Resurrection: how to even learn it
Jan. 27th, 2014 12:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethGURPS rules poking again.
94 Resurrection* Regular Heal./Necro. Perm. 300 2 hrs. Instant Regeneration, Summon Spirit. 9
I already poked the power requirements for Resurrection. Today I'm thinking on the prerequisites. Because if you're in an ultratech world like Vorkosigan then there's 'mostly dead' and 'dead dead' and the difference is in how much damage and how long it has been, just like with Resurrection spells, but there's no requirement for necromancy. Necromancy assumes an actual afterlife with spirits in it that need to be retrieved. Also it leads to zombies. Death Vision -> Summon Spirit -> Zombie. There's a surprising amount of the college that does not involve zombies, but really, zombies are where its at. So does your 'verse really need zombies? And for that matter, does it need spirits? Because if the answer is no you need a new prerequisite chain for Resurrection.
... the basic spell for the Necromantic college is Death Vision, which shows people a vision of their own deaths. I don't really see how that's more basic than 'Sense Spirit'. In every other college the 'sense' spell is the base. But in necromancy you can't even get from 'sense' to 'summon', and you don't even need to 'sense' to 'summon'. I reckon I'd tweak that list. I think the thaumaturgy book says that changing prerequisites is just a minor tweak and they're of limited use for game balance anyway. I'd check but there's currently half a dozen magazines and six other GURPS books on top of that one. I need to fix it so the shelf is in arms reach again, because otherwise I just take everything off the shelf and pile it up in arms reach.
ANYway, to get Summon Spirit for Resurrection purposes, you need Death Vision. You need to have spent 200 hours practicing making people see their own deaths. Which, funnily enough, is 'always chilling' and causes a mental stun, usually the result of failing a fright check. If your goal is curing death, this is an odd spell to have in your arsenal. Plus the Healing spells can be based on having Empathy, which is a GURPS advantage but still basically means understanding very well what the other guy is feeling. 200 hours practicing Death Vision while entirely understanding what it does to the person you cast it on is going to have an effect on people.
Sense Life -> Sense Spirit -> Summon Spirit makes more sense to me anyway. But Sense Life is a Communication and Empathy college spell, meaning Resurrection has requirements in 3 colleges already, Comm. Necro. and Heal.
But if there are no special 'spirits' to summon back into a human, what are you actually doing, to heal the mostly-dead? Healing the brain. The Healing college has the spells 'relieve paralysis', which involves nerves, but the 'relieve' spells are temporary. 'Restoration' is the first spell to permanently restore the use of limbs or eyes, so the first to fix nerves permanently, and it is already a prerequisite of Resurrection. Regeneration is too, and that regrows even complex structures. So regrowing the brain as a bunch of grey matter is already included in the Resurrection prerequisite chain. There are much fiddlier things to fix in a brain than a back though, leading to things like lost memories in the Vorkosiverse. 'Restore memory' is a spell, but only works on one memory at a time, and there are penalties to using it more than once a day. Using it to restore the memories of a lifetime would be a painstaking and drawn out process.
There is no higher level version suitable for mass memory retrieval in the Magic book, but there are rules for inventing spells. There's pretty good game limits reasons for leaving it be though, or else you can cast spells to remember absolutely anything that ever happened as if it just happened. Hmmm, put like that, 'Retrogression' where you re-experience a memory might be relevant. But you can't really target it.
Maybe just putting 'Restore Memory' in as a compulsory prerequisite, instead of one of several paths, would be sufficient to swap out Sense Spirit?
Having a bunch of Healers who study the necromantic spells just so they can try and learn to Resurrect would give one flavour, and a lot of character mileage. But if you don't have ghosts and undead and suchlike, making it about memory seems reasonable. But Restore Memory has a lot more prerequisites than Summon Spirit and requires IQ 11+ , so it's a harder path. That makes it tempting to keep both - there's a quick and easy way if you want to dabble with death magic, but there's a harder path for the more gifted, if you don't fancy messing with undeath.
