From: Tome of Gentle Unburdening
When violence cannot be avoided, this defensively oriented spell shifts the force of an incoming blow or damaging word into the air around the caster. The threat does not rebound upon the attacker; instead, it diffuses without retaliation.
Favored by healers and diplomats who stand firm without striking back.
Lore
Among the pacifist orders of Saṃsāra—especially the Resonant Mediators of Dorset and the white-sleeved healers of Qashtara—there arose a doctrine:
“Strength is shown not by what you strike…
but by what you refuse to let strike you.”
This spell originated as a battlefield prayer where healers refused to abandon the wounded even under assault. By accepting harm without accepting vengeance, the caster reshapes violence into meaningless motion.
It is often whispered that the spell teaches a secret—
the world itself prefers peace, when given the choice.
Those who master this spell are honored not as cowards…
but as unbreakable shields who never retaliate.
Use and Casting
This is a defensive, reactionary peace-magic interruption spell.
Once per day, when harm is about to land—whether physical, magical, or verbal—the caster softens the destructive intent and gently redirects the force into the surrounding aether.
No backlash.
No escalation.
Just quiet resilience.
Saṃsāra Stat Block
Tier Availability: Tier 1 (scales slightly with caster tier)
Spell Type: Passive/Reaction (non-attack)
Activation: Spoken acceptance phrase + raised hand or open stance
Duration: Until triggered once (or 10 minutes maximum)
Trigger: Caster is targeted by an attack, spell, or hostile social strike
Effect:
Reduce the first incoming harmful event (physical, magical, psychic, or social) by:
• 15% of total damage or
• –1 Rank to the social/psychic effect
(whichever applies)
If the caster is Tier 2+ → reduction improves to 25%.
The attack still “connects” visually, but the intent is stripped away.
Side Property: Cannot be used to enable or conceal counterattacks.
If the caster immediately delivers violence back, the spell cancels and deals a 2d3 pain penalty to the caster’s Mind’s Eye as karmic recoil.
Skills Involved
• Composure (optional enhancer: improves effect +5%)
• Wisdom of Restraint (unique pacifist-order skill, if possessed)
• Divine Flow (for healers and sanctified practitioners)
Cost
• Mana: 2 (flat)
• + mild fatigue if triggered in high-stress combat
Requirements
• Caster must not be the aggressor this round
• Hands must be free (or open stance)
• Must be lucid and willing to accept a non-violent resolution
Tags:
Nonlethal Defense, Peace-Magic, Aether Diffusion, Protective Buffer, Mediation Tool, Divine, Pacifist-Aligned, Reaction Spell, Crowd-Safe, Guardian’s Grace, Non-Retaliatory, Emotional-Redirection, Combat-Deescalation, Passive-Barrier, Stress-Diffusion, Psychic-Soften, Nonviolent-Stand, Battlefield-Pacifism, Harm-Dissolution, Diplomat’s-Aegis, Peacekeeper’s-Resolve, Protective-Aura
Roleplay & Tactical Usage
In Social Conflict
• Perfect for high-stakes diplomacy where insults or psychic coercion are weapons
• Demonstrates social mastery: You cannot be provoked.
• After the deflection, calmly continuing the negotiation shames aggressors without retaliation.
RP cue: A hurtful word is spoken… and is simply refused entry.
In Open Battle
• Best used by non-combatants under threat
• Allows a healer to finish a stabilization ritual while shrugging off a single strike
• Buys a crucial moment for allies to step between them and danger
Tactic: Stand visible. Do not run.
Force enemies to attack elsewhere or lose momentum.
In Stealth or Rescue Missions
• Enables a pacifist front-liner to hold a doorway or shield civilians
• Makes the caster a tempting target, delaying suppression fire
• Lets the team reposition while violence “breaks” harmlessly aside
RP moment: “Hit me if you must—your anger will find nothing to land on.”
In Mental or Emotional Assault
• Especially powerful vs. fear bombs, domineering speech, or psionic spikes
• A bully’s power evaporates into dignified silence
• Encourages inner calm and the refusal to escalate
Visual cue: Aggressive energy becomes a harmless whisper of air.
