Yagathai
01-17-2004, 10:12 PM
Here is v0.1 of my Alchemy rules. I post them here so that you can pick them apart, so that I can rebuild them to be faster, stronger, better...
Alchemy
The role of alchemy in the middle ages is a curious one. At once the refuge of the highly educated and the total charlatan, the alchemist's laboratory was a place that the average man looked on with wonder and dread. There is no doubt that alchemists were the closest thing to natural scientists that existed at that time, but as the scientific method was several centuries away, their methodology was haphazard at best. After all, once an alchemist becomes methodical, organized and firmly grounded in the real, they stop being an alchemist and start being a scientist. In a fantasy setting, of course, alchemy becomes a little something extra.
Alchemy is a dangerous and unstable art. Alchemists are notorious for eccentricity and instability (it's probably the mercury) and there are few men brave enough to drink something that comes out of one of their laboratories, which is just as likely to be deadly poison as it is to be a love philtre. A noble that keeps an alchemist at his court is wise to put his guest in chambers made of stone, far away from any of his valued guests. The odd smells, choking fumes and smoke, irregular explosions and mad cackling is otherwise quite distracting.
Uses
So what can you do with alchemy? Well, first and foremost, in a traditional low fantasy setting an alchemist is probably the closest thing to a chemist that you can find. Identifying a strange substance found smeared on an arrowhead, silver plating a dagger, doctoring lamp oil so that it burns green instead of yellow, or inventing gunpowder -- if you want this done, chances are your friendly neighborhood alchemist is one of the few people that can do it for you. And then there's the more fantastic aspects of alchemy: Substance transmutations, potions to heal or kill, and that most coveted of artifacts, the Philosopher’s Stone. They say it can change lead to gold and grant a man immortality. Alchemy is also one of the few ways that a sorceror or witch can store the power of a spell until it's needed -- essentially, magic potions.
Obstacle levels
Here are some sample obstacles for some basic alchemical actions:
Ob. 1: Create noxious smoke and fumes. Realize that the softly bubbling substance in your crucible is about to explode.
Ob. 2: Identify a simple substance, like gelatin or tin or leather. Refine something fairly simple into something even simpler, like chalk from oyster shells or pure water from seawater.
Ob. 3: Basic electroplating. Determine whether or not something is poisonous without actually feeding it to your apprentice.
Ob. 4: Create an acid that will eat through organics. Refine simple things from more complex substances, like iron from blood or cyanide from the king's dinner. Create an Essence for use in sorcerous potions.
Ob. 5: Invent and create Greek Fire. Identify complex substances and what they might be used for, including sorcerous Essences. Create substances that have an effect on human physiology other than stopping it.
Ob. 6: Create an acid that will eat through metal or glass as well as your soft, tender flesh. Create a Perfect Essence that can be used in sorcerous potions.
Ob. 7: Invent and create gunpowder, or other equally improbable and ridiculous substances achievable via advanced chemistry (A black powder with the power to move mountains of stone! Glue that will stick anything together! Nonalcoholic beer!)
Ob. 8: Create fantastic substances that even advanced chemistry can't achieve, like an acid that will eat through anything (including the glass bottle that you attempted to compound it in, as well as, of course, your soft, tender flesh), or a cloth as light as air that can stop a sword blow from a strong man, or nonalcoholic beer that tastes like the real thing. In other words, grey-shade stuff.
Ob. 9: The Philosopher's Stone!
Ob. 10: Transmutation! Like flesh to stone or lead to gold or, if you're an idiot, gold to lead.
Ob. 11: The stuff of legend: A small vial of poison potent enough to befoul an entire ocean, a sleeping draught so potent that a single drop makes a man sleep for a hundred years, a fertilizer that can make a beanstalk grow to touch the sky. In other words, white-shade stuff.
Ob. 12: I've done it! The Elixir of Immortality is mine!
