Alchemy blends craft, intuition, and wonder. This section explains how characters create potions, salves, and strange mixtures that reflect the world’s wounded beauty.
ALCHEMY
Fantasy Science
Alchemy is not magic, it’s fantasy science. Potions, mixtures, and concoctions behave the way a common person imagines science might work in a fantasy world: plausible, imperfect, and never miraculous but just enough.
Crafting
Crafting potions is automatic in a workshop or laboratory. In the field, you rely on a portable kit, and results are not guaranteed. Crafting time, materials, costs, skill, and tools are hand-waved for the sake of play.
Tools and ingredients exist in the fiction, not in inventory slots.
Theme
Alchemy is freeform. Describe the potion you want to create within the broad theme of "Fantasy Science". Effects should be grounded in chemistry, biology, herbalism, metallurgy, or similar pseudo-scientific ideas.
Limitations
Some ingredients are rare or costly, and mixtures spoil quickly. You cannot hoard potions or outfit allies with an arsenal. Your workshop may store preserved ingredients, but not finished mixtures.
You can maintain two prepared potions at a time. Creating a new one forces you to discard or destabilize an old one.
This keeps alchemy meaningful without complex resource management.
Field-Crafting (Unstable Results)
Crafting in the field with your portable kit is unreliable. When using, consuming, or applying a potion crafted in the field, roll 3d6 + Mind vs TN 12 to determine success.
- Success: The potion works as intended.
- Failure: The potion is flawed, weak, or unreliable.
- Critical Failure: A complication occurs, determined by the fiction or the GM.
When in doubt about crafting time, assume one potion requires at least one hour; a non-trivial amount of time in a potentially dangerous space.
One assistant can meaningfully contribute by adding their mechanical bonuses if they're also an alchemist. They cannot reduce crafting time.
Botched Potions
You cannot know whether a potion works until a full dose is tested (micro-testing is inadequate). It’s possible to accidentally poison someone or make them sick with a bad mixture.
Important: Failures are never catastrophic. They are scientific imperfections, not explosions. This keeps field-crafting interesting without discouraging it.
Download: Character Sheet
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