Why It Is Feared
Those who cannot provoke retaliation
cannot control the battlefield with rage.
Some commanders hate this spell more than shields—
for shields can be shattered.
Self-possession cannot.
Perception of Activation: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Sight
What is Perceived: A faint ripple in the air erupts from the caster’s body, bending force and animosity outward like a transparent shield.
Description: Light refracts at the moment of impact, turning harsh strikes into soft distortions, like a stone gently dropped into still water. The caster’s eyes may glow with a soft, resolute calm.
Positives: Visually communicates nonhostile protection; can deter attackers who recognize their efforts are nullified.
Negatives: The shimmering ripple can reveal the caster’s position, drawing attention or marking them as the priority target for those who hate diplomacy.
Hearing
What is Perceived: A muted hush replaces the expected sound of impact — blows land with a soft sigh rather than violence.
Description: Words spoken with spite dissolve into air like distant wind, losing their bite and failing to escalate conflict.
Positives: Reduces the psychological intimidation of loud attacks or verbal aggression.
Negatives: Some allies may mistake the silence for magical suppression, potentially creating confusion in chaotic engagements.
Touch
What is Perceived: A gentle pressure like warm hands steadying the caster’s shoulders.
Description: The force that should bruise or cut instead brushes by like a breeze sliding around their body.
Positives: Reinforces confidence in the spell’s protection, helping maintain composure under attack.
Negatives: The strange lack of pain may disconnect the caster from realistic danger, tempting overextension.
Smell
What is Perceived: A faint aroma of clean air and rainfall, as if tension were physically washing away.
Description: The scent arrives subtly and vanishes just as quickly once the moment of danger passes.
Positives: Creates a calming and grounding atmosphere in hostile spaces.
Negatives: In enclosed environments it may stand out unnaturally, implying magic at work.
Taste
What is Perceived: A whisper of coolness on the tongue, like breathing through mint leaves.
Description: A psychosomatic effect signaling release rather than resistance.
Positives: Helps steady breathing and mental focus.
Negatives: Can distract if repeated numerous times in rapid succession.
Extra-Sensory Perception 1: Harm’s Turning
What is Perceived: The caster senses incoming hostility before it fully strikes — a mental map of kinetic and emotional threats.
Description: Intent appears as subtle directional pressure or visual ghost-lines indicating where harm would have landed.
Positives: Enables predictive defense and improved positioning during conflicts.
Negatives: The heightened awareness of aggression can induce emotional strain if surrounded on many sides.
Extra-Sensory Perception 2: Neutral Benevolence
What is Perceived: The caster feels a philosophical shift — harm becomes merely motion, anger simply sound.
Description: The world’s violence is perceived as weightless, its emotional charge briefly neutralized.
Positives: Facilitates peacekeeping, empathy, and clear-headed choices.
Negatives: Emotional detachment can appear cold, potentially upsetting allies who expect visible passion or outrage.
Extra-Sensory Perception 3: The Unbroken Line
What is Perceived: The caster intuits a thread of selfhood that remains untouched regardless of battle.
Description: A sense that inner dignity cannot be cracked by cruelty or collision.
Positives: Immense resilience in negotiations, interrogations, or standoffs.
Negatives: Overconfidence may lead to refusing necessary retreat or backup.
Tale of Soft-Blow
Shield of No-Strike
It is written, in a scroll that was once a book that was once a song that was once a whisper, that there lived a healer called the Quiet Palm. Some say she was not a healer at first, but a warrior who forgot how to hate. Others say she was born with hands that could not harm, though the world demanded she strike.
In those days, battles roared like thunder that had lost its rain. Warriors believed that only louder violence could calm the storm. But the Quiet Palm did not raise blade nor voice. Instead, she stood where blows fell strongest. Yet not one strike reached her skin. Spears slowed into reeds, blades turned as though embarrassed, and hateful cries slipped away like frightened birds.