So how long does this take? Alchemy is an art that requires patience and exacting attention to detail. Base time for Ob. 1-3 is Ob. in days. Base time for Ob. 4-6 is Ob. in weeks. Base time for any Ob. 7+ is Ob. in years. The road to immortality is a long one.
Successes over and above the Ob. can be used to reduce the time it takes to accomplish a goal. Every two extra success expended towards working faster reduces the time something takes by 10%.
And how much can you make? That's completely up to the GM, but I'd recommend no more than two or three functional units of Essence for each attempt.
You need a Philosopher's Stone to even attempt anything with an Ob. of 10 or greater.
Failure
An alchemist that fails his roll is in for a bad time. Roll a DOF and consult the table below:
1-2: Catastrophic failure!
Sometime during the alchemical process (GM determines exactly when) there's an acid spill, a fire, an explosion, caustic fumes, a nasty tumble off of a high stool or something. Anyone in the laboratory risks being hurt. Calculate IMS, Power = the Ob. of what was being attempted. DOF: 1-2 = I, 3-4 = M, 5-6 = S.
3-4: Simple failure.
At the end of the allotted time, the bubbling stops, the smoke clears and... nothing happens. Sorry. Look on the bright side: Nothing happened.
5-6: It works (only not really)!
The desired result is not achieved, even though the alchemist thinks that it has. Something has happened, though. A test returns a false positive, that Essence isn't as Perfect as you think it is, the skin moisturizer for the Duke's wife turns out to decay into a necrotizing venom in a week's time. GMs take note: This is where the really fun stuff happens.
Options
An alchemist may work Normally, Patiently, Carefully, Carefully and Patiently or Hastily.
An alchemist working Normally works normally, thus an alchemist working as patiently as possible to create a Philosopher's Stone takes nine years.
An alchemist working Patiently increases the time he takes by 50%, but if he should fail he can adjust his DOF roll on the failure table by one, either up or down. Thus an alchemist working Patiently to create a philosopher's stone takes 13.5 years. If he succeeds, nothing else happens, but if he fails he's got a much better chance of not blowing the top three floors of the Duke's chateau to kingdom come.
An alchemist working Carefully can decrease his Ob. by up to 2, but for each level of Ob. thus reduced, his original time is doubled. Thus an alchemist working Carefully to concoct a Philosopher's Stone can do it in 18 years with an Ob. 8, or reduce his Ob. even further, to 7, by taking 27 years.
An alchemist working both Carefully and Patiently adds his multipliers together, thus an alchemist working as Carefully and Patiently as possible on the Philosopher's Stone takes (gasp!) 40.5 years (9 base plus 18 = 27 for working Carefully, decreasing his Ob. by 2, plus half again that time for working Patiently)
An Alchemist working Hastily can decrease his time by 10% for every additional point of Ob. he wishes to take. However, working Hastily revises the DOF table for failures to the following: 1-4: Catastrophic Failure, 5-6 It Works (only not really)!.
Working with Formulae
An alchemical formula can be a great help when trying to repeat a procedure someone else has already successfully attempted (even if that person is you!). However, as alchemical script is an arcane and idiosyncratic language, it's not as easy as one might hope. It can take anywhere from a few hours to weeks or even months to properly understand what all of those little squiggles mean.
As a rule, correctly deciphering an alchemical formula requires a Symbology roll of difficulty equal to the Ob. of whatever it is that's described in the formula. Obviously if the alchemist was of a different culture or tradition, penalties may apply. Alternatively, it's significantly easier to read notes in a familiar hand (like your own), so in that case there should be a substantial reduction in Ob.. Success indicates that you've correctly deciphered the alchemical script enough so that you can follow it.
Alchemical formulae vary in quality. Successfully deciphering a formula grants anywhere from 1-4 bonus dice that can be used when making the actual Alchemy skill check.
You can assume that any alchemist worth his salt keeps copious notes while in the laboratory. Distilling those notes into an actual formula with a Symbology check is usually done after the smoke clears. Assume two levels of Ob. on the Symbology check for every bonus die you want the formula to be worth, up to a maximum of 4 bonus dice (or Ob. 8).
