So you ransack a wizard's laboratory and find a bunch of 'potions'... or: wizards don't use GHS

One of my other hobbies is rockets; specifically, the history and eccentricities of liquid-fueled rockets. (Don't worry, all you solid afficianados - I appreciate a tonne of PSPC just as much as the next guy.)

I don't remember how, exactly, but this got crossed the other day with thinking about D&D and potions.

D&D has potion mixing and potion tasting charts. Often they do nothing, or create a poison, or mix effects, or whatever. In any case, it seems like the common thing to do with strange bottles of weird liquids recovered from a wizard's study is to try them out. I imagine the conversation going like this:

DM: You've slain the basilisk standing guard out front, and you open the door to a crowded laboratory. Bottles, flasks, and retorts line the walls and teeter precariously on a large wooden table, covered with illegible notes and scratches. Everything is covered in dust.

Player: Cool! I look through and see if there's anything that looks valuable! Are there any potions?

DM: You grab a whole bunch of bottles and stuff them into your knapsack, but there are too many to fit all of them, so you have to leave the lion's share behind-

Player: Oh, we're definitely coming back here, with a caravan!

DM: Right, but for now you have to leave some behind.

Player: OK, OK. Are any of them potions?

DM: You don't know. None of them have readable labels. Some of them have no labels at all.

Player: Fine, how can we test them?

DM: Lots of ways. The same way you test anything, really. It's not like you're carrying a Potion Testing Kit in your backpack - are you?

Player: No. Huh. Okay...potions are meant to be drunk right? I drink one, and see what it does!

DM: Are you sure? It might have hostile effects, and you'll have used it up regardless of what it does.

Player: Okay, okay...I got it. I'll uncork it and try a little taste. That should work, right? I mean, even if it's poison, it'll only be a little bit.

The thing that struck me is that ransacking the wizard's laboratory is one of the few actual touchstones we have with real life. Arcane alchemy captures a sense of wonder and strangeness that doesn't have much place out here in Paper & Paychecks, but one thing we do have is strange arcane chymical laboratories with truly strange and wonderful things on the shelves outside normal human experience.

However, in real life, most of these things aren't exactly meant for human consumption. In real life, wizards have rocket fuel on their shelves.

The thing about these strange and wonderful chemicals is they require careful handling. Some of them are so reactive that uncorking the bottle might kill you, if you're careless about it. Almost all of them are so reactive that yes, a tiny sip is a very bad idea.

What's a thousand words worth when you can have some examples?

High Test Peroxide

Peroxide's normal, right? I have some under the bathroom sink right now! Sure, but that stuff's at 5% strength. At 40% the stuff starts getting interesting. At 70% it's a rocket monopropellant - meaning it's so reactive (in the presence of lots of catalysts) by itself that it'll violently explode.

Here's an example

I was unable to find an example of someone reacting HTP with meat, but you can extrapolate from what happens when you pour your household stuff onto an open cut what'll happen - except those bubbles will be strong enough to become an explosion.

HTP should be stored in an opaque bottle in a sealed place, else the light and heat will cause it to slowly degrade. Or quickly.

Why a wizard wants it: You mean your wizards need excuses to play with explosives? Fine. HTP can easily also be used to spark other reactions, and probably has a pivotal role in the distillation of Bloom of Giant's Eye (a solid, metallic substance that's one of the primary 'less dangerous' sources of small amounts of orichalcum, since it only involves harvesting the eyes of storm giants).

Fuming Nitric Acid

(Also all sorts of other nitric substances)

I don't really need to say much about this, do I? It's nitric acid; it's an acid. But concentrations powerful enough to be used as rocket fuels exist and should exist in a wizard's lab. (It's also useful for other stuff.)

Two 'common' variations are called White Fuming Nitric Acid (or WFNA) and Red Fuming Nitric Acid) or RFNA. These things are so nasty they're usually mixed with a 'inactivating agent' to keep them from eating away the bottle you want to store them in.

(Skip to 4:42 if you don't care about the rest.)

Why a wizard wants it: Fuming Nitric Acid is an essential tool for the distillation of just about anything. In the real world, nitric acid is an industrial chemical for a reason: it's too damn useful. Same thing in fantasy; fuming nitric acid is probably an essential reagant in many, many reactions that eventually lead to those Potions of Gnome Control that litter your campaign world. There's a reason not just anyone becomes an alchemist, and most wizards are crazy.

