Poisons, minus obsequious naming requirements

What is this?

Hopefully, a nice easy way to deal with, create, and resolve poisons.
Also, as much as I love coming up with cool names for all manners of things like herbs, metals, poisons, whatever, I never know whether the inclusion of names in the system itself is good or not. It feels quite proscribed, and I feel bad not using them, and its extra cognitive load for me to remember all the new names, and the old names they secretly referred to.
So, this is an attempt to keep it all nice and simple, and no-prescriptive; just a list of effects and a way to adjudicate how effective they are.
[Inspired very muchly be Wyrdspeak's post on the same. Its much better than this, and I really only did this because I don't like my poisons pre-named! Sorry Meridian, I hope I have expanded on this enough to merit this blantant thievery.}

How does this work?

Each poison has one of the following effects, a delivery method, and a strength, expressed as a number; the higher the number, the more devastating the poison. There is no nice and easy scaling for how much you should set the [x] as due to the various types of effects the poisons can have. I suspect that making X about the same as level would be fair, but like I say, some scale far more aggressively than others.

Delivery Methods

There are generally 3 types of way to inflict these poisons:
Injury: Whether they are slathered on a weapon, or injected through fangs, these go straight to the bloodstream, and inflict their effects at the start of the target's turn. If the wounded part can be cut off before then, the effect is avoided (which of course, may not be possible).
Ingestion: When swallowed, possibly with something else, they have their effects manifest after a small delay, anywhere from 1 minute to 1 hour later. If vomited back up before the effects manifest, it is avoided.
Inhalation: These poisons are breathed in, and once breathed in, the effect manifests at the start of the target's next turn. The poison can be avoided entirely simply by not breathing it in.

Types of Poison Effect

For mundane poisons, roll d8.
For supernatural poisons, roll d12.
For potentially truly strange poisons, roll d20.

1 - Ability Damage: Damage caused by the poison [x] is applied directly to an ability score.
2 - Paralysis: The poison paralyses the target for [x] turns.
3 - Sickness: The poison sickens the target for [x] turns.
4 - Blindness: The poison blinds the target for [x] turns.
5 - Nerve Damage: The target takes damage equal to [x].
6 - Heart Attack: The target must save or die, with a penalty to the save equal to [x].
7 - Hypersensitivity: Increase damage the target takes by [x] each time for 1 minute.
8 - Berserk: The target enters a Barbarian's rage for [x] turns.
9 - Hallucination: The target has an [x] in 6 chance to lose their turn to visions for 1 minute.
10 - Mutating: The target must save or mutate, with a penalty to the save equal to [x].
11 - Nightmare: The target fears the source of the poison for [x] turns.
12 - Arcano-suppression: The target may not cast spells for [x] turns.

These are the whacko ones.
13 - Miniturisation: The target is shrunk to 1/100th of their normal size for [x] turns.
14 - Gravitonic-suppression: The target is unaffected by gravity for [x] turns.
15 - Nega-poison: The target's ability scores are inverted (as in, 20 - score) for [x] rounds.
16 - Doppel-poison: The target spawns a evil-twin with the exact same statistics and abilities. Must make a save or die in [x] turns.
17 - Necronaturalisation: The character is treated as an undead for [x] days.
18 - Disorientation: The player must turn around/turn their screen off for [x] turns.
19 - Ambiguiety: The player may not look at their character sheet for [x] turns. If they try to do anything their character can't do, they miss their turn.
20 -  Numbing: Neither the character nor the player may speak for [x] turns.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Recent Stuff

Cafe Prost and the Little Red Notebook

The Jackalope is here, and requires a SACRIFICE. Anne requested the following gift: The Coffee House - Cafe Prost! It is well known i...

This the gud stuph right hear