Resurrection and its complete prerequisites, as shown under standard GURPS rules:
Death Vision -> Summon Spirit
PLUS
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Minor Healing -> Major Healing -> Restoration -> Regeneration -> Instant Regeneration -> Resurrection (9 prerequisite spells, 2 colleges)
OR
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Awaken -> Restore Memory
PLUS
Minor Healing
AND
Itch -> Spasm -> Clumsiness plus 2 more Body Control spells (I would suggest the Pain -> Resist Pain set, for magical anaesthesia) -> Paralyze Limb ->
Stop Paralysis -> Relieve Paralysis
meeting the requirement 2 of 'Restore' spells or 'Relieve Paralysis' -> Restoration -> Regeneration -> Instant Regeneration -> Resurrection (19 prerequisite spells, 2 necro, 6 body, 11 Healing)
Even if you decide not to require necromantic spells, the prerequisites in the Body college still require you discomfort or even hurt people before you can help them. Interesting.
Also a possible reason Healing magic would not be common or trusted, if the students need someone to volunteer to be hurt for 200 hours each! No, they couldn't cast the spell without 200 hours practice, and they'd only need to cast it the once to prove they'd got it, so the volunteer would merely get hurt that once. At least in theory.
Healers would still have spent hundreds of hours deciding to hurt someone and fixing their every repetitive action on that goal.
Restoration* needs Major Healing, or any 2 of Relieve Paralysis and the Restore spells
If it's 2 Restore instead of any paralysis then
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Awaken -> Restore Memory
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Minor Healing -> (other college prerequisites) -> Restore
Restore Hearing: Minor Healing, Keen Hearing or Strike Deaf
Restore Sight: Minor Healing, Keen Vision or Strike Blind
Restore Speech: Minor Healing, Great Voice or Strike Dumb
Keen (Sense) ie Keen Vision and Keen Hearing are both Mind Control college spells. Strike spells are Body Control spells. Great Voice is a Sound college spell.
They should be more careful with their naming though because as written there's also Restore, in the Making-Breaking college, or Restore Mana* in the Meta-Spells. But I'm going to pretend they were more clear in the specifications.
So it's possible to get to Resurrection with just Necromancy and Healing spells, but there's a lot of other routes that require one of Body Control, Mind Control or even the Sound college. All of which have different basic spells, and most of which require causing discomfort before getting to the spells useful to healers.
Also, 9 is the shortest prerequisite chain, not the most logical or the most interesting.
9 still represents a minimum of 1800 hours of lessons, or 900 hours of intensive lessons if there's such a thing as Healer boot camp, but I don't think that really works. They require Magery 3 eventually, but need either Empathy advantage or Magery 1 to even get started. Students in a learned Magery world would spend 5 points on Magery 0, get access to spells that are not Healing, or to Healing if they have Empathy, and then go spend another 10 points before they can proper get started. Each point is 200 hours, so 1000 hours for Magery 0, 2000 for Magery 1. 20 days per point with lessons plus self teaching at maximum, probably 4 weeks per point if there are weekends or you want to ever stop and do something other than read. 20 weeks before you can learn any spells, a further 40 before you can start learning Healing spells, and then 4 weeks per spell at barest minimum, or 40 for the shortest path to Resurrection. Two more sets of 40 weeks before you have the Magery to attempt learning Resurrection. 20 plus 3*40 plus 40 equals 180 weeks, or somewhere between three and a half to four years.
If you knew you could learn to raise the dead in four years, I think you'd stick with it.
But there's very useful spells that would add more sets of four weeks to that. It's mentioned in the rule book that Recover Energy is so useful most mages learn it. There's also Suspended Animation, which requires four healing spells, and the Mind Control spells Foolishness, Daze and Sleep, but should be handy for getting people back to healers with more specialised spells. There are time constraints on Resurrection spells, but the logic behind them isn't listed. However Summon Spirit has time Modifiers: -1 if it has been more than a week since the subject’s death, -2 if more than a month, -3 if more than a year, -4 if more than 10 years, -5 if more than 50 years, and -6 if more than 500 years. But Resurrection is at a -1 penalty for each full
day between the subject’s death and the beginning of the spell. So that isn't the Spirit part making difficulty; it's likely to be the normal biological processes. So I reckon if you cast Suspended Animation as soon as they're dead then only the Summon Spirit time modifiers should apply. Suspended Animation works until broken, by the Awaken spell usually, so it would be like the rush to cryo preservation, but with that slow ticking clock in the background. You'd get people who specialised in Suspended Animation and some transport skills, magical ambulances, who would hope to get there while there was still life but still be useful after death. However this is an extrapolation, not a thing in the GURPS book. Resurrection should be difficult, and maybe the original clock is because spirits forget how to do that whole 'living' bit after a while.
Right, someone is supposed to be visiting, like, ten minutes ago, I'll post this and get back to it another time maybe.
