Harvesting poison/venom?

Jon Potter

First Post
Are there rules for this somewhere?

My players want to harvest Monstrous Spider venom and I'm at a loss. My first inclination is to just use a Heal check to find and extract the venom sacks, but I'm really just guessing.

Any help would be appreciated.
 

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Our GM always went with a Wilderness Lore check for stuff like that.

I'd suggest a DC, but to be honest, I'm pretty sure he was just making it up as he went along, letting us harvest one dose for a good roll, and one or two more doses for really obscenely excellent rolls.

--
we also used wilderness lore for harvesting monster body parts for spell components
ryan
 

Good idea, HC. I'd probably use the same mechanice but require an craft (alchemy) roll instead, since that makes the nigh-useless skill more interesting.
 
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Make a Profession(whatever) check to determine how many GP's worth of raw venom you extract in a week.

Then, make a Craft(Poisonmaking) check to turn the raw materials into finished product.

Ex:
One 'dose' of Medium Monstrous Spider venom costs 150gp.

If you take 10 on Profession(Spider Handling) and have a total bonus of +10 to your check you extract 10gp worth of venom per week.

Five weeks later you take your 50gp worth of venom and start making Craft(Poisonmaking) checks. Again assuming taking 10 and a bonus of +10 nets you 40gp of progress per week.

Four weeks (160gp) later you now have one "prepared dose" of Medium Monstrous Spider Venom.

Upside: "free" poison for your weapons.

Downside: Each "free" dose takes nine weeks to create.
 

Thanks for the advice.

Wilderness Lore seems like a good skill to use. To my mind Alchemy would make sense if it needed to be brewed or somesuch - such as a plant-based toxin might.

But I agree that Alchemy is woefully underused.

And I'm talking about cutting out the dead spiders' venom sacs, not milking the spiders over time. For something like that, I agree that it would likely be a Profession (X) check.
 
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For cutting out the dead spiders venom sacs:

A Medium Monstrous Spider is CR1.

According to the treasure tables, a CR1 encounter should generate ~300gp worth of treasure.

Assuming you find no treasure in it's lair, a skill check could therefore allow you to extract up to 300gp worth of raw venom from the spider.

Craft(Poisonmaking) [see above] would allow you to turn that raw venom into 6 "prepared doses" of Medium Monstrous Spider poison.
 

Pyrex said:
Make a Profession(whatever) check to determine how many GP's worth of raw venom you extract in a week.

Then, make a Craft(Poisonmaking) check to turn the raw materials into finished product.

Ex:
One 'dose' of Medium Monstrous Spider venom costs 150gp.

If you take 10 on Profession(Spider Handling) and have a total bonus of +10 to your check you extract 10gp worth of venom per week.

Five weeks later you take your 50gp worth of venom and start making Craft(Poisonmaking) checks. Again assuming taking 10 and a bonus of +10 nets you 40gp of progress per week.


Four weeks (160gp) later you now have one "prepared dose" of Medium Monstrous Spider Venom.

Upside: "free" poison for your weapons.

Downside: Each "free" dose takes nine weeks to create.


Four weeks for one dose? Seems a bit too much effort. The best rules I have seen have been in the Quintessential Rogue. It seems crafting poison and trapmaking are far more difficult than one would think going by the rules.
 

I´d go with Craft (Alchemy) and a fairly high DC. For making Antitoxin it´s DC 25, so it should be the same for making poisons. Having 5 ranks in Wilderness Lore could give a +2 bonus, if it´s a natural poison like spider venom.
 


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