Hydrazine

Hydrazine is an odorless, colorless chemical that to the eye and touch seems just like water. It's also pretty stable on its own, but when mixed with oxidizers (like the nitric acid shown above, or many of its byproducts) will violently explode.

In fact, the explosion is so violent that hydrazine is still used in rockets today. The Soyuz rocket that sends astronauts to the ISS runs on hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide (one of the byproducts of a nitric acid reaction in some cases). Careful jostling it around with other potions; if a flask breaks your backpack may explode!

However, we're interested in a taste test. Unfortunately for adventurers, its reactivity is outmatched by its toxicity. A mouthful or even a sip may very well kill you.

Case Study of Hydrazine Poisoning

---

In a 1965 correspondence from F. James Reid to the British Medical Journal, the effects of accidental hydrazine ingestion can be seen.
A young English sailor had been drinking beer during the afternoon before being placed on duty in the evening. He was considered to be fit for duty and competent until the accident. While working in his ship's engine room, the young sailor ingestion between a mouthful and a cupful of concentrated Hydrazine believing it was water.

• Hydrazine, greatly diluted, was used on board the ship to prevent corrosion in the ship's boilers by seawater.

Immediately upon drinking the chemical, the sailor vomited and returned to the deck to report to his superior officer at 11:30pm. After having been given a raw egg and milk, he vomited once more and collapsed, unconscious onto the floor.
Upon admission in a West African Hospital at midnight he was flushed, afebrile, unconscious, continent, and vomiting. His pupils were dilated, central and reacted to light; however, there were no chemical burns on his lips or mouth and he was able to swallow. At this time the respiratory and central nervous systems were normal upon clinical examination.
In response to the accident, the stomach was washed out with warm water which was partially siphoned and vomited back. He was given intramuscular chloroquine sulphate due to the prevalence of malaria in the region; cyanocobalamin, because the chemical was believed to have a cyanide-like effect; and ascorbic acid all intravenously with dextrose, dextrose-saline, and Hartmann's solution. These chemicals were given in all three liters over a period of 16 hours. The patient then passed 600ml of alkaline urine via a catheter, with the condition of his bladder at that time remaining unknown.
Twelve hours after the ingestion of the hydrazine, his condition remained unchanged with the exception that vomiting had ceased and the pupils were smaller and divergent to the right. Two episodes of violence requiring restraint by four strong African nurses also occurred.
Sixteen hours after ingestion, the patient was more flaccid and once again violent; it was decided to send him to the U.K. by air. 33 hours after the accident, the patient was flown out; however, once reaching France, the pilot of the aircraft refused to accept responsibility of the patient as his respiration became irregular and shallow.
48 hours after the accident the patient was admitted to a Paris hospital. His condition upon arrival was described as comatose and convulsive. He was intubated under anesthesia and given mechanically assisted respiration for the next ten hours; he was also given 10% dextrose and vitamin B.
The patient improved hour by hour, though the main concern was for his neurological state. His psyche, memory, voluntary motor skills, and higher functions were normal. However, he had ataxia even with his eyes open, a lateral nystagmus to the right, and a loss of vibration sense. He was unable to write, though he could draw. There was paresthesia of all four limbs at the extremities and he was unable to reproduce one hand movement imposed upon the other. Severe hypoesthesia of the hand (especially the right hand), in distribution of the radial nerve ensued. E.E.G. results were within normal limits and tendon reflexes were normal. Fortunately, the ataxia was improving to the point that the sailor would able to travel unescorted by air to England, only two weeks after leaving Africa.

• The final condition of the young man is not known.

With all that in mind, I recommend the use of a new table:


Sipping random bottles from a wizard's laboratory table: (roll 1d6)

1. The stuff explodes in your mouth. Save vs. poison or die messily. If you pass, take 1d4 damage.
2. Horrible poison. Save vs. poison or die.
3. Nefarious poison. No immediate effect, but you will die in 1d4 days and start feeling ill in 12 hours. No save.
4. Hyper-volatile! Uncorking the flask causes it to react with air. Save vs. wands or have your hand blown off, taking 1d4 damage, and everyone nearby save vs. paralysis or get splashed. Those splashed take 1d4 damage.
5. No effect. It's inert, I guess.
6. Huh, this might actually be meant for human consumption. Roll on another chart to determine what potion it is. (Don't forget to include lamp oil and 'normal' poisons.)

Don't swig random chemicals. Get an expert, or test them with objects other than your body.

