Obeah

Obeah
Clans	Salubri
Bloodlines	Nkulu Zao
Sects	Independents Laibon
Rituals	None
Combination Disciplines	Obeah Combination Disciplines
Rarity	Rare

Obeah is the so-called "healing discipline," referred to that way by onlookers who have seen it work such wonders as knitting a grievous wound back together in an instant or clearing the clouds of madness from an elder's eyes for the first time in centuries. Primarily practiced by the now hunted nearly to extinction Salubri, it can restore flesh and spirit and protect others from violence and danger (although, as with all things in vampiric unlife, often not without a cost).

Basic Powers

Panacea

You may help heal others' wounds by licking them; just as you are able to close your own feeding punctures, you can help close other injuries as well. This does not necessarily entirely heal the injury, but it closes the wound and prevents further bleeding or infection.

Sense Vitality

You can tell at a glance how healthy someone is, recognizing someone who is doing very well distinctly from someone who is suffering. You do not necessarily know what's wrong with someone or how it came to happen to them, but many vampires are unconcerned with this, since they primarily use it to pick healthy, strong-looking victims from which to feed.

Anaesthetic Touch

With a touch, you may cause someone to pass into a comforting, dreamless sleep, getting deep rest and relief no matter how they were feeling. When this power is used on a vampire, they still cannot sleep during the evening, but they gain a blissful removal of any pain they might be feeling, which remains gone for the rest of the night.

Auguring the Sickness

You are an expert in sickness, able to read the finest of bodily signs to unerringly diagnose any illness or medical condition with perfect precision. You can tell as well if a discipline or other supernatural power was used to inflict this illness, although not who used it.

Gift of Sleep

You may quiet the nervous system of someone that you touch, calming their entire system no matter what is bothering them. Mortals and animals fall immediately into a restful sleep, while supernatural creatures remain conscious but suddenly feel all pain and discomfort dissipate for the rest of the scene. The person you use this power on must be willing to accept its effects; if they are not, nothing happens.

Intermediate Powers

Corpore Sano

You may burn some of your blood to heal a wound, either your own or someone else's that you are able to touch. Once healed, it appears as though it were never injured.

Neutral Guard

You may create an area of distance around yourself, preventing others from coming closer than in earshot. Others are not harmed or confused by your barrier; they simply cannot bring themselves to move any closer in that direction. People who are already inside your barrier are not ejected automatically, but if you move, the barrier moves with you.

Peacemaker

You can exude an aura of peace and tranquility, causing all but the most strong-willed of those around you to feel soothed and calm. This power is often used to hold diplomatic negotiations, or to calm tempers while settling a dispute.

Ending the Watch

You may instantly and painlessly euthanize a living being, provided that it genuinely wants to die. This power cannot be used on anything that no longer qualifies as strictly living, and it simply does nothing if its subject, however deeply buried, still wants to remain alive.

King David's Blessing

By playing or singing music, you soothe someone else's nervous system, temporarily relieving them of any symptoms they are experiencing. As long as you keep the music going, your listeners no longer suffer from any symptoms of their Derangements.

Mens Sana

You may cure a single other person's derangement by touching them and drawing it out while they are in the throes of an episode. Use of this power comes with the unsettling side effect of possibly infecting the vampire using it with the derangement they have just removed from someone else, so its use tends to be sparing even among the most tender-hearted of Salubri.

Shepherd's Watch

You may consecrate an area no larger than a field; by carefully bleeding along its borders, you may make it impossible for violence or ill-will to be done within it. Anyone is free to enter or leave, but those within the area simply cannot take a violent action, or even try to lash out socially or psychologically. The area remains safe for the rest of the night or until you leave it, whichever happens first.

Advanced Powers

The Ailing Spirit

You may reunite a severed spirit with its body, helping those souls that are in danger of being permanently lost to the winds of the spirit world. Whenever you encounter a spirit that cannot return to its body (for example, someone using Auspex but losing track of their body), you may blow on the stuff of their spirit, immediately causing them to snap back where they belong.

This power can occasionally be a double-edged sword; while it's a helpful way to guide the lost back home when things are going well, should the spirit's body be currently occupied by someone else (for example, a malicious ghost or an elder using Dominate), the violent shock of the two spirits colliding has been known to cause severe permanent derangements in both.

Unburden the Bestial Soul

You may actually draw the soul out of another willing participant, holding it in your hands as you remove taint from it to allow it to return to its original self. When you do, the person being affected is unconscious and unaware, absolutely unable to perceive anything happening around them; once you return their soul to them, it has either decreased or increased one dot on their morality path. This power allows vampires to help one another achieve their spiritual goals, but it cannot be used to rewrite an unwitting subject; attempts to use it on anyone who does not actively want to change their path simply fail.