94 Resurrection* Regular Heal./Necro. Perm. 300 2 hrs. Instant Regeneration, Summon Spirit. 9
I already poked the power requirements for Resurrection. Today I'm thinking on the prerequisites. Because if you're in an ultratech world like Vorkosigan then there's 'mostly dead' and 'dead dead' and the difference is in how much damage and how long it has been, just like with Resurrection spells, but there's no requirement for necromancy. Necromancy assumes an actual afterlife with spirits in it that need to be retrieved. Also it leads to zombies. Death Vision -> Summon Spirit -> Zombie. There's a surprising amount of the college that does not involve zombies, but really, zombies are where its at. So does your 'verse really need zombies? And for that matter, does it need spirits? Because if the answer is no you need a new prerequisite chain for Resurrection.
... the basic spell for the Necromantic college is Death Vision, which shows people a vision of their own deaths. I don't really see how that's more basic than 'Sense Spirit'. In every other college the 'sense' spell is the base. But in necromancy you can't even get from 'sense' to 'summon', and you don't even need to 'sense' to 'summon'. I reckon I'd tweak that list. I think the thaumaturgy book says that changing prerequisites is just a minor tweak and they're of limited use for game balance anyway. I'd check but there's currently half a dozen magazines and six other GURPS books on top of that one. I need to fix it so the shelf is in arms reach again, because otherwise I just take everything off the shelf and pile it up in arms reach.
ANYway, to get Summon Spirit for Resurrection purposes, you need Death Vision. You need to have spent 200 hours practicing making people see their own deaths. Which, funnily enough, is 'always chilling' and causes a mental stun, usually the result of failing a fright check. If your goal is curing death, this is an odd spell to have in your arsenal. Plus the Healing spells can be based on having Empathy, which is a GURPS advantage but still basically means understanding very well what the other guy is feeling. 200 hours practicing Death Vision while entirely understanding what it does to the person you cast it on is going to have an effect on people.
Sense Life -> Sense Spirit -> Summon Spirit makes more sense to me anyway. But Sense Life is a Communication and Empathy college spell, meaning Resurrection has requirements in 3 colleges already, Comm. Necro. and Heal.
But if there are no special 'spirits' to summon back into a human, what are you actually doing, to heal the mostly-dead? Healing the brain. The Healing college has the spells 'relieve paralysis', which involves nerves, but the 'relieve' spells are temporary. 'Restoration' is the first spell to permanently restore the use of limbs or eyes, so the first to fix nerves permanently, and it is already a prerequisite of Resurrection. Regeneration is too, and that regrows even complex structures. So regrowing the brain as a bunch of grey matter is already included in the Resurrection prerequisite chain. There are much fiddlier things to fix in a brain than a back though, leading to things like lost memories in the Vorkosiverse. 'Restore memory' is a spell, but only works on one memory at a time, and there are penalties to using it more than once a day. Using it to restore the memories of a lifetime would be a painstaking and drawn out process.
There is no higher level version suitable for mass memory retrieval in the Magic book, but there are rules for inventing spells. There's pretty good game limits reasons for leaving it be though, or else you can cast spells to remember absolutely anything that ever happened as if it just happened. Hmmm, put like that, 'Retrogression' where you re-experience a memory might be relevant. But you can't really target it.
Maybe just putting 'Restore Memory' in as a compulsory prerequisite, instead of one of several paths, would be sufficient to swap out Sense Spirit?
Having a bunch of Healers who study the necromantic spells just so they can try and learn to Resurrect would give one flavour, and a lot of character mileage. But if you don't have ghosts and undead and suchlike, making it about memory seems reasonable. But Restore Memory has a lot more prerequisites than Summon Spirit and requires IQ 11+ , so it's a harder path. That makes it tempting to keep both - there's a quick and easy way if you want to dabble with death magic, but there's a harder path for the more gifted, if you don't fancy messing with undeath.
Resurrection and its complete prerequisites, as shown under standard GURPS rules:
Death Vision -> Summon Spirit
PLUS
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Minor Healing -> Major Healing -> Restoration -> Regeneration -> Instant Regeneration -> Resurrection (9 prerequisite spells, 2 colleges)
OR
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Awaken -> Restore Memory
PLUS
Minor Healing
AND
Itch -> Spasm -> Clumsiness plus 2 more Body Control spells (I would suggest the Pain -> Resist Pain set, for magical anaesthesia) -> Paralyze Limb ->
Stop Paralysis -> Relieve Paralysis
meeting the requirement 2 of 'Restore' spells or 'Relieve Paralysis' -> Restoration -> Regeneration -> Instant Regeneration -> Resurrection (19 prerequisite spells, 2 necro, 6 body, 11 Healing)
Even if you decide not to require necromantic spells, the prerequisites in the Body college still require you discomfort or even hurt people before you can help them. Interesting.
