House Jorasco

Though House Jorasco’s healing touch can be found across Khorvaire, the house’s main seat of power is the city of Vedykar, in Karrnath. The enclave there is known within the house as Resthold, and is the home of the matriarch, Ulara d’Jorasco.

Aside from Vedykar, Jorasco maintains large healing enclaves in Fairhaven, Sharn, and Gatherhold in the Talenta Plains. Two notable enclaves include the The Panaceum in Sharn and the Hall of a Thousand Mirrors in Q'barra. The house also has holdings and Healers Guild facilities in Flamekeep, Korth, Newthrone, Taer Valaestas, Trolanport, Pylas Talaear, and Stormreach, in addition to small offices and clinics across Khorvaire.

Worlds Apart

Like its sibling House Ghallanda, House Jorasco was born on the Talenta Plains. Unlike the Ghallanda halflings, House Jorasco long ago shifted its focus from the ways of tribal life to the cosmopolitan traditions of central Khorvaire. Today, Jorasco halflings have little or no connection to the ways of their nomadic ancestors, and are firmly entrenched in the lifestyle of the Five Nations.

House Jorasco has long been established as the preeminent source of healing in Khorvaire, having skillfully pushed the temples of the Sovereign Host and the Silver Flame out of the healing business centuries ago. The advent of the Last War saw Jorasco healers spread across the length and breadth of the continent. Remaining steadfastly neutral allowed the house to serve all sides in that conflict, providing mundane care for soldiers and magical healing for the officers who directed the war. Jorasco healers assisted in important military operations and engaged in joint missions with House Ghallanda, offering respite and healing for the wounded—away from the front lines.

Even after the Last War’s end, Jorasco still reaps the benefits of that dark conflict. Those who were broken in battle require a lifetime’s care now that the war is over—and such care is House Jorasco’s specialty. Since the end of the war, the house has expanded the number of enclaves and healing houses it runs by nearly a third, including opening state-financed centers for veterans of the Last War in each nation.

The Price of Healing

Initially, House Jorasco was the Jorasco tribe, a collection of related family lines. Eschewing the battle-hardened traditions of the Talenta tribes, Jorasco halflings earned their keep through their skills at healing: from midwifery, to patching up wounded warriors, to helping ease the dying along their way. Their skill would be paid for by the recovering individual’s family or tribe, an exchange of gifts and services that was the expected convention of Talenta culture.

When the tribe became a house, the dynamic changed. In founding the house and establishing its headquarters in Karrnath, Jorasco soon found itself in debt to House Cannith and House Sivis—debt that called for Jorasco’s services to be repaid in coin, not kind. In time, the healers of Jorasco were operating on a set schedule of fees and asking for payment in advance.

This initial fee schedule was designed to support the healers of Jorasco in return for the time they spent caring for others. As the house became more successful, however, payment became less about survival and more about profit. The Korth Edicts codified this situation in a way, preventing the houses from owning land and forcing them to focus their fortunes in gold alone. Since that time, Jorasco’s mission of healing has always been balanced by the house’s passion for profi t, a reality that angers those most in need of Jorasco’s gifts.

Source: Dragonmarked

Like House Ghallanda, House Jorasco has its roots among the nomadic halfling tribes of the Talenta Plains. The Mark of Healing appeared on the plains not long after the Mark of Hospitality. When Karrn the Conqueror marched southeast, he—and by extension the rest of central Khorvaire—made contact with the Jorasco tribes and the Mark of Healing for the first time. After lengthy negotiations with Karrn’s governors and the barons of the other dragon marked houses, Jorasco became a full-fledged house. Unlike the Ghallandas, the Jorascos took pains to integrate themselves into their new society as quickly and completely as possible. In a great migration outward, House Jorasco members established hospitals across Khorvaire, adopting Khorvairan customs and leaving of their tribal heritage behind.