Elder Powers

Pain for Pleasure

By touching someone, you may scramble their pain receptors, causing them to feel pain as an intense, wonderful pleasure instead. This power can be used for a multitude of reasons from rendering medical aid to keeping a torture victim alive, but it is most often used by vampires to simply avoid having to feel discomfort themselves.

Renewed Vigor

By touching someone and spending a moment in focused concentration, you may cause all wounds on their body to heal as if they had never been. They are restored completely to full health, while the user of this power suffers from half the damage they have literally used their own body and spirit to successfully help someone else.

Warding the Beast

You may designate an area no larger than a normal room and place a spiritual seal on it that prevents anyone within from entering Frenzy. Only those who are significantly more powerful than you and have powers that interact with their Beast are likely to be able to break free; everyone else is incapable of flying into a truly murderous vampiric rage (although nothing stops them from being the normal amount of angry).

Blissful Gaze

You no longer need touch those you wish to help with Obeah powers; you can now affect anyone nearby that you can perceive.

Repulsion

You may protect yourself by giving others an indefinable feeling that they should move away from you. Others do not necessarily know why they want to move, and are likely to rationalize it by remembering errands they need to run, deciding to do something more fun, or vaguely thinking that they are uncomfortable, but none of them are able to connect it to the vampire who first used this power. Others stay several yards away if they can help it for the rest of the scene, but you may end it early if you wish.

Safe Passage

Everyone around you instinctively thinks of you as a positive neutral party, making them want to give you free passage, provide you with supplies, and ask you for information and small favors. While it is still possible for a vampire using this power to convince others to turn on them, usually by doing something violent or insulting directly in front of them, it is unlikely that small incidents or rumors will prevent people from wanting to support them.

Purification

By touching a victim of possession, you may force their attacker out of their body, shunting them into a nearby inanimate object that temporarily contains them. The previously possessed person is now freed, while the entity using their body is likely to be very confused and angry about its new circumstances. Many vampires flee the area as soon as this power is used, not wanting to be on the receiving end of a Demon on a revenge rampage after escaping from confinement, but others are said to keep sealed jars containing all manner of monsters just waiting to be set free again.

Rayzeel's Song

You may now heal everyone you can perceive of all their wounds, founting wellness, comfort, and relief over the entire area. The vampire using this suffers from wounds just as they do when using other Obeah powers to heal, making healing very large numbers of people potentially hazardous.

Vitae Block

By touching someone, you may cause your own blood to infiltrate and "freeze" some of theirs, rendering it tainted and unable to be used. Mortals and other living things usually become immediately and seriously ill, often dying of anemia or similar symptoms, while vampires discover that much of their blood cannot be used to heal them or activate powers and must be purged to allow them to feed again. (Obviously, creatures that do not have blood in the first place are unaffected.)

Spirit Marionette

You may send your spirit to reach into the soul of another being, taking control of them as though moving them with puppet strings of spiritual energy. You control their actions and speech for the rest of the episode, though you do not gain any special awareness of how to impersonate them correctly. This power does not actually possess others; they remain in their bodies and even awake and aware of what is going on.

Unburden the Flesh-Clad Soul

You may use this power to elevate a mortal soul to realms it could not even have dreamed of; by touching them, you may remove their soul from their body and recreate it as a new astral body, releasing them to live forever in the Astral Realm as if it were their native home. This power has often been a subject of contention, with some vampires believing that it interferes with things that should be the realm only of the gods, and others claiming that if it is within their power to send a mortal to an eternal paradise, they should do it regardless of who might argue.

Resurrection

You may return a dead person to life by touching their body and speaking over it for several focused minutes. Someone thus resurrected has vague, blurry memories of their "near-death experience", but does not truly remember what happened while they were dead. This power can only be used on those who have died the same night; once the sun rises, they are truly beyond its power.

Important Things to Keep in Mind

Obeah users are very attractive to other vampires: since they can remove pain and suffering and heal wounds, they are in high demand as healers to important Princes and Elders, chief torturers among the Sabbat, or miserably imprisoned workhorses whose entire existence is dedicated to preventing a single person from ever feeling discomfort again. The rarity of Obeah is not overexaggerated, since those clans and bloodlines who use it are small in number, but it is also true that its wielders are unlikely to go around advertising it.

Because Obeah causes its user to directly touch bodies and even spirits, its use is also not without risks. Stories abound of neonates who were caught up too zealously in their powers and died draining themselves to the end to heal someone else, or who accidentally touched a truly foul soul and went mad from the attempt to cleanse it.