Lycanthropes and Belladonna

[jmucchiello]

Two things, I've only recently started a lycanthrope adventure in my campaign and I've noticed a few holes (perhaps) in the rules. (Or perhaps I'm just not finding it.)

1) Is there a price listed anywhere for a dose of belladonna sufficient to cure lycanthrope (when administered within an hour of the bite)?

2) If a character is bitten, can he make his Fort save against the belladonna to avoid the Strength loss or must he forgo the saving throw in order for the belladonna to cure the potential lycanthrope? The rat bastard DM in me says, you must purposefully fail the saving throw for the belladonna to cure the lycanthrope. But I'm wondering what others think of this. Similarly, can you use neutralize poison to stop the secondary damage or must the secondary damage also take effect for proper lycanthrope prevention? If the character has delay poison in effect and it doesn't wear off for over an hour after he is biten, is he SOL?

For fun, I didn't have the players roll their saving throw against the curse of lycanthrope during the battle. So when the wolves return to human form. Everyone was like, who's been bitten? Do we have enough belladonna? Who made the save? When they looked my way at that point I said, if you take the belladonna, the Fort save is moot. If you don't take the belladonna within an hour, I'll have you roll the save then.

Opinions?

 

[Cheiromancer]

In Speaker in Dreams, the side-bar on page 13 gives a cost of 5 gp for belladonna to be administered.

Now about whether or not to allow fort saves; for an ingested poison a successful save means you did not actually swallow it- you managed to spit it out in time. Or if you swallowed it, it did not stay down. Under that interpretation of what a save means, the PCs will have to forfeit their saves in order to benefit from the belladonna.

On the other hand, the entry under "Curing Lycanthropy" in the MM allows/requires the PCs two fort saves to avoid the strength loss. Belladonna tends to make you sick, but this is a side-effect of helping to prevent lycanthropy, not the means by which lycanthropy is cured.

Note that even if the first save is successful, you still need to make the second one. Otherwise you spat out/threw up the belladonna and don't get any benefit from it.


When my players encountered were-rats, I did the same thing you did.