Also a possible reason Healing magic would not be common or trusted, if the students need someone to volunteer to be hurt for 200 hours each! No, they couldn't cast the spell without 200 hours practice, and they'd only need to cast it the once to prove they'd got it, so the volunteer would merely get hurt that once. At least in theory.
Healers would still have spent hundreds of hours deciding to hurt someone and fixing their every repetitive action on that goal.
Restoration* needs Major Healing, or any 2 of Relieve Paralysis and the Restore spells
If it's 2 Restore instead of any paralysis then
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Awaken -> Restore Memory
Lend Energy -> Lend Vitality -> Minor Healing -> (other college prerequisites) -> Restore
Restore Hearing: Minor Healing, Keen Hearing or Strike Deaf
Restore Sight: Minor Healing, Keen Vision or Strike Blind
Restore Speech: Minor Healing, Great Voice or Strike Dumb
Keen (Sense) ie Keen Vision and Keen Hearing are both Mind Control college spells. Strike spells are Body Control spells. Great Voice is a Sound college spell.
They should be more careful with their naming though because as written there's also Restore, in the Making-Breaking college, or Restore Mana* in the Meta-Spells. But I'm going to pretend they were more clear in the specifications.
So it's possible to get to Resurrection with just Necromancy and Healing spells, but there's a lot of other routes that require one of Body Control, Mind Control or even the Sound college. All of which have different basic spells, and most of which require causing discomfort before getting to the spells useful to healers.
Also, 9 is the shortest prerequisite chain, not the most logical or the most interesting.
9 still represents a minimum of 1800 hours of lessons, or 900 hours of intensive lessons if there's such a thing as Healer boot camp, but I don't think that really works. They require Magery 3 eventually, but need either Empathy advantage or Magery 1 to even get started. Students in a learned Magery world would spend 5 points on Magery 0, get access to spells that are not Healing, or to Healing if they have Empathy, and then go spend another 10 points before they can proper get started. Each point is 200 hours, so 1000 hours for Magery 0, 2000 for Magery 1. 20 days per point with lessons plus self teaching at maximum, probably 4 weeks per point if there are weekends or you want to ever stop and do something other than read. 20 weeks before you can learn any spells, a further 40 before you can start learning Healing spells, and then 4 weeks per spell at barest minimum, or 40 for the shortest path to Resurrection. Two more sets of 40 weeks before you have the Magery to attempt learning Resurrection. 20 plus 3*40 plus 40 equals 180 weeks, or somewhere between three and a half to four years.
If you knew you could learn to raise the dead in four years, I think you'd stick with it.
But there's very useful spells that would add more sets of four weeks to that. It's mentioned in the rule book that Recover Energy is so useful most mages learn it. There's also Suspended Animation, which requires four healing spells, and the Mind Control spells Foolishness, Daze and Sleep, but should be handy for getting people back to healers with more specialised spells. There are time constraints on Resurrection spells, but the logic behind them isn't listed. However Summon Spirit has time Modifiers: -1 if it has been more than a week since the subject’s death, -2 if more than a month, -3 if more than a year, -4 if more than 10 years, -5 if more than 50 years, and -6 if more than 500 years. But Resurrection is at a -1 penalty for each full
day between the subject’s death and the beginning of the spell. So that isn't the Spirit part making difficulty; it's likely to be the normal biological processes. So I reckon if you cast Suspended Animation as soon as they're dead then only the Summon Spirit time modifiers should apply. Suspended Animation works until broken, by the Awaken spell usually, so it would be like the rush to cryo preservation, but with that slow ticking clock in the background. You'd get people who specialised in Suspended Animation and some transport skills, magical ambulances, who would hope to get there while there was still life but still be useful after death. However this is an extrapolation, not a thing in the GURPS book. Resurrection should be difficult, and maybe the original clock is because spirits forget how to do that whole 'living' bit after a while.
Right, someone is supposed to be visiting, like, ten minutes ago, I'll post this and get back to it another time maybe.