Healing times

[Ville]

Bear with me here...
I have always loved one thing about WOTC/TSR products: The Drow and their culture. It actually provided a chance for intrigue and roleplay besides the hack and slash. (Anyone remember The Queen of Spiders?:-)
I just bought City of The Spider Queen and started thinking how it would run in TROS.
Naturally I'll have to tone down about 99.9% of the encounters and magic users and monsters but the idea of dwelling into the mysterious underdark is quite exciting.

But limping through the underdark isn't very glorious.
Getting hit by a sword sucks in TROS, as it rightfully should.
Since I save magicians for NPCs only and healing potions do not fit into TROS I was wondering has anyone brewed up any "pseudo-magical"herbs/skills that would cut down the healing times?
Getting hit should still suck but I do not want my players camping in the underdark for months.

[Lyrax]

The best skill is to not get hit.  However, in real life, most of the medical cures were based on herbal remedies, thus herbalism would be a useful skill.  Unfortunately, there aren't many plants in the underdark, so I'm not sure how you'd work it in...

My advice?  If the characters get hit, that character should limp back to the surface to recover, perhaps with a buddy, while the rest of the group completes the quest without him.  Or, if a PC gets hit, kill him off.  TROS is deadly for characters.

[Brian Leybourne]

If you want your campaign to have a more narrativistic and less simulationist feel, you might allow healing rolls (which reduce the pain level of a wound by 1) each day instead of each week. This way wounds don't last nearly as long, and it has more of a film or book feel where even serious wounds never seem to slow the protagonists down for long.

Depending on how I want the mood of the campaign to be, I sometimes do this myself. It's not as realistic, but it means you avoid the characters having to have huge periods of downtime after every fight, while still having wounds be a serious inconvenience to be avoided.

Brian.

[Psychopompous]

But limping through the underdark isn't very glorious.
Getting hit by a sword sucks in TROS, as it rightfully should.
Since I save magicians for NPCs only and healing potions do not fit into TROS I was wondering has anyone brewed up any "pseudo-magical"herbs/skills that would cut down the healing times?
Getting hit should still suck but I do not want my players camping in the underdark for months.

Sounds like good incentive for them to avoid fights they can't easily win. I'd leave it at that. Set up the scenarios so that the player's don't have to fight anyone they can't easily take (or can fight at an advantage) unless they screw up.

That's how I run my Shadowrun games :)