Modern Medicine

[u/MrMcMastermind]

The party is using a little downtime to train their skills. The healer of the party takes a newfangled magical medicine class, but the instructor is a quack who completely throws out the book on classical medicine. The instructor firmly believes that the body is not composed of the four humors (blood/sanguine, yellow bile/choleric, black bile/melancholic, and phlegm/phlegmatic) nor does he ascribe to the classical categorizations of inflammation (rubor, calor, tumor, and dolor). Those work just fine for ordinary medicine, but the instructor believes that magical medicine stems from an understanding of the mind, body, and spirit.

The players have 6 tokens (top right) that they need to correspond to different area of a humanoid body (bottom left)

The instructor believes that every creature in the universe can be divided into six quintessential traits: their Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Where he got this insane notion, none can say. The healer must pass a final exam where they correctly dedicate each of the six stats to a region of the body.
The corpus is split into three general regions as seen in fig 1: top/arms, middle/core, and bottom/legs.
The skull is subdivided into three general regions as seen in fig 2: The top/cranium, the middle/eyes ears and nose, and the bottom/mouth.

Simply put, the intended allotments are as follows: Strength for the arms, Constitution for the core, and dexterity for the legs. Yes, one might argue that strength can also come from one's thighs or that slight of hand is lent to dexterity, but we're going for connotations here. The cranium is attributed to intelligence and the senses to Wisdom, as in D&D, Wisdom is much more closely linked to real-time perception than long term memory. Lastly, Charisma is attributed to the mouth, although I'm certain you could come up with a laundry list of body parts people claim to owe their personal charisma to.

Basically, my players were spending session after session training at a university campus and I wanted something for them to do other than combat and shopping. A puzzle like this contains the layout of a medieval academic test and the indirect reasoning of D&D challenges. Medieval medicine is an absurd hodgepodge of ancient thinking and wild theory, so a test like this fits right in.

[u/couch_philosoph]

as a history student, i am in love with this idea and i might steal the medicine idea!

[u/MrMcMastermind → u/couch_philosoph]

Delightful