Potions, Essences, and getting Bruno laid
Creating a magical potion is a difficult thing, not lightly attempted. After all, you can't jam the magical power of a spell that meddles with the very fabric of reality as we know it into a pitcher of cream during afternoon tea.
Magical effects -- incantations -- can only be stored in materials appropriately attuned to their particular element. These materials are called Essences, and are vital to the creation of magical items and potions. These Essences can then be cleansed of impurity and refined into Perfect Essences, which are even more effective in storing magical power than essences are. If the Perfect Essences of each element are refined yet further, and combined in a specific and controlled manner, you get the Ultimate Essence, more commonly referred to as the Philosopher's Stone.
Creating an Essence of a particular element is an Ob. 4 Alchemy check. Assume that enough Essence is created to hold the energy from one spell. Extra in the Alchemy check not devoted to working more quickly can be put towards making the Essence more pure -- no extra successes spent in this manner indicates an Essence that is just pure enough. You can only store as many extra successes from an incantation in an Essence as the Essence has successes devoted to purity.
For example, Mordecai the Wizard wants to create an Anima Essence to store The Sense in. He achieves 6 successes on his Ob. 4 Alchemy test, and decides to devote the 2 extra successes to purifying the Essence. When it comes time to channel The Sense into the sticky green paste that he comes up with, he gets another 6 successes, beating his Ob. by 4. Nevertheless, when it comes time to actually use the Essence it will be as if he cast The Sense with only 2 extra successes.
Important note: No matter how pure an essence is, it is not the element which it can store. A Water Essence is not pure water. It is a complex combination of conventional and magical compounds and radicals which has been specifically designed to be able to store the magical energy of an incantation that invokes the power of that particular element. It is also almost certainly extremely toxic. This becomes a problem if the sorceror hopes to create a potion that needs to be imbibed to take effect. The sorcerous incantation "Like Water" is very popular among alchemists who enjoy imbuing Essences with magical effects.
A Perfect Essence is an Ob. 6 Alchemy check. A Perfect Essence must be refined from a regular Essence of the desired element. A Perfect Essence has two advantages over a regular Essence: The first is that there is no limit to the number of extra successes for any particular incantation that can be stored in a Perfect Essence. The second is that eight Perfect Essences can be combined into a Philosopher's Stone (with an appropriate Alchemy check, of course).
How To Do It
You need three things to imbue an Essence with a magical effect: The Essence itself, the ability to cast the Channel Forces spell and the spell that you want to imbue the Essence with. Here's how it works: First you cast Channel Forces on the Essence as normal, and sustain it. Then you cast the spell you wish to store in the Essence. For spells with a variable Ob., like Witch Key or Persuade, you determine now how powerful you want the potion to be. You would decide that you're going to imbue this Earth Essence with a Witch Key spell with an Ob. of 4. If you try and use that imbued Essence on a lock that requires an Ob. of 5 to open, it will not work. Also, in the case of Persuade or similar spells, the exact wording of the incantation must be determined as it's being cast. For all intents and purposes, that's it. The incantation is cast now, but doesn't take effect until the potion is used.
If a Garbled Transmission occurs at this point, the effects should be quite interesting. The elemental forces manipulated with incantations are sensitive and finicky. They don't take well to being forced into the Essence of an inappropriate element.
The exact finished form and use of the imbued Essence is between you and your GM. For example, an Earth Essence successfully imbued with Witch Key spell might come in the form of a noxious, gritty, oily black liquid that you drink, and the next lock you touch opens. It might be a dry flaky red dust that you sprinkle over a lock to make it work. It might be a sparkling block of wax that you have to melt inside the actual mechanism itself. Use your imagination. The only hard-and-fast rule is that once used, an imbued Essence is gone. It can't be used again to store an incantation.
