P is for Poison
I’ve got a problem with potions. Or more specifically, I’ve got a problem with the guys that make the potions. This freakshow is in my game pretty much verbatim, and in the little blank spot next to “class” is the least trustworthy word in all of gaming: Wizard.
Remember how we discussed a few weeks back that wizards tend to go bad? Well it’s that same beard-faced, abomination-summoning, physics-fiddling weirdo that’s pouring newt’s milk or whatever the crap into a beaker and telling you to chug it down. This is not OK. I mean sure, it might conceivably give you giant’s strength or invisibility, but this thing* might also “shape that you can care while lifting the flabby part.” I wouldn’t put money on it though.
What I’m getting at is this: There’s no Food and Drug Administration in fantasy land. Even if those potions do perform as promised, you’re going to get all kinds of magi-cancer in your twilight years. And side effects? Forget about it. You’re going to get warts, your warts are going to become tentacles, and your tentacle-warts are going to try and strangle you in your sleep. Best case scenario your descendants become sorcerers. And nobody deserves a Thanksgiving table full of snooty pretty boys checking their hair in the cutlery and reanimating the turkey.
As an experiment, I put the question to you. Have any of your characters ever imbibed some magical comestible, only to suffer grave consequences? Tell us what happened, and don’t skimp on the gory details!
*Forever-dead link used to got to a Japanese beauty product. Still have no idea what it does.
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I don’t have any tales about dubious consumables, but I do have one that “wizard” reminded me of.
I was playing an especially odd duck. Well a pony. It was a My Little Pony Friendship is Magic game. Just in case you thought I was some weirdo who plays as a pony in D&D. Or a duck. Haven’t played any ducks either. Where was I?
Oh yes. So our party had just gone up an elevator and for some reason the GM decided to have it go hilariously fast and hilariously have us roll saves to see how our stomach’s fared. Now just the previous week I’d joked that my monochromatic character was all rainbows on the inside. Well, I rolled a nat 1. So I declared that my character performed a Vomit Rainboom. Which consisted of a full on high powered stream of vomit that then exploded, plastering the walls and everyone not in the elevator in rainbow vomit.
I received equal parts applause and disgust. Which was exactly what I’d been aiming for. That’ll teach GMs to impose arbitrary saves!
I imagine that it went something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7w-hcOd6GA&t=3m9s
Also, how did you like Ponyfinder? Was it well-balanced?
I have no idea, that wasn’t the system we were using. We were playing a system called Pony Tales: Aspirations of Harmony. It wasn’t well-balanced and became less so over time.
I did not realize there was more than one pony-centric product on the market. I have lost face amongst my brony brethren. My shame knows no bounds.
It’s like you tailor these things to me, it really is. Or, you’re just shooting for trope percentage and your gun kata is working really well.
Back before it was a 2 man party, it was a 4 man party, though sadly the other half of the squad (the cleric and rogue) opted to focus on realspace for a bit. While we were four, though, we were investigating an old tomb as our first actual dungeon crawl, full of birds of all sorts. We got down to the main sepulchre, where the rogue and I repaired the machinery to hoist up the coffin, to see if the old Baron had anything neat buried with him. Of course, we weren’t going to divest him of anything -on- him, that would be rude.
Meanwhile, I as the wizard have identified a curious fungus, known as Runesprawl. It seemed to have a randomizing effect on spells. I cast Light on a bunch of pebbles, made a control group, and tossed the rest near the runesprawl, where they mostly changed colors from ‘white’ and one exploded harmlessly. I thought to myself “Hey…I could weaponize this for when I fight other casters.” A ha. A ha.
The Undine isn’t doing much of anything and I’m worried that she’ll be getting bored, so I ask her to package up some of the Runesprawl while the gnome and I work, and the cleric makes sure all the dead things stay dead and nothing’s being too desecrated. She obliges…but she breathes some of it in.
Fast forward, she gives it back to me later, not feeling well at all, and I take it back, apologetic that my request might have deleterious consequences. A few minutes later, I get some on my skin while I’m running tests. I go to Prestidigitate it off. My world explodes into a nightmare planescape, where I’m watching the planet shatter itself and all life being extinguished. Then I come to, half a dozen sanity points down. The Undine has similar effects, though they’re more muted and more constant. Lesser nightmares, every night.
We get back to town and see the Apothecary. He is -incredibly- disappointed in my decision to take the Runesprawl, and I finally heed his advice to bury it, as I have reason to believe him when he explains that ‘greater men have tried to use it before. Every single one of them died of it, wailing.’ He starts treating the Undine, too.
A few visits later, the fungus has taken a turn for the worse in her body, and it’s starting to meld with her flesh. The apothecary is at wits end and gives her like an hour to live. So of course, time for me to get involved! I start casting! Of course it’ll work. Of course it’ll do the same thing it did last time, where I got a really bad effect and then was cleansed. Of course my previous trial with the pebbles didn’t clearly show me that the stuff was -randomizing.-
The long and the short of it is that I go absolutely honkers insane while trying to describe as many symptoms as I’ve contracted from infection, to advance knowledge of Runesprawl and its effects, FOR SCIENCE. I spend the next month in an Asylum thinking I’m a paladin while the Undine survives and spends the same month convalescing. The Runesprawl winds up successfully fusing to her, giving her an extra heart and a few good organs to have backups of, and also chitinous plating that gives her a +1 NAB. Downside is that she’s very visibly tainted and certain parties (cough cough The Inquisitioncough) are likely to be less than amused if they discover this.
The Apothecary does not like me much after all this.
TL:DR Check with your local apothecary before you mess around with stuff you find in Evil Woods and Tombs.
