Knowing Hands

Knowing Hands

Touch has always told you things that sight cannot. The tension beneath a shoulder, the warmth of skin after exertion, an old injury hidden beneath an easy smile, or the subtle difference between discomfort and pleasurable pressure can capture your attention immediately. Fascination with touch and physical sensation led you to study bodies carefully, until knowing where and how to place your hands became both a pleasure and a practiced skill.

Work with your GM to determine where you developed that experience. Perhaps you apprenticed to a masseur, healer or bathhouse attendant, tended exhausted athletes and adventurers, studied anatomy with physicians, or became sought after for remarkably attentive hands. Whatever your history, years spent exploring how bodies respond to pressure, movement and contact taught you to recognize physical condition through touch.

Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Medicine

Tool Proficiencies: Herbalism kit

Languages: One of your choice

Equipment: An herbalism kit, a small bottle of scented massage oil, several clean linen wraps, an anatomical notebook filled with observations and diagrams, a keepsake from someone who first taught you the value of skilled touch, a set of common clothes, and a pouch containing 10 gp

Feature: Practiced Touch

Your experience has made you unusually attentive to the physical condition of others. When a willing creature allows you to examine them by touch, you can usually recognize ordinary signs of muscular fatigue, stiffness, tenderness, physical tension and similar readily detectable conditions. You can also distinguish many old injuries from recent ones when they produce obvious physical signs.

Your reputation and vocabulary allow you to speak comfortably with masseurs, bathhouse attendants, athletic trainers, mundane healers and others whose trades involve hands-on care. In settled communities, you can usually locate such practitioners and learn ordinary information about local therapeutic customs, services and techniques.

Suggested Characteristics

Those with Knowing Hands rarely regard touch as incidental. Some delight in giving pleasure or relief, others are fascinated by anatomy and physical response, and many find that their hands begin assessing tension and posture almost before they consciously realize it.

d8	Personality Trait
1	I notice tension in someone’s shoulders before I notice what they’re wearing.
2	My hands are rarely idle; I knead, trace, test and examine whatever interests me.
3	I remember people remarkably well by the way they feel beneath my hands.
4	I am constantly offering to work the stiffness out of my companions after a long journey.
5	I find discovering exactly the right amount of pressure deeply satisfying.
6	I instinctively notice posture, balance and how comfortably someone moves.
7	I treat skilled touch as a craft worthy of serious study and continual practice.
8	When someone says, “Right there,” I consider it a personal triumph.

d6	Ideal
1	Care. Skilled hands should leave someone feeling better than they did before. (Good)
2	Sensation. The body possesses its own language, and I intend to experience it fully. (Any)
3	Mastery. Precision separates an expert’s touch from an amateur’s fumbling. (Lawful)
4	Trust. Allowing another person to touch you can be an extraordinary act of confidence. (Good)
5	Discovery. Every body has something new to teach an attentive student. (Chaotic)
6	Pleasure. There is nothing frivolous about making another person feel wonderful. (Any)

d6	Bond
1	The person who taught me my craft could recognize an injury with a single touch.
2	I once helped someone recover when everyone else had given up on them.
3	I still carry the first bottle of oil given to me by my mentor.
4	Someone once trusted my hands when they trusted almost nobody else.
5	I am searching for a practitioner whose legendary technique I desperately want to learn.
6	One person knows precisely what my hands are capable of, and I have never forgotten their reaction.

d6	Flaw
1	I sometimes reach out to examine something before remembering to ask.
2	I have difficulty ignoring obvious tension or stiffness, even when nobody requested my opinion.
3	Praise for my hands goes directly to my head.
4	An unfamiliar technique can distract me from considerably more urgent matters.
5	I occasionally assume I understand someone’s body better than they do.
6	I once badly misjudged what someone wanted from my touch, and the embarrassment still follows me.