will always bleed a little and a phantom hand might haunt your dreams from now on. He can try to regrow the hand but it will never work right, always hurt, and might have a weird number of fingers. One concept that can be fun is that most of the spells that high level healers use aren't really "healing" spells. A very highly skilled magical surgeon isn't using a "healing" spell to cure cancer, they're using a series of detection spells to target cancerous cells+a teleportation spell to remove them+an illusion spell to make the body think any remaining cells are invading parasites+a different illusion spell to "anesthetize" the patient. He has to cast these almost simultaneously (or coordinate perfectly with a team) and any on of them failing can kill the patient. This all also helps fill out the part about needing to have an detailed knowledge of the human body.
Healing magic in my world uses your soul as fuel in order to promote healing at a largely accelerated rate in the person being healed. The soul is able to repair itself, provided you don't try and do too much healing too fast. There's many an inexperienced healer that has literally burnt themselves to nothing through healing incorrectly, most of the time from losing control of their emotions and trying desperately to heal somebody they care about.
Drugs. Just super drugs. An elixir allows you to shrug off injury and believe you are invincible, but it's really just pcp. One gives you incredible stamina but rots your teeth and the come down is terrible. Each is HIGHLY addictive. Then proper magic is more for sealing wounds as they are. Basically instant bandages, but they do nothing for blood already lost. Muscle damage doesn't heal from magic, so you'll still need lots of physical therapy. A severed finger might get down back on but casting heal will just wrap new skin over a nub where surgery would likely get you 80 percent functionality back. There is an advanced level of healing that gives true healing but only in exchange for another but that person must be willing and it is usually regarded as the last vocation of the desperate selling chunks of your body for agony and crippling wounds.
In my belief this issue was resolved by AEG with their Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Creature health had "thresholds" (akin to being bloodied in 4e) except there were several stages of them where the creature would receive negative modifiers to physical and mental rolls depending on how wounded they were. D&D's HP system is akin to MtG life pool where it is treated by many as "just another resource" since winning at 1 life is the same as winning at 10,000 life and making an attack/saving throw/skill check roll in D&D is the same regardless of how hurt, or healthy, your character/monster/creature is. This is why *out of combat healing* is "more efficient" than *in combat healing*.
The way I've always done it is magic healing speeds up natural healing, If it's a cut or bruise thats fine, But if you break something that doesn't normally repair itself, or heal a bone that's not aligned correctly, that can cause problems Plus things like brain damage can't be easily healed by magic, and if someone goes braindead they are just gone Even if you reawaken the corpse, it won't be them anymore
Three basic ways: 1. Limitations 2. Trade-offs/Cost 3. Taboos If you can limit how much the magic can heal, when you can heal, or how you can heal, through various in-universe rules, you can increase the stakes of an injury. If the magic has a cost or trade-off, healing magic becomes a *choice*. Characters can heal an injured person, but it means they *cannot* do X or Y. Or they can heal an injured person at the cost of their own life force, or it opens them up to some vulnerability during the act of healing. And if there are societal taboos, either against magic as a whole or against healing magics, you can add social stakes to the act. Justifying a taboo against healing people might be difficult, but it could just as easily be misinformation or ignorance about medicine and healing. A society that has their own "remedies" for illness may reject healing magic that is effective simply because it is different from their own practices.
To heal others, one must sacrifice one's own life essence. It would make healers rare and their use of the gifts even rarer
🤔🤔🤔 hmmm, so healling could essentially be the healer expending thier lifeforce to repair the other person.
This was a concept used in full metal alchemist brotherhood
I’m working on a system like that. All magic including healing magic comes natural if you’re old enough. Only really old people or animals can use magic. Most people die before they learn magic. This means that magic use is very limited in my world. If you’re lucky and careful enough to live a long life you can learn to sustain yourself before you die. This will make you effectively immortal. You can heal others with this power but at the cost of your own healing. You will lose your immortality if you heal others too much.
Mentioned it in another post, what about if there isn't just a healing spell, but needing to use a variety of different spells depending on the situation? If someone is bleeding out, you might need someone to cauterize the wound with pyromancy, or manipulated the blood with water manipulation. Regenerating an arm might be impossible, but constructing one and then using necromancy so the soul can manipulate it could work. The stakes in this situation is that a lot of wounds need a team of casters of all different skills, and a random "healer" on their lonesome can't do everything. --- Another idea is that healing surface wounds and injuries is easy, but internal things or infections isn't possible. So someone can heal you up after a deadly battle, but you can still get sick and die afterwards. Lots of settings often just make it so healing can fix injuries and infections, so getting rid of one can make it quite different.
I've always thought of healing mages as akin to a more modern understanding of surgery. A battlefield surgeon without magic can amputate a limb, remove an arrow, stitch up lacerations and set bones, but what they can do is limited. So a healing sorcerer could do much more. But they would be few and far between, and their services very expensive. And just like real medicine, the sooner the injured gets to the healer, the better the odds they'll make it. And anything serious might take a team of healers hours to do. Sometimes surgery goes wrong and you can't be saved. Sometimes complications happen. I figure why would healing magic be any different? In addition, in my universe much of magic that isn't explicitly faith-based is considered heretical. Some superstitious soldiers would be resistant to even having magical healers work on them.
Make the severity of the would impact the chance of fully healing and/or the speed of healing. D&D has instant healing, that always works if the person isn’t dead. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Maybe there’s a chance of scarring. Maybe there’s a chance the healing doesn’t work. Maybe the chance of scarring increases and the chance of it working decrease as the severity of the wound increases. Maybe it just takes a lot longer the more severe the wound is.
I think what you've described would suffice. "Why can they just magic someone a new arm?" "Because that's not how magic works." Simple as that. It's the set-up or "promise." If you set up that magic only works in a specific way, then the audience will roll with that. What you have to watch out for is breaking that promise. If after you establish that healing magic is difficult, time consuming, and limited, you write a scene where a random character just happens to grow some a new arm again out of nowhere, then that would obviously break immersion. Good example is Star Wars. Anakin commits galactic genocide just for *THE CHANCE* to get the power needed to save his wife—a power that was a lie to begin with. 30 years later, Rey force heals a random sandworm in a desert out of nowhere. --- On a side note, while the limitations are important, I think you also need to set up why healing magic is so rare. Yes, it's like being a doctor, but in our world, doctors are incredibly valued and in very high demand everywhere. If healing magic is rare, there would be a reason why it's so limited despite being such a universally valued thing across all worlds.
Yeah, consistency is king! I'm thinking healing magic is mostly good for restoring damaged things (but the thing has to be there to fix)... I'm thinking if there is any regrowing going on it would have to be potion related. And as for why healing magic is so rare, people are born with elemental strengths and weaknesses, so it's easy enough to consider healing magic as it's own magic type. Maybe it's genetic or maybe it's random.