“How do you deny the hit?” asked a swordsman whose rage broke his voice.
“I do not deny,” she said. “I welcome the blow, then let it pass.”
And the swordsman could not understand, for his mind was a clenched fist.
The Quiet Palm walked battlefields not as a fighter, nor a coward, but as a path between both. She stood before a king’s champion, a man whose fury cracked shields like dried bone. When he swung down his massive axe, the wind itself screamed. But as the axe met her calm, it curved into air, landing with all its anger gone, like a child’s toy dropped from tired fingers.
Shocked, the champion demanded, “What curse twists my strength?”
“No curse,” she said. “Your strength is your storm. I am only the place where storms become sky again.”
Yet enemies began to fear her gentle ways. Some declared her an omen of weakness. One warlord, afraid his army might learn peace, sent a hundred arrows into the air to blot out light. She simply breathed. The arrows bowed, apologetic, and settled into the grass around her feet like fallen leaves.
“Join me,” she told the warlord, “and you may lay down the burden of striking.”
But he, terrified of a world where his power meant nothing, fled into darkness and was never seen again.
Still, the Quiet Palm knew her work was not to erase wrath but to soften it. She taught her spell—the Gentle Deflection of Harm—to any who vowed never to repay attack with attack. Some learned. Many failed. A few, in learning to yield, became unmovable.
When at last she grew old and the world forgot she had ever held back a thousand deaths, she placed her calm within the air itself, saying:
“Let any who choose not to strike be kept whole.”
Then she vanished, like a sigh granted freedom.
Moral of the Story: True strength is not the force that stops a blow, but the courage to take no part in its direction.
Suggested conversions to other systems:
Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition)
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Category: Defensive Mythos Magic
Cost: 5 Magic Points, 1 Sanity
Casting Time: Instant response to an incoming attack
Mechanics: When the caster would take physical or emotional harm, the effect of the blow is reduced by half, rounded down (damage or SAN loss). This happens without causing harm to the attacker. The spell lasts for one attack or incident of emotional trauma.
Limit: One use per day.
Notes: The calm detachment required may appear eerie or unsettling in CoC’s horror tone — potential social penalties afterward if witnesses feel unnerved.
Blades in the Dark
Special Ability: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Type: Protective Technique (Arcane)
Effect: Resist the full effect of a Harm or negative consequence without reflecting it back or escalating violence. Gain +2d on the Resistance roll. Harm reduction is narrative and pacifistic — attackers feel their aggression fade, not rebound.
Stress Cost: Standard for Resistance; ability costs 1 Stress to activate.
Use: Once per score.
Tone: Ideal for diplomats, mystics, and unusual ghosts-in-the-crew who quell violence rather than escalate it.
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Level: 2nd-level Abjuration (Unique Spell)
Casting Time: Reaction, when targeted by an attack or harmful effect
Range: Self
Components: V, S (a calm exhale and open palm)
Duration: Instantaneous
Effect: Reduce the damage from one attack or harmful effect by 2d8 + spellcasting ability modifier. The attacker suffers no repercussion. If the trigger is psychic, verbal, or emotional harm, reduce the disadvantage/effect similarly.
Limit: Once per long rest regardless of spell slots, due to spiritual focus.
Flavor: Designed for clerics, druids, bards, monks, and peace-aligned paladins.
Knave
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Spell Type: Once per day; pacifistic defense
Casting Time: Reaction to an incoming Harm effect
Effect: Reduce incoming damage by 1d8 + caster’s highest ability modifier. This does not count as armor and stacks with mundane protection. No effect ever rebounds to an attacker.
Focus: Requires the caster to keep one hand free and maintain a calm demeanor. Panic breaks the spell.
Narrative Hook: Encourages problem-solving without violence; prized among wandering healers.
Fate Core
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Aspect Granted When Active: Serenity Even Under the Blade
Activation: Cast once per session as a Free Action when threatened
Mechanical Benefit: Gain a +2 bonus to Defend against any physical, social, or mental attack as the harmful energy diffuses into the scene rather than the caster. If you take Stress from the attack, reduce the Stress by 2 (minimum 0).