The Last War: When the Last War began, House Jorasco immediately started fielding entreaties from the armies of the Five Nations, each of which wanted medics who bore the Mark of Healing tending to their war casualties. House Jorasco quickly found itself with lucrative contracts with all of the Five Nations—contracts that were extended and renegotiated over the course of the next century. Every major campaign of the war had a contingent of House Jorasco healers on the march—and many campaigns had Jorasco healing behind the lines on both sides.

Source: Eberron Campaign Guide

When entering an enclave of House Jorasco, one quickly notices the dearth of nonhalfl ings there. Though house ranks are primarily fi lled by those born of Jorasco blood, halfl ings of any family can seek employment as hirelings and can easily rise to positions of power. Though its connections to the Talenta Plains are long severed (to the point where many plains halflings openly distrust the house), Jorasco has an open policy of accepting fosterlings from the Talenta tribes, offering them the opportunity to become a member of the house upon reaching adulthood.

Members of House Jorasco believe that they have a sacred duty to heal and give aid to people in all the nations of Khorvaire. Nearly all its members serve in that capacity, with the exception of those few house heirs who deal exclusively with Jorasco business.

As a member of House Jorasco, the duties of your birthright were impressed upon you early on—doubly so if you developed the Mark of Healing. Injury and illness are ghosts stalking the living, robbing them of health and youth. You have been given the ability to combat these scourges, and even to pull someone back from the brink of death. Jorasco trains you to use these skills in the service of others, but it also reminds you that everything has a price. As much as you might like to spread your healing prowess for free, you have a responsibility to keep your house healthy as well.

Whether you found your way into Jorasco through birth, marriage, fostering, or employment, you took part in a ceremony that marked you as an accepted member of the house. This ritual varies from enclave to enclave, but typically begins with a purification ordeal involving fasting for a full day and night. The ceremony that follows involves ritual wounding and scarifi cation, followed by healing magic and an offering to Olladra.

As part of Benefit the ceremony, you made an oath of loyalty to the house, swearing to treat none but those who return the gift of healing with payment. Only in this way can the house prosper. Breaking this oath is a serious offense, and healers have been cast out of the house for doing so. Once accepted within the house, you were given an assignment in the Healers Guild. Though you might have worked for the guild in the past, your service now as a house member is mandatory. Your degree of dedication to both the healing arts and the bottom line determines how quickly you rise within the ranks of the house.

As a Jorasco healer or heir, you are never far from the action. You might be hired to accompany a caravan, a militar y unit, or an expedition to any of the dangerous corners of Khorvaire. If assigned to an enclave, you might be asked to seek out the source of a new illness, to fi nd a cure for an exotic curse afflicting a wealthy patient, or to hunt down healers who have violated their vows.

Inevitably, adventurers get hurt. When they do, they almost as inevitably seek a healer of House Jorasco. Even in a group that includes a cleric, PCs often come up against diseases, curses, and mortal wounds beyond the ability of low-level healers to remedy. In such situations, Jorasco is always waiting with open arms—and an eye to its purse. Officially, House Jorasco never accepts services in kind, but for adventurers who cannot afford to pay, the house will sometimes “loan” the required fee and set an exchange of services as repayment.

Service to a Jorasco healer might involve retrieving a certain medicinal herb from the Shadow Marches, seeking out a beholder’s tongue for a rare alchemical cure, or helping to keep anyone from entering or leaving a quarantined village. In many cases, making good on their debt might well place the PCs in need of a healer again.

House Jorasco was originally a tribe of Talenta halflings renowned for its steadfast nature and healing gifts. With the appearance of the Mark of Healing (and the subsequent appearance of emissaries from House Cannith and House Sivis to explain its significance), the Jorasco halflings accepted that their fate was larger than the plains of their birth. When House Jorasco settled in Karrnath and the lands beyond, the halflings gave up their nomadic ways.