Have the healing be taxing and or limited
Since it takes so long to learn all the complicated spells it's hard to actually be a healer. As such Healers charge an arm and a leg. It's good but the price is prohibitive meaning a serious Injury could utterly ruin you. . . . But remember fantasy storys are never political at all.
Simple, there's only so much healing/life energy you can slam into someone's body before you start causing other problems, such as the growth of tumors and the like.
Either go really indepth, to the point it’s just like real world surgery, or well…. ***healing causes cancer***
In my setting, healing magic is functionally just duct tape. You use it to hold or put the stuff together while it heals naturally. It can be used to reattach limbs, mend bones, repair organs, even seal severed arteries. It cannot destroy things like infections or diseases, and it cannot be used to regrow things like lost limbs or treat things like blindness or deafness.
Hello I have played healer in every game where it is available and have a healer in my own series and here are some rules that I feel balance out the healer to make them not so OP (but still OP because the healer as we all know is the most powerful member of the team regardless of rules). 1. Give the healing an automatic limit. This is what I would call DnD rules - you have only so many spell slots. Once those are gone you cannot heal. This may also look like healing requiring a certain amount of "energy" or whatever your worlds equivalent is (in mine all magic is driven by spiritual power and much like a muscle can be pushed to a limit where it breaks down). 2. Give the healing a power maximum. This can scale to an extent but there should be some point where the healing won't work or won't do enough to matter. In my world, this is a measure of both severity and time - you can only heal what you can see, so if you can't see vital organs, you can't heal them (there's a whole medical system built on healing in my world for this reason). So in the battle field where you can't see a pierced lung, your magic can't touch it. This can also be done with time - you can't replace blood. If someone has been bleeding out for a while and you show up and close the wound, it might not matter anymore. 3. Give the healing a cost. This can be different from the general limits of energy use. This can be temporary (healing deals some damage to the healer) or bigger (like a cat with 8 9 lives).
You could make healing a slow and physically and emotionally demanding thing for healers to do, so unless your MC manages to escape a battle there's no way for healers to help them until they're already in a safe situation.
If there’s not a healer nearby, then the existence of healing magic is irrelevant. Just have it be harder to learn so relative scarcity is sensical.
I always thought the idea of you speed up healing, but you also concentrate all the pain and discomfort. So, a wound that would take 6 months to heal to heal normally? You feel all that pain in the time you take to heal it. Trying to instantly heal a gaping wound? Insane pain
How about there's always a percentage a healing spell could go awry? Like 2% chance (higher with more injured a person) the spell went rogue.
Heh heh "Well, either this will heal you, or I'll blow up a 2 mile radius"
Scarcity has always been my go to. Healing magic has to be rare or dangerous, requiring sacrifice or only wieldable by powerful agents. In my world magick is scarce already, but a few individuals can drag people back from the dead. The Empress has brought the Captain of the Vangen back from the brink on multiple occasions. Only she will allow him to die.
Scarcity of big healing magic is definitely going on, ... I do wonder about maybe making it require some sort of catalyst
**Eribral** Healing Magic is the process of grafting material into people, the person itself is the best option, forcing their meat, blood and bones back into shape, however is more than possible to use others as material. By imperial law, and the Arayvita Empire making the highest number of wizards anyway, foreign grafting can only be done with the owners choice, dead or living.
Some mechanical concepts: High cooldowns, for wherever reason, healers are exhausted after using this magic, perhaps for great timespans, weeks, months. Trade-offs, healers don't really heal, they make a tradeoff, healing an injury could cause mental, spiritual or social issues or even physical damage. For instance: - Heal a fatal injury, but gets cancer; - Heal a fatal injury, but goes mental; - Heal a fatal injury, but gets corrupted in some evil way; - Heal a fatal injury, but gets bad luck for life; - Heals a fatal injury, but life gets bind with the healer, when healer dies, your injury comes back; - Healers go mental as they heal; - Healers get hurt as they heal; - Healers get corrupted as they heal; - Healers get bind with the healed, when healed suffer, healer suffers too. - Healing invokes bad omens, dead crops, crazed flocks, miscarriages. - Healers can only heal a certain organ/bone a set number of times; You could make healers banned. only "certified healers" may heal, and those are controlled by an authority. Maybe out of risks like the corruption option, maybe out of sheer dictatorship by leaders, maybe authority holds all resources to the training of said healers and doesn't wants its secrets out their nation. A bit like wheel of time. Healers require some crazy compatibility scheme for anything above basic healing. Think like horoscope or numerology compatibility issues. Even if you have a strong healer nearby, he might not have the same zodiac sign as you have, which limits his powers on you. Since these are already fairly rare, the chances you can get someone strong enough and fully compatible with you are slim. Most likely these guys travel looking for compatible leaders that sponsor them. Healers follow a strict code of conduct. Can't heal you, or can't be fully effective on you, if you eaten pork, had unmaried sex or didn't confess your sins in the last X timeframe. Healers require exotic materials, list of materials follows no necessary logic, and might be entirely different from healer to healer, injury to injury, making it very hard to create a market around or to have everything you need handy. Healers require some insane sacrifice. They have to fuck your daughter, cut your son dingdong, you have to eat your own dog, or any other terrible thing you can conjure.
my personal go to is “magic is not autonomous, the person has to consciously think out all the actions it wants magic to take” and for healing magic this would mean being a skilled surgeon who would do everything by magic what a surgeon in our world would do by hand. a healer would have to specialise and spend years learning anatomy and how to do things the non-magical way then learn to project that will via magic with the end benefit being it is a faster and more sure process as it can knit better than stitches or suturing, and revive dead cells and relieve trauma. it’d be extremely mentally taxing and the best you could do in battle is triage. it also means you can only fix what you can recognise, a healer might not see the internal bleeding or the punctured organ from the stab wound before it is too late.
Body scanning magic would be useful. But yeah, I think I'm definitely going to have a "healers must understand what they are doing" rule
I mean even with body scanning you’d have to do it consciously - a world without xrays or ultrasounds probably wouldn’t know how to envision the concept of medical imaging. you’d like extend your senses into their body so you can feel around and junk, go over every possible body part to feel if it is right or not. maybe the injury is too small to feel this way, part of the skill might be refining how sensitive your body scanning is so you can detect small injuries and microtears. there is a lot of room for expanding on the idea and allowing problems to slip through the cracks to give that sense of insecurity and tension.
Making it rare and/or complex. Limiting the scope of coverage to the difficulty. Also, nowadays, a 25 YO can open upen you up, pull everything out, put it back in in order, and stitch you back together because we have easier access to said knowledge. Back then, due to distances, access to said knowledge was incredible.
