Midwives care for pregnant people and infants and handle general reproductive health for all genders. Their days are unpredictable, as one minute they could be helping a patient with menstrual pain and the next running to a birth. The nature of their work makes them flexible, with many skills overlapping with other specialties. Each child a midwife helps birth is considered one of their own children, and they continue to be part of their lives. All people on their birthdays give a small gift to their Midwife and mourn them as if they were their own parents after they die. Midwives also perform gender affirming transformations, which are most commonly performed soon after the Lightkindler Ceremony as children come of age.
Specialty Boon #
Once per game session, players of this specialty can freely take advantage of the Midwifes’ specialty boon:
The Future’s Nurturer #
The future doesn’t just arrive on its own. People like you must nurture it into being, protecting the young and those that rear them in equal measure.
Describe an old, instructive fable which you tell, perhaps to soothe or distract your patient.
Immediately increase the patient’s life energy by 2 and anyone else present by 1.
Rafa Bag Supplies #
- Blankets & towels
- Cloth diapers
- Wooden stethoscope
- Small scissors and scalpel
- 1 hand pie of choice
- 5 Silver Dollars
Herbal Remedies #
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Tea for Diabetes
Recipe
Make a tea of goat’s rue and cinnamon to decrease blood sugar levels.
Instructions
Drink before meals.
Increases life energy by +1, +3 if the user has diabetes.
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Tea for Pain
Recipe
Make a tea of white willow bark and ginger to treat pain including headaches, back pain, and menstrual cramps.
Instructions
Brew tea.
Mind is freed from minor to moderate pains only.
Midwife Skills #
Recommended Starter Skills #
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Breathe
Breath is life. All Rafa learn different types of controlled breathing to activate different conscious states, and in turn they become conscious of how emotions and breath dance with each other.
This skill helps a patient breathe. Tell the Rafa what is carried on the wind, like breath, that rises up around them?
Side Effects
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Ease Pain
A wise Rafa once said that pain leaves marks on the body and the mind. A deeply unserious Rafa once said that pain is weakness leaving the body, and they were made to retake their ethics courses twice.
This skill lowers a patient’s pain. Tell the Rafa how the pain makes itself known as it departs the patient.
Side Effects
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Energy Boost
While boosting the energy of a patient, some Rafa emit a gentle light, while others bring a crisp sea breeze with them. Rafa Yohanan, blessed be her memory, shortly after Freka fell to the ocean, was rumored to cause her patients to twinkle in the darkness of the night.
This skill revives and boosts a patient’s energy. Tell the Rafa about their patient’s energy and how it hums.
Side Effects
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Heal Wound
Stimulating flesh to cover incisions is easier, all things considered, but some Rafa specialize in doing so without scarring. Muscles are literally and figuratively harder to heal, but repairing organs are their own specialization.
This skill covers over any flesh wound without leaving any scarring. Tell the Rafa what they feel at the same spot on their own body.
Side Effects
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Staunch Bleeding
Scholar Asher, blessed be his memory, wrote that, “as the blood of life flows within us, so does the Light flow through all the spaces in this world. Even the most full, and especially the most empty.”
This skill stops a patent’s bleeding. Tell the Rafa about the qualities of their patient’s light.
Side Effects
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Understand Babies
If babies have language, is it not unadulterated emotion? Overwhelming delight, pure rage, and transparent desire. Perhaps Rafas need not meddle in energy bending to decipher, but it provides a comfortable fallback.
This skill allows one to understand, but not speak the language of babies. Tell the Rafa of the baby’s strongest sensation, often overwhelming the Rafa for a brief moment.
Side Effects
Advanced Skills #
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Block Pain
“Pain is information. Of the world around us, and inside us. I just wish it would stop announcing itself when we’ve already welcomed it inside.” – Reba Mitrad, blessed be their memory, who lived with chronic pain.
This skill blocks pain in a specific area specified by the Rafa. Tell the Rafa what complimentary feeling blossoms in the corresponding area of their own body.
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C-Section
Rafa Midwives are multidisciplinary by nature. Surgically extracting babies draws on the full wealth of their capabilities. Positioning, the umbilical cord, speed of going into labor, blood loss–so many things could go wrong that every safe delivery is a sign of the divine.
This skill surgically births a baby, whether or not the birthing parent is in labor.
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Gender Align
Rafa Jin writes that all efforts of aligning one’s gender with their body are not only beautiful, but “share, in the limited ways we can comprehend, kinship with the divine act of creation.”
This skill facilitates gender-affirming changes desired by the patient. Tell the Rafa what transcendental experience of their patient’s gender occurs within them.
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Heal Infection
While they are our siblings under the Light, followers of the Lumdai faith have a tendency to ascribe malice to that which inconveniences them. What does that have to do with infections? Good question. Infection and symbiosis demonstrate two sides of the Light’s infinite complexity.
This skill cures a patient’s infection. Tell the Rafa what emotion is radiating from the infection.
Side Effects
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Increase Milk Production
Pregnancy demonstrates the body’s great adaptability, and change doesn’t stop after birth. Many birth parents worry more about innately insufficient milk supply when other factors are at play, so Rafa Midwives developed holistic approaches to supporting them.
This skill stimulates milk production. Tell the Rafa what stressors to relieve or techniques can help.
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Induce Labor
Rafa Abainesha, blessed be their memory, collected writings and other depictions of this skill being used since well before the fall of Freka. They theorized it as being where the Society of Rafa sprang from.
This skill prompts a uterus to contract for birth or abortion. Tell the Rafa whether they experience any cramping in their own body.
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Promote Flow
The body is a mirror of the world. As people tend to their homes through the seasons, Rafa tend to the ebbs and flows of their patients. These two calendars are not so different.
This skill helps necessary fluids to keep flowing through the body. Tell the Rafa what season their patient’s body is in and how they know.
Side Effects
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Remove
The village is a macrocosm of the body, for within the body many codependent beings live. We call the healthful spirits symbiotic and the harmful ones parasitic. Be careful what you excise.
This skill removes a foreign or harmful object from the body. Tell the Rafa how this process occurs in their patient.
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Temperature Control
Outside Houses of Healing, it’s not well known just how few degrees stand between life and death. Rafa Physician Nuri believes in erring on the side of warmth for destroying infection, though they are not known for their bedside manner.
This skill raises or lowers the temperature of a patient’s body. Tell the Rafa how the heat or cold leaving their patient appears.
Side Effects