Foraging & Crafting Poisons & Medicine || D&D&Dael

believe you me humans this one almost killed me hello humans my name is Dale Kingsmill I have a D&D video for you today this is one of those very very exciting times at least it's exciting for me oh well I really ever did I think it's nice when I want or need something for my D&D game and I just make it a little bit more flash than I maybe would have and give it to you as well anyway this is something that I've been thinking about working on for a very long time collecting notes on for a very very long time so I began working on it like last Tuesday thinking that I could get it up for Thursday no no no no Dale how boy did it take much longer than that but it's here it's done what we're talking about today is poisoners and what's the health version of a poisoner someone who makes medicine a folk medicine make up basically I'm sure it is a universal DM experience to have a moment where your players have I don't know kill the venomous lizard of some kind and they go hey can we harvest the poison glands so that we can poison our weapons or to have one particular player who's often a rogue and they're interested in focusing on making their own poisons to use or on the flip side you have people who who take the medicine skill hoping that they can even if they don't have healing magics healing spells they maybe want to be more of a field medic type of the character I've encountered those several times myself and it is it is a super cool thing I would love to play a character who focuses on poison or on medicine but when we get down to it ultimately it just becomes they say hey can I try to find stuff to make a health potion and you go okay make a nature check and they either roll well or they don't you make a decision as to whether they found the stuff and then they roll again using their herbalism kits or then of course you've got the the sort of expanded rules on poisons that sort of give you a bunch of example poisons and talk about the the four groups of poisons you know whether their contact injury ingested or inhaled that's cool but when you get down to potion making or poison making it's always bothered me that it kind of comes down to the the gold cost that kind of decides the things for you I really wanted to make a tool that would enable the the sort of earthy like get out there find the plants you just know the lore of these plants so well basically just just a version in game of that real-life thing that humans have done for as long as we've been around humans have just been incredible at collecting this information about well this plant if you chew on the back it's a painkiller this plant is deadly poison so we called it deadly nightshade you know just passing this information down throughout the generations but let's just get into it let's get into it alright so what I'm gonna need you to do is in the description there is a link to the document that I'm looking at here that I've been working on for the last thousand years oh boy okay looking at a screen now I'm gonna take these off I only need them for five distances right so open up that document look along with me so that you can take a square see what we're talking about okay there's some written out versions of basically just the rules I'm going to say out loud to you now so you can skip that first page and let's move down to the tables it's basically just a tool how this works is when your player says hey I'd like to take a while to look around and see if I can find any you know medicinal herbs that I could use to make a health potion for example what the tables are they're categorized under seasons so four major categories summer autumn winter spring and then within each of those categories the sort of regional environments predominantly based off of the environments that you find in the Raiden jaw plus partly because you know we need to help the Ranger as much as we can and given them some cool bonuses to search for this stuff might be nice there are the exceptions of I changed because I think it's called Arctic usually I changed Arctic to tundra just because you know it's predominantly plant-based so if if we're looking for medicinal plants being on an iceberg isn't as useful as a Tundra which is I mean basically the same anyway and I also added jungle as a separate thing to forests because they are just extremely different environments when it comes to plants and animals and the such holding a laptop why and I also added urban just because some of these are things that like some animals typically like to live near human settlements because I don't know they get to eat people or whatever or humans you know keep bees or humans grow certain herbs stuff like that those are the environments and those are the seasons and basically what you do your player says I would like to search for some medicinal herbs could be used to make a health potion and you say to yourself hmm well let me think where are my party right now they are wandering through grassy hill country in the middle of spring so let me scroll down to spring grassland you say to your player hey make either a nature roll or a survival roll your player says hey Google roll a d20 for me sure you roll a seven oh not brilliant but this player has a plus five so what do they actually get they got and number look guys I know I'm a DM I can't do maths I'm a theater major 7 plus 5 is 12 oh good thing because the lowest thing on this chat is a 12 wow this imaginary player did not roll very well it's what they get for using Google instead for real dice the next thing you do is you say to them how much time would you like to spend looking around for you know medicinal herbs and whatever it was that I said they're looking for they go you know what it's getting dark we're just setting up