Note¹⁾

Sometimes misunderstood as necromancy; sarcurgy, or 'flesh-work' is the magic of healing, reshaping, and handling flesh. While granting the ability to restore severed body parts and cure diseases and poisons, sarcurgy cannot restore a soul to a creature. Sarcurgists often hide the more unsavory parts of their work from common folk in case their work is misunderstood. A talented Sarcurgist might swiftly gain fame as a healer.

Physical Contact
To perform any of these spells, you must be in constant contact with the tissue upon which you are performing a spell.

Concentration
To maintain a spell, you must maintain concentration on it. Each spell requires its own stream of concentration.

Tools
Sarcurgy requires some tools: Knives, needles, sutures, syringes and the like. Not having a medic's kit on hand may cause these abilities to fail.

Medical Training²⁾
To become a sarcurgist, one must have a heightened understanding of the body and its works. The character's backstory must include at least two years intensive training in a field that grants one such knowledge.

Flesh-knitting³⁾⁴⁾
You can magically join and shape animal tissue as if it were clay. You can also transmute tissue from one kind to another. When joining tissue, you can join any type of animal tissue to another: skin-to-skin, skin-to-muscle, muscle-to bone, etc. Joining tissue occurs at the rate of 1 square centimeter per minute. When shaping tissue, you can grow or shrink the amount of tissue by 1 cubic centimeter per minute. When transmuting tissue, you can slowly convert one type of animal tissue into another: Skin-to-shell, bone-to-organ, fingernail-to-hair, etc., and this occurs at a rate of 1 cubic centimeter per minute⁵⁾. You can even transmute tissue that comes from one individual into tissue from another individual. However, flesh-knitting brain tissue is troublesome: While you can flesh-knit brain tissue easily, you cannot replicate the neural structure of an individual's brain. Brain tissue produced through flesh-knitting produces a “blank-canvas” type of brain tissue, in which the memories, skills, and connections within that tissue must be re-learned by the individual⁶⁾. You may perform any combination of the three shapings, joining, shaping, transmuting, at once. You must touch the area for the entire duration of the operation, and any interruption in physical contact ends the spell with the tissue returning to its original state prior to your attempt to join. Flesh-knitting has many uses, including but not limited to: Adding or restoring functional limbs, organs, or natural armor (by shifting flesh from another area of the creature's body, or adding flesh from a different creature); shaping flesh can extract parasites; and transmuting flesh can turn diseased tissue into healthy tissue. The rate at which flesh-knitting operates doubles with each additional rank of Sarcurgy (Rank 1: 1, Rank 2: 2, Rank 3: 4, Rank 4: 8, Rank 5: 16).

Each time you gain ranks in Sarcurgy, you may also gain your choice of one of the following perks:

Deathless
Your body stops aging and you cannot die due to age-related effects.

Guinea Pig
As long as you have a designated living animal subject for this purpose, you may inoculate it with, and extract from it, infectious diseases, toxins, and medicines. While this subject is in your possession, the inoculations within it will not deteriorate or escape, nor will it die from illness (though it may still die from injury and old age). Inoculation or extraction requires an Action and your sarcurgy tools to perform.

Inured to Disease
Your body is immune to poisons, toxins, and infectious diseases. If you choose, you may exclude any poison, toxin or disease from this immunity, but this choice cannot be undone.

Medical Expert
Your anatomical, medical, microbiological, and zoological knowledge is as good as the best doctors and zoologists in the world.

Ritual: Read the Bones
After completing a ritual that takes 10 minutes and a set of a deceased creature's remains, you can examine the remains of the creature to learn its perspective on its experience prior to its death, and its expectations regarding the future. While examining the remains, you may pose questions to the remains that the GM will answer. Simpler creatures may only reveal simpler concerns; where they might find food or shelter, or what the weather might be. The range of experience and expectation accessible to your questioning is dependent on your ranks in sarcurgy. At rank 1 the remains will answer experiences 1 day prior to the creature's death, and its expectations up to 1 day beyond its death. At rank 2, a week's worth. Rank 3: a month. Rank 4: a year. Rank 5: The remains can answer any questions about the creature's experiences and expectations. This spell requires concentration only during the 10-minute ritual. If the ritual is completed, no further concentration is required, and questions can be posed for as long as the sarcurgist has access to the remains.