As a rule, if the effect is a simple one that requires no direction, like say Witch Key or Strength of the Ox, the potion can be used by anyone, Gifted or not. Granted, a non-gifted character might not know what to make of what she's seeing or hearing through The Sense, but it's not something that requires a lot of conscious control. On the other hand, a potion imbued with a spell that requires concentration or targeting, like White Fire, just isn't something that a non-gifted character wants to try to use. Controlling and channeling that kind of arcane energy without the gift is like trying to focus sunlight through a flawed lens. Whether the presumptuous character's head simply explodes in a burst of lightning, or whether the lightning zaps whomever is closest irregardless of whether they're friend or foe, or whether nothing at all happens, it's up to the GM. Whatever it is, though, it should be bad. Mortals who meddle in things beyond their abilities should be punished.
Let's look at an example: Bruno the Cad is madly in love with the fair Damsel Endistressa, a maiden of great beauty and distressingly unassailable virtue, so he goes to Helga the Woods Witch who has been known to supply a love philtre to unscrupulous suitors from time to time, in exchange for... favours. He approaches her with the suggestion and she's amenable -- Bruno's a jerk, but he's got a nice body, and it's not like Helga gets a lot of company. So after favours are exchanged (he closed his eyes, gritted his teeth and thought of the queen) Helga decides to do what she can for him.
First she'll need an Anima Essence. That's an Ob. 4 Alchemy test, which takes a base time of four weeks. She's going to work Patiently, though, so that time is increased to 6 weeks. She asks Bruno a couple of questions and then tells him to come back in a month and a half, but brush his teeth next time, and gets to work. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, Helga stars off in her lab. The GM makes her player roll her Alchemy skill of 5 against an Ob. 4, and with a little Artha she makes it. Success! Six weeks later she has a pitcher of pale green liquid that smells like freshly mown grass. She feeds a little bit to a rat she found in a trap earlier that day. It squeaks once, voids itself, convulses and dies. So Helga casts "Like Water" on the substance, rendering it non-toxic, if not very palatable. It works, and the next rat doesn't die (until Helga feeds it to her cat, anyway).
Next, Helga portions the Essence into a few parts -- she figures she's got enough for three potions -- and casts Channel Forces. With her B4 Sorcery and her B6 Will she gets 6 successes, easily beating the Ob. of the spell, which was 4. Her player sets aside a Will die to sustain the spell as Helga watches the liquid fizz and bubble. She knows she can't wait forever, so she casts Persuade next. Persuade has an Ob. of the target's Will. She knows from questioning Bruno that the Damsel Endistressa isn't particularly strong-minded, so she figures casting Persuade against an Ob. of 4 should do the trick. She speaks the arcane syllables of the spell, and then "Damsel Endistressa, you are so beautiful. Why waste your youth? Wouldn't it be a good idea to retire in private with the next thing you see and rut like wild animals? If you do, I'm sure you'll enjoy it." Bruno said he needed a love potion, but Helga knows what he REALLY wants. It's a little harder now to make the Ob. 4 spell, as Helga's down a Will die, but with a little bit more Artha she manages to do it. The Essence stops bubbling and turns a light yellow shade. There we go. Helga's sure that if Bruno manages to get the fair Damsel to drink it, and he can ensure that he's the next thing that she sees, he should be in for a good time.
Little does she know that she's a lot tougher than she looks -- how else has she managed to stay a maiden this long? -- and actually has a Will of 5...
The Philosopher's Stone
To create a Philosopher's Stone, first you need a Perfect Essence of one of each element. Assuming you put your years in and succeed in your roll, congratulations, you've got what most men would kill their mother for. The Philosopher's Stone in and of itself does nothing. It's what it allows you to do that makes it so valuable. First of all, no alchemical manipulation with an Ob. greater than nine is possible without a Philosopher's stone. Second, when you're using a Philosopher's Stone you can consider the Ob. of an alchemical skill check of Ob 8 or less to be 2 lower than it actually is for the purposes of calculating how long it takes (obviously, Ob. cannot be reduced below 1). Finally, a Philosopher's Stone allows you to use your Alchemy skill as if it were one shade lighter than it really is. Please note that it doesn't actually lighten your skill shade -- you just roll dice as if it did.