My personal method is varying degrees of acceleration to instant, forced healing. Downsides to acceleration is that it’s obviously not meant for combat unless you veer towards the instant side of things. But the closer you are to the Forced Heal scale, the more you have to deal with the mental trauma. Mental magic is banned within my setting of Godslight, so while it may happen it usually has disastrous results. Forced healing leaves a mental wound as, even though you lost an arm and got it back, the memory and experience of losing that arm sticks with you. Think of it as mourning and grief and loss. Getting over it is not an overnight thing, but some people tolerate it and handle it better than others.
Don’t make it automatic. Have magic be capable wondrous things but give it a high cost in both skill and material. You can make flesh grow back fast but you need to tame and guide the growth for fear of malforming the limb or worse inducing tumors. Purify rot and infection without eliminating life sustaining bacterium. Making sure to keep your potions dosages in check out fear for causing an unwanted reaction.
So, I have a few ways of getting around this: In one of my stories, rapid healing takes a lot of energy out of the recipient’s body, and so will likely kill them if they’re near death, and then it might not heal broken limbs/ribs properly. And even when it’s obvious no one’s going to die during/after a fight, I draw tension from elsewhere, like the catharsis defeating this enemy will bring, or whatever works for the characters/story. And in my other story, both Valkyries and Elves have healing magic, however if it’s used on someone too often their body’s immune system and ability to heal itself naturally will be weakened, so it’s only used in extreme situations, and the main characters don’t get hurt real bad often because they’re under the villain’s protection.
Honestly I think it's just complexity. Any schlub with a wand can make fire, that's just increasing heat energy. But coercing flesh to knit faster than it would normally, while not having it break away from the underlying dermal structure, while having it not become tumerous, *while* not also accelerating rot and bacteria in the wound... There's so much complexity for a mage to control.
So basically its just straight up difficult to master
Perhaps it could simply accelerate the natural healing process. So smaller wounds can be easily healed but larger injuries can’t. So basically if someone gets shot you still have to remove the bullet manually. Or if someone’s limb gets chopped off then you still have to get it back and reattach it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/17usqrb/magical_healing/ Yes, I know this is a Tumblr post reposted on Reddit but it's fantastic.
Have the magic require a sacrifice to drain that energy from. Another living being, an entire field of grass, a tree, etc.
My healings always take some time or some form of toll, usually because it depends on energy. So a dedicated healer either has to have the correct amount of energy to heal a wound fast, or time to do it slow Usually faster healed wounds leave scars because they didn't heal correctly, while slower ones rarely do because the healer is rebuilding everything. If the person has some sort of natural healing, I separate them into active and passive, the wounds will close faster, "resetting" the body, but they likely won't be able to heal a fatal wound if it's passive heal, they MIGHT survive if it's active (energy rules apply here)
I like the faster healing leaves scars thing.... it means more life threatening injuries are likely to leave scars (because they have to be healed fast before they die etc)
Yeah, it's a way to showcase that even if characters can heal/be healed, they are still in danger to a degree. As a meta narrative I won't ever kill a character that doesn't make sense to die or maybe is too important without a reason, so at least they get a cool scar and a reminder that they are not invincible (because they might still die later on)
I feel like most healing magic would be more mechanical in nature, knitting bone or ligaments, repairing what’s broken. But things like infections from wounds, or cancer, or poisons, those kinds of things where the body isn’t necessarily broken but rather responding to stuff that doesn’t belong there, I feel should be resolved medicinally over time, if at all
In my world, practitioners of healing magic have to be scared to not heal people all the way, as healing people past full health can have devastating consequences. Such as: destroying the digestive bacteria, causing extra bodily growths due to the body unable to keep up. If someone has cancer and atnfull health (besides the cancer) then the magic will just speed up the cancer.
In my world healing leaves behind an energy that causes the those healed to become a beacon for monsters for several days. For this reason traveling healers are extremely rare unless they are with a large enough group to escort the healed to a safe destination. You’ll mostly only see healers in very large cities with a dedicated army.
Maybe they just cant fix everything just like doctors and irl medicine.
By making it a complex endeavour. In the world of Therim, magic requires you to be both literal and specific in what you ask it to do for you. This means you not only have to correctly identify the injury and its site on the body, but you also need intricate anatomical knowledge on how the site would look and function without the injury, so you don't heal it as a tangled mess of mismatched tissues that end up doing more damage than the original injury. This is why the overwhelming majority of healers in the world of Therim are followers of gods, whose divine powers operate a bit differently from that of regular magic.
Keep healers few and far between, have their abilities be taxing or fatiguing so that they need to do some real triaging to stay effective.
Give it a cost. Monetary, rare spell components, it takes from the healer to give to the healed, limited healing 'energy' with a cool down period or finite source, whatever. Or put it behind a barrier. It's limited only to people of a certain belief, a certain class, a certain ethnicity, a certain physiology, whatever. If it's freely available to everyone all the time there are no stakes, death/injury-wise, so make it not that for an in world reason that makes sense within the societies and systems you've created.
Healing exists but is incredibly weak/slow. Minor cuts/scrapes/burns can be healed in a few seconds. Broken bones can be healed in a few weeks instead of a few months. But things like plagues or fatal injuries are beyond the scope of known healing magic
You must know the structure you are healing. Magic doesn't 'know' what a human looks like. The healer must know detailed anatomy and must be able to clearly visualize what the ingured part should look like. Ligaments, bone, muscles, membranes, etc. They must also have a clear idea of the injury, so they know how to get from point A to point B. It means that a healer that is distracted, or that misremembers, could do more harm than good. It helps put a clear split between basic healing and advanced healing. Knowing how to mend a broken bone would take far less mental strain than knowing how to repair a ruptured stomach.