The legacy of the plains lives on only in the house’s leadership structure, which bears little more than a superficial resemblance to the other dragonmarked houses. Groups within the house remain structured along family lines. Ulara d’Jorasco (LG female halfling) ules the house as matriarch, but all house members hold the right to advise the leadership as they see fit. The matriarch is chosen by the house membership and directs the activities of the house until she dies or loses the respect and confidence of the house. As a result, Jorasco changes leadership more often than any other house, but such changes have yet to disrupt the house’s operations. Ulara spends almost all her time at the Jorasco enclave in Vedykar, and is greatly beloved by her house.

The Jorasco leaders wanted to use the Glidewing as their symbol, but the majority insisted on a unified theme of magical beasts. The Jorasco matriarch had seen a painting of griffons descending on a battlefield to help the wounded, and it stuck with her; this was accepted by her kin and the Twelve. As it turns out, the image was actually of griffons descending on a battlefield to feed on carrion, so it’s often been seen as an odd choice, but the house has stuck by it.

Initial reactions to members of House Jorasco depend heavily on the finances of the NPC in question. Wealthy individuals have initial friendly attitudes toward house members, while the poor have an unfriendly attitude. Indigent or impoverished NPCs might even have an initial attitude of hostile, especially in areas of plague or war, or if they have been refused help due to their lack of funds.

House Jorasco fills a specifi c niche in Eberron, providing an organization whose job is to heal others and taking that game role away from the cleric class. Jorasco is a source of healing that characters can call upon at will, though not without cost. The house can be a great source of contacts and adventure hooks simply because of its high profile in an EBERRON campaign. Because so many make use of it, House Jorasco functions as a crossroads for the people of Khorvaire, allowing individuals from disparate backgrounds to cross paths.

Jorasco NPCs use their skills for the benefit of others but they can seem distant or lacking in empathy, especially when they press for payment up front. Jorasco NPCs have great respect for their house oath, but do not automatically turn a blind eye to those who cannot afford their services. However, they are more likely to fi nd a way to help a character in need raise the money than they are to break their oath and potentially risk the wrath of the house.

http://keith-baker.com/dm-medicine/

For all its profit and all its efforts, House Jorasco found its resources stretched thin toward the end of the war. In order to maintain their presence at the front lines, the halflings withdrew many of their healers from small communities and distant border towns. Injuries and illnesses swept through these “abandoned” territories, causing even those who never saw a day of fighting to feel the horrors of the war. Resentment and distrust of House Jorasco developed in these rural regions, and it continues even to this day. The warring nations, also running low on resources, began to focus the efforts of the house more specifically, hiring it to heal officers or accompany only the most important missions, rather than to provide the more general healing Jorasco had previously supplied.

Despite this tighter focus, however, and the house’s recall of more distant members, the halflings couldn’t keep up with demand. They increased the cost of their services in order to bring in revenue and allow them to prioritize their efforts. The nations chafed under this added burden, but had little choice other than to pay it. Several nations began looking into alternative sources of healing, and had the war continued longer than it did, it’s possible that Jorasco might have found its monopoly on nonreligious healing threatened. (Specifically, several nations attempted to train clerics devoted not to a deity, but to the philosophies of nationalism and patriotism. This would, ostensibly, have granted them the power to heal as capably as clerics of other philosophies, without splitting their loyalties. As of the end of the war, none of the nations had succeeded in these efforts.)

For all the profit the war brought them, the Treaty of Thronehold was a relief to the halflings of Jorasco. Most of them had seen far more bloodshed and suffering than they had ever imagined, and the house leaders were well aware that their position and status were growing shakier by the year. With the end of the war, House Jorasco dramatically dropped the cost of its services and set about trying to bolster its position in the new order by reemphasizing the availability of its skills and abilities.

Aftermath

House Jorasco has found the aftermath of the war potentially more profitable than the war itself. Some soldiers require long-term care, many war-torn communities are ravaged by disease, and the governments of the Five Nations, even when they prefer not to deal with the dragonmarked houses, lack the resources to tackle these problems on their own. Those who resented the halflings for their actions and prices during the war often have little choice but to turn to them now.

