Jacob/WhatAlchemyCanDo

Lots of people are putting forward ideas for alchemy systems. At this stage I'm not going to think about the "back-end" of the system - what the rules are, how it breaks down into skills, how to balance it, and so on. This page is just a big list of everything alchemy might be able to do - all the things that could go in a "front-end". Some of it is copied from other people, some of it is my own.

Please add anything you can think of.

Things herbalism could do:

Effects on a person who drinks a potion.

Effects on a person by something smeared on blade.

Effects on a person by contact poison or gel.

Identify potions

Identify potion components

Find potion components

Research/invent new potions

Make potions in downtime

Make potions in uptime

Increasing the effect of a potion if you deliver it personally.

Potions delivered intravenously? Please? It's a very believable way of increasing the effect or allowing alchemists to make potions above their level (they can brew something with the correct effect, it just can't be taken orally). --Valtiel

Oh, this is a cool idea. --R

I have a couple of issues with this. One is that injections feel a bit too high-tech for TT, the other is that physrepping them safely (i.e. without syringes) would be hard). Something with an analogous effect would be cool, but I'm not sure about "intravenously". --Jacob

Injections don't feel high-tech at all, at least not to me. I can think of lots of ways to prepare a larp-safe syringe - the most obvious one being a plastic syringe without the needle, sprayed with metallic paint, and with a narrow plastic (or any other material, really) rod affixed to the end to look like a needle. Obviously it couldn't be used as a weapon, but it's safe enough to administer to a willing or incapacitated subject. I've also got an old metal ear syringe that I'd be willing to lend to someone on a per-interactive basis. --Valtiel

Healing potions

Potions that let you regenerate hits continuously

Regeneration of limbs

Bring back the dead. This should be even rarer than spiritual resurrection, so it won't help us balance the class much, but the Elixir Vitae could be a valid alchemical goal.

TT equivalent of the Philosopher's Stone? I kind of like this one, it gives all the alchemists a nice obvious motivation, as well as a reason to either work together (for the good of humanity) or be fiercely independant (because you want all the profits) --Valtiel

''I'd like it to be more like an alchemical "Mathemagic" (inadvisable, dangerous, likely never have a system) rather than an alchemical "8th-level miracle" (powerful, useful, system included, yours by right). --R

Venoms which do damage to the location they wound

Like a one-shot unnatural damage bonus? Nothing as deadly as Venoms are at the moment, please, I dislike instakills on principle. --Valtiel

Agree. Linear damage increase, say 1-2-3-4, would put it on a par with what you could do with magic. --R

Venoms which deliver damage to the torso

Agree that it's in flavour, dislike for reasons of having an attack cause damage to two locations simultaneously. --R

Venoms which deliver "through" damage.

The call would be something like "single triple through", which is horrible. --Valtiel

More like "quad through", I think. Taking an example from magic buffs, which are not 'single red single' but 'red double'. --R

Converting all the damage to Through damage is horrible. Natural triple plus a relatively cheap Single-through damage potion would give you Quad Through by weapon which is a call I don't want to hear very often. Also, see the comment about "converting damage to Through" below, in the "things herbalism should not be able to do" section. --Valtiel

Poisons which have long-term odd effects done by the refs telling people stuff, a la Maelstrom

Cannot use DAC

Weakness

Frailty

Hallucinations (although these are a bit naff unless phys-repped, I think).

Since we already have a miracle which causes hallucinations, there's no real argument against letting a potion do it as well. --Valtiel

Etc, etc, etc - if the refs have time to tell you about it, it can do anything.

If we want this to work on blade venoms, we need a call for "You just got poisoned, a ref will get back to you about what it does", because taking Inflict calls correctly in a fight is hard. --Valtiel

I strongly suspect the finished system will recycle the VENOM N call to mean exactly that, with the number giving the level. --NT

If we have levelled venoms, yes. We don't have to. --R

Race-specific poisons: everyone eats the omlette, and only the pyrokin drops dead.

