Brewing potions
If you are trained in Alchemy, you can brew potions from herbs. Open Alchemy… in the abilities menu and choose a potion. You need no station and no tools, and the flask is free: an alchemist always has bottles. You can brew anywhere.
You need:
- Skill: Alchemy. Witches start with it, a craftsperson may take the Brewster trade, and a commoner may have it as their trade (others: Which skills you start with). No one teaches it.
- Stock: herbs, and for some brews an essence or a flask.
- Place: anywhere, with no tools.
The battle flasks (fire, frost, thunder, smoke, pitch fire, the blasting flask) and three potions (frost, earthing, sea legs) also take an essence. Elementals leave their element’s essence when they die, and other fire creatures sometimes leave an essence of fire (What creatures leave). The flask of fire also takes a flask of oil, and pitch fire a flask of tar. You buy those; they are never brewed. A flask counts only once you know what it is: an unknown potion is no use to a recipe, even if it is in fact oil.
How a brew goes
There is nothing to choose. What the brew takes comes from your pack, and you are asked to confirm: “Brew a potion of healing? It uses 2 sprigs of moonwort, and takes about 20 minutes.”
A brew takes 20 minutes. Anything that would stop a rest stops it; then nothing is spent but the time.
When the time is up you make one check: 2d12, plus your Intelligence modifier, what Alchemy gives (+8 at 100, +12 at 200), and your talents for Intelligence checks, against the recipe’s difficulty.
- Made: you have the potion, and you know it for what it is, even if you had never seen one before: you know your own work. Potions have no grades: a brew either works or it does not.
- Failed: everything the brew took is spent and the brew goes murky. You are left with a murky draught.
- A natural 2 always fails, and worse: you are left with a brewer’s blunder, a gamble to drink.
- A natural 24 always brews the potion.
Every finished brew may earn Alchemy a training mark, whatever came of it.
The recipes
You know a recipe by your Alchemy, never by learning it: each is listed from a skill value, and greyed out “beyond your skill” below it. A recipe you lack something for is greyed out “not enough” of what is short.
The last three columns are the chance that a brew makes the potion, for someone of average Intelligence with no talents (a dash: not yet listed at that value).
Some potions are never brewed. The elixirs, the gamble draughts (the draught of chance and troll’s blood), holy water, and the deeper potions (restoration, quickness, and the like) come only from loot and shops. Oil and tar are bought, never brewed.