Magical Socialized Medicine

[Ariel Hapzid]

So in my campaign setting Shattered Horizons I'm working on the Empire of Man. One of the keys to the government is breaking it up into 5 pillars of power. One of these pillars is the Church of the Light, which is ran more like a corporation than a government. Which brings me to one of the capacities of the Church of the Light and that is providing health care to the citizens of the Empire with their divine magic. I was thinking that everyone has socialized health insurance paid for by the gov't.

How could I make that work, what would be the best way to supply divine healthcare to the commoners of the empire?

[LordVreeg]

Fantastically quid pro quo.  The Church retains their congregation by giving free health care.  Makes the people as bonded to the church as belonging to the empire.  I'm sure this is how the church got into the government.

The first thing I'd do is work out the logistics of how much healing you want to give out vs how much magic is out there.  This looks like it would not do well with a magic-poor setting.
I mean, resurrections and raise deads done on a regular basic makes for a very unusual setting.  even cure disease being available en masse during a plague calls for a huge amount of magic.

[Cheomesh]

High taxes and or harsh material furnishing requirements for components.

M.

[brainface]

OTH, the Vlad Taltos books employ resurrections as more or less a matter of course. It's different from say core DnD in that time is a big factor (you have a couple hours) and I believe head injuries are pretty much a deal breaker. (Presumably old age puts a socket wrench in things too.) It runs kinda like a hypothetical "mundane" society might where someone is fine as long as they get to the hospital on time. (Also there's weapons that destroy your soul. You don't wanna get stabbed by those.)

In other words, you don't have to stay within the limitations of core DnD or whatever if you don't want to (where a cure light wounds would basically bankrupt a peasant, and you basically have to kill a small dragon to afford resurrection.)

[Elemental_Elf]

If most of your citizenry are just 1st level commoners, you could just stock up on scrolls of Cure Minor Wounds. 1 point doesn't sound like much until you realize 4 would completely heal a commoner.

As for the mass production of these scrolls, you could change the rules... Perhaps the Church holds some sort of extra-planar being captive and siphons off energy from it to create the scrolls for no xp and a minimal amount of copper to cover the cost of the paper.

[Pair o' Dice Lost]

One option from Eberron is the eternal wand.  Eternal wands look like normal wands, they hold an arcane spell of 3rd level or lower, they let any character who can cast arcane spells cast the contained spell twice per day, and they require Craft Wondrous Items.  Now, you could say that the reason this particular church is on top is that they've discovered how to do the same thing for divine spells, so they can have any divine caster in the church using these cure wands for effectively unlimited healing as long as it's less than a certain number of times per day.

An eternal wand of cure minor wounds is only 173 gold and 13 XP to create with the right feats (so an artificer working for the church could crank out tons of these), and an eternal wand of cure light wounds is only 308 gold and 25 XP to craft.  That should give you as much physical healing as you could possibly want, leaving you to make specialized clerics who handle diseases, regeneration, and that sort of thing.

[Elemental_Elf]

Eternal Wands could work but... Wouldn't there be a threat of idolatry with the wand? Peasants  may come to believe the wand is, in fact, a conduit to God (as opposed to the caster)... To me I think it might be easier to just create a bunch of scrolls, each made out to look like sheets of prayer... Then again, no one said (in the OP's campaign) that peasants would idolize the wands nor that eternal scrolls couldn't exist... Ooo, I like that idea because the Church could make special bibles where every other page is a page from the bible, and the other the eternal scroll. Essentially, the Cleric/Adept reinforces the power of the divine by making it appear he is healing the peasants by reading tales from the bible... I'm not sure why but that idea just tickles me.

[Superfluous Crow]

What's wrong with the wand being a conduit for God? The church probably has more than one symbol, and a tool of god that can only be used by the Ordained would only add to the prestige of the church.

[Elemental_Elf]

Hmm, it just lacks the inherent symbolism that the bible has. Then again, if the symbol of the religion is something akin to a cross or crescent or some form like that, then the actual wand could be fashioned to look like it... That is a powerful symbol of faith. Imagine a Priest in medieval Europe healing the wounds of peasants by invoking the power of the cross... Wow, I like that almost as much as the bible!

[Pair o' Dice Lost]

If you don't like the eternal wand idea, you could look into the Unbound Scroll prestige class.  At the 5th level, you get the Ghostwriter ability, which lets you effectively spend uses of your dragonmark to cast a scroll without using it up.  Refluff that to restrict it to members of that church (rather than members of House Zilargo) and whip up an analog to the mark of healing to use, and not only could the priests innately heal people with a feat or two but they'd be able to use tons of the "bible pages" to heal people as well.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Just turn the wands into whatever you feel like using.  So long as you don't change how they function what they look like is irrelevant in terms of game mechanics.

I could certainly see holy relics being like this, no matter what they are.

Of course the OP may not have been asking for mechanical advice.