'' I don't like, though mostly because it is a defined Thing in the system that you can't do it at the moment. But partly because it *would* be really quite difficult to do- this berry EATS YOUR NERVES and the races are fairly similar once you've got their clothes (and skin) off, as it were. (though a ritualled up elemental-elf-only poison would be doable, I guess...)

Antivenoms

Antidotes for specific other potions

Antidotes to classes of potions

Purgatives that antidote anything - But not in a very pleasent way --Valtiel

Preemptive antidotes which protect you from potions.

People have wanted this for ages, let's give it them. --R

I like the effect, but not calling it an "antidote" - I suggest "vaccine" instead. --Jacob

"vaccine" will make me cringe. Please, no. "Inoculation"? No, that's almost as bad. Um. Argh. --Pufferfish

Antitoxin? Preventative? Counteractant? Serum?

Serum I like. Question: will it be more fun to make taking a serum after you've taken the effect work as an antivenom, or to make the before-hand-only? I'm inclined to think the latter, but I'm far from certain. --Jacob

A skill that lets you counter a potion or poison without needing an antivenom/antidote, either potion-specific or not (like the heimlich manouver, only better). Might also need First Aid n as a prerequisite.

Probably causes damage or temporary weakness due to bloodletting, for the sake of balance with antidote potions. --Valtiel

More bloodletting! Always good. --NT

I like this idea. A series of treatment methodologies to purge various things - cool. --R

A series of skills that make you immune to various subsets of potions, permantently.

A series of skills, as the above, but with the prerequisite "Persuade someone with alchemy skill Y to do XYZ, and keep doing it", rather than "possess alchemy skill Z", and an alchemy skill or skills Y to go with them. This is probably a bad idea for a variety of reasons, but I put it forward just because it feels wrong that the person who needs the alchemy skill is the one doing the immunisation rather than the one receiving it.

Potions to drive people into a berserk rage with no system effect.

Potions to drive people into a berserk rage, granting them a damage grade.

Rather call it "potion of strength"... --R

Potion of stupour - you cannot fight, (and perhaps cannot cast, shout, run etc).

Potions to induce specific behaviours - anger, love, fear etc perhaps. OTOH, I think many of these are unfun, silly, would drive people OOC, and wouldn't be used much. Possibly let them be researched but not standard, as a compromise is people really want them?

The mind control miracles got massively changed for a very good reason. --Valtiel

Love potion possibly bad; Viagra potion, er, useless but more the kind of thing I'm imagining alchemy as capable of. --R

Potions of speed that grant DAC

Potions of strength that grant a damage grade

Potions of fortitude that grant damage resistance.

All good, but you need to make sure they are correctly balanced and durationed. --R

No I don't, I just have to say "let there be DAC potions" and a dozen people will leap in and argue vociferously about how to balance it for months on end. :-) More seriously, the idea of this page is to put as many things in for consideration as possible, not to start ruling the bad ones out. --Jacob

Freeze

Silence

A potion can't stop you from clapping or hitting something loudly, which is what the Silence call does at the moment. --Valtiel

No it doesn't, we decided the other way in the end. --Jacob

Blindness

Drop, followed by X

Strikedown lots (your legs don't support you).

Disarm lots (your arms don't work).

There are safety issues with Disarm N. It encourages people to use the Brawling skill, which I don't think we want. If we really want durational disarms, we could always modify the Disarm call to say that you can't use Brawling while under a Disarm N effect? --Valtiel

Strikedown *and* disarm - those two effects feel as though they make more sense together than separately as potions.

