Some ideas for bits of alchemy system, many stolen shamelessly from Requiem and Chesssypig, with the following underlying goals
- -It should be relatively easy for a PC alchemist to become a noted expert a very small area; I want it to be rare that alchemist A is strictly better than alchemist B. As such, I want to subdivide alchemy quite finely.
- -Alchemy should deal with changing and utilising the physical properties of materials. There is a division between "herbalism" - physical properties of potions - and "transmutaion" - physical properties of everything else; the former is currently much better developed as a science in Grantabrugge for historical reasons, but this may change due to IC factors.
- -At this stage I do not give a colourful idiom of your choice about costings. I've put some in as a sample; these should *not* be regarded as thought-through or trustworthy.
Basic concepts
- I think that a good way of differentiating alchemists would be to make laboratory access part of the requirement for making a potion. There would exist a list of types of equipment - boiling tube, simmering pan, melting pot, balance, spatula, pipette, etc - (N.B. these names suck; we should use better ones, they're just here to illustrate the concept); each of which could have "tags" added to it - golden pipette, extra-strong test tube, etc. The alchemist's guild make infinite amounts of the most basic equipment available to their members, and sell some forms of more advanced equipment. Other equipment needs to be specially commissioned, found, or - hopefully often - borrowed from other alchemists. Each recipe requires a list of equipment, as well as ingredients.
- The reasons I'm proposing this are a) it makes it useful for alchemists to borrow expensive equipment from one another, forcing them to interact, and b) it makes it easier for alchemist A to be better than B at one thing but worse at another, because A has a golden crucible and B has a dragon-horn stirring rod (or because A has a better lab and B has more skills).
- Possibility: make each type of equipment require a specific skill to use. I don't see any reason why we'd want to do this, but there may be some I haven't thought of.
- All alchemists have basically the same number of time units per week (40?). There are skills that increase this number, but not by much. However, the number of time units a potion takes to prepare is not a constant. Each potion recipe has a basic time-cost, and then an alchemist can buy skills to reduce that time-cost, either for individual recipes, or for categories of potions. Specially made equipment will reduce the time cost of any potion made using it, too.
- There will exist multiple different recipes for most potions - a fast one using expensive ingredients; a cheap, fast one needing special equipment, a slow but dirt-cheap one needing different equipment; etc.
- Some recipes may require more time units than an alchemist gets in one week; these will take multiple weeks to brew.
- To maintain a potion for a week requires n (3?) time units, one dose of a special herb sold by the alchemists' guild cheaply but not freely, and one potion-preserver. It also requires the skill "preserve potions N", where f(N) is the number of potions you're preserving that week for some function f (probably f(N) = N, but we might want alchemists to be able to preserve more potions than that). Potion-preservers are a type of equipment not provided freely by the alchemists guild, but relatively easy to buy; you cannot preserve more potions than you own potion-preservers.
- There are a certain number (6?) disciplines of herbalism, with appropriate names - distilling, combining, purifiying, etc. Each of these is a separate levelled skill. Each recipe has a list of levels in disciplines it requires.
- Potions with similar sorts of effects effects usually, but not always, need similar equipment and skills: healing potions usually require crucibles and alembics, and lots of distilling; aggressive combat buffs need lots of separating and a little combining, and usually boiling tubes. This means that if an alchemist specialises in an area they're likely to be able to use more advanced recipes in that area that they find, and that it's harder for one alchemist to be able to do everything off a limited list of skills and equipment just by aquiring enough recipes.
- Each recipe will have some, none or more of tag-words. The standard list is:
- Healing, Poison, Cure, Buff, Bemuse - these are relevant to the effects of the potion.
- Vector - this goes on potions which are non-ingestive, delayed-action, for use on inanimate objects or similar. I'm not quite sure this is a good idea; I'm mentioning it anyhow.
- Simple, Advanced - these speak for themselves. Are you a bread-and butter alchemist or a specialist in the obscure?
- Elemental - things which are partly alchemical and partly magical. A single tagword.
- Sacred to John, Sacred to Justice, etc - potions which are partly alchemical and partly spiritual. A different tagword for each god, although some skills apply to all of them.
Other tagwords (Atlantean, orcish, explosive, etc) may exist, but are not commonly known about. N.B. that it is not possible to make elemental or sacred potions without magic or spirits - the recipes invariably call for you to either know some yourself or to have help from someone who does.
- What I want from the rules on phys-reps and identification
- It should be easy to whip up a potion phys-rep in a hurry. A piece of paper with some notes and a ref's signature is acceptable; something laminated isn't. Arguably even the piece-of-paper approach is too complicated, given how useful it is to be able to run up to a ref before a linear and say "I go to the alchemists' guild and buy 4 2-hit potions and 2 2-hit antivenoms", and how much harder it would be if the refs had to write them out.
- It would be nice if identifying potions did not require a ref in general (although potions which identify as "see a ref" are probably inevitable). It's not an absolute priority, though.
- Not all alchemists should be able to identify all potions on sight. Identifying potions should be a skill it is possible to specialise in, and doing so should be worthwhile. It should be possible to make potions harder to identify than usual, so that to be really confident your drink isn't poisoned you need to get an alchemist who's specialised in identification to some extent to check it.