Big red button, big red bottle of chaos wine, magic moss…It’s all the same really. A PC is going to push/drink/inhale it. The scary bit is that, no matter how much you test that sort of thing, there’s always going to be an information gap between the two sides of the screen. For a player, pushing the button really is stepping into the great unknown.
In my own game, for example, I had a transmutation platform that had a chance to mutate PCs that stood on top of it. The monk player got a kleptomaniac monkey tail. The alchemist, thinking that was pretty cool, decided to give it a go. He was less than enthusiastic about his newfound blindness + blindsense. A 20′ field of vision isn’t such a great trade for a ranged character.
I was playing a pampered Winter Wolf Paladin. Not an anthropomorphic one mind you, a 7′ long armored wolf devoted to Mielikki. The rest of the party consisted of a flirtatious male bard, a quiet druid, a particularly dumb barbarian, and a halfling ex-courtesan rogue.
Before the Rogue joined, my character was the only female character. The Bard, being the flirtatious type, would flirt with every humanoid woman he came across, and if he didn’t come across one he’d flirt with me. My character would give as good as she got, and we’d have a laugh afterward. The one time my character pushed it a little further (to make him uncomfortable, mostly) he said something like “become a human, then we’ll talk.”
While investigating a cult (as many good adventurers do,) we came across a makeshift alchemy rig full of mysterious potions, vaguely labeled if at all. We stashed them away eagerly, promising to experiment with them a bit later.
Fast foward a while, and we have found the cult’s base of operations and need to attempt to interrupt their world-shattering ritual, standard stuff. Final fight, let’s go. We start preparing when someone remembers the potions. Eh, it’s the last fight, what do we care if we survive? Let’s chug em!
The potions each have a main effect and a side-effect. Things are normal at first: some folks are buffed, some debuffed. Our once-beautiful halfling courtesan loses her hair and her sight. My character gains an aura: Any creature within 60′ feet of her who can see her will fall in love with her, no save. The side effect? Dramatically increased libido. The Bard is standing behind me, so he is smitten, and I am literally a bitch in heat.
Thinking quickly, the Bard chugs a potion, hoping to resist the effect or maybe go blind. Instead, he ends up with a potion that allows him to polymorph into a creature of his level or lower. With a sigh from his player, he declares that his love-smitten Bard would, of course, turn into a winter wolf.
What happens next is obvious to all, i’m sure. The deed is done most enthusiastically on the spot, which alerts the cultists to our presence. We charge in, but the fight is pretty easy when the cultists all fall in love with me the moment they see me. We stop the ritual and all is well.
Afterwards, having come to his senses, the Bard attempts to take his own life. Apparently he never told us he was royalty, and his royal parents would murder him for having half-puppy bastards with some extraplanar monster. I talk him down though, promising I will be taking the children back to the Feywild.
In our next campaign, several characters were the children of this (un)holy union. =)
Bonus: My cute little Sprite girl, Key, drank a potion that turned out to be a Potion of Gender Change, with side effect of Instant Mustache. I played her as tiny Vegeta for the rest of the game.
Please tell me that one of the extraplanar monster wolves tried to claim the throne in the next campaign.
Not yet, but one is a rising interplanar pop star.
This has all the elements that a D&D story ought to have. Bravo, bravo.
once as an alchemist I bathed in and drank still warm dragon blood to remove a negative level, then continued drinking it strait from the heart chambers of every dragon we killed (high level campaign about an approaching dark army ruled by dragons) 4 in total,
When I rolled for reincarnation, my DM did it with my type as “dragon” instead of humanoid (unbelievably, because I wound up as a “young adult” dragon, this actually LOWERED my stats)
and then I did it to the end game BBEG (one of the 3 creator gods)
Results still pending.
You know how in this comic I ask what kinds of freaky backstories can give sorcerers their powers? Now we know.
Well, there was this time our party’s tiefling (whose skin had turned purple because of reasons) wanted a “strong drink”. He got himself a “drink” matching his skin color. Turns out it was purple worm poison, and that’s how the fight started.
I hope that tavern got zero stars on Yelp.
Our healer, in a RQ campaign, would make his own healing potions. And, depending on his roll, they would have a Use Before… date on them. And our GM would roll to see if the potion would work, and if not, what the real effect would be.
What kind of “past expiration” effects did you have?
oh yes, correct labels can be very satisfactory:
most Annoying Player for Kingmaker is probably an MBA.
his favorite line „just give me the GP values“ (when I started the loot description)
So I gave a big crate of carefully labeled Resist Energy to some Orcs. A big fancy crate with fancy labels and a fancy wax seal with the fancy looking initial of the BBEG on top (CL18). Well Mr. MBA played a sorcerer who could cast Resist Energy himself, so he said „I sell my share of the potions for 150GP each at the magic shop“
Didn‘t bother to identify, because labels.
That was one happy merchant.
Oof. That hurts. My players went through a similar catastrophe with a ring of regeneration. That story lives under this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/detect-insult
It’s tough because you don’t want to skip over magic item identification entirely. That’s how you wind up with cursed items. Yet if you take the time and identify every last potion, you wind up slowing the game to a crawl. Not sure I’ve ever found a good solution to that one. :/
well the other players kept their potions for an emergency, so it hit the right guy 😉 He also sold the 1000GP silver mirror I put in the loot two sessions before he picked up Scrying. Sadly someone bought it before he could buy it back, so he had to have one made to order and wait a few weeks for production and shipping.
Nice! After five years and 13 levels of play, I finally opened up my megadungeon campaign for made-to-order magic. My players (who are a bunch of silly buggers) now own an apparatus of the crab.
The party’s evil alchemist planned to give the barbarian a potion that would make him really strong and then explode. Not that he ever got a good chance.
…the barbarian deserved it. Or his player did, at least.