camp I'm only gonna look around for an hour and you say alright well with that score over 12 you've managed to seek out and find quite a few dandelions this isn't like the best example because I wanted to hit a flower that we didn't all immediately know what it looks like but all right fluffy seed heads right yellow weed flowers jagged leaves etc if it was a plant you didn't know you could look at the description it gives you a brief description of what it looks like and you can say to your player because of your experience with making your own potions you know that dandelions can be turned into a health tonic by extracting the juices from their roots that by the way when it comes to those phrases that I've used in this document cuz again I did make this for me in my game I don't just have health potions of varying sizes for extra flavor I have a health tonic which is just a painkiller basically because remember the loss of hit points isn't always like major wounds so the regaining of hit points doesn't always have to be some magical amazing thing yeah so a minor healing potion is a tonic which is basically just a painkiller that you drink a standard health potion is a salved that you can put over cuts and scrapes and whatever it numbs the area of the wounds it's a little bit more specifically targeted so it adds more hit points a potion of greater healing in my game is a pill I like to think of it as being like the pill that miracle max uses and the Princess Bride and finally I have instead of a potion of superior healing I have basically that bit from Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade where they get the Holy Grail and he's got the water in it and He pours it over his dad's bullet wound and it like smokes up it turns into fog and the wound is gone that's my potion of superior healing that one is magic so anyway that's what those phrases mean when I say tonic that is shorthand for mine a healing potion that's the 2d 4 plus 2 and up in the steps that I I just described it I trust you to work it out so in this example where they only got a total of 12 they would only be able to pick up a dandelion but let's say that they rolled a total of 15 you know that they are looking at only medicinal herbs not poisons so you can skip right over the black root there and and go down to the big blue stem at this point because they're only searching for an hour they can only gather enough of an ingredient to make one dose of whatever they're making with one hour you know what I mean so every hour they get the equivalent of one dose in ingredients so you could describe to them how the dandelion and the big blue sins that they find they know contribute to minor healing and then describe them coming across some bright star like blossoms that that a yellow and that have these weird mild purple fruit on them and they recognize these these are John's wort and John's wort if they are interested they know can be turned into a cell it's much more useful if it is made into an ointment that can be spread on the skin then the player who's spending one hour collecting ingredients for this can make a decision do they want an ingredient that will make one dose of a higher healing potion cell rather than a tonic or maybe they're just collecting spare ingredients that they want to put towards their brewing later on will describe how it gets more complicated in a minute and they can choose whether they want to collect the dandelion or the blue stem or you know and of course if they weren't just looking for medicinal plants if they were just like I want to see what there is around here that I can forage and harvest then you could include the the black root in that collection phase I am sorry by the way it took me a really long time to decide how to color code the medicinal versus poisonous stuff because I was like well video games have conditioned us to think of poison is green and of you know health potions as red but then when you only have red and green red is bad and green is good eventually I just went with video games I've been playing a lot of Dragon Age but the thing that I'm actually sorry about is I'm sorry to anyone out there who is red-green color blind I'm sorry I should have tested this on my dad first so that is the harvesting phase as an example and that is it is predominantly plant-based because plants sort of the the part of the natural world that has so much variation in terms of poisons toxins and sort of medicinal effects but I've got other stuff in here too there's a lot of animals there's a lot of fungi I never know whether to call them plants or not and there's even some mineral content so then that's how a player can harvest ingredients for use in potion or poison making and how you use the table that is the biggest part of this tool now in terms of brewing things when brewing medicine or poison you're making a DC 15 intelligence check while using a poisonous kit or a herbalism kit I think I said those the wrong way around but match them to the right one now that's DC 15 that's quite a high starting point I mean it's not super high you know but it can be lowered it takes one hour of focused attention to create one effective dose of a poison or a medicine because quite frankly the rules is written saying that it could take like up to 300 days to make one potion is ridiculous why would anyone try to make a potion if it was going to take them 300 days one effective dose takes one hour that's a solid investment when it has to come in between adventuring and resting and all these things certainly on their down days that they'd have a solid amount of time to make a solid amount of things and there are limits there as well we'll get to it that's the standard that's DC 15 one hour with one hours worth of charging of ingredients but for every