Black was the Root, but Milky White the Flower (Pharmakeia for M&M)

The people have been clamoring (clamoring!) for more overwrought Mazes and Minotaurs houserules. And who am I to deny them? Indeed, who am I?

When you want to make a potion, describe the effect you want to produce and add ingredients. There are two kinds of ingredients, Animal and Vegetable. Animal ingredients can be obtained from slain creatures, so long as the creature has things like blood and flesh. Tiny, Small, and Medium creatures provide 1 ingredient, Large creatures provide 2, and Gigantic creatures provide 3. Animal ingredients may produce effects that relate to the animal they came from: An eagle may give eyesight or flight, a bull may give strength or horns or rage at the color red, obvious stuff. Animal ingredients are not rations, they are stuff like blood or powdered horn or eyeballs.

Vegetable ingredients may be either found or bought, but the only plants useful for Pharmakeia are the Six Sovereigns:

1. Mystic Mandrake, whose form is that of both man and woman. The one who pulls a Mystic Mandrake from the earth* must make a Mystic Fortitude save or lose (temporarily) 1d2 of a random basic attribute, except luck. Roll 1d6 to see which attribute is affected, but if you roll luck there is no effect. The effects of Mystic Mandrake are described below.
2. Scorching Cinnamon, whose element is Fire, which can cause fevers and alleviate sorrow.
3. Limpid Lotos, whose element is Water, which can dampen pain and produce euphoria.
4. Fuming Frankincense, whose element is Air, which can make one feel light-limbed or light-headed.
5. Earthly Amaranth, whose element is Earth, which can make the limbs strong but static.
6. Holy Moly, whose element is Aether. The one who pulls a Holy Moly from the earth* must make a Mystic Fortitude save or lose 1d2 Luck. The effects of Holy Moly are described below.

*This is exact wording that you should exploit

In each locale, only one of the Six Sovereigns grows, and can be found with a Hunting roll. The MM may either rolls or choose which one makes sense. A city state may sell 0-5 of them, depending on its size and prosperity (1 for small, 2 for medium, 3 for large, ±1 for poor/rich, +1 for Magocracy).

Four of the Six Sovereigns have a basic element associated with them, and can produce effects relating to that element (e.g. water-breathing for the Limpid Lotos). All potions with one of these elements give an extra spell point when imbibed by an elementalist who uses that element, and take a spell point away from an elementalist who uses the opposite element. Using two ingredients with opposite elements negates this effect.

To turn the ingredients into a potion requires a source of water, a source of fire, a fire-proof and water-proof container like a pot or a beaker, and 10 minutes. The process is mostly just boiling the ingredients. What makes it a potion instead of just soup is the divine names and secret words you speak into the brew.

For each ingredient that you use, state how it is contributing to the overall effect, and roll a d10+10, and check if the result is below your luck score and your wits score. If it is below both, that ingredient functions in the potion as you described. If it is below one but not both, that ingredient functions in the potion but produces a side-effect. If the roll is below neither score, that ingredient does not function or contribute to the potion. A roll of 10 (or, 0) is always a failure in this way, even if your scores are above 20.

Example: Boops has a luck score of 17, and a wits of 12. He rolls a 1d10+10. If he rolls a 1, his result is 11 and is below both, meaning the ingredient functions perfectly. If he rolls a 2-6, it is below his luck but not his wits, and it functions with a side-effect. If he rolls 7 or more, it does not function at all.

If the MM is unsure of the effects of each individual ingredient on the main effect of the potion, just assume a numerical increase: there's an extra dose, or it lasts twice as long, or its effect is twice as strong, etc. Thus, if an ingredient does not function, the result can be simply determined. However, its more fun if you can figure out what happens if your Limpid Lotos functions but your Gill of Fish does not in your potion of water-breathing.

Potion effects can, at minimum, reproduce the effect of a spell using one Power-point per ingredient. For instance, you can get a +2 to a score similar to a Divine Blessing. However, just as making a potion is more chaotic than normal spells, potions can also break the rules of normal spells. A two ingredient "blessing" potion can, for instance, give a temporary +4 to a stat, where using Divine Blessing with 2 Power-points can only give +2 to two different stats.

If an ingredient has a side effect, the MM should use whatever is funny and makes sense, write it down, and not tell anyone until they drink it. If the MM is unsure, two tables are provided below. For all diseases and mutations, they last for the duration of the potion, and then the character makes either a Physical Vigor or Mystic Fortitude save (their choice), otherwise it sticks around until cured. For Benefits, roll a d20 + luck modifier. If it is over 20, it sticks around.