Alternatives to the Random Encounter Clock

One of, if not the chief function of random encounters is to force the players to make decisions about what to do and what to leave alone. This is usually expressed as a penalty for taking more time or extraneous actions, and it usually is, since random encounter rolling is usually tied to time spent - i.e., actions taken.

Unfortunately, in my experience of GURPS this pretty much completely breaks down. Further, even in systems where it usually works, there are downsides. Perhaps the encounters are too dangerous, especially in a densely-inhabited dungeon where they would bring others. If handled poorly they can become a joke or a severe annoyance for the players. Sometimes they send the wrong message, or they simply aren't wanted in your dungeon.

Nevertheless the function of rewarding time and action economy is worthwhile to salvage. I originally thought of using random encounter tables along with faction diagrams to give reinforcements to the set-piece monsters, but the more I mulled this over, the less I liked the idea. One of the reasons random encounters work is because they give immediate consequences to the players. Generally, immediate consequences are better for informing behaviour than mediate. With the reinforcement idea, or any other scheme that puts off the results, players are more likely to shoot themselves in the collective foot. In the example given, they'd most likely keep doing whatever until the monster density became so great there was no feasible way to proceed, or until it maximized - and then there would be no further disincentive.

Then I had a breakthrough: why does a wandering monster system have to involve monsters at all? If the central point is to make the players economize their actions, that can be done without monsters as easily as with. Further, avoiding monsters makes it work for systems like GURPS as well, where the attrition due to combat is nowhere near as strong as it is in D&D.

To that end, I give you a few 'timers' I've been thinking over lately:

The Timed Dungeon

The essential feature here is that the dungeon itself has some integral timer which makes exploration progressively more dangerous or difficult. Some specific examples:

• The dungeon is flooding: every <interval> more and more of the dungeon is underwater. To do this you need to know the source, and the relative elevations of various rooms. I'd recommend giving rooms four states - dry, ankle-deep, chest-deep, over-your-head, completely-filled - and rate the source(s) by how many stages it can fill per interval. Generally I'd eyeball the map and flood downhill, with rooms getting to ankle depth before the water spills over to a lower place. Bonus points if you use some fluid other than water - I'm partial to mercury or poison gas.
• The Archmage is out: every turn roll a d6. Once you cumulatively roll 5 1's, he's come back. The party better skedaddle soon, because he's a 60th-level ubermage able to cast Elric's Flaming Haemerrhoids at will. This works well with archmages' towers, elder dragons' dens, demons' lairs, and generally anywhere you can stock a big nasty that the party knows would squish them flat in an outright fight. A variant has the bad guy already there, but temporarily neutralized - asleep, behind a failing barrier, whatever. Season dice and intervals to taste.
• The dungeon is unstable: maybe it's situated in the caldera of a live volcano, or in the rift between the astral and ethereal planes. Or maybe the entrance is an old mine shaft that's under serious stress. This has much the same mechanics as the archmage one above, but after a certain accumulation of rolls the entrance will be closed, or the dungeon will collapse, or whatever. A variant on this is the 'clockwork dungeon' - where the map changes every so often, making navigation difficult or impossible. Maybe the dungeon is a wizard's toy, or it's slipping through time, and staying too long will mean you have to deal with dinosaurs or barbarians where you expected your village to be.

The Timed Treasure

 Whereas above the dungeon itself was becoming undelvable over time, in these scenarios it's just becoming undesirable to do so, due to disappearing reward.

• Kingdom of the Sidhe: After a certain time passes, all the loot in or from the dungeon will lose all value. The adventurers had better retrieve and spend it beforehand! Keep a timer keyed to turns or hours or whatever. Whenever enough time passes, increment it by one. Don't forget to make sure the players know they need not only to acquire the loot, but get rid of it too! An elven favorite is turning leaves into gold, but fresh basilisk blood or psionic crystals that must be preserved by the local alchemist after being chiseled from the walls are also good ones.
• Explosive treasure: Do you really want to muck around when you have a backpack full of white phosphorous in kerosene? Make the treasure valuable but volatile. It doesn't have to be explosive; it might be an acid, or a powerful djinni bottled in a jar and yearning to get out, or carefully preserved bottles of essence of green slime. Every time the characters do something dangerous, it has a chance of backfiring.
• There goes the neighborhood: The denizens of the dungeon have decided for whatever reason to pack up and leave, bringing their stuff with them. Much like the coming of the archmage in reverse. Roll a d6. After 3 or so 1's, randomly or by fiat pick a faction; they exit the dungeon with all their treasure. To complicate matters, the PCs might be between them and the exit.
• Competition: The old standby; have another party racing the PCs through the dungeon. This takes a care and finesse which is outside my scope. I'd think at the very least you'd have structured tables and a general idea of how the NPCs will progress through the dungeon, but coming up with specifics for running this scenario is left as an exercise for the reader. An exercise he'll hopefully then publish on a blog, so I can steal his ideas.