A Philosopher's Stone is not necessarily indestructible, nor is it necessarily a stone. It can be a vial of silver liquid, a gem, a swirling, indistinct form glowing at the center of a glass orb or even a potent arcane symbol burned irrevocably into an alchemist's mind.
Recommendations
How a GM uses alchemy in his own game is up to him, but I do have a few recommendations for both players and GMs on how to handle it:
First of all, alchemy is more chemistry than magic. If a skinny, knob-kneed bookish sorceror type sets out to create "a substance that will give me great strength, the ability to take a lot of punishment and fearlessness in battle!", and he succeeds at his check (at least an Ob. 5, probably higher), he didn't just create a potion of Rhymes-with-Fencer's Transformation. Instead, he just invented PCP.
Alchemy is unpredictable, and has side-effects. There's no OSHA or FDA to regulate alchemy. Lots of time spent in an alchemical laboratory or heavy use of alchemical products isn't good for you. For characters that overindulge, consider lowering Health or applying traits like Palsy, Disturbed, or Halitosis and the like to simulate the sorts of things that happen to someone constantly exposed to dangerous substances that they don't know enough about.
Negative consequences should be balanced and serious. If someone tries to create a tonic that grows back hair and they fail, the result shouldn't be a tonic that makes someone grow fluorescent blue hair. It should be a tonic that causes severe chemical burns to the scalp. If you're really stuck on the blue hair thing, at least make the alchemist and his client think twice before meddling with the forces of nature: The hair is not only blue, but also ignites when it comes in contact with sunlight.
Alchemy
The role of alchemy in the middle ages is a curious one. At once the refuge of the highly educated and the total charlatan, the alchemist's laboratory was a place that the average man looked on with wonder and dread. There is no doubt that alchemists were the closest thing to natural scientists that existed at that time, but as the scientific method was several centuries away, their methodology was haphazard at best. After all, once an alchemist becomes methodical, organized and firmly grounded in the real, they stop being an alchemist and start being a scientist. In a fantasy setting, of course, alchemy becomes a little something extra.
Alchemy is a dangerous and unstable art. Alchemists are notorious for eccentricity and instability (it's probably the mercury) and there are few men brave enough to drink something that comes out of one of their laboratories, which is just as likely to be deadly poison as it is to be a love philtre. A noble that keeps an alchemist at his court is wise to put his guest in chambers made of stone, far away from any of his valued guests. The odd smells, choking fumes and smoke, irregular explosions and mad cackling is otherwise quite distracting.
Uses
So what can you do with alchemy? Well, first and foremost, in a traditional low fantasy setting an alchemist is probably the closest thing to a chemist that you can find. Identifying a strange substance found smeared on an arrowhead, silver plating a dagger, doctoring lamp oil so that it burns green instead of yellow, or inventing gunpowder -- if you want this done, chances are your friendly neighborhood alchemist is one of the few people that can do it for you. And then there's the more fantastic aspects of alchemy: Substance transmutations, potions to heal or kill, and that most coveted of artifacts, the Philosopher’s Stone. They say it can change lead to gold and grant a man immortality. Alchemy is also one of the few ways that a sorceror or witch can store the power of a spell until it's needed -- essentially, magic potions.
Obstacle levels
Here are some sample obstacles for some basic alchemical actions:
Ob. 1: Create noxious smoke and fumes. Realize that the softly bubbling substance in your crucible is about to explode.
Ob. 2: Identify a simple substance, like gelatin or tin or leather. Refine something fairly simple into something even simpler, like chalk from oyster shells or pure water from seawater.
Ob. 3: Basic electroplating. Determine whether or not something is poisonous without actually feeding it to your apprentice.
Ob. 4: Create an acid that will eat through organics. Refine simple things from more complex substances, like iron from blood or cyanide from the king's dinner. Create an Essence for use in sorcerous potions.
Ob. 5: Invent and create Greek Fire. Identify complex substances and what they might be used for, including sorcerous Essences. Create substances that have an effect on human physiology other than stopping it.