Animal Side-Effects (d6)

1. Disease. A purely negative effect, like coughing up feathers or blindness.
2. Mutation, limbs. Your legs become a snake tail, or your arms become wings or some-such.
3. Mutation, facial. Your whole head becomes an animal head.
4. Mutation, personality. You gain the pride of a lion, or a sibilant hiss in your voice, or an irrational fear of mice, or whatever.
5. Mutation, minor cosmetic. Your eyes become goat eyes, or you're a bit slimy, or something. No effect besides people can tell you used a potion.
6. Benefit. You basically just get a free potion effect, like if you used a potion of Eagle Flight you get the Eagle's Eyesight thrown-in.

Vegetable Side-Effects (d6)

1. Disease, lame. You come down with an ignominious imbalance of the humors: A fever, cough, diarrhea...
2. Disease, cool. You come down with a rather interesting imbalance of the humors: Coughing fire, river-like tears, stone hands...
3. Mutation, personality. Your personality shifts one step towards the sanguine, choleric, etc. depending on the plant.
4. Mutation, minor cosmetic. Your hair starts smoldering, or your skin turns grey. No effect besides people can tell you used a potion.
5. Elemental Energy. You can cast the magnitude 2 Elementalist spell for the relevant element, once.
6. Benefit. You basically just get a free potion effect. You can breathe fire, or have skin like stone. Cool!

Mystic Mandrake and Holy Moly act a little differently from other ingredients. They have no side-effects when used in a potion, treating a result that indicates side-effects as merely a success. Mystic Mandrake does not "count" as an ingredient for the purposes of determining the strength of a potion. Instead, due to its affinity for balance and humanity, it negates one side-effect produced by another ingredient. Holy Moly does count as an ingredient when determining potion strength, but has no properties of its own. When any magician drinks a potion containing either, they get an extra power point.

Obviously, Magicians of various kinds are best at at Pharmakeia, with their high wits and luck, but most cities also have a Pharmakeus who can make potions out of ingredients brought by hunters and warriors for a considerable fee. A normal Pharmakeus has ~13 luck and ~16 wits.

GLoGhaven

 

:/

I do not like Strixhaven. As an MTG set, it was ill-conceived and cringey. When they adapted it for 5e (curses on its name), they further stripped it of all interest by making every subclass only affect combat (not to mention straight up forgetting what some of the schools were all about). It is egregious and I cannot abide by its very existence in the world, whether I play either game or not. There should not be a world in which Strixhaven, as it currently stands, exists. So it falls to me, the ultimate abiter of good taste, to make things RIGHT. You could rearrange these into wizard school cantrips easily.

LOREHOLD

A: You can read any language that you've never heard spoken.

B: If you have most of the pieces and spend a bit fiddling, broken things work once for you.

C: When you tell a proper story, everyone sits up and pays attention. This includes the dead. 

D: You can talk to ruins, relics, and artifacts. They are surprisingly mobile when they want to be.

PRISMARI

A: As long as you are touching it with your hands only, you can sculpt non-solid elements into solid forms.

B: You can perform a dangerous dance which causes you to become the center of attention. You can do this while attacking.

C: While performing the dance, choose two non-solid elements. You can manipulate those elements in [class level]*5' as if you were using your hands.

D: You can shape non-solid elements into creatures, though you have to take more time for bigger creatures and you can't control more than one.

QUANDRIX

A: You are a smartypants, and can estimate and calculate easily (use Wolfram Alpha) / You can do minor shenanigans: illusory duplicates, acting as though you had two extra mage hand arms, and vanishing completely for half a second.

B: You can spend up to [template] minutes calculating, after which you can summon a fractal that looks how you choose which deals [minutes] damage attacking, has [minutes] HP, and armor as chain. Very Pointy. Lasts [minutes] minutes.

C: You can cause people to think you are an expert and a great wizard by saying something about "quantum"

D: You can sacrifice a fractal to open a portal to its location, which lasts [minutes] rounds.

SILVERQUILL

A: You can create light as a lantern. You bleed ink.

B: You can use up a well of ink to summon a little imp thing. You must give it a secret (may be untrue), which it loves to tell to people (though it loves people admiring it more). Annoyingly intelligent. You can fully control [templates] instances.

C: People believe it when you lie.

D: You can use up a book's worth of ink to fly, somehow.

WITHERBLOOM

A: You can make any organic material into food, or poison

B: You can expend all your rations or all your poisons to make that many noxious pests. You can't control them at all and they love nothing more than causing plague and famine and souring cow milk.

C: You can cause bones (nonliving) to float, and living plants to grow at twice the rate.

D: If you have a whole living creature, you can make the entire thing (including the soul) into food that fully heals all who consume it (if it is the same sort of creature as the consumer, it can even revive the dead), or a potion that transforms the consumer into that creature. Both effects cause the consumer to gain some or all of the memories and feelings of that creature.