Ritual: Reanimate
Using a ritual that takes eight hours to complete, you bestow unliving animation on a corpse. The corpse's head must be reasonably intact. Once animated, becomes a creature with the 'undead' type, cannot be injured by poison or disease, and follows your commands loyally. The creature is animated for a duration that depends on your ranks in sarcurgy. When using this power on an already animated creature, the ritual only takes 1 hour to complete, and you extend the creature's animated duration up to the maximum determined by your ranks. If you use this power on a creature that had been animated by a different sarcurgist, and your ranks in sarcurgy exceed theirs, you wrest control of the animated creature from the original sarcurgist (as well as restoring its duration as previously described). This spell requires concentration only during the ritual, if the ritual is successful, no further concentration is required. A creature reanimated by a rank 1 sarcurgist persists 1 day; rank 2, 1 week; rank 3, 1 month; rank 4, 1 year; rank 5, indefinitely. The creature can be killed (de-animated) by the destruction or removal of its head.

Each time you gain ranks in Sarcurgy, you may also gain your choice of one of the following perks:

Your body stops aging and you cannot die due to age-related effects.

As long as you have a designated living animal subject for this purpose, you may inoculate it with, and extract from it, infectious diseases, toxins, and medicines. While this subject is in your possession, the inoculations within it will not deteriorate or escape, nor will it die from illness (though it may still die from injury and old age). Inoculation or extraction requires an Action and your sarcurgy tools to perform.

Your body is immune to poisons, toxins, and infectious diseases. If you choose, you may exclude any poison, toxin or disease from this immunity, but this choice cannot be undone.

Your anatomical, medical, microbiological, and zoological knowledge is as good as the best doctors and zoologists in the world.

After completing a ritual that takes 10 minutes and a set of a deceased creature's remains, you can examine the remains of the creature to learn its perspective on its experience prior to its death, and its expectations regarding the future. While examining the remains, you may pose questions to the remains that the GM will answer. Simpler creatures may only reveal simpler concerns; where they might find food or shelter, or what the weather might be. The range of experience and expectation accessible to your questioning is dependent on your ranks in sarcurgy. At rank 1 the remains will answer experiences 1 day prior to the creature's death, and its expectations up to 1 day beyond its death. At rank 2, a week's worth. Rank 3: a month. Rank 4: a year. Rank 5: The remains can answer any questions about the creature's experiences and expectations. This spell requires concentration only during the 10-minute ritual. If the ritual is completed, no further concentration is required, and questions can be posed for as long as the sarcurgist has access to the remains.

Using a ritual that takes eight hours to complete, you bestow unliving animation on a corpse. The corpse's head must be reasonably intact. Once animated, becomes a creature with the 'undead' type, cannot be injured by poison or disease, and follows your commands loyally. The creature is animated for a duration that depends on your ranks in sarcurgy. When using this power on an already animated creature, the ritual only takes 1 hour to complete, and you extend the creature's animated duration up to the maximum determined by your ranks. If you use this power on a creature that had been animated by a different sarcurgist, and your ranks in sarcurgy exceed theirs, you wrest control of the animated creature from the original sarcurgist (as well as restoring its duration as previously described). This spell requires concentration only during the ritual, if the ritual is successful, no further concentration is required. A creature reanimated by a rank 1 sarcurgist persists 1 day; rank 2, 1 week; rank 3, 1 month; rank 4, 1 year; rank 5, indefinitely. The creature can be killed (de-animated) by the destruction or removal of its head.

Designer notes

Join, shape and transmute should remain bundled together in the same ability to allow ease-of-use. I want sarcurgists to simply be able to heal and reattach limbs with as little rules-fuss as possible.

Constant contact
Mainly, the sarcurgist should be treated like a surgeon - his spells fail if: He is not in contact with the flesh he is working on, OR if he is not incontact with his tools which are also in contact with the flesh he is working on.

Useful rules of thumb

• 1 kilogram of flesh is approximately equivalent to 1,000 cubic centimeters of volume.
• The average volume of a human is 62,000 cubic centimeters (or approximately 1,033 hours of rank 1 Flesh-knitting. 517 hours @ rank 2, 260 hours @ rank 3, 130 hours at rank 4, 65 hours @ rank 5.)
• There are roughly 450 cubic centimeters per pound of human flesh.