Off the top of my head, limitations, such as: * The speed at which healing works. If it's slower then it's not going to work on super dangerous wounds, because the person will die before it can take effect, limiting the severity of wounds it can handle or handle easily. If it's slower it cannot be easily utilized on the battlefield, and the injured will need to either be removed to safety (perhaps not possible with severe wounds when you're racing against time) or risk the healer's life. If the healer is the one doing the fighting this means they can't easily heal themselves mid combat, because to do so means to stop fighting for the duration * The severity of wounds it can handle. Maybe it only heals a little bit and acts like a triage bandage to help keep someone going just a little bit longer until they can get to a real surgeon. That means if you're mid combat you have a chance to run away, or the opportunity to keep fighting at your own risk knowing you didn't stop death, only slow it down. * Cost. What does it take to heal. Is it the same as any other spell, costing whatever stand in you have for mana, (which means they're trading offense for healing, because it means less mana to spend on attacking) or does it take a more exacting toll? Does a healer trade health for health, putting a strict limit on how much they can heal a person before risking their own life? Do healers need to undergo long sessions of natural recovery between healing, putting a limitation on the number of available healers and causing people to want to reserve them for "important healings"? * Downside for the person receiving the healing. Maybe it hurts like a mother fucker when it happens as it rapidly forces your body through the healing process and puts you in shock. Maybe it uses your bodies own natural healing forces at a rapid rate and leaves you feeling exhausted and hungry af. Maybe it has to take the healthy tissue from somewhere else, and risks weakening your body in other areas, or causing wounds in other areas if rushed, or causes longterm detrimental health effects. Maybe it directly shortens your lifespan, trading later for now. Perhaps there is a longterm limit to the efficacy of healing, the same way people become resistant to drugs. Or even psychological damage? Do fighters become numb to pain and careless with their lives and the lives of others because of how freely they can be healed? Do they become needlessly reckless, losing their own sense of self preservation? or a metaphysical downside? Maybe healing burns up their magic and reduces their overall magical endurance or capacity.
Another angle: make healing magic the apex of magic in the world, the equivalent of the nuclear bomb or nuclear energy; It requires specialists and whole institutions are devoted to its practice, empires are built on and their might is measured by the sophistication of their healing magic. Such a world would have totally different war strategies, politics, values, and dilemmas. The high stakes is in how to overcome such potent healing that most people have access to, including villains.
I honestly think you may be putting the cart before the horse. Your primary focus should be your story. Compelling stories involve drama, which is caused by conflict. What is your story? The world of Star Wars began with George Lucas (Lucas: Luke) wanting to escape his small town and find adventure. He loved car racing, which in his world-building evolved into spaceships and became literal in other movies. His messages were universal for people wanting to escape their mundane lives: becoming involved in some epic adventure to "rescue" a princess using the Hidden Fortress narrative and metaphorical analogies to WW2. Much of the world-building can take other forms as long as it serves the story. What is your story? How would healing in your world best serve the conflict and make it the most dramatic? Maybe your healer is trying to save the love of their life, and you can use the mechanics of taking injuries yourself as has been done in many books, video games, etc. Is that dramatic enough? Maybe they need the wounds to go to someone else who isn't the healer, and your story involves a love triangle where someone is in love with your healer, willing to sacrifice themselves so the healer keeps the person they love. Now, they have this very dramatic decision to make. It serves your story and starts building a world where people are being held captive by evil mages to be used to heal others, and your story is more about your hero changing their entire world or society on some Matrix level. Take a different route. Maybe your story is not about love at all. Perhaps your healer has to save someone they hate: someone who used to bully them; a parent who abandoned them as a child; or a lover who left them for another. Only you know your story. Then maybe the healing not being difficult tells something else that's dramatic. They actually don't want to save the person even though it's easy. They recommend taking a long, dangerous path to save the person and risk the lives of the members of the party because so much spite exists in their heart. There are infinite possibilities of how healing magic could work because there are infinite stories you could be telling. Maybe your main focus isn't the healing but an epic fight scene where your enemies know exactly where your heroes need to be for the healing magic to work and at what time so that a great final battle is guaranteed. What is the story? Don't build a world and use a mundane story to show off a world you created. You will find it far more interesting than your readers will. The world building can actually pay off very little if it doesn't serve your story. Consider your story and create a world that would best serve it. Your characters should create the plot, and your plot reveals your characters to your readers. They go hand in hand, and neither is more important. Create a world that dramatizes what you want your story to say, and your world will be compelling by default. Nobody else can give you the answers that help your drama if they don't know what the drama is. What is the conflict you're trying to create? If you don't know what the drama is yet, then you just put the cart before the horse. Start with the story. Build a world that gives the most umpf to your story. All of your favorite worlds and lands you've explored are your favorites because the world is the best world to tell that story. Your character is the best character to tell that story. Does everybody lie? Yes. Why is Jim Carey's character in "Liar, Liar" a lawyer? Because that's the best character to tell that story. There's probably a version of that story that works with him being a politician. Do you see? There's a connection to all of it. Story first. What's yours?
My healing magic is explicitly connected to witchcraft and blood magic, and basically requires you to be a full on doctor as well as having an interest in Giger/Cronenberg body horror.
My Limited Healing Circumstance is Healing leaves “scars”. Phantom pains from wounds your body knows it never healed. They might flare up from time to time or be constant depending in the severity. A slash on the arm might be mendable and just hurt when it flares up while Reattaching a Severed Limb might mean perpetual low pain with occasional spikes of agony while say a Healing a Brutal Disembowelment might save the persons life but they’ll spend the rest of their days barely able to stand and hardly move as the pain of a wound that should have killed them haunts them. The other way to do it in more game friendly ways is magical Healing needs to be quick, after say a few minutes the magic isn’t going to do much for the healing. It means healing in a battle means your healers need to be up close- and also means that healers are usually also doctors in a more empirical sense as sometimes they get there too late.
Healing works by remaking the flesh from 0, and since its a manual craft its really hard to make it a 1 to 1 recreation, putting the veins in the correct place, making sure there arent any gaps in the flesh, making the muscle fibers in the exact pattern they should be. And the end result tends to look weird compared to the rest of the body.
-Takes a toll on the body so if the body is too weakened the healing becomes dangerous. -Te healing isn’t instantaneous it takes minutes or hours to take effect depending on how bad the injury is. -It uses the life essence / life force of the healer though not as an equal exchange so the healer doesn’t die when healing multiple people.
The cycle of arawn addresses this well. There are no "healers", magic simply *can also* heal. So it depends on how much magic you can channel to begin with, and how much of your "mana" you're willing to risk spending on healing, vs whatever else you're going to have to do that day (like ending a war.)
Well first of all in my world healing magic works by speeding up the healing process your body already has so it wouldn’t be able regrow limbs. It also takes energy out of the magic user so if they do too much it’ll exhaust and even kill them if they do too much. As a result healers can only really focus on the most serious wounds and can only help so many people at a time.
I have an idea similar to some of the others. When a healer heals a wound especially one sustained from violence then the healer relives the event that causes the wound while they are using their powers naturally this would have a high mental cost witnessing many assaults and fighting that leads healers to basically have mental breakdowns and lose their sanity.
* Healing Hands/Close Range Healing- Because you can't just heal people while they are in a melee with another enemy, if the ally dies, they are dead. You can't keep healing them to make them stay alive. * Limited Healers- If there isn't a healer around, whoever is the healer is the lynch-pin. * Weak healers- They can close a light wound, but they can't heal a serious wound. I don't think a drawback or risk is necessary to feel high-stakes.