EXTRA CREDIT

*: You can keep excellent hold on an item, even if you trip.

*: You can cast spells or abilities one handed OR while running.

*: If a spell or ability would requires materials, time, etc. you can ignore that and use it as though you used the least amount of those possible [templates] times per day

*: You can use an ability at the same time you cast a spell

*: You know how to find things in any library

*: You get invited to wizard banquets

*: With lab conditions, you can keep spell or ability effects going indefinitely

*: You can slowly levitate a foot off the ground

*: In a land aligned with your college, cast with +1 magic

*: You can try to cast any spell reasonably within your schools domain with instability equal to your magic.

*: Once per template, cast a spell you don't know.

GLoGtober 3: Orbs and Everything Else (Hypogeum)

 

Orbs

As I wrote about in my Previous Post, it is believed there are three prime substances in Hypogeum: Stuff, Life, and Magic. I wrote there mostly about the movements and behaviors of Life, but here I will talk mostly about the behavior of magic. Like Life, Magic can be either found in a pure, gaseous state, or dissolved into another material. As well, Magic has a material memory like Life. This memory takes the form of Spells.

Orbs are a shape of stuff which is good at absorbing Magic. The type of stuff the orb is made of might have some affect on this ability. Certainly, the type of stuff it is made of affects the spells it is predisposed to. Orbs made of a once living material, like bone or wood, cast spells related to the magic present in the being it was procured from. Orbs might have this sort of intrinsic property if made from another magic containing material.

Other orbs are made from materials which don't normally contain magic, or which have had their magic fully drained or purged of its memory. Crystal is most favored for this (see below). Into such a blank orb is placed a seed spell, which can thenceforth shape the magic absorbed into it. This process of shaping can affect the appearance and form of the orb naturally, or very learned people can try to modify an orb to be more suited to a spell or class of spells. This makes the variety of orbs we find in the world.

Orbs, like swords, might not be made of specific type of stuff, but instead be made out of Orb. These can be found commonly, and might be blank, but more often have a spell in them.

Crystals

Crystals are both a shape and a type of stuff. They are ordered and regular. A cubic crystal forms cubes naturally. A pointy crystal forms points, given more stuff to work with. Despite this natural tendency toward one shape, most crystals can be formed into orbs manually, with some skill and persistence.

Crystals are valuable for one property of theirs: It takes considerable effort to get magic in and out of them. This may not seem like a good thing, but it means crystals are often naturally magical blanks, and if you can get pure magic in them, they store it without turning it into spells. It isn't that difficult to do, its just harder than natural processes allow most of the time. If you find a magic crystal out in the wild, that means either someone put it there, or something really magic happened there once upon a time.

Crystals are used in jewelry and art objects for three reasons: firstly, and obviously, its pretty; secondly, it makes good magic item batteries, making the objects useful; and thirdly, for safety. Magic infused crystals glow, and crystals inset into magical objects become infused. If you are handed a fancy thing, you can tell its not magic (thereby, not cursed) if it has crystals that aren't glowy. Still makes it hard to tell if you are being cursed by a magic item, but at least you know that some random jewelry isn't going to curse you.

You could, of course, just use crystals as light sources. Many people do, especially in areas with lots of them. Adventurers who are sorcerers or relic-seekers use them very often.

Runes

Runes are another shape of Stuff. They are very bad at storing magic in general. However, each rune is alright at storing one specific spell. Magic with any other spell memorized, or no spell memorized, simply slides off it. Magic with a memory is very rare in natural, ambient conditions, so just carving a rune and leaving it out won't attract the specific spell it is attuned to. The spell must be transferred to the rune. 

Most runes are carved into other materials. These runes are durable, but can't hold almost any magic. Some runes are written on other materials with ink. These are both less durable and have less capacity than carved runes. Some inks are very good at storing magic, and so have higher capacity than carved runes. 

The best practice, many say, is to scribe with this magic-storing ink on very magical paper or vellum, making a scroll. Scrolls can basically hold a whole spell, both energetically and mnemonically, but casting the spell drains the stuff of magic, which has the same effect as removing all the water in a sand castle. 

Some scrolls exist in the Hypogeum, but they are very rare, and runes aren't used very much in the current era. The most research about them is done in darkling settlements. Scrolls in general are very basic looking, showing a single large rune. Runes also form naturally, as described above, on some spell containing items, like orbs.

Books

Just like scrolls, books aren't common in the Hypogeum. Most Folk aren't much for literacy, but if they are, they paint things on hard tablets or walls, or carve it in clay, or do other things besides. Its simply too damp to make books feasible. However, they do exist.