Are we talking about 'by blade', here? I can't see another useful way of applying them, but we're stretching the bounds of reality if we're granting Disarm by weapon (traditionally callable by striking someone's weapon) to Alchemy. --R

Either, potentially. A "disarm 300, strikedown 300" potion slipped into someone's drink would be a good way of taking them out; I don't see that alchemical disarm by blow requiring the blow to land even though other types work if you hit the weapon is a problem, because only the user needs to know about it. But to be honest, when I suggested it I hadn't even thought about that. --Jacob

Weakness

Frailty

Temporarily negate weakness

Temporarily negate frailty

Potions with either of these effects should be brewed specially for each specific case of weakness/frailty, because there are lots of things that cause them and one potion wouldn't cure all of them. I like the idea on principle. --Valtiel

I don't think there are many forms of weakness and frailty that wouldn't be fixed by lots of stimulants and painkillers. Of course, there'd be nasty after-effects... --NT

I like the idea of these. --R

Truth potions

Only at Ridiculously High Level, please. I think we learned why Compel Truth is a bad thing. --Valtiel

Or with side-effects roughly equivalent to torturing the victim to death. Compel Truth is mainly bad, I think, because it lets people prove their innocence, or investigate people who they don't know dun it. --NT

I kinda like the side-effects route - as long as you can't then make it into a blade venom or ingestive poison more effective than the normal. --R

Potions of weak will, that duplicate the "mesmerise" miracle.

Immunity to strikedown and/or disarm (potion of reflexes)

Potions shouldn't grant immunity to magic or spirit effects unless they're made with magically or spiritually empowered components, and there are lots of magic/spirit Strikedown or Disarm effects which reflexes wouldn't protect you against. --Valtiel

Immunity to blindness (potion of hearing, or night vision, or other justification).

Blindfighting, yes. Negate Blindness no, see above. --Valtiel

Cures for diseases.

Addictive potions, for manipulating people.

Really slow-acting but fatal venoms or poisons, to which the antidote is hard to find, so that you can then give them to people and offer them the antidote to make them do things (although this runs afoul of spiritual curing).

Cures for rockrose.

And other addictive stuff. --NT

And drugs. --R

Hollow teeth, so you can carry a potion/poison with you and have it kick in whenever you want.

Delayed-action delivery (gelatine capsules or something) might be a better way of doing the slow-acting poison trick above.

I like this one --Valtiel

Me too. --R

"Potions" for use on unliving things. Undead and golems don't have metabolisms, but there are probably chemicals and herbs that do interesting things to them.

Can't see why. Undead are almost entirely unaffected by any effect on their bodies (those that have them), and golems have no digestive system. --R

True, you couldn't hurt incorporeal undead. Surely a monster made of stone, probably all of one sort, is a walking invitation to nasty chemical reactions, though? Or not - chemistry was never my strong point... --Jacob''

A monster made of stone is only slightly more vulnerable to acid than any normal human, and chemical reactions won't help because they're not chain reactions and can't target a specific part of the thing, so you'd need a vat of chemicals as large as the golem. --Valtiel

More to the point, most monsters made of stone are statues animated by some summoned magical beastie and so we have the undead problem again in that they don't care if their body's feeling a bit peaky. Stone's actually rather inert - acid will dissolve carbonates, but anything that's going to make a short-timescale difference to stone is going to make a hell of a difference to, for example, flesh. If we had potassium elementals I'd agree with you, but stone is kinda hard and rocky. --R

Potions of scent change or no scent, for fooling "rec scent". Probably wouldn't get used, though.

I think it would. --R

Potions of apparent race change - makes your skin change colour, your ears grow/shrink, your beard grow etc. Doesn't change your facial features, though, so it makes you look like "you, but an elf". Can be used in combination with disguise.

Hmm, Disguise II in a can available to level 0 characters with money? No. --R

No, very specifically not disguise II - you're still recognisably you. The uses would be a) combine with a Disguise skill to appear as a different race (so "part of the upgrade from DI to DII in a can, but not the useful bits about being harder to detect), and b) take it before talking to someone who doesn't know you, to present yourself as a member of a different race. But *not* concealing your identity.

I like the idea but physrepping it is a bastard. If, for example, Diane took one of these potions and applied prerequisite black Snaz, people would think "Hey, Thomas has a new character" rather than "That Drow looks a hell of a lot like Diane". --Valtiel

Invisible inks, for conveying secret messages.

