Day 02: Heindrik Todesfelde, Doctor of Physick (for Black Powder & Brimstone)

 The second character is a sawbones turned monster hunter. 

Heindrik Todesfelde, Doctor of Physick

Class: Witch (herbalist) 

Strength: -3

Agility: +1

Presence: +1

Toughness: 0

HEALTH: 6

Guilder: 10

You may brew d6 of the potions or poisons on page 86–87 as long as you can scrounge up some ingredients. Potions made in the wild lose vitality after 24 hours. 

You start with: 

A Brewers Kit consisting of; 

Brass pot 

Weights and scales

 Flint and steel 

Six glass bottles with stops

 One pint of pure ethanol

Healers Mask 

This mask has glass lenses and a long beak stuffed with healing herbs. This will protect you from miasma as well as foul smells and airborne maladies. It also makes people uncomfortable.

Spells (reskinned as medical procedures). 

Ministrations (Healing Hand)

Heal up to d4 creatures 6 hit points

Forensics (Talk to the Dead)

Ask an intact corpse 3 questions. 

You knew a girl in medical college. Julia was her name and you suppose that she was a woman ‘of easy virtue’ or whatever the accepted euphemism is. The point is you had a good time with her. You were young, sure, but it was something genuine. You were gutted to see her on the slab, dead from exposure. To see her cut open by dr. Ronander as he discoursed on the degradation of lung tissue was just adding insult to injury. 

You lingered when the others had left the theater. Julia’s face was serenity itself. A stark contrast to the brutal mess that was her body. Then she opened her eyes and grabbed your hand.

“Beware the stag and the tower,” she said. Her voice was gentle but distant. 

You still have a patch of dead skin on your hand where her thumb touched it. 

You left Tvaynburg Imperial College of Medicine, eager to pit your razor wits against the world’s ailments. There were problems aplenty, and while you dealt with a few cases of vampirism (false) and Adelmann’s Lycanthropy, most problems were simple and mind-numbing.   

Your recourse is simple: laughing gas. It was something you learned in the City where you worked as a resident physician to Freiherr Oluff Gelspaad. It was stable work, but as you were comforting a retiring hypochondriac you felt your mental faculties atrophy. You began dreaming of Julia, horribly altered by the grave. Julia, the stag and the tower. 

You went to laughing parties in ale houses and lounges, learning to appreciate nitrous oxide as Providence’s way of teaching us levity and dispersing the dark clouds of melancholy and ennui.

The addiction cost you your soft and easy position. You took to the road and became, in essence, the Empire’s most qualified barber-surgeon. 

It is a hard life, but for every runny nose or infected tooth, there’s something more interesting. Poisonous mold masquerading as demonic possession. A circle of pernicious anemiacs self-medicating with human blood. The madman who talked to his shadow. A trifle until the shadow answered, in your presence. Science still has far to go!