DC20 Magazine #15 - Poisons
Added 2025-09-01 14:00:10 +0000 UTCIn this issue of the DC20 Magazine, we're releasing our DC20 poison system! In this one, you'll get a bunch of examples for types of poisons, along with rules for how to handle the use of poisons in your game. We're excited for you to get your hands dirty with these devious poisons!
Comments
So I used these as a jumping off point to create a foraging, gardening, and potion brewing mechanic into my game. I recently created a hexcrawl for a travel section of my campaign. I homebrewed a list of ingredients for each basic and advanced potions, creating recipes for basic potions with rare ingredients to turn them into advanced potions. I then I distributed those ingredients across the hexmap with encounter opportunities to run into dangerous animals in that ecosystem. Pairing that with dungeons, camps of combatant NPC's, and other special locations with lore, gave me a means of simulating in world travel between cities and classic AD&D style exploring that gave me more incentives to play with. Here's where I wanted more content/rules/system to work with: The herbalism trade has examples of categories you can brew, but no further information. I did the following: 1. I made it so the PC could only create one potion/trade mastery point/long rest (I have a rule that there's only 2 potion slots/party member backpack). 2. In harvesting, you have to make a roll to see how effective the harvest was, creating a variable yield that you can set depending on the rarity/value of the things it can make. Basic ingredients are DC 5, rare items are DC10, etc. 3. I homebrewed the following potions with ingredients of ascending rarity: a. Resistances (DC10) b. Immunities/Inspiration/Adv (1 check) (DC15) c. Advanced potions supplied by DC20 (DC20) 4. A template for the amount of ingredients of each category you'd need as a campaign world prep list would be nice. To play the game with x number of basic potions and y number of advanced potions (potentially having tiers of advanced potions) Crits allow you to collect items and plant them for yourself. For every 5 over the DC +1 yield. I eventually dropped the categories of things you can make given in the 9.5 manual and just used this system. I generated the list of everything and hid stuff in the descriptions to give my party worldbuilding tidbits and worldbuild far off lands they're travelling to before they get there by having some ingredients traded by special travelling merchants. The 3rd tier of advanced ingredients (Advanced potions supplied by DC20) can't be bought and must be found. I was going to use those potions as a way to weaken or trick mid-high tier villains/gatekeepers in the world to make plot points more dramatic. Anyone have any constructive critiques of what I've done or a way to improve how I built out on the base system?
Kurt Anderson
2025-09-14 23:41:58 +0000 UTCDisapointing that this magazine did not include more detail on the ingredients of posions, who can create poisons and how this might effect the save DC for the poison. EG To prepare a poison you have the raw ingredients of the poison and spend 1 minute must succeed on a alchemist or herbalism kit check against the poison DC, Sucess/5: the poison DC increases by 1.
mat taylor
2025-09-12 14:57:25 +0000 UTCFinally an RPG that has rules for getting drunk! Getting drunk at the local Tavern is such a common thing players do with their PCs. It always has to be home brewed how to handle that though when PCs get drunk.
Dan
2025-09-02 00:03:08 +0000 UTCOh, I'm loving these mechanics, and the fact that this can also be useful to simulate diseases is a big plus.
Gustavo Campanelli
2025-09-01 21:48:53 +0000 UTC
