Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
GM call, really. Real-world esoteric traditions often have crossover but don't need to and thus you can have a large number of possibilities (or you can just default them all to Con Artist), but effective forms of esoteric medicine are probably working from shared principles so there might only be a few types.
|
Let's assume that neither the GM nor his estimable Assistant for Real-World Research and Rules has the first idea about any traditions of faux-medicine, beyond knowing that alternative medicine either has not been proven to work or has been proven
not to work.*
It seems to be in genre for any setting where martial arts include mystical skills like Pressure Points to have them also include Esoteric Medicine. Until now, I've always just included the skill without specialisations, assuming that different flavours of bovine excrement amounted to familiarities and perhaps Cultural Familiarities.
But I note that official publications which make use of Esoteric Medicine seem to assume mandatory specialisation for the skill, but I have not seen any published guidelines for how to handle such specialisations in the real world, or the rather more common campaign settings which superficially resemble the real world, but are significantly more interesting in some fashion.
I noticed that in a current campaign, three PCs had Esoteric Medicine listed as skills, all of them because they studied a martial art where they had learned 'traditional healing' from their guru/sensei/sayagi. One of them just had a little Dabbler level, one had a point in an Optional Specialisation focusing on massage** and one is an actual MD who also took a decent level of Esoteric Medicine from his Chin Na hobby.
The game is
Supers in an otherwise fairly realistic world, hewing as closely to ours as possible with the apparent change point being a fairly recent and still secret experimental drug test / training program that mysteriously resulted in emerging powers among test subjects around a decade later.
As such, no one has yet been shown to use mystical martial arts in the setting, but as some of the results of the experimental project seem decidedly non-physical and even scientifically impossible, the world might well be secret magic and have alchemy or chi powers, as the experiments clearly weren't
just science.
I'm disinclined to have Esoteric Medicine cost points, but do absolutely nothing. I think it should at least have the potential to be helpful in case the characters run into anyone who can kill with the dreaded
dim mak or something. Until then, I suppose they ought to be at least modestly useful in dealing with minor aches, bruises, sprains, muscle pains and fatigue from working out and sparring as part of the martial art tradition in which the skill was learned.
To do either, though, I apparently have to make a decision about the major mandatory specialisations which exist in the setting, not to mention how they inter-default.
So, what are the major traditions that ought to exist in our real world, especially those likely to be taught as part of martial arts?
Either (Chinese) or the apparently canonical, published specialty of Esoteric Medicine (Taoist) ought to be associated with Chin Na, I suppose.
What Esoteric Medicine specialty would be associated with Burma, specifically a family from the Kachin autonomous area where the grandfather converted to Christianity in the 1930s?
And what Esoteric Medicine specialty would be taught as part of Indonesian or Malay silat?
What about FMA (escrima/kali/arnis)?
*Because we are also aware of what they call alternative medicine that works. Medicine.
**Which actually amounts to quite a high skill level for someone whose superpower is inhumanly enhanced senses and has Per 20.