“It was a large room, heavily outfitted with the usual badly ventilated furnaces, rows of bubbling crucibles, and one stuffed alligator. Things floated in jars. The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.”

Alchemy, in the game world that our characters reside in, is a skill that can be taken either at character creation(2 points) or as a veteran skill at a later point. It has as pre-requisites both Poison and Potion Lore II (4 points each) which in turn both require their corresponding level I (3 points each) skill. This makes becoming an alchemist a skill intensive endeavour taking 16 out of your 20 starting point allocation.

You get for this access to a standard set of potions and poison that you can brew. This includes basic healing balms, blade and ingested venoms and some minor elixirs that provide minor protective or bolstering characteristics for a short time.

The basic process of brewing a potion is the same; acquire the ingredients you require and then spend some game time brewing the potion or poison you desire following the recipe. Your ability to do so each day is controlled through use of Work Units(WU). An alchemist gets 6 WU a day with which to do all of their alchemical activities. There is a roleplay aspect to brewing a potion requiring a period of time combining the ingredients and some amount of alchemical equipment consistent with your style of alchemy (See Below)

Whilst a lot of the mechanics of alchemy lean towards a scientific style of activity with laboratories and work units and so forth this is not essential. Want to play a witch combining things in a cauldron or a dream speaker combining hallucinogenic compounds as part of their connection with the spirits that is perfectly fine although the same mechanical constraints apply.

A recipe will require a certain combination of passive ingredients and active components. Both passive and active components can be acquired by those with the ranger skill. They can also be acquired through trading with passive ingredients usually trading for a few copper whilst actives may cost a number of silver depending upon demand. The price of alchemical oil (a passive) is inflated due to its additional uses as a conflagrant.

The fun part of alchemy is the research side in this author’s opinion. To participate in this you will need an alchemical laboratory and you agree a research goal with the game team. In order to research you spend work units to represent your focussed activity on achieving the agreed goal. The harder the goal the more work units it will cost you to achieve it. Once you have achieved it you are given a recipe card for the new potion or poison and can make it just like one of those on the standard list.

An alchemical laboratory is an expensive piece of kit. A standard laboratory if purchased at standard rates will cost you 150 silver. A superior laboratory that grants the same benefits and one additional WU will cost 200 silver pieces and a master crafted top of the range laboratory grants an additional 2WU but costs an eye watering 450 silver pieces. It is worth noting laboratories themselves are potentially craft-able items and deals may be struck with NPCs and players for better rates.

Alchemy is also a social activity ! Individual alchemists can teach others the recipes they have learnt or researched. This is often a much quicker process than researching the recipe from scratch. It does however require both the teacher and learner to contribute WU. It is also possible to reverse engineer potions or poisons you find and learn a potion from a basic understanding of its components (its recipe). These however are much slower ways of gaining the knowledge. It is also possible to work together on a brewing or research goal. Alchemists organise into groups of 3 with a lead and contributors (termed a coven) and these coven can further organise into collaborations of multiple covens. These organisations can all work towards a common brewing or research goal getting in achieved much quicker than an individual working alone.

Some of the items an alchemist can make are used by others in order to progress their own crafting activities including alchemical inks used for scroll making and tattooing (Each spell has a corresponding ink) or specialist inks used for inscribing sigils.

It is worth noting that there a few other niche things an alchemist can do. This includes preserving body parts in order for them to be used a later date by surgeons and the like. They can also separate components from harvested blood (the so called humors) that again have uses within the medical community. The ability to do these things is itself a simple research task.

Finally a mention for the Alchemist Guild. This is an wholly IC phenomenon whereby like minded characters get together in order to share alchemical knowledge and/or talk about things of interest to the alchemical community. They organise regular meetings at each event which are well worth attending for both new and experienced alchemists in order share knowledge and make contacts.