- I think the best approach is simply for each potion to have a piece of paper in it, folded over, detailing what it does. When in doubt, call a ref and have them come and unfold the paper and answer your discerns. In general, though, keeping track of where potions came from should mean that you don't have to do it terribly often.
Sample recipes:
- Produces: 2-hit limb healing potion
- Ingredients: snake's head, ladies' fingers.
- Equipment: retort
- Time cost: 25
- Disciplines: Distilling 1, Combining 1.
- Tagwords: healing, simple.
- Produces: 2-hit healing potion
- Ingredients: liver of blaspheming Jew, nose of Turk, Tartar's lips.
- Equipment: retort, alembic, gold crucible.
- Time cost: 15
- Disciplines: Distilling 5, Combining 3, Separating 2.
- Tagwords: healing, advanced.
Skills:
I'm setting these up to tally with my proposals at /OperationDeforestationMKII in terms of what you need to buy them; it would be easy to change this is people prefer.
- Identify (tagword) (6 per tagword): You can identify the effects of any potion with the relevant tagword with 30 seconds of examination. Call "recognise (tagword)". "Identify sacred" is a single skill.
- Distillation n (10): one of the six disciplines.
- Combination n (8): ditto;
- Purification n (7): ditto;
- Separating n (6): ditto;
- Synthesis n (5): ditto;
- Titration n (4): ditto;
- Facility with (tagword) n: Lets you make recipes with the relevant tagword for n less than the base cost (N.B.: not "n less than what the cost would otherwise be). This counts as a different skill for each tagword for purposes of double-buying. Costs are as follows
| Tagword | Cost |
| Healing | 12 |
| Simple | 15 |
| Advanced | 8 |
| Poison | 8 |
| Bemusement | 6 |
etc
- Facility with (recipe) n (5): as "facility with tagword", but only works for a single recipe.
- Fast worker n (10, prereq of 30*n XP of alchemy skills): grants 3 extra time units per purchase per week.
- Preserve potion n (10): you can preserve up to f(n) potions per week with the relevant equiment and herbs.
- Efficient preservation (20, prereq of 170 XP of alchemy skills): you can preserve potions for 2 rather than 3 time units a week.
- Reverse engineering n (8): given a potion, you can work out the recipe it was made from in (time cost - facilities) x 15 / reverse engineering skill level, *if* the sum of the number of points you miss out on the relevant disciplines by is less than or equal to your reverse engineering skill level.
- Example: Bob has distillation 6, separation 1, reverse engineering 4, facility with healing 5. He has found a healing potion requiring distillation 3, separation 5 that takes 15 time units to make, but his facility with healing would reduce it to 10. He can reverse engineer it in 10 * 20 / 4 = 50 time units - taking all his time one week and some the next. He will not then be able to make it, but he'll know what it takes.
- If it needed distillation 7, separation 6, or combination 1 to make then he would be unable to reverse engineer it, as the sum of the points he missed it by would be more than his reverse engineering level.
- Research n (8): as reverse engineering, but instead of starting with a potion you give the refs a specification of what you want, and they create the recipe nearest to it; the cost in time units is three times that taken in reverse engineering (i.e. 45 x (cost - facilities) / skill level).
- "Heimlich manouvre" - a skill that lets you physically purge people of effects, at the cost of leaving them injured or weakened, was something that's been previously proposed. Probably requires first aid III or IV as well as a certain amount of alchemy.
- "I've spent the last six years building up an immunity to iocane powder": take half effect (no effect?) from venoms.
Transmutation
- Transmutation works on exactly the same principles. It uses most of the same skills, but the list of disciplines is different, so skill crossover with herbalism isn't all that great.
- Some of the equipment used is the same, some is different.
- Much of the more advanced equipment used in herbalism (and in transmuting) is made by transmuters, making what few there are much in demand.
- What transmutation does is alter the physically properties of materials. It does not, in general allow you to make things which produce limited-use effects - talismans don't feel like alchemy, and "gel dispensers" or "intravenous potions" don't belong outside of sci-fi. There may in some cases be transmuted objects that are destroyed on use, though, like glass daggers or specially-toughened ablative armour. But any transmutative effect is, at bottom, a matter of changing the properties of the material - making it tougher or sharper or more brittle or heavier or lighter or more conductive or better able to hold an edge (or slightly odder things like making it glow when warm, or bounce to a height greater than the one they were dropped from).
- Much of the difficulty in making hard transmutative recipes lies in the equipment, which is harder to obtain than that used in herbalism; often, if you want to make "flangey object X" which you have a recipe, you'll discover that it needs a Perfect Crucible; you'll need to find a recipe for that, which will require a Golden Hippo statue; you'll need to then find a recpie for that, and so on until you get back to a recipe you can find and make already, and then work forwards. The flip side of this (because otherwise doing that would be really dull) is that advanced transmutative equipment often has weird and interesting powers and side effects of its own. Also, it's very rare, and in much demand (by those wizards who know about it, as well as by transmuters), so if you have something especially hard to make you're likely to aquire Plot as a result of it.
/ScrappedIdeas?