This feels as much like transmutation as herbalism to me - possibly it could be either or both? -- Jacob

Some things that don't feel like herbalism to me:

Converting damage to "through": a venom might splash through armour, but it wouldn't make the blade go through it.

Acid which makes a thin path through the armour for the blade to go? --ChessyPig

Would destroy the armour, even if it were remotely realistic. --Valtiel

Armour: a potion might make you more resistant, but it wouldn't grant ablative armour.

I'm not sure why 'hardened skin' (through some kind of salve) wouldn't act in entirely the same way as, say, leather armour. --ChessyPig

Because when it wears off and your skin stops being hardened, you've still got all the holes in it. --Jacob

But your spleen doesn't have any holes in it. A few cuts and scrapes are to be expected (IC!) from a fight, I think, even if you don't take any mechanical damage. --NT

Halt: shaking wouldn't remove the effect of a potion

"Halt 60 every minute for five minutes" sounds like a reasonable 'confusion' effect to me. Someone can snap you out of it briefly, but you are still confused and go back to being confused after a while. --ChessyPig

I don't like potions causing Halt either. Freeze, yes. --Valtiel

Short disarms, strikedowns (and to a lesser extent other short "effect" calls) - something that major wouldn't wear off fast, I think.

Actually, I don't see any reason not to have a potion which very briefly disrupts someone's balance, but they get used to it quickly. --Valtiel

Anything interacting with the supernatural, unless you're using either supernatural skills or supernatural components. So probably not immunity to freeze, halt, or silence, or negates. Repel is a borderline case.

There are far too many different ways of causing Repel for a potion to counteract them all. --Valtiel

I consider Alchemy to be supernatural. It can completely heal a wound, compel the truth, and make someone fall in love. Just because it's obtained by mortal skill applied to herbs, rather than petitioning gods or messing with the elements, doesn't mean it can't be supernatural. Moreover, Magic and Spirit can affect each other to some degree, and are defined as being almost completely opposite each other; Alchemy should surely be able to affect either. --NT

I disagree with that - I think alchemy very specifically shouldn't be supernatural, because a) we already have two forms of supernatural, which is arguably one too many, and b) it ought to be possible to do interesting non-supernatural stuff, and we *don't* want Science; alchemy gives a convenient plug to that gap. Magic and spirit can both interact with alchemy, but it shouldn't be able to interact with them, in the same way that a ritual can blow something up but an explosion won't be magical.--Jacob

Sleep is awkward. It's a very natural effect, but the system doesn't cover it. "Drop" is probably the closest we'll get.

The system does cover it. "Inflict 1: You are now asleep, you may wake up as normal", "Inflict 2: You are now asleep, you can't be woken except by damage for five minutes, thereafter you can wake up as normal"... --ChessyPig

Nothing wrong with Drop. --Valtiel

Well, unless they could be woken by damage and got horribly murderated while they were Dropped because they hadn't been told that yet. --NT

'' The current sleeping potions have an Absolutely Unwakeable period- I see no reason for this to be changed, and therefore Drop is fine. --Pufferfish

Ranged, mass etc effects. If you want to use a potion on someone, you need to get it into their system.

Grenades and throwing acids! --ChessyPig

A mass effect could be caused by a vapourising potion, affecting anyone caught in the vapour cloud. The alchemist would need to take an antidote beforehand to avoid the effect herself. I don't see why potions shouldn't be usable as throwing weapons so long as we have some safe physreps and people know that you can't pick up the bottle and throw it back, because it's meant to break on impact. However, potions should never grant a Target call because that's just stupid.