Ob. 6: Create an acid that will eat through metal or glass as well as your soft, tender flesh. Create a Perfect Essence that can be used in sorcerous potions.
Ob. 7: Invent and create gunpowder, or other equally improbable and ridiculous substances achievable via advanced chemistry (A black powder with the power to move mountains of stone! Glue that will stick anything together! Nonalcoholic beer!)
Ob. 8: Create fantastic substances that even advanced chemistry can't achieve, like an acid that will eat through anything (including the glass bottle that you attempted to compound it in, as well as, of course, your soft, tender flesh), or a cloth as light as air that can stop a sword blow from a strong man, or nonalcoholic beer that tastes like the real thing. In other words, grey-shade stuff.
Ob. 9: The Philosopher's Stone!
Ob. 10: Transmutation! Like flesh to stone or lead to gold or, if you're an idiot, gold to lead.
Ob. 11: The stuff of legend: A small vial of poison potent enough to befoul an entire ocean, a sleeping draught so potent that a single drop makes a man sleep for a hundred years, a fertilizer that can make a beanstalk grow to touch the sky. In other words, white-shade stuff.
Ob. 12: I've done it! The Elixir of Immortality is mine!
So how long does this take? Alchemy is an art that requires patience and exacting attention to detail. Base time for Ob. 1-3 is Ob. in days. Base time for Ob. 4-6 is Ob. in weeks. Base time for any Ob. 7+ is Ob. in years. The road to immortality is a long one.
Successes over and above the Ob. can be used to reduce the time it takes to accomplish a goal. Every two extra success expended towards working faster reduces the time something takes by 10%.
And how much can you make? That's completely up to the GM, but I'd recommend no more than two or three functional units of Essence for each attempt.
You need a Philosopher's Stone to even attempt anything with an Ob. of 10 or greater.
Failure
An alchemist that fails his roll is in for a bad time. Roll a DOF and consult the table below:
1-2: Catastrophic failure!
Sometime during the alchemical process (GM determines exactly when) there's an acid spill, a fire, an explosion, caustic fumes, a nasty tumble off of a high stool or something. Anyone in the laboratory risks being hurt. Calculate IMS, Power = the Ob. of what was being attempted. DOF: 1-2 = I, 3-4 = M, 5-6 = S.
3-4: Simple failure.
At the end of the allotted time, the bubbling stops, the smoke clears and... nothing happens. Sorry. Look on the bright side: Nothing happened.
5-6: It works (only not really)!
The desired result is not achieved, even though the alchemist thinks that it has. Something has happened, though. A test returns a false positive, that Essence isn't as Perfect as you think it is, the skin moisturizer for the Duke's wife turns out to decay into a necrotizing venom in a week's time. GMs take note: This is where the really fun stuff happens.
Options
An alchemist may work Normally, Patiently, Carefully, Carefully and Patiently or Hastily.
An alchemist working Normally works normally, thus an alchemist working as patiently as possible to create a Philosopher's Stone takes nine years.
An alchemist working Patiently increases the time he takes by 50%, but if he should fail he can adjust his DOF roll on the failure table by one, either up or down. Thus an alchemist working Patiently to create a philosopher's stone takes 13.5 years. If he succeeds, nothing else happens, but if he fails he's got a much better chance of not blowing the top three floors of the Duke's chateau to kingdom come.
An alchemist working Carefully can decrease his Ob. by up to 2, but for each level of Ob. thus reduced, his original time is doubled. Thus an alchemist working Carefully to concoct a Philosopher's Stone can do it in 18 years with an Ob. 8, or reduce his Ob. even further, to 7, by taking 27 years.
An alchemist working both Carefully and Patiently adds his multipliers together, thus an alchemist working as Carefully and Patiently as possible on the Philosopher's Stone takes (gasp!) 40.5 years (9 base plus 18 = 27 for working Carefully, decreasing his Ob. by 2, plus half again that time for working Patