Skill | Alchemy

Alchemy is the skill of blending rare ingredients, potent substances, and arcane components into useful mixtures, remedies, and compounds. Your mastery of Alchemy enables you to identify unknown substances, create healing balms, potent poisons, antidotes, and even magical elixirs. Through careful measurement, precise timing, and secret knowledge, your concoctions can alter the course of battles, cure ailments, or unlock hidden potentials.

Common Uses:

• Brewing healing potions to rapidly restore Hit Points

• Crafting antidotes to cure or prevent poisons and diseases

• Preparing poisons to apply to weapons or secretly administer

• Identifying unknown liquids, powders, and magical substances

• Creating specialty compounds, such as explosives, smoke bombs, acids, or flame-retardants

Magical Alchemy:

To create potions or compounds with magical effects, the alchemist must include magical ingredients in the recipe. If the creator does not possess the Magic skill, a willing caster must be present to infuse the final product, spending MP to seal its arcane properties. Alternatively, an alchemist with the Magic skill may use their own MP to imbue such concoctions. All magical substances require discovery, negotiation, or design within the story and GM approval before creation.

Passive vs. Active Clarification:
Alchemy is always an active skill. Using it requires deliberate time, focus, tools, and ingredients. You cannot passively perform Alchemy; every attempt must be explicitly declared.

Linked Statistic:
Mind (Mind)

Typical Difficulty Benchmarks:

• Identifying a common healing potion or known poison: Easy (+30%)

• Crafting a simple antidote from widely available herbs: Routine (+20%)

• Preparing a moderate poison or healing balm under safe laboratory conditions: Favorable (+10%)

• Mixing a potent explosive or strong acid without specialized equipment: Challenging (–10%)

• Creating a magical potion or complex compound under field conditions: Hard (–20%)

• Brewing a legendary potion or antidote under extreme conditions or time pressure: Very Hard (–30%)

Consequences of Success and Failure:

• Success: Your alchemical concoction functions exactly as intended—effective potions heal, poisons weaken or incapacitate, antidotes neutralize toxins.

• Critical Success (01): Your mixture surpasses expectations. It may provide increased effectiveness, double potency, additional beneficial side effects, or yield extra doses.

• Failure: Your concoction proves weak, diluted, or slightly off. It may function at diminished effectiveness or expire quickly, wasting ingredients and effort.

• Critical Failure (00): Your mixture backfires dangerously, potentially exploding, causing harmful side effects, poisoning the intended recipient, or permanently damaging expensive ingredients and tools.

Gameplay Example:
Lena, playing Aria, is attempting to create a potent poison to silently incapacitate a guard. Aria’s Alchemy skill is 55%. Given the difficulty of making a powerful poison quickly in a makeshift workshop, the GM declares this is Hard (–20%), leaving Lena needing a roll of 35 or lower. She rolls an 18—a solid success. Aria carefully bottles the venom, confident that it will swiftly knock out the guard without lasting harm or detection.

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File Created: 04/30/2025
Last Modified: 04/30/2025