Potions Plus v.1

As you may have collected, not everyone is a fan of poison as it stands in Dungeons and Dragons right now. Some think it underwhelming and others may be unimpressed with the way it's handled in general. This guide should hopefully give you a new angle on poisons and a way to enjoy them once again!

The Main Idea

The purpose of these pages is to breath some new life into poison crafting by implementing a light-weight, customizable system for you to use. The best part about it is that the same rules can be applied to normal potions, but for the purposes of brevity, we're going to be focusing on the poison aspects of it for the time being.

Step Overview

Poison crafting under this system has just 2 main steps. Acquiring the ingredients and putting them together, no different then the normal rules, right? Well, a majority of what makes this system unique is what falls under the putting them together part. Under this system there are 3 ingredients required to make a properly potent poison. A base, the poison itself, and the bolstering agent.

Let's go into greater detail concerning the ingredients.

The Base

Simply put, a base can be anything that holds the other ingredients.

Each Base ingredient carries with it a Detection DC, this represents how difficult the poison is to detect when mixed in with other things, such as food or drink. Some poisons have a very low detection DC, as they're not meant to be delivered stealthily, others have a very high DC, making them perfect for subtle operations.

Like most of the ingredients that you'll read about later, some bases can only hold their form when mixed with the right ingredients. This means that for a powder base to hold it's “powderiness”, it needs to be mixed with other powders, or else the poison becomes a paste, which while not inherently a bad thing, may not be what you're looking for. More on this later.

Furthermore, the cheaper the base, the larger the potency debuff it accrues on the final product. Conversely, the more expensive the base, the greater the potency buff.

The Poison

No poison is complete without the, well, poison.

Like the base, poisons come in a variety of different forms, each needing to be matched with a similar form to maintain the original. This ingredient applies the Poisoned condition and decides the Save DC that must be passed in order to not only stave off the poisoned condition, but also the effects of the bolstering agent. It also dictates the duration that the creature will be poisoned for.

Some poisons grant a higher DC, but a shorter duration, others grant a lower DC, but a longer duration. There are poisons that grant higher numbers for both, but these are greatly expensive.

Note: All poisons allow the target to reattempt the save after each turn, unless stated otherwise

The Bolster

The Bolstering Agent works to grant the poison it's secondary effects

The effects granted by the bolster could be as simple as dealing damage over the duration or a large spike of damage at the beginning to opening cuts all over the subjects body or freezing extremities. Each bolster has 3 possible effects, each broken up into 3 roll ranges. The lower range produces a weaker effect, the middle range produce the standard effect and the high range goes above and beyond, elevating the poison to a much more powerful tier.

Converting Ingredients

As stated before, all ingredients come as a preexisting form. This can be either a powder or a liquid. In order for a poison to remain in one of these two states, one must make sure that the form of the base matches the form of the poison.

This can all be circumvented with the proper preparation, however. If one has Alchemists Tools, they would be able to convert the ingredient's type, taking an amount of time correlating to it's gold value.

This is exemplified on the table:

Conversion Time

Gold Value (GP) Time Required 10 or lower 30 minutes 11-15 1 hour 16-35 2 hours 36-65 6 hours 66-85 12 hours 86-100 24 hours

Anything costing more than 100 GP takes 24 hours and an additional 2 hours for each 10 GP extra.

Delivery Methods

Consolidating things down, the form a poison ends up in dictates it's delivery method, as explained by this table.