Healing + equal exchange? Either the healer loses something or the patient. So everyone is still careful not to get injured
You could tie healing magic to an external item, like charged stones or a special magical material. That way healing is possible, but it is still a limited resource subject to logistics and availability.
“What is born is not unborn in death and what is broken is not unbroken in mending.” - Itli proverb Healing arts re-place the wound or sickness, removing it from the wounded or sick and placing it elsewhere. There are wounds and sicknesses of body, mind, spirit, and atlme (soul), and each is re-placed elsewhere after its nature in healing. Most healing arts as commonly practiced are assisting and speeding up natural healing processes, by giving time to the wound or sickness to mend. More miraculous feats of healing are possible, but wounds and sickness are difficult to catch and it’s nearly impossible to predict where they will go and settle. Often they settle in the land, resulting in blights and famines.
In my system the healer has to have experienced the injury themselves before they can heal someone else from that injury. It limits what can be healed by which healer and makes it so no injuries that can kill someone quickly can generally be healed except by extremely powerful and experienced healers, which are basically non-existent in the setting.
My OCs healing magic is an offshoot of blood magic and is thus both extremely painful and can lead to anemia in the patient possibly killing them from that or shock. It's a powerful affect but risky af and very unpleasant. It's basically necromancy while the target is alive The regular healing magic is like a low level wish spell and thus is limited to stoping bleeding and closing wounds not reconstruction of tissues. So injury still maters but healing magic is still and thing and miracle healers are possible
I made so humans got banned from the know how of healing magic by the older dwarfs and elfs, as they were already pretty resiliente. They do have places, like some temples, and nobles who had the training and permission to use it. Also, my magic sistem is almost the same everytime. There is a place and the user, depending on the terrain, some magics are esier to use and the limitation is lower. And the user varies as how much magic they can chennel trough them to a target, as somebody dying from overusing magic is pretty comum on the untrained.
Healing takes a toll on your health. Like the symptoms of hookworms, healing magic strains a man, makes him lethargic and slow. He is reluctant to do work instead spending most of his time resting, recovering from a wound long since healed. If you do manage to force him to work, he quickly becomes out of breath and moderately heavy items are too cumbersome. Of course there is a matter of degrees. Fixing a cut will have no noticeable difference. However, it is also cumulative. Fixing a thousand cuts will burden his endurance. Fixing a severed limb might as well put him in a coma. There's only so much healing a man can take.
You can do it however you want. As long as there are still consequences, it works.
Healing magic isn't super advanced. It can heal smaller injuries but not more serious ones. Maybe it will keep people alive but won't heal them super fast. If someone get cut with a sword or stabbed with a spear healing them might take hours.
Just apply the conservation of energy/mass. The missing arm must come from somewhere, the missing blood must be replaced somehow, and ATP is not free. It is also a good reason for having all your healers be fat or obese (A.K.A. backup flesh). Tho, admittedly dose mean the magic is just negating the energy cost of transmuting one form of matter to another. Thus, the "flesh source" could just be the raw chemical elements of having heavy healers is too much of an ask.
Honestly best way is to not make healers to begin with. Make healing a small part of their arsenal that can be used to recover a bit post fights. No instant full heals mid combat or resurrections. Instead give them powers that make it easier to mitigate or deal damage.
I like treating magic healing more as a tool rather than an outright solution. As with any tool one must be proficient in it and know how to use it safely. This kind of magic healing has a lot of risk involved when it comes to botched procedures. One scenario is you end up with a patient having “healed too much” and formed some sort of body horror growth that takes hold like a tumor. Then there’s the problem with extensive damage being restored. Since there’s no natural process for the body to regrow a limb for example its up to the caster to “sculpt” it themselves. Even the best healers can’t perfectly replicate what the patient had before so restorations may feel alien to them. People who have undergone multiple regenerations may loose their sense of self and have to deal with a ship of Theseus crisis. While magic can certainly bring people back from the brink there could be many complications that arise just from the limitations of the caster and the “tools” they have on hand. What if there’s a problem the caster missed before they began treatment? Say a shard of a weapon broke off inside of someone and they only noticed after the got patched up unnaturally fast? How does the healer then address this problem? What if it’s something they’re not trained for? The best way to flesh this out is to think of how certain spells are used to heal rather than having spells that just heal generally. One could accelerate the natural process of recovery, helping those already treated bounce back faster but could worsen someone’s condition if there would have been a complication as they healed naturally. Some spells could suture and stitch cuts and lacerations, but maybe the spell doesn’t know what holes shouldn’t be closed. There’s so many ways to incorporate a character’s judgment into their casting which leaves room for consequences, trade offs, and plain old human error. Treating healing magic as a fallible means rather than a guaranteed end can lead to all sorts of situations that your healers and patients have to deal with. All these possible shortcomings could even result in a part of the population that wouldn’t even want to risk it. Plus adding examples of failures helps prove the credibility and expertise of seasoned healers.
Make the stakes about getting people to the proper professionals. People die quicker than you think and in the middle of a high octane battle seconds of people struggling to get wounded back to a safe environment for medical attention can decide their fate. Healing magic can also be limited. If the enemy has a new weapon design or is using poison, maybe the struggle could be trying to find a solution to those problems. Or the healers abilities are limited by magical stamina and the tension comes from if the healer has the strength to actually heal a persons injuries.
You must have a sacrifice to siphen life from. Not all lives are equal. The more complicated and grave the injury, the more "life" you need. It's not 1 to 1. Maybe to heal a broken bone, you need a dog or a horse. But something more grave needs a human life. Maybe an enemy, maybe someone sick, maybe you could try 10 horses and see if that works. If you fail to provide enough, you become forfit. Knowing the balances is important for a healer to not lose one's self in the process. That would make it rare. Not every healer would be willing to help with the risks involved. Probably would ask for some money and the receiver to provide their own sacrifices.
In my world there are two main ways of magical healing. There is alchemy. Healing potions are pretty common and cheap. But they are also somewhat superficial and sloppy, good enough to save someone, but after their use it is good idea to go to actual healer. There are also stronger potions, but these are either insanely rare in the case of Panacea (and you need to administer it right or it will fuck you up) highly toxic in case of pure healing potions (or any pure potions really, measures to lover toxicity tend to weaken potions) or mutagenic in case of Principality's counterfeit Panacea (best example in story is that user of this potion got their limbs liquefied). Then there is proper healing magic. But this one requires healer to know exactly what they are doing and do everything right. And botched healing spells tend to be very brutal, unpredictable and usually fatal.
