Our Apothecary missed a couple of sessions, and we suffered greatly. Our Librarian is a Blood Angel, so no access to healing powers. Is there any other way to recover wounds during a mission? Is Medicae open only to Apothecaries?

I should also mention we only use the Core Rulebook, no other books. Thx!

Medicae is on the General Space Marine Advance tables… at Rank 8. The GM can always offer Medicae as an Elite Advance to someone for a few hundred xp, or you can house-rule a basic Medicae servo-skull or something for when he's not there.

If I were to GM another game I'd house rule (among many other changes) all space marines have Medicae: First Aid. Meaning they have the training to carry out basic first aid only (they are super intelligent demi-god warriors after all, wouldn't they know first aid). I would treat it as a seperate advance (as part of a medicae rework, mainly to make medical stuff more interesting and useful).

Obviously if a marine only has Medicae: First Aid they CANNOT do any of the following:
Extended Care
Surgeries or autopsies (though pulling organs out of a live enemy to see which one will kill it instantly is still ok)
Medicae research
Any Medicae forbiden lore tests
Any Medicae tests other than first aid or blood loss
Diagnose
Harvest Gene Seed

We had a similar situation, our Apothacary dropped out for several months due to his girlfriend moving in (from another country) so understandably he decided she was more important than a game. He has since rejoined the group, but our way of dealing with it was to have his character sheet and run him basically as a healer bot. I would update him with what had happened and how much xp he had gotten (less than the main group) and he updated his sheet and sent me an updated version. This did help in preventing the issue of the team falling apart too badly, it wouldn't have been my first choice of fixes but the rest of the group were happy for that to be the fix so we went with it and it worked. If you don't want that or there is disagreement then I would say give them a medicae servo skull as suggested by Captain Ventris.

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Medicae is on the General Space Marine Advance tables… at Rank 8. The GM can always offer Medicae as an Elite Advance to someone for a few hundred xp, or you can house-rule a basic Medicae servo-skull or something for when he's not there.

I like the idea of the Medicae servo-skull... maybe with some requisition cost?

Having the apothecary function as a healbot when the player is not there is the obvious choice. The other one is to use Fate Points for healing.

I ran a game of all Greyknights using the DW rules. The lack of a healer really changed the game dynamics. Using fate points to heal eventually ran into a wall of "we out of fate points and we're chasing the boss." FP heals 1d10, FP parry saves 10-20 froma boss hit. Without being able to use FPs to reroll parries the boss was knock a marine into critical every round or so instead of every 3 rounds.

Having read this forum, i asked for the servo skull for my game a player. While it doesn't heal very much, saving the nickeling and diming really let us keep our FP for when it mattered. More epic and more fun.

I had a similar situation where our Apothecary refused to do first aid because the Battle-Brothers had no medical insurance.

They ALL have the Astartes Blue Shield Plan, they just may not have had their cards on them is all.....

And now I want to play a Marine who only joined the Deathwatch for the dental insurance. Preferably a Carcharodon, or maybe a Space Wolf.