Gotta love me a dialogue episode! Is it the same for you? If you prefer more action-packed episodes, do not worry, action is coming. We’re finally getting a glimpse of each character’s past. Since I nuked their homeland, areas and people from each’s backstory cannot really play an active part in the campaign, but memories and lived experiences can. People learn from mistakes and trauma lives on in the mind.

Mechanics

Medicine checks

On different forums and other podcasts, I’ve often heard that the medicine check is the most useless skill of all, and it is often shunned by players. I had never realized it was so and it came as a big surprise. One of the reasons I believe people think the medicine skill is useless is because they do not see how it can be used in-game. The Player’s Handbook is not very inspiring, telling us that a successful check can stabilize a dying creature and diagnose an illness. Xanathar’s Guide to Everything’s added a couple of ideas for checks but the skill remained a bit bland, in my opinion, so I get the unpopularity.

I think for the skill to make sense, we need to broaden the way we look at it. We tend to compare medicine proficiency with modern practices and healing magic, but that isn’t how skill checks work. When a player is making an Arcana check, they aren’t attempting to replicate a magical ability without expending a spell slot. Rather, they are, for example, trying to recall what they know about a certain magical phenomenon. The same expectations should apply for a skill like medicine. If players think they can bypass resource expenditure with a skill like medicine, they have the wrong idea. What the skill can do, however, is make Difficulty Challenges (DCs) easier, help find remedies, and answer questions. Proficiency in a skill gives you a completely different way to approach a situation; one that does not rely on spell slots, concentration, components, saving throws, etc. It can even be used in combat.

One more note before I give you concrete examples on how I like to use the medicine skill in-game. We forget how recent “modern medicine” is. What we consider modern medicine came about when doctors moved from miasma theory to Germ Theory and Bacteriology. That was in the 19th century. Yup, only around 1830 did we start to understand how disease spreads and how we become sick. The inside of the human anatomy was pretty much unknown until the Renaissance was well underway (16th century). Even with great spells like Heal or Mass Heal that cure diseases or Detect Poison and Disease that can identify a disease, there is still the problem of knowledge. Neither of those spells fills the gap on how the problem came to be, how it transmits, etc. By making characters that are ahead of the curve or recipients of ancient knowledge, the Medicine skill has its rightful place in Dungeons & Dragons.

My favorite use of the skill is to help an investigation. It’s not rare in a scenario to investigate a crime scene or to find corpses. The investigation skill can help to find clues but only a person who knows humanoid bodies and have studied anatomy could analyze how the person died. The older the corpse the harder it is to read wounds, blood splatters, nicks or saw marks on bones and other traces on the remains. To be able to reconstruct the timetable of how a person died is a valuable skill that can be told by a successful medicine check.

We sometimes tend to forget that the field of medicine also covers the mind. Paired with some well-placed Insight checks, a character could approach a disturbed individual with a psychotherapeutic angle. A person panicking, or one that is disconnected from reality, for example, could be appeased by medicine checks.

More specifically in Uncreated, since we are playing in a grittier environment, sometimes conditions and ailments last for a while. In low magic setting like ours, the medicine skill becomes incredibly valuable as items such as potions of healing are used in last resorts situations only.

During the episode, we see Aesafina and Lucian’s concern for Ciofra. They can see he’s not well, but they lack the knowledge to help reduce the fever. Lucian casts Cure Wounds, which raises Ciofra’s vitality and closes his wounds, which in turn will help him fight off the fever, but it does not affect the fever directly. Later in the campaign, we’ll see other uses of the medicine skill as Ciofra is proficient in it.

Setting

The printing press and books in Lamordia

I’ve always wondered how to explain books in my campaigns. On one hand, they are wonderful vehicles to transmit knowledge to players and yet they feel a bit incongruous in a medieval setting. Books were quite rare and fragile items. Before the invention of the printing press in 1439, they had to be copied by hand. Of course, as objects of great value, they were passed down generations, and through time they could be accumulated.

In a fantasy world, it’s also very possible either the invention of the press happened much earlier, or they are magically copied, which would either make them more accessible and /or more expensive depending on the method used to duplicate them. In Uncreated I did not have to make the choice. Lamordia is a low fantasy / low magic world, so books are not produced magically but neither is the period inspired by the Dark Ages. As I’ve mentioned in other GM logs, the era is inspired by the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth so around 1500-1550. The printing press was invented about 100 years ago and books are now accessible to anyone.

What is a bit different are the illustrations that can be found in books. Through alchemy, faithful reproductions of much bigger artwork can be made into metal engravings and printed in books. They are limited to greyscale but all sorts of books on art, nature or medicine exist in Lamordia, fully illustrated.

Seasons in Barovia

Players of the module Curse of Strahd might knit their brows whenever Barovia is mentioned in Uncreated. First, there was the reversed sun and now this talk of seasons. Or lack of. Indeed, I made a couple of GM decisions about Barovia when I ran Curse of Strahd to fit my own narrative, and since Uncreated is the continuation of the same narrative, I am keeping them.

When I read Strahd’s story, I saw a mind that was stuck in time. A man cursed to forever repeat the same mistakes and a never-ending loop of pain and misery. Strahd IS Barovia. He is the land, quite literally, and as such, I made it corrupted and unchanging. It is perpetually in this state of decay resembling Fall. It wishes for youth and the green of old, but that time has passed. In Lamordia, the problem lies elsewhere so the cycle of seasons has been preserved.

Vodyanoy Folk tale

The Vodyanoy the characters read about in the folk book they have found is a creature from Slavic legends. The summary I make to the players is quite close to how it is depicted in the sources I was able to find. Like many other mythical creatures, what it does, how it lives, and its powers vary from tale to tale but most agree the Vodyanoy was extremely dangerous and generally evil. Here is a short folktale about the vodyanoy. This one is transcribed from Atlas Obscura’s article on the vodyanoy. You can also read many other folktales that belong to the public domain that were collected by Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afanas’ev over at Project Gutenberg. Enjoy!

Download the handout

Notice me senpaice!

One last thing before I sign off. I still find the Notice me senpaice joke hilarious. I don’t know if you do as well but I made a thing. And I love the thing. Here it is. If you love it too you can even buy the thing I made to support us. Oh yeah, did you know we have merch? Yeah! We totally do! You’d be a pal if you supported us that way too, but what we care about truly is that you listen to our pod. That’s our main focus and always will be!

Hit the Books - GM Log