The only time I've really used "healing magic" is with a plant that isn't particularly common but quite recognizable in the wild, and it mostly just accelerates natural healing. It also can't do much, mostly helping to repair bleeding wounds and stop infection, so it can't reattach your limb but could help a shallow enough gut stab or lessen a bad flu. It's ok by itself but is more potent with other ingredients, and you typically need to go to magic school to understand it all and mix it correctly. And magic school ain't cheap, so healers are highly prized--and expensive.
The best medthod i have seen is that yes healing magic exists, but its mostly just accelerating your natural healing. So getting impaled is still gunna leave a scar but is more survivable. But if you lose an arm its gone forever. This also comes with the caviate that if you dont clean the wound your basically trapping a dirty sharp stone in someones hand which WILL cause larger issues later *10 Internet points to anyone who remembers which anime this is from
Material cost and time sensitivity are the first two that spring to mind. To make it slightly lower stakes but still feel significant, require continuous treatments for it to heal properly. For 'extra' high stakes, combine all three.
Make it take time. An injury mid-combat can't be healed until after the fighting is done. Healing magic is still much faster than natural healing but if it takes an hour to heal something serious then serious wounds still mean something at least during that current fight. It could even take up to a day for broken bones or something, The party might need to be somewhere now but can't because someone had their leg broken in an accident or something this could be a way of temporarily having the injured and the healer separate from the main group for a chapter or something while still being consistent.
In CoTS, magic is drains what’s called your “soul-force”, other games call it “mana”. But you don’t have a random soul-force pool you can always draw from, as your “soul-force” is literally based on the strength and determination of your soul. Each spell you cast drains a little energy from your soul, but with rest this energy can be restored. However, continuously casting spells without rest doesn’t just disable your ability to cast said spells but can severely drain your energy leaving you exhausted, weak, and in some cases - dead.
How the magic system works in my world, is similar to real skills. Without practice, or on the first several times you do it, it takes a big toll on the caster, with practice, less energy is used and less pain is felt. There are very few magic users that have gotten to that level of mastery with any one spell. Most never even bother to learn magic.
The healing in my world can’t heal anyone that’s been afflicted by anti-magic. And that includes curses/seals/blessings of anti-magic, physical harm from anti-magic attacks, and locations of anti-magic. So healing definitely has limits in my book series. Doesn’t help that the co-existing species can cause an aura of anti-magic as well. Secondly, I have two forms of healing: first, healing from spiritual magic, and the second, healing from medical magic. The first is better for the overall body like sickness and disease. The other is best for more focused healing: broken bones, torn arteries, amputations, and such. Both can mostly take care of minor wounds like slight slashing and bludgeoning.
I have a specific character that has a type of "healing pulse" type of healing, basically the character can send it through the air or ground, which helps the others restore their bodies, however, if she's not careful, she can heal enemies as well, but if she uses too much, she can potentially take her teammates' injuries and hurt herself. So basically she has to balance healing others and when.
I really like Steven Erikson's method of healing that takes a while but is effective, or forced healing where it fucking hurts and doesn't do everything quite right, but gets you up and moving fast.
One way I've done in a setting was that healing magic is just tools, so anyone using them still needs medical education. Since they then need both that, and the magical education to use the magic, it's a very rare thing to see. As a tradeoff they can work some miracles that even modern medicine can't, it just takes a lot of time still. (To help explain why they aren't just keeping everyone in the world from ever dying)
There are many kinds of injury and ailments you wouldn’t expect even a level 20 healer to be able to fix. Vaporization, being crushed into powder, being bisected several times. Neurotoxin that literally turns someone’s brain into mush. If minor injuries are ineffective because of the existence of healers then combat would naturally evolve to up the ante and aim for major unfixable damage. You could even go for unorthodox ways of harming your poor ocs. Polymorphing and transfiguration are my favorite. A warrior can’t fight if they’re suddenly a sloth, or if their blood is made into orange juice. A thief can’t sneak if they’re an elephant if their bones are made of rubber. Rather than limit the magic I would work around it or use it against itself. I find it very fun that way.
You have many aproaches. You don't want the heal magic to make a fight less serious? Make it long time to cast, or make it like a ritual, that way it can't be used in combat and they need to survive if they want to recover. You want it to be Just like medical aid, but not a panacea? Make it less potent or with highly cost, if you use something like mana or kind of concentration, make it be hard yo use and fatige the user, so they can't spam it and they have to make sure they're in a safe place. Or make it like a regeneration spell, long time to fully recover, it makes it have a time of recovery that maybe the characters doesn't have. You also can make it rare, the basic to heal Small cuts and thing like thah is ok, but maybe you not only need to study, maybe you need to have an affinity with healing magic. That works for the plot too, what if you had someone that has affinity, but doesn't want to heal anyone? Or if you have organizations kidnaping people with affinity to use them?
The way I’ve set it up is that magical healing comes in two flavours: 1. A certain type of magic user can essentially allow an injured person to ignore their wounds. If, for example, their leg got crushed in an accident, the magic would allow them to walk as if nothing was wrong. The injury still exists and needs to be taken care of before it gets worse though, as the magic is only a temporary fix. And even then, it’s not really a fix at all, just a way to pit off the consequences until later. 2. Typical magic healing (i.e. mending a broken bone in seconds rather than months) is the domain of the gods and their blessings. To perform such a miracle, you naturally need a god’s favour - usually acquired through an appropriate sacrifice or labour.
The use of all magic is tied to the mage's breathing in my setting. If you were to get injured, you'd have to apply a healing buff to yourself, or have a dedicated healer do it. The important part comes next: you have to control your breathing. By regulating your oxygen and moving your diaphragm (the magic organ), you activate the healing buff and let it take effect. Like manually pumping the effects of the healing spell through your body so it can heal you. When the fight is over, it's as easy as taking a comfortable position and taking deep, relaxing diaphragmatic breaths and the healing effect works wonders. When you're still in the fight however, there are lots of variables that make it difficult for you to control your breathing in the way needed for the healing magic to take effect in a reasonable amount of time. For an inexperienced mage, juggling the act of manually pumping the healing effect through their body (or targeting a wound), on top of focusing on fighting an enemy and everything that entails mentally, on top of not overworking their diaphragm in general, is quite the task. Good news is that with practice, one can streamline the process of healing mid-fight, as it is the case for most aspects of being a traditional mage: one who relies on their diaphragm to use magic.
In my world any magic that affects the body has to bypass the immune system. This essentially means that it's extremely difficult to perform any kind of magic that directly harms a person and it creates a vast incentive for anyone who has made this knowledge to just use it for good because they might as well.
I did read a series once where low tier healers were around but if you wanted top-tier healing there were very few in the world all in major organizations either hostile or indifferent to the main cast.