All of these methods only work if the party knows what's going on. I can't stress that enough. Often this can be handled narratively either in the moment ("The dungeon appears to be flooding with a silvery liquid. Judging by its rate of flow, you'd expect this place to fill up fairly quickly - unless there are hidden depths you don't know about.") or beforehand. ("The old man insists that he heard strange rumblings over the last week and the Crypt of Sasura is on the verge of collapse after all these centuries, so you'd better hurry.") Still, that may not always be the case, and the players should always have at least a rough idea of how their time limits are being decided. If that's too 'gamist' or something for you, don't use these methods.

Deceptive yak shaving

You're not stealing it if you say "Martin asked me to post this to see what people thought."

If you say "Look at this awesome thing I made (unless it sucks, then Martin made it)" and I link to it from the forums, it's also not stealing, and pretty funny.

If you actually  claim ownership, then I sic Katz on you.  :)   - Martin, a player in my game

 As an outgrowth from the tactical discussions that happened in previous posts (and will continue to happen, though I haven't gotten back around to them yet), I asked Martin to come up with a short sheet of fill-in-the-blank options for players to have in front of them. He did, and I think it looks fairly nice, though next session I need to pause to make sure people actually fill it out with their own damage and skill levels. (Otherwise it's useless of course.)

While completing that project, he got side-tracked with what he calls "Deceptive yak shaving." Specifically:

So while digging around learnin' about combat strategy for the cheat sheets I idly wondered what the best deceptive attack strategies were for various attack skill/defense roll combos.

A few hours later and a lot of Yaks ended up shaved.  Deceptively shaved.  Boy are they gonna be surprised when they find out.  - Martin again

 And after a quick side trip to a thread on the forums where he tried to pin down exactly how much more "damage" a critical hit was worth than a regular hit, after accounting for the fact that you will hit, and including relative effects like crippling and dropping of weapons, he came up with a really cool chart that lays out your optimal Defensive Attack strategy based on relative offenses and defenses:

For best results, use a yak-hair brush and lather with Mama Bear's handmade soap pucks.

I like this chart for many reasons. First, to defend its relevance, especially at higher defense levels: your base-line opponent in Dungeon Fantasy has Skill 14. With a Medium Shield, that means a defense of 14/2 = 7 + 3 for defense + 2 for shield + 1 for retreat = 13. If you make it a Large Shield and give the opponent Combat Reflexes, that's a 15, which is already pushing the right edge of the chart. (Also: yowza. That shows you right there that "eating up a defense so the Knight can hit" is actually quite useful, not a waste of time and talent at all.)

Second, it broadly validates the first-pass recommendations by +Douglas Cole that lowering your skill to 14 or 16 is the way to go if you want to maximize your chances. There are certainly exceptions, like when you have Skill 22 and your opponent has Defense 15, but they're exceptions around the edges, and you're not too far off from optimal if you stick to the recommended course.

Third, it is supporting evidence that Defensive Attack is doing its job. With the exception of that 22 vs. 18 slot, when your skill goes up and your opponent's skill goes up, you're better off taking a higher defensive attack. (That exception is sensible if you think about it: 22-6 = 16, maximizing your chances for a crit.)

Of course this chart isn't the end-all and be-all of GURPS combat recommendations. It assumes a man-to-man fight on level ground with absolutely no interfering effects. It's a fun little thing to noodle around, though.

Yak shaving for fun and profit: Making Procrastination Work for You!

We all get to that point: we want to do more in our crafted little worlds to bring them alive, but something holds us back. I'm not talking about a lack of desire; if that's the case, you're best off doing something else. I'm talking about those days when you're thinking to yourself, "I really do want to work on that new dungeon," or whatever it is, but you just can't find it in you to actually reach for the computer/drafting paper/abacus/tattoo needle.

First, some serious tips:

1. Have a schedule. Stick to it for three or four weeks straight. After that time, keep sticking to it, but it will be much easier now that you've formed the habit. You don't have to do a lot on any given night that you've committed yourself to, but you have to do something - even if it's just doodling or scratching down some ideas you had during the day.
2. Find a different section of the project. Want to map that second floor but just can't find the juice? Work out monster placement elsewhere, or webs of relationships, or treasure troves. (Random Generation can help.)
3. If your world is meant to be more than just a single dungeon, work on another part of it. Maybe you're incapable of statting up the Temple of the Umber Ophidian, but you could make some headway on that Shrine to the Malevolent Malvolio you'd been meaning to save for later. Just because the players won't get to it next session doesn't mean it won't be useful.
4. Try coming at your work from a different angle. If what you need is monster placement, stats, or mapping, try thinking about the history and present-day uses of the dungeon. Layering interesting bits onto the backstory can fire the imagination with ways to make those bits relevant through gameplay.

I've already used all the above myself, so I can attest to their effectiveness.

"Oh, sure," you say, "but you're not the first person to tell me this. Heck, you're not even the best, with your anemic little four-point list! Give me something entertaining!" And you know, you're right, so here's another, potentially less helpful but more interesting list:

1. Play Dwarf Fortress? Combine your hobbies! Build a grand fortress, then lose it in any of the million ways you can in that game, then go back in adventurer mode or history mode to check it out. Lift it directly and plop it down in your world. (Extra points if you somehow theme the dungeon, e.g. everything is made of bronze, or the dungeon contains mechanisms to rearrange itself.)
2. Surf the blogosphere. There's some really cool stuff out there.
3. Ask a five-year-old
4. Perhaps my favorite: run some piece of fiction or fantasy gaming materials through a Dissociated Press algorithm and look for interesting words.

Shaving yaks for fun and profit: random encounter tables for the journey to Verbobonc

Sometimes you just have to take a step back and do something fairly useless for your game as a sort of perverse GM-only enjoyment. When this happens to me, I try to make it something at least potentially useful that at the same time won't tempt me to inflict something undesirable on my players. So instead of building some intricate interlocking pieces on the philology of my world, I give you the Random Encounter Table (for travel to and from Verbobonc):

Travel encounters: (to/from Verbobonc) Roll on this table if the party scores a random encounter (check 9 or less on 3d6, or 12 or less at night, check once per day and once per night)
01-05    Gnoll band (3d10)
06-12:    Hobgoblin band (4d10)
13-17:    Highwaymen (3d10) (professionals, with horses)
18-22:    Brigands (4d10) (ill-equipped rough men of the hills)
23-27:    Outlaws (5d10) (men of a local robber-king setting up his outlaw duchy)
28-33:    Bandits, (2d10) (desperate locals, poor equipment and morale)
34-47:    Travelling group (1d50, most noncombatants)
48-54:    Gnome border patrol (18)
55-62:    Orcs (3d10)
63-68:    Bugbears (2d10)
69-77:    Elf patrol (8)
78-82:    Trolls (1d3)
82-86:    Ogres (1d6)
87-90:    Giant Eagles (1d6)
91-99:    Roll again twice more
00:         Special, roll on the Specials table

Specials:

01-30:    Large Merchant Caravan (PCs may trade at the caravan for normal prices, everything except non-perishable magical goods, e.g. magic swords and armor or artefacts)
31-45:    Patrol of the Barony (1d6 knights, 40 footmen, 20 archers, 20 spearmen/halberdiers)
46-50:    Dire Wolves (4d10)
51-58:    Hill Giants (1d6)
59-66:    GURPS Bugbear lair (use DFM 1 rather than D&D bugbears)
67-70:    Hunting Slorn (1d6)
71-80:    Religious Procession (1d10 clerics, one of whom is actually a Cleric, and 1d100 pilgrims)
81-86:    Travelling Dwarves (2d10, on their way to/from the gnomes or elsewhere)
87-93:    Mercenary group (4d10, well armed and armored, may attack or hire on depending on reactions)
94-96:    Travelling group of Temple folk (like travelling group above, but from Nulb and evil - never better than 'Neutral' reaction)
97-99:    Griffins (1d6)
00:         Green Dragon


And hey, it solves another problem, which is making the journey to Verbobonc more than just an exercise in accounting. Plus, it tells me something about the Duchy of Verbobonc and the Kingdom of Furyondy generally - they're strongholds, and folks can mostly get by in their villages and the like, but houses are fortified, and people move in large groups when they move. Later ages won't be telling stories about the Pax Furyondia.

Later on, if I'm feeling aimlessly ambitious, I'll make a seasonal weather table as well (or just steal Gary's, if I can find one).

I need another one of these for the Hommlet-Nulb or Hommlet-Temple journey...