additional hour that you take to prepare this medicine or this poison but DC is lowered by one plus you'll note while going through the tables that it has the form column which talks about you know tonic selves contact poison inhalation poison there's also the effect column which tells you the specific effect of that medicine or that poison if you have collected multiple sets of ingredients with the same effect so say you collected the what was it it was blue something blue grass blue joint something if you'd collected that as well as the dandelions because they both have the same effect which was to D four plus two healing you would be able to combine those in the making of one dose and again bring the DC down by one point so for example if you did two hours foraging and you brought back enough for one dose of dandelions and enough for one dose of blue whatever it was and then you decided to take an extra hour in the brewing of the potion the DC goes from 15 down to 14 then if you decide to use both of those doses worth of ingredients to make one dose it comes down to 13 it comes down again so for every additional hour it comes down one for every additional ingredient that has the same effect it comes down another one so then as well there's an extra choice in there with the idea of like I could make two separate minor healing potions with the dandelions and the blue joint or I could make one minor healing potion but it will be a more guaranteed success during the creation process throwing poisons that is a extra caveat if you're brewing a poison those same rules apply additional hour brings the DC down by one and if you add more ingredients with the same effect brings it down by one for every full dose is worth of ingredients again but it's important to note that when it comes to poisons the fewer ingredients you use the more potent the poison so for every DC that you lose by adding an additional ingredient to make it easier the constitution's save DC for an enemy that is subjected to the poison also goes down so if you take one hour but two ingredients to make one dose of poison the DC goes from a Constitution save needing to reach 15 to 14 so you see what I'm talking about also worthwhile noting that I have tweaked herbalism and poisonous kits so that the care the poisonous kick comes up like twice in that core book it is barely there I've tweaked those kits a little bit so that they each only have five vials in them so they each only contain five vials just to limit it so that you know someone can't make a thousand million poisons using just what's in there poisoners kit if they want to make more they're going to have to purchase flasks separately and be able to secure them in their backpack separately basically totalism kit is used for making medicines poisonous kit used for making toxins I've made up a separate kit called the apothecaries kit that a player could purchase in order to be able to make both medicines and toxins if they are interested in doing such at the moment I have it that you have to be proficient in both a herbalism kit and a poisonous kit in order to make both those things with the apothecary kit like if if you're only proficient in a herbalism kit then you could only make medicines with an apothecary's kit but if you're proficient in both then you can make both with it and there's room in it for eight vials so I don't know whether anyone will think that's worthwhile but I put it in there anyway plus I made up an available feat just to make it a little bit more like you know you can grow with it as a tool with the apothecary feet you can use half as many ingredients if you take the full time to make a dose of medicine or poison or you can take half the time if you're using the full ingredients hautboy alright hopefully there's nothing out on explaining really I wanted this to be a useful narrative tool that cuts the DMS time down you don't have to have the greatest imagination on the planet to be able to use this the idea was that someone could spring on you that while they're traveling they want to look for herbes and you can give them a roll and you have you know different names for things you have descriptions of what they look like you can flesh it out a little bit more so that it feels like they're actually doing something as their character in the world rather than just rolling a dice at a table and getting like a note on their equipment list you know what I mean so yes hopefully you find purpose in this it's something I've wanted to have access to for a long time so I thought why the hell not make it and why the hell not make it in a way that will be very easy to reference on the fly when and if someone decides to go looking for medicinal whatsit and everything in there by the way everything in these tables is either proven to have medicinal effect or poisonous effect or else I've based it on folklore or something like that almost all the names given for these plants are actual names that people use for these plants here and there I tweaked them or you know changed them from being sub Mormon tea it was a useful one that's in there but I had to change its name because it's D&D there are no moments you know a statement for the stupid none of you are that I'm sure but just in case one wanders in and watches this hey don't go eating any of these plants just because my D&D thing said that they were medicinal don't do it I had a lot of fun with it I know far too much about various plants and rocks and animals right now and how poisons work and how medicines work super cool fun times but I'm glad it's done I really hope I haven't forgotten anything apart from that I do believe that's it I'm done email this to your grandma and I will see you some other time son yeah [Music] [Music] it will never get less sweaty to film