Limits: Cannot be used to counterattack or escalate violence.
Narrative Tone: Projects nonviolent resolve — can discourage further aggression from NPCs as a narrative shift.
Numenera / Cypher System
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Level: 4 Cipher (Occult, Pacifistic)
Activation: Enabler; cast as a reaction
Effect: When you would take damage, reduce the damage by 6 and convert the remainder to Ambient Energy (harmless). No Energy ricochets at the attacker. Also reduces Intellect damage from fear-based effects by 2.
Use: One use per day; depletion if treated as artifact 1 in 1d20
Cost: 3 Intellect points
Flavor: Highly valued by nano-monks and peace-priests who travel battlefields.
Pathfinder (2nd Edition)
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Traditions: Divine, Occult
Level: 2
Cast: Reaction, triggered when you are targeted by an attack
Range: Self
Effect: You gain Resistance 8 to one instance of physical or mental damage. This is not a shield block and does not counterattack or impose conditions on the attacker.
Limit: Once per day
Traits: Abjuration, Nonlethal, Mental (if the triggering harm is mental/emotional)
Role Niche: Keeps a healer standing in the thick of combat without angering foes.
Savage Worlds (Adventure Edition)
Power: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Rank: Seasoned
Power Points: 2
Casting: Reaction (free action on incoming attack)
Duration: Instant
Effect: Reduce the damage of one attack against the caster by a number equal to the caster’s Spirit die type. Emotional or taunt-based attacks have their penalty reduced by 2 instead.
Trapping: The reduction manifests as air ripples and tension diffusing harmlessly.
Limit: May only be activated once per day, even if PP remain.
Role: Ideal for a pacifist character concept, keeping stakes high without violence.
Shadowrun (6th Edition)
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Type: Detection / Manipulation hybrid, Health tagged
Range: Self
Target: Self
Duration: Instant
Drain: F–3
Effect: Cast as a Major Reaction when attacked. Reduce incoming Physical or Stun damage by hits on the Spellcasting + Magic test (minimum reduction 2). The remaining threat disperses with no chance of reflecting damage back to the attacker. Does not stack with armor augmentation.
Narrative Role: Nonviolent defense often used by mediators, security mages, and corporate negotiators who refuse escalation.
Starfinder
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
School: Abjuration
Level: Mystic 1, Witchwarper 1, Precog 1
Casting Time: Reaction when you are hit by an attack
Range: Self
Duration: Instant
Effect: Reduce the damage of one incoming attack by 1d8 + casting ability modifier. If the attack is non-physical (mind-affecting insult, psychic lash), reduce the penalty or damage by 3 instead.
Limit: Once per day
Descriptors: Mind-Affecting (if applied to mental harm), Nonlethal, Emotion
Narrative Use: Ideal for frontline diplomats or healers in chaotic multi-faction combat zones.
Traveller (Mongoose 2nd Edition)
Psionic Talent: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Psionic Discipline: Telekinesis (Radial Dampening Field)
Activation: Reaction
Cost: “Effort” — 2 PSI points
Effect: When targeted by a melee or ranged attack, reduce the damage by the caster’s PSI DM + 2 as the kinetic force disperses around the body. No ricochet effects or return damage.
Limit: Once per day
Failure: On a failed PSI check (8+), the force only reduces by PSI DM, and the caster suffers –1 DM to PSI checks for an hour due to emotional strain.
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (4th Edition)
Spell: Gentle Deflection of Harm 880
Wind: Azyr (Celestial), Hysh (Light)
CN: 6
Range: You
Target: Self
Duration: Instant
Effect: When harmed by an incoming attack, reduce the Damage inflicted by the caster’s Willpower Bonus. Fear or Intimidation Effects against the caster impose a penalty of –1 SL instead of the full amount.
Traits: Abjuration, Nonlethal, Emotion, Subtle
Miscast Risk: On a Miscast, the caster becomes fatigued by the emotional weight they temporarily softened.