Books are sometimes brought in by Humans and other otherworlders. These are written in glyphs that only humans can read, and are generally worthless in the hands of others, unless they are collectors. However, some books written by humans are dangerous things known as "poetry", a kind of tool used by humans to enhance their already silver tongues. Poetry read by humans can be intoxicating, and can rival magic in terms of its ability to affect Folk. Some writings in ruins or dungeons have been identified as poetry by human explorers, lending further credence to the theory that humans were the original inhabitants of the Hypogeum. These ruin poems are known for their ability to make any meaning to them impenetrable to all but the most clever and free-thinking Folk (PC Folk).

Books can also be found, rarely, as treasures. Like all treasures, these seem apparently native to the Hypogeum. Often they have a large rune on the front. If the book is a relic, the rune is an indicator of the spell contained within. Some wise Darklings have discovered that treasure books have internally consistent language, unique to each book so far as they have found. This has become widely known, though not widely used except by weirdos.

A note on Treasures and Relics: Treasures are valuable things found in the Hypogeum. Among almost all people, it is generally accepted that one treasure is worth mostly the same as another, barring extraordinary circumstances, and not accounting for taste or individual usefulness. If you bring a fancy hat back from your adventures, its valued the same as a magic item or filigreed staff or, indeed, a book. Mostly they are used for sentimental and aesthetic reasons anyways. Relics are items, sometimes treasures, that can be used by Relicseekers and contain an intrinsic spell. The nature of magic in an relic is such that only Relicseekers of a certain predilection can use them. An Orb couldn't be used by a Bookseeker, after all!

Porbal

Portals

[Post Pending]

Wizards (Damn Them)

The magic present in people is diffuse and faint, normally unusable, just the background level of magic in any place. Wizards are people who cultivate magic in themselves. Most of the time, wizards are sorcerers, also called arcanophages. They drink or eat things with lots of magic in them so that they may concentrate that magic. Most often they drink magic infused water, sometimes (incorrectly) called distilled magic. Not everyone does, though. Relicseekers attune their minds to a certain sort of relic, allowing them to use or siphon the magic inside objects.

The heavy use of magic has effects on the body and mind of its users. Both sorcerers and relicseekers gradually are changed and mutated by the presence of magic, in such a way that allows more magic to enter their bodies, and be more easily manipulated. Orb-like organs, maze-like brains, and other mutations allow true wizards to contain many spells discretely, absorb magic naturally, and modify existing spells.

However, learning new spells is difficult. Either new relics or runes must be obtained, or maddening insights must be undertaken. The easier way is to take apprentices. Each person has some faint magic already inside them, and that magic has a memory, and that memory is a spell. Cultivating that magic to the point that a person's natural spell may be cast, and thus learned by the teacher, leaves the apprentice an almost capable wizard. 

Of course, for as many true wizards are out there, there are a thousand middling sorcerers and superstitious relic-seekers, skirting along on not even a basic understanding of the nature and behavior of magic. Such is life.

GLoGtober 2: Slimes (Hypogeum)

 

In the Hypogeum, the wise Folk say, everything is made of three things: Stuff, Life, and Magic. Stuff is solid, life is liquid, and magic is normally a gas. Stuff makes up things like rocks, people, etc. Life and magic can be absorbed in certain kinds of stuff, like a sponge. They disagree on whether these elements can be created, or whether they simply change into one another. 

Most creatures have both life and magic in a framework of stuff. Cooking something normally drains the life out of it, making it drier. This is good, because too much life in a steak might mean it starts kicking around your stomach, making you sick. Stuff without any life in is much harder to digest though, sometimes even impossible. Life tends to stick to one shape, regenerating the kind of stuff its in. That's why your blood stops your wounds, while other people's blood makes you sick (unless you are a vampire). 

But if cooking evaporates the life, then you can put a condenser over the top and distill it. Distilled life doesn't have this "memory", and is normally called a health potion. But there is an easier way.

A slime is the simplest form of creature. Its basically just a blob of life keeping its shape. There's almost no stuff in it. It rolls over other organics and digests it, its own life-memory overcoming theirs. Most of the time, it leaves behind all the other stuff that can't be digested. In this way, it is pretty dangerous.

However, life memorizes stuff. It has a much harder time memorizing life. That is to say, slimes are easy to pop, and only a light simmer makes high quality health potions.

Some slimes are more advanced, and have incorporated other materials into their bodies. These slimes are valuable, because the materials they contain are very easy to extract. However, they are also more dangerous, as their life-memory is much stronger, and thus, they are both harder to kill and quicker at digesting. Magic slimes are the easiest and most common variant.

It should be noted that life memorizes the first life-filled thing it comes across. Drinking life that already has a memory, even a weak one, has side effects. Stay safe out there.

Life comes in Green, Red, Black, and White flavors. Magic, Blue, Purple, and Yellow.