The Golarion Gazette

For centuries, walk into any church or temple in Golarion and you were almost certain to see an adventuring party wandering around looking for a cleric to join them. Even the temples themselves weren’t always happy with the attention, as religious services constantly got interrupted by bands of armed adventurers running around demanding a healer. While some temples of Abadar took advantage of the situation by offering sanctioned “rent-a-cleric” services, others just wanted the adventurers out of their sight. “These adventurers kept interrupting our live human sacrifices because they were asking for someone to channel energy to heal them,” said Bargarak Balgaran, a priest of the Temple of Rovagug. “They don’t even understand that Rovagug is an evil deity of destruction, so we can’t help with healing in the first place.” Despite all this, clerics did end up being one of the most widely sought-after classes for adventuring parties, leading to accusations, not always unfair, of them abusing the situation to get the better part of loot splits.

But the past few decades have seen something of a renaissance in non-magical methods of healing. While nonmagical healing techniques were once widely regarded as strictly inferior to magic, as it once took several days to heal even a simple sword stabbing, healers have now discovered how to bring people back from near-death to tip-top shape in less than an hour without the use of magic. One of the key figures in the healing renaissance was Rahadoumi scholar Kassi Aziril, who developed so-called “battle medicine” techniques that can heal someone in just a few seconds, making it useful even in the heat of a battle. These new methods, among others, make it possible for adventuring parties to tend their wounds with hardly any expenditure of resources, enabling them to happily slaughter monsters until they tire of exhaustion. The increase in nonmagical healing has also come as welcome news to superstition barbarians, who have historically faced challenges in obtaining access to healing that doesn’t conflict with their beliefs.

Pharasma, one of Golarion’s major healing deities and the sole provider of resurrections, has released a statement condemning non-magical healing as “unnatural”, although this has been widely dismissed as simply a self-serving attempt by a deity to preserve her dominant market position. Nevertheless, another source of opposition has come from ecologists and environmentalists, who worry that the new techniques, by enabling adventurers to kill more monsters per day than ever before, could lead to monsters being hunted to extinction. “In order to preserve the ecosystem for future adventurers,” said leshy ecologist Spirit of Starlight, “we need strict regulations to limit how many monsters each group of adventurers is allowed to kill per day.”