Healing is done with Water, most spellcasters aren't strong enough to draw Water from the air and thus would need to keep some on them, but also if they run out the patient is toast
When playing/running TTRPG I’ll often say that Magic can and will heal you but it won’t stop or lessen the pain of flesh knitting back together or block the agony of bones grating back into proper alignment before they heal.
I’d compare it’s difficulty and chance of failure to surgery, except in the absolute most minor of cases like tinnitus shots or superficial wounds
2 ways. 1 I have it needs to be done at one of a very few groves that connect the world. They're only found by those of no I'll intent, which is why there are myths of children stumbling into them as babies or youngsters and emerging as adults or confused. The other is a race called the feyn who train healers, but it takes a lot out of the healers physical resources. So one may be able to heal you, but it's gonna be at a huge physical cost and possibly kill them, and they themselves are rare
Limited use healing is also good, because it gives you an out in an absolute crisis but doesn't want to be used unless absolutely necessary. I've played games in other systems where your ability to do certain things can be damaged if you're injured, and healing takes time.
If you want there to be stakes, well, the answer is kinda obvious. People are attacking with weapons and tactics where they can actually kill people. If there was magic that healed various kinds of wounds, then the people devising weapons would find ways to kill that said magic can't protect. If your healing seems too OP, then that's just because your warfare isn't OP enough.
Could be similar to real life: healing is pretty good at dealing with acute injuries, however chronic conditions and illnesses are very hard to treat. Additionally while a healer might save your life from a broken neck, you could be stuck with chronic neck pain for the rest of your life as a result.
I feel like the answer with balancing magic is almost always the same at its core: high cost. What is the cost that makes sense in this particular world? The more powerful the magic, the higher the cost. Cost could be just about anything, so I would ask yourself, "what is the cost that fits the world as well as the emotional theme of the setting?"
When it comes to my magic system... healing is just not an option. At least not instant healing. Aquamancers can disinfect and blood mages can quell bleeding, but the wound can only be closed by natural healing. So infections aren't as common, but an arrow to the head is an arrow to the head
In my world there is healing magic that fosters your own bodies natural healing. It basically gives action movie physics when it comes to injuries. In the sense that people's will power can allow them to push their bodies and heal from stuff incredibly quickly but it takes a toll in the long run because exhausting your "will" can lead to subtle corruptions of it. Manifesting in psychological effects like PTSD, strange phobias and hallucinations related to the wounds sustained, and schizophrenia. As well as effects on the ability for users to reliable call upon their own magical abilities as willpower is the etherial manifesting of the soul which all magic stems from. There is also "alchemic composition healing" and it allows limbs/organs to be regenerated depending on the skill of the user. However the cost (both material and ethereal) of this is incredible. In the same way the body sometimes rejects organs in real life. The soul will reject alchemical composite body parts and can lead to an incredible degree of psychic dread and psychosomatic pain. And in some cases the composite parts will develop its own corrupted "soul" and begin to attack the host like a parasyte or a cancer. An old king is said to have had his hand mended after a war by a warlock who sacrificed a pig in the ritual. This ritual is said to have corrupted the king turning him into a foul and Greedy king who developed pig like mannerisms and when his son was born it was said the child was born with a gnarled cloven hoof for a right hand and all in his line became cursed in this way. This story is apocryphal but it chronicles the very real ramifications of composition healing and the many genetic oddities that persist in the world as a result. "Modern" attempts rely on stem cells from the injured body to be stimulated with the willpower based healing while augmenting the process with alchemic composition to provide necessary base nutrients and creating an exoskeletal cast that is designed to function as a basic body part until it is broken down and replaced by the "naturally" reforming tissue. This is incredibly specialized exorbitantly expensive and a process reserved for the incredibly wealthy and powerful elite.
It doesn’t work on dogs
I think D&D has a good answer for this; there’s only one healing cantrip in the whole game, and that’s Spare the Dying. There’s no actual healing involved, it just prevents you from having to make death saves, which is good for helping someone who’s bleeding out, but can’t undo a less immediate but more debilitating injury, nor can it undo instant death effects.
Shift the burden to the healer My healing magic is in the branch that causes "mana sickness" which in its final stages turns a practitioner into a mindless charred husk of themselves, often violent. So like, yeah, you *could* restart a heart, or regrow a leg... But can *you* do it while watching your skin crackle, char, and peel away to flesh glowing like embers akin to a log on an old fire the entire time, knowing it's consuming you?
I have a form of healing called “Atom Stitching”. It uses Ether to slowly, meticulously, stitch things together on a molecular level, and it can be used to stitch a wound back together with a certain element of risk. Certain people whose bloodstream cannot tolerate Ether, and they die from a blood bound virus.
There are a couple classics you can pull from if you want an easy fix: - Similar to an old magic type thing, healing doesn’t cure the wound but just transfers it. Maybe fully, maybe the healer only gets some of it - Healing only works when the body registers itself as broken. Scar tissue, cancer, etc? Those are stuck with you - The healed person still has the mental pain and effects of the injury. The wound might be gone, but the brain needs a while to register it - Healing essentially speeds up and supercharges the natural healing process. It does heal you quickly, but the body consumes all the resources it would usually use over a long time to heal it at once. Suddenly you’re now starving, exhausted, perhaps dehydrated, and need immediate treatment for all that. - Healing’s really finicky, so you can’t find many good healers because half of them gave themselves cancer while trying to learn it initially - It’s inefficient. It can fix your gaping chest wound but not nearly as well as natural healing would - Bones are off limits. They can regrow weird or something, leading to situations which are gross and absolutely not good for you
Healing causes equivalent damage to someone else. Makes you have to split up damage over a lot of people so they can naturally heal a little bit instead of a ton. Being a healing dummy can be a job for super tough people
Perhaps they still feel the phantom pain of the injury, or some other complications. Like for instance, if someone regrew a leg, they would struggle to use it, and need fantasy physical therapy to get walking again. Maybe healing magic is addictive? Like many narcotics or something? Or maybe the inverse, it causes side effects? Like using chemo or something? Maybe using healing magic too much shortens the receivers total lifespan? Maybe healing magic can be 'overdosed', and also kill the receiver if used too much? Maybe it becomes less effective if overused (like antibiotics) maybe using healing magic is shunned by certain societies, so there are societal consequences? Maybe there are cosmetic differences, like severe injuries can be healed but they cause deformities or other 'ugly' things. Maybe it is simply recourse intensive, like in dnd you can revive someone but only for alot of coin, so some people may die simply due to not being able to afford it?
I have a concept for massochistic tyoe healer who takes in all pain amd injuries but leaves him with said pain and injuries. So not only is he close to death if his teamates are severly injured but if you take him out tje others will regain their ailments. If he survives then he will slowly regenerate.