I really dislike the idea of throwing potions. Eeech, safety. Mass calls would work, especially if you *did* have to take the call yourself as well... --Pufferfish

I don't see throwing potions being worse than throwing knives for safety. --NT

Note "safe physreps". --Valtiel

I dislike these because it reduces the differentiation between alchemy and casting. I think that alchemy will be more fun if it is not given easy ways round the problem of getting something into someone's system, and balanced accordingly, than if we have to up the cost of each potion to take account of the possibility of someone being affected by it without drinking or being it. Possibly some specific "mass effect" potions, but I'm not sure even about that, and there should not be a way to make Joe Random Effect work on someone except via ingestion or blade alchemically. --Jacob

Antivenoms for which timing is important. I'm specifically thinking of 'this has to be administered at the same time that the poisoning took place, next week' as this fits in well with our play schedule :).

Mundane Useful Stuff. I'm thinking contraceptives, abortifacants, happy pills, the right thing to put in a bottle and shut up your colicky baby, virility enhancers, Snake Oil for your 'general wellbeing' (effect: mildly addictive), rat poison, industrial acids for etching pretty patterns on things, dyes, cleaning products, flavour enhancers...

Things Transmutation could do:

Steel's Law of Transmutation I don't think that transmuting should be doing anything that doesn't feel like changing the physical properties (not the shape, in general) of a material, to some other set of properties a mundane material could feasibly have (although they needn't be those of an existing mundane material.

Hmm. Should one be able to create devices and contraptions beyond the ken of non-transmutational engineering? If not there are many fewer things one can do with this. --R

My first answer - although not one with much deep thought behind it as yet - is "not standardly". Devices and contraptions are something that should be having system effects, I think - TT is not a technological setting, but a) transmuters will have lots of the relevant knowledge (although that knowledge isn't transmutation in itself) and b) they'll be able to make materials with the relevant properties - a transmuter can make a spring-powered gizmo other people can't because they can make steel which bends further before it breaks, and is springier. But in general I think devices and contraptions are something that should be treated along the same lines a rituals - risky, unreliable, and not something you use in the field. This *does* reduce the number of things you can do with transmutation; that's deliberate - without this reduction, the set of things you can do with it is "everything", given that there's no effect I couldn't describe a pseudotechnological gizmo to produce; with it it's a manageable sized set of effects. --Jacob

+1 natural or unnatural damage next blow or next n blows on a weapon.

+1 damage all shots on a bow (+1 damage at all times on a melee weapon is broken, +1 damage at all times on a bow is just really powerful).

+n points of value to a piece of armour, not counting against the wearer's limit, unreparable.

Repair the above, in uptime.

Make armour count as less than its normal number of points for purposes of restrictions.

Make a normal-looking item of clothing count as armour.

Make a weapon deal "through" damage.

Make armour immune to "through" damage.

This doesn't really work as some Through damage is metaphysical damage-to-your-soul and so you would need special spirit-blocking armour which would only really be available if you had a spiritual component, and some Through damage is 'it doesn't make any sense for your armour to protect you'. --ChessyPig

Er, no, no it isn't, it has been repeatedly and specifically defined to me by three different ref teams that spirit damage *is* always physical, but tends to be internal bleeding and so on. --Pufferfish

Armour immune to "through" but not "spirit through" ("magic through" could go either way), conceivably? It's really complicated, but as it's an opt-in effect you can just choose not to wear that doesn't matter too much. That said, I wouldn't have a problem with special armour applying against unranged spirit through damage - "the blow didn't get near your spirit to discharge" or some such - and ranged spirit damage is rare enough that I think "immune to through" wouldn't be a bad thing. --Jacob

No, not the damage matrix! We already killed it, do we have to burn the corpse and scatter the ashes to the four winds too? I don't see why the Cunning Treatment of armour can't include measures to trick magical and spiritual effects into harming the armour rather than the wearer. Rat's blood and samples of the elements spring to mind. Or possibly maggots. Maggots are always good as spiritual chaff. --NT

Make something cheap into something valuable.

Make something cheap into something that appears valuable. This is much more fun than the above, because it leads to plot, and not just cash.

Making weapons and armour out of stuff other than metal without penalties.

I wholeheartedly approve of this one. --Valtiel

Prepare a statue for animation as a golem by a ritual or rite.

