Perfecting Living matter

[LadyLens]

A doctor, who's also a Moros, extracts and perfects bone marrow from a leukaemia patient, then destroys the patient's remaining marrow and injects the patient with the perfected marrow, letting it regenerate. This is based on the normal methods of treating leukaemia. What might happen to the patient?

[Mrmdubois]

Whatever the ST needs. Depending on how it’s Perfected and who the patient is things could turn out fine or yuh could end up with Abyssal bone cancer.

[Tessie]

I fail to see how the Abyss would enter into the equation unless a spell to perfect the marrow is cast in front of Sleepers who are told it is a spell.

[HerbertIsBestBert]

Whatever your Legacy wants to happen to them.
Bone Marrow is so esoteric a bodily "organ" that you'd certainly need a specialized Legacy focusing on it to make that work.

And unless you just want to do some kind of "Bone Marrow" Legacy, that could actually be a really cool/creep Lich Legacy.

Extracting their organs one by one, Perfecting them with an Attainment, then surgically or magically reattaching them.
Given the open dev material for Signs of Sorcery states "the material does not die unless reverted to its mundane form", that could very possibly work.

Possibly adding in a Reaper angle by figuring out where the seat of the soul is, if indeed there is one. Possibly to keep themselves "alive" while they perfect the brain, heart, and other important organs.

[thenate]

After extracting it, you perfect it with what and how?
Life could potentially fix the cancerous cells but I don't think making that Lasting fits.
Life or Death should be able to isolate the cancerous cells from the set, however, and isolate and kill them.
Having done that, the remnant could be expanded with Life and reinserted. Or, for that matter, simply reinserted.

Personally, I'd allow a Perfecting effect guide healing such that it actually restores full function. In this case, it would need to be maintained for a few months to help the marrow restore selective immunity.

A Death/Life conjunction could simply target the infected cells or even end the cancer in the cells..

[Mrmdubois]

A Death/Life conjunction could simply target the infected cells or even end the cancer in the cells..

Just Life is all that would be required.

[Mrmdubois]

I fail to see how the Abyss would enter into the equation unless a spell to perfect the marrow is cast in front of Sleepers who are told it is a spell.

Or a Disciple who decides to rush things instead of spending their Reach wisely, and who releases the Paradox. Or maybe a Scelrsti forces the Paradox on him, etc. There are options, context matters.

[Michael]

The Preview would seem to indicate that it wouldn't work, though not really what would happen.

I mean, looking at it, it's a little odd that the author doesn't seem to offer more consideration of blood, seeing as blood donation is pretty common. The general suggestion that living materials become symbolically dead might cover that, though that seems a little arbitrary.

[HardcoreHannes]

Bone marrow for all needed purposes is acutally alive. What you need to cure leukaemina are the living cells of the marrow. I do not recall anything in the book about perfecting living matter. So it falls under the purview of Live and the results may varry heavily depending on how the perfecting was done.

[Michael]

I do not recall anything in the book about perfecting living matter.

It's from the Signs of Sorcery preview.

[thenate]

Just Life is all that would be required.

Arguably.

That entirely depends on how symbolically you look at cancer.

From a strictly scientific standpoint, you just need to remove the mutation/infection/misconfiguration from each cell. (Whichever type it is) One could argue that Life might be able to simply heal the damage in cells or order them to shift their control state or otherwise just fix things.

I counter by pointing out the inability of Life to simply restore things that can't recover on their own. Regeneration is a fairly analogous spell effect.

I'd further argue that cancer qualifies as a Death pattern intruding into a Life pattern and is, thus, resistant to the basic healing effects of just Life.

[Mrmdubois]

thenate And you’d be wrong.

Heck, you could kill cancer via Body Control and a bit of creativity, restrict blood and nutrients to the cancer cells so they starve for instance, or instruct your immune system to attack the cancer cells.

Requiring Life and Death for something that can fall purely under the purview of one and maybe under the purview of the other (Ending the cancer via just Death for instance), is just holding onto the old conjunction paradigm of arcana in 1e, which itself is a relic from Ascension. It’s an outmoded and irrelevant way of thinking.