Channel: MonarchsFactory

Views: 89,246

Rating: 4.9757156 out of 5

Keywords: MonarchsFactory, Dael Kingsmill, Geek & Sundry, Geek & Sundry Vlogs, Geek and Sundry, Geek and Sundry Vlogs, Geek, nerd, australian, australia, vlogger, Greek mythology, myths, mythology, Dael, Kingsmill, Dale, Dale Kingsmill, story, storyteller, story teller, story time, funny, d&d, dungeons and dragons, dnd, poison, medicine, healing, potions, craft, homebrew, tool, tips, 5e

Id: ka_dPgJGzPw

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AFKennedy]

This system sounds WAY more fun than what I’ve tried to come up with on the fly when my PCs are playing characters that are big into the crafting/foraging/potions/poisons side of things. And good to see Dael getting posted here!

[u/DizzyCrabb]

I'm impressed by how much work was put into this mechanic, which is often an afterthought. Between this and her rules on animal companions I get the jist of what true dedication to the craft is. Thanks Dael, you're a gift to the community!

[u/RoyMBar]

Now that Matt has his own company, he should probably hire Dael to work for MCDM and incorporate her work into a book or even make a Big Book of Alternative Rules and put some of his rules and hers into a single book.

I bet there are some people out there that would buy it.

[u/Varris_Tulek]

This is really neat and I'm totally gonna use it. It does however...kinda seem like it needs a small bit of balancing. If I know my players they will take hours and hours stockpiling poisons and health potions no matter the cost. One of them indicates it gives a level of exhaustion per round? Others say "Death in X minutes/hours"? I get that they're cool for gameplay, but they seem a bit robust....

Also, am I missing it or did she not mention durations for the poisons?

[u/blaek_]

I made a colorblind version for Deuteranomaly afflicted individuals: https://www.gmbinder.com/share/-L_QKEK7SbkqiW4ixd2r

[u/Dalfamurni]

My wife and I have been using a VERY similar system for a year now. She made it, and I made an injury system which is tied into ours (The main differences are in how it's tied in together). We plan to eventually release it on DM's Guild, because we really want to be able to make a living doing what we love. I doubt it'll do very well now that her's came out, but I really hope no one thinks we straight up copied her.

It's very similar, but purely by coincidence. :/

We may need to go back to the drawing board on ours now, really.

[u/Spiderfuzz]

This is pretty cool. I'm working on my own foraging and survival rules and I might modifiy some of these ideas!

[u/GreysMatterH]

I love the way she approaches things, she's always got a unique take on things - this is a hobby that can always use fresh ideas.

[u/blaek_]

I added these solutions for my own usage of these rules:

Usage

A character may be devious enough to poison a targets food or drink, but many poisons may be applied to blades, arrows, or bolts.

Creatures subjected to poisons made this way must succeed on a Constitution Saving Throw of a DC equal to that used in the crafting proccess, +1 for each additional hour spent crafting the poison.

Upon a success, the creature takes half of any damage and ignores all other properties.

On a failure, the creature is afflicted by the properties of the poision, and must make additional Saving Throws at the end of each turn.

Once opened, a poison retains potency for 1 hour.

and

Shelf Life

Potions and poisons made this way are potent for 1d4 + 4 days.

All in all, I'm a huge fan of this homebrew and I'm excited to start using it at my table. I just wanted to round out some edges for my own satisfaction, thought I might as well share the feedback :D