Branding a tatoo on to someone, like the level 1 blessing and cursing miracles.

Smoke bombs of mass blindess? OTOH, I like alchemy not having ranged/mass/easy to deliver effects. --Jacob

Enhanced evaluate - tells you something about what something is; some objects are immune to normal evaluate, gives a more accurate answer, etc/

Allows purchase of incomes skills IV and perhaps V?

Ways alchemy could interact with other skill trees:

Wildnerness characters can find components for potions

Some rituals could require alchemical ingredients. Some rites could use them as sacraments (e.g. potions of Strength for Mallan, catnip for Bast, etc).

Alchemy could be relevant to the "forgery" and "detect forgery" skills.

Wilderfuge is up for a rewrite. We can put in more skills interacting with alchemy, if we want to.

There could be healing skills that require both First Aid n and some Alchemy as prerequisites. I'm not sure what these could be, though - FA already gets close to the boundaries of believable physical healing, I think.

Magic + alchemy = magic potions (and loads and loads of other stuff). A whole new vista of options. I would strongly encourage the system catering for this more than it currently does (i.e. not at all), both in terms of options and of power level available.

I like the idea of Magic interacting in a beneficial way with Alchemy (Alchemical components for rituals, magical components for really special potions), but should Spirit and Alchemy interact at all? We already have a Purge Poison miracle, but should Alchemy be able to affect Spirit effects? --Valtiel

My view, FWIW, is that alchemy shouldn't be able to interact with spirit, but that spirit should be able to act with alchemy, although it wouldn't do so often. --Jacob

Additional things alchemists can do:

Forensics - spend N minutes (probably 5 or 10) roleplaying carefully searching an area up to the size of a room (say, the main room of the Wessex Arms), now you know who was here over the past however-long (probably 'week'). Higher levels could give you more timing information and a little tracking information (which door they left by), more information on what exactly they were doing there, longer durations into the past, what they were carrying, things about people covering up their activities etc. Like track, would also cover 'removing forensic evidence'.

Ooh. Shiny. I'm not sure that it really fits into alchemy, though. Forensics with dead bodies might (and would be fun)- or rather, if you have high-level First Aid and some alchemical goodies you could get more out of a body than you could with only one of the two. --Pufferfish

Research - alchemists can 'go away and look up' things in 5-10 (or however long it takes the ref to sort it out) minutes in an interactive instead of having to wait for downtime. Obviously this is somewhat unreliable (looking things up in a hurry might mean you get it wrong or it might be something you can't get in a hurry, i.e. the ref might not know. Higher levels might give you the chance to sit and think for a while (i.e. consult a ref) and 'remember' relevant information. This is basically Knowledge (Arcana) (as opposed to the wilderness lore that Wilderness characters get, which is Knowledge (Nature)).

I like in principle. I'm not sure I'd want to do that to the refs in the middle of an interactive. --Pufferfish

I think having a system for research in uptime is a mistake, and if there were one then it wouldn't make sense to make alchemists better at it than wizards, who don't need any more abilities. By all means say "I'm an alchemist, I go and see if the guild library has anything on this" to a ref, but I don't think we want to formalise it, if only because of ref-time being a finite resource. --Jacob

Reverse engineering - "I have a foo. What would happen if I ate it?" "I don't know, but give me a small sample and a couple of days in my lab and I might be able to tell you." At first would probably destroy a dose figuring it out, at higher levels may preserve it all. A related but similar concept would be the ability to seperate alchemical products into their component parts, which is good if the Holy Item of Great Importance has been ground up and used in someone's Uber-Potion Of Doom which has been liberated from their hideout in the woods in a linear, and more prosaically if you suddenly want the herbs for something else (say, a specific antivenom).

You can already do this. Some people might prefer a defined mechanic for it. I'm not sure if providing one (except, perhaps, for taking a potion apart and reusing bits) would actually reduce ref time. --Pufferfish

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To reiterate: please add comments and ideas to this page! --Jacob