81 lines
No EOL
5.8 KiB
Markdown
81 lines
No EOL
5.8 KiB
Markdown
### **Type:**
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Healing Guild & Medical Order (Neutral-to-Altruistic with pragmatic undertones)
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---
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### **Core Focus:**
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The **Sable Coven** dedicate themselves to the healing arts: treating the wounded, alleviating disease, advancing medicine, and developing new alchemical and arcane remedies. Unlike formal hospitals tied to cities or temples, the Coven go where others will not — battlefields, plague zones, slums, and collapsing ruins.
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They are driven by the principle that **life has no borders**: race, politics, and wealth should never dictate who receives healing. This humanitarian creed often places them at odds with regimes and factions who view access to medicine as a privilege or political tool.
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The Sable Coven are pragmatic healers: they are known for harsh bedside manner, grim efficiency, and practical methods. They wear the name “Coven” not out of mysticism but because outsiders found their midnight surgeries, strange poultices, and unnatural success unsettling.
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---
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### **Regions & Cities of Influence:**
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- **[[Jessergate]] – [[Serpent's Way|Serpent’s Way]]:** Field clinics and healing halls to serve slum dwellers, dockworkers, and the destitute.
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- **[[Dragabri]] – [[Ironswill]]:** Triage halls supporting forge-workers and veterans constantly injured by industrial labor and mercenary conflict.
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- **The [[Hildywilde|Hildywildes]] – [[Pabrycg]]:** Herbalists and druids blend swamp medicine with Coven practice, creating potent alchemical cures.
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- **[[Stoffen]] – [[Ledon]]:** Medicinal farms and apothecaries provide core supply lines for Coven operations.
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- **Battlefields Across Baltun’ia:** Mobile triage wagons and field surgeons are deployed in conflicts, often neutral parties allowed safe passage.
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---
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### **Structure & Membership:**
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- **The Circle of Salves:** Senior apothecaries, plague-breakers, and master surgeons who direct research and resource distribution.
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- **Bloodhands:** Field medics and healers, equally trained in stitching wounds, magic, and battlefield triage.
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- **Greenbrews:** Herbalists and potion-makers, specializing in remedies sourced from rare plants and leyline-influenced flora.
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- **Ashroses:** A compassionate but feared group of plague-workers and epidemic responders, known for entering infected districts when no one else dares.
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- **Lay-Friends:** Common volunteers who help maintain wards, carry water, prepare bandages, or dig graves when healing fails.
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Membership is diverse: [[Humans|humans]], [[Gnomes|gnomes]], [[Halflings|halflings]], [[Elves|elves]], [[Feykin|feykin]], and even [[Automatons|automatons]] who specialize as **caretaker healers**.
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---
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### **Philosophy and Goals:**
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- **Compassion Above Politics:** All wounded deserve care, no matter allegiances.
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- **Knowledge Shared, Not Hoarded:** They publish basic medical texts and train commoners in hygiene and survival.
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- **Healing Without Judgement:** They treat criminals, nobles, rebels, automatons, and soldiers with the same efficiency.
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- **Preservation First, Reform Through Healing:** They believe strengthening communities through health will naturally reform corrupt systems.
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---
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### **Political, Social, and Economic Influence:**
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- **Political:** Deny affiliation with any party, but their neutrality is politicized — [[Belter Overview|Belters]] petition them to bolster workers, [[Vexen Overview|Vexens]] resent them healing “unprofitable bodies.”
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- **Social:** Beloved by commoners, distrusted by elites who see them as potential agitators for the downtrodden.
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- **Economic:** Supported by donations, “healing tithes” offered voluntarily by grateful communities, and rare coin from reliable mercenary contracts. They are not rich, but universally valued.
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---
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### **Culture and Customs:**
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- **The Oath of Ash and Rose:** Members swear to heal all who come, even enemies. "Ash" signifies death they cannot stop, "Rose" the life they nourish.
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- **Night-Vigils:** Healers light lanterns for three nights after mass deaths, guiding spirits and comforting survivors.
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- **Scar Binding:** Senior healers tattoo or scar themselves with emblems of healed wounds — each scar or mark represents a life saved.
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- **Gray Cloaks:** Members are identified by cloaks dyed gray-black, symbolic of their neutrality between light (life) and shadow (death).
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---
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### **Potential Plot Hooks & Conflicts:**
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- The party must escort Sable Coven healers into a plague-ridden city under siege and help them establish a makeshift ward.
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- A Sable Coven caravan is attacked while transporting rare medicinal herbs — if lost, an entire city may fall to pestilence.
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- PCs uncover that one branch of the Coven is secretly supplying **healing to automatons freed by the [[Shadowforged]]**, creating political tension in Jessergate.
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- Alchemical advances by the Coven attract the **[[Serpents Coil Overview|Serpent’s Coil]]**, who attempt to steal and market counterfeit potions.
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- A noble hires PCs to discredit the Coven for “healing criminals,” but they may discover the group is saving innocents ignored by the elite.
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---
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### **Notable NPCs:**
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- **Matron Elira “Ashrose” (Human, Elder Healer):** Stern and stoic; runs the Circle of Salves. Known for battlefield triage and mercy executions when healing is impossible.
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- **Brother Garrik Bloodhand ([[Dwarves|Dwarf]], Surgeon):** Gruff but skilled battlefield medic who has saved hundreds; jokes grimly to mask the horrors he’s seen.
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- **Silwen Mossdaughter (Gnome Greenbrew):** Herbalist obsessed with hybridizing fey and mundane plants to push medicine further. Warm and eccentric.
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- **Aurox (Automaton Caretaker-Class):** Once made to heal Ancients, now leads orphan relief in [[Voxiu]], patching flesh and plating alike.
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- **Sister Veyna Mirebloom (Elf, Ashrose):** Works in plague zones of the Hindywildes. Compassionate to a fault, often risking her own health to save others. |