Games Like Field Surgeon

Kessendorf is dying, one patient at a time.

Plague smoulders in the Tanners' Rows, the Ostrau company is fighting at the city's gates, and the Hospice of Saint Ildra takes in everyone the city throws away. You are its newly sworn apothecary-surgeon, and the table is never empty.

Surgery the way it was done as a Sawdoctor.

Eight period instruments: lancet, tongs, leech-pipe, gut thread, Saint's salve, tincture, cautery brand and scrying lens, each with its own motion. Ease an arrow through the muscle that grips it, rock a head loose from the bone, close a sabre cut muscle first and skin second, soften boiling pitch before you lift it, wind a tourniquet before you look for the bleeding vessel, and seal a sucking chest wound as the patient breathes out. Every action is graded; clean chains raise your rank.

Every patient comes from a different culture with it's own

Six races to learn. Humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, hornfolk and giants all come through the Hospice doors, and no two cut, bleed or heal alike. A dwarf's hide is thick and his blood dark and slow; the lancet must work patiently. An elf's skin is so thin the lamp glows through it: easy to open, quick to bleed, and unforgiving of a slip. An orc's leather hide turns a hasty blade, his near-black blood clots fast, and tinctures barely touch him. A giant bleeds out slowly and heals slower still. Know your patient before you cut.

A prayer that stops the clock or could send you to the pyre.

Draw the five-pointed sign to invoke the Litany of Stillness and slow time for a few precious seconds, once per operation. Careful, if The Inquisitor of the Ash Tribunal sees, he would condemn you for witchcraft.

Plagues that fight back.

A heretic coven, the Hollow Choir, sings to the Mother of Plagues, and each of its hymns takes root in a host as a disease pushed past anything nature allows: the Vigil Plague, the Answering Pox, the Red Roll, Saint Ildra's Fire and four more. Each one flares in time with its hymn and its bell. Learn the rhythm, then cut it out. Every host you save, or lose, leaves its mark on the city.

A grim story told in candle smoke and ink.

Story chapters between operations, set to an orchestral and medieval score: guild politics, witch hunts, field hospitals, black humour, and the question of what a healer owes a city that burns its sick.

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