On the other hand, not everyone has been so quick to forgive House Jorasco for its wartime decisions. Particularly in the backwater rural communities, people still feel as though the house abandoned them. In the face of the war, religious practice has experienced a resurgence, and a number of poorer people—never Jorasco’s most loyal clientele to begin with—are turning to their faith rather than to the halflings. House Jorasco has never seen a period so profitable as today, but the wisest among the halflings know that their fortune is balanced on a knife’s edge, and the slightest ill wind could send it tumbling

While the Healers Guild and House Jorasco are technically separate entities, the house’s single-minded focus on healing makes it diffi cult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

The halflings of House Jorasco are known far and wide for their understanding of life, and for their facility with the care of the injured, the mad, and the dying. What few consider is that anyone able to coax the terminal back to life must be intimately familiar with the processes of dying, and that some of those exposed to a lifetime of death and madness pay a price for the knowledge they gain.

Within Jorasco, members of a militant sect of healers twist their powers to darkness. Though these nosomatic chirurgeons are not uniformly evil, the power they wield is a dark stain on Jorasco’s reputation. Indeed, though their existence is officially denied by the house, when a chirurgeon is found, agents of Jorasco are the first ones sent to silence him.

Playing a Nosomatic Chirurgeon

Your connection with House Jorasco likely dictates how (or if) you choose to conceal your activities as a nosomatic chirurgeon. Some chirurgeons remain respected members of the house, plying their dark trade in absolute secrecy. Some are excoriates, driven to the path of the nosomatic chirurgeon by the same compulsions that drove them from the house.

Whether you are bookish or take a more hands-on approach to your work, you maintain a level of detachment that makes you appear cold and stoic, especially compared to others of your race. Chirurgeons often cultivate skills of deception, to better blend in with their fellow halflings and divert unwanted attention.

As a nosomatic chirurgeon, you seek always to increase your understanding of illness and disease. If you remain within House Jorasco, your insights might grant you great respect from your fellow healers and house superiors—as long as they never suspect the source of your knowledge.

As practitioners of a dark and dangerous art, nosomatic chirurgeons exist far outside even the criminal mainstream of Khorvaire. Each chirurgeon has a different story of what drove him or her to take up the path. Some seek purely intellectual fulfillment; others are driven to near madness in their quest to tame the powers of life and death.

Nosomatic Chirurgeons in the Game

As a class, nosomatic chirurgeons have no organization or contact with one another. The secrets that underlie the study of the chirurgeon’s art are found in hidden notebooks and scribbled in the margins of ancient texts. All nosomatic chirurgeons take up the path in their own way, and only occasionally hear of others like themselves. If chirurgeons within Jorasco meet, they typically fear exposure and take appropriate action to silence each other. Outside the house, chirurgeons sometimes compete over access to a particular specimen, strain, or potential discovery. In either event, conflict between them is brutal and short.

Because a nosomatic chirurgeon’s life is one of secrecy, they inspire the same reactions as their public personalities. Chirurgeons identified as such to a person who knows their reputation are treated indifferently at best. Those who hide within Jorasco are treated as any other house heir, but healers exposed as nosomatic chirurgeons inspire a hostile reaction among fellow house members, often to the point of violence.

Nosomatic chirurgeons are a secretive class, and are therefore easy to work into a campaign. PCs in a chirurgeon’s presence are typically given no reason to suspect anything out of the ordinary. Every dragonmarked Jorasco heir has the potential to be a nosomatic chirurgeon, whether a gifted healer craving to expand his knowledge, or an insane assassin seeking the power to slay with a touch.

For players who are drawn to dark characters, a nosomatic chirurgeon is an appealing choice. The path of the chirurgeon promises power, but for characters with a strong connection to House Jorasco, that power might come at a price.