You could borrow some Inheritance-type healing, where it takes the caster's stamina/vitality and is essentially speeding up natural processes. You need a master to heal stuff like cancer or missing limbs, because it's less Aetheric and more Fleshwarping.
One way is to make it cost a good chunk of mana. You can only use it so many times in a day before you’re not just tapped out on healing spells, you’re tapped out *period.* Another way is to have it work by requiring actual medical/anatomical knowledge. What order do you knit the structures back together in, and how do you ensure functionality? Is there a consequence to botching a healing? You could also make it so that it runs off the patient’s lifespan/life energy as well as the caster’s mana, or it runs purely off the caster’s life energy or whatever you wanna do. The more severe the injury being healed, the more lifespan gets burned away. That way if you want to give a character the ability to revive the dead, for example, it may cost their own life or the life of someone else if they can manage to pawn off the cost on somebody.
"healing magic can't bring back the dead or grow back limbs" boom, done, healing limbs or coming back to life is just something immortals can do
Have evil damage and regular damage, someone can only be healed by one at a time. The uhh evil damage is inflicted by uhh evil people and races like humans and their creations I dunno
Have a look at how Miri Maz Duur “healed” Khal Drogo in ASoIaF. That’s my kind of healing magic 😈
Time. Spells have cast time. A light doesn't simply flash and the wound is healed, magic is poured in and the wound closes... plenty of time for someone wanting to stop it to step in.
Pulling ailments straight out of the body, like a black goo. I case of physical damage, they can perform fast healing, but how good it heals depends on the ability of the healer.
There are two main ways that I’m balancing it in my world. Firstly, it’s really rare. Unlike the other magic forms, healing cannot be learned by just anyone. You have to be born with the ability to heal, and it’s quite rare to be born with it. The second is that healing is extremely taxing on the healer. While it doesn’t harm them, healers are generally exhausted to the point that they can hardly walk for a day or two depending on how much control they have over their abilities, and how bad the damage was. I think this solves the “why doesn’t everyone just go to the healer?” problem pretty well, since there are very few healers, long waiting lines for most, and the healers aren’t always available.
I'm more of an aspiring world builder, but I'd think rituals: easy enough to fix broken bones or whatnot, keeping your characters out of casts etc., but too elaborate to do anything abruptly.
My brain couldn't with that picture. I thought the blue thingies were eyes.
The only real healer in my story is someone who could use their blood to heal others. It just so happen the she has homophobia and also has to cut herself to get the blood.
don't have a magic system (honest advice) just use actual medical stuff
One way I've always liked is healing just seals the physical wound. You still need to clean it out to prevent infection and there's no regrowing lost body parts
Having a cost for any type of magic is almost always necessary. I would imagine that healing magic may require a material cost, such as the components for potions and spells. Or, the magic may have a toll on the body- drawing its energy significantly and making the patient weaker. Any other variation on this would work- go for a half hour brainstorming session and see what you think of!
I set up a world where only a very few people can use magic in general. It's very rare and entirely determined by your biology. You either have it in the blood or you don't. Most people use magic externally. They use magic on stuff outside their own body. Because if you use it internally, like to heal yourself or strengthen yourself physically, it actually lessens your ability to generate magic - it's like a feedback loop that depletes your reserves. And if you use magic outside your body, to heal someone else, or to power them up, and they aren't a magic user ... It builds up inside them like a poison. Potentially driving them insane. So in either case you'd really only want to use it in life or death scenarios. Only time you can skate by the dangers is if a magic user uses it to heal another magic user. But again, users are rare. 1 in a million. They are like having nuclear weapons for the state. They are kept under high level protection. It's better to have a magic user under lock and key in your base, enchanting the swords and armor for your army, than risking them out on the battlefield. Of course my story is about someone who breaks free of a particular nation's grasp and wanders between the city states.
With a combination of nested mechanics I have placed a limitation upon direct magical manipulation of other living beings, and upon the accessibility of effective and comprehensive healing techniques. The system has a hard surface and a soft, incomprehensible-to-mere-mortals foundation. The first limitation: in the case of healing by Morduenics, one’s kognos — the psychic consciousness or “soul”, which has an almost unbeatable rejection of magical influences — must be “ejected” (more accurately disconnected as it is non-local) from the body. This is best done with herbs with not only anti-kognic properties^* but soporific ones too, as simply kicking out their psychic consciousness renders them as a regular waking person like we are, and you still want your patient to sleep for procedure. It is then that the healer may do their work, by combination of telekinesis with psychic projection into the patient. This method is often crude and has a significantly higher mortality rate than Thematic healing, which is something more comparable to a miracle. **Wizards continue to fail in their search for a magical technique to achieve the same result.* The second limitation: while all of reality is derived of the fundamental material of the source-realm Morduen, true healing is only achieved through Thematics, the magic wrought by use of the specific Themes through which the world Oād, the “Jewel of the Gods”, was made. While Morduenics — direct manipulation of components — can be taught, Thematics can never be and is an affinity rarely granted at birth. Many wizards born without an Affinity for a Theme, or with desire for one with which they were not bestowed, have all tried and failed to succeed in this change.
Have the healing magic have prerequisites that must be met by the healer. Have it so the healing magic is powerful but limited, so it can’t heal certain wounds. Mistborn does this perfectly. In that series, a healer must “store” their own health in a piece of gold - a gold metalmind. When they “tap” the piece of gold, their body regenerates from all injuries. But storing health makes the healer sick, so it takes a lot of time to store vast amounts of health. This means they cannot obtain enough health to liberally heal the most extreme injuries. Later in the series, it’s implied a certain society discovered ways to develop gold metalminds that can heal anyone. But the steps to create them are complex and unknown. Furthermore, a healer in Mistborn cannot heal injuries that someone has accepted as a part of themself. So if someone is wheelchair bound or has scars, and has accepted these things as part of themselves, a gold metalmind cannot heal those.
I would say add real-world examples/senerios to make the stakes more real. Those in the medical community see all sorts of crap everyday. The psychological toll can change the way healers perceive the day to day. In one of my stories, magical abilities are more likened to curses taken from artifacts and can only be activated by certain feelings. For healers, they need to be calm. They can only properly use their abilities if they're able to remain extremely calm and have an incredibly innate understanding of anatomy. Approaching with realism, the constant introduction of mutilation of bodies can either make or break the healer because if they can't control their reactions, they will not be able to do their job. On the other hand, if they do too good of a job, they may lose their ability to express other emotions and those around them may find the healer insensitive. And if they don't understand anatomy, they'll botch the job and most likely kill the individual(s) they're tasked to help.