Cultivating Poison Components

[Night Watchman]

Okay, here's the deal. One of my fellow players has the skill Cfrat: Poisonmaking and he and our GM are kind of at a loss as too how to tell exactly how much material the player can gather from a single source be it a creature, fungi, plant, or other source. So, I'm on assingment from our DM to ask the Enworld community to find the answers to these two questions.

- How do you handle gathering the components to make poisons from creatures?
- What is the best way that you have found to determine the number of doseages a character can get out of a single poison component?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Are you using the base Craft (Poisonmaking) skill? Or are you using the updated rules from Complete Adventurer?

Assuming the first, the answer's easy.

Let's say you kill a dragon, and want to harvest from it the raw components of dragon bile (a rather nasty potion).

Dragon bile, the poison, costs 1,500gp per dose. Per standard Craft rules, that requires 500gp worth of "raw materials." We'll assume that most of that is actual dragon bile (450gp) and the rest (50gp) is assorted herbs, reagents, and other stuff.

So, all the DM has to do is decide how many gps worth of dragon bile you can get out of the dragon. If he says "900gp worth of bile," then you've got the majority of the raw materials for two doses of dragon bile poison; they character will need to spend an additional 100gp for assorted sundries and make some skill checks in order to process it (following normal crafting rules).

Now, as far as handling the gathering of the poison materials, I'd decide how much of the raw materials are available at maximum. In this case, the dragon had 1,000gp worth of dragon bile in his various organs. Then, have the player make a Craft (Poisonmaking) check against a particular DC. For every point by which he misses the DC, reduce the amount of raw materials he gathered (say, DC 30, -10% per missed point). In our case, the player hit DC 29, and ruined 10% of the raw materials. He therefore ended up with 900gp worth of dragon bile.

 

[majustismp15]

Arg! I had to make a new account just to post to this.
I am the player in question, and the short of the situation is: Our group will never encounter a means to buy poisons, or the components for that matter.
We came across a few monsters in the dungeon and we noticed they used poisons as part of their attacks (monstrous spiders and carrion crawlers). Since I can't buy the components, but have a source of raw material right there I asked the DM if I could get the materials from the source myself.
He said to roll a craft poison making check (equal to that of making it) to see if I can get any raw materials (making sure I don't rupture poison sacks or fumble it upon extraction or the like). After that we were at a loss for what to do. As a group we decided how much poison a freshly dead creature would have left. We decided that since these monsters have enough poison to affect 8 PCs multiple times that it would be prudent to say that they have 1d4 doses that is extractable.
So now my character has 7 doses of monstrous spider venom and 7 doses of carrion crawler brain juice. I've yet to refine them so all I have is the raw materials.
A question that I've been asking myself is "If this IS the poison of said creatures, why do I need to make a craft check to make the poison? Isn't it already poisonous?"
Now you know what we did, how much we settled on, and what type of creatures we've come across.
Also, if anybody can answer my 'why do I need to further craft?' question that would be awesome.

 

[Jack Simth]

Also, if anybody can answer my 'why do I need to further craft?' question that would be awesome.

Specifically? So it will last more than a day or two in storeage / more than a minute or two on the blade / so it will stick to the blade yet come off in the target / et cetera. Sure, you drop a vial down someone's throat, then yeah, they're in trouble. Usually, though, you won't have that option, and need a different delivery method.

 

[Kieperr]

How about this view. The creature in question produces the poison within its body and stores it in some manner within its body. In order for the poison to remain lethal and fresh the creature's body also produces the necessary enzymes for this. Once you kill the creature this process ends. If you want to use said poison you must process it in a manner that maintains the lethality (usually by concentration of toxins and/or removal of impurities) and shelf life (by adding preserving agents). This is why you have to use Craft (Poisonmaking) to make poison.

Poisons are not simply removed from a creature's sac and used. They need to be processed in order for them to keep their viability. As for how much you get, our group limits it to one creature provides enough raw material to craft a single dose. This keeps people from over supplying themselves with poison on the cheap and makes obtaining components a challenge that explains the high price of poisons.

 

[majustismp15]

Thanks, I'll bring it up with my DM.

I will miss being able to obtain 7 doses of poison from one encounter though

 

[ceratitis]

go to general rpg forum and look up a thread by 'boz' called "critter bits" or something similar, you will find a huge list of things to harvest from monsters with rule bits on to it and how long they last. be sure to get both the word and the excel file.
cheers
Z

 

[Kieperr]

The CAdv's gold reference is a secondary source that contradicts the primary source, in this case the PHB, so you go by the PHB's silver per week.

You created 450 sp (Out of 2000 sp) worth of the poison in a week. You still have some work to do.

 

[SuedodeuS]

The CAdv's gold reference is a secondary source that contradicts the primary source, in this case the PHB, so you go by the PHB's silver per week.

You created 450 sp (Out of 2000 sp) worth of the poison in a week. You still have some work to do.

Primary source usually does trump secondary, but in Complete Adventurer the use of gp instead of sp is mentioned as an exception to normal crafting rules. Poisons use gp just because they would take entirely too long if it were based on sp (keep in mind that the high cost of poison is meant to indicate its rarity rather than necessarily its difficulty). After all, if you think about it, it makes no sense for it to take Lidda over a month - when beating the DC by 15! - to purify a single dose of poison into useable form.

 

[Three_Haligonians]

Do you folks have access to Dragon Magazines? If you do, Issue 349 has a class act article about poison making that I find really good.

One of the rules it comes up with is "use a Survival check to harvest raw materials out of a dead creature - "amount = 10sp x check result".

It then goes on to say that harvest materials degrade to worthlessness in 1d6 days but does describe some checks to prolong "shelf life" ; DC 15 Craft [Alchemy] prolongs for one week, plus one additional week per 5 points the DC is beaten by.

If you fail by 5 or more you ruin the materials and you can only extend shelf life once.
Of course, if you have a spellcaster gentle repose will help.

Anyway, if the player is a rogue-type and Survival is not a skill you want to invest in, I'm sure Craft [Alchemy] or Craft [Poison making] would substitute nicely (for me, they are the same skill.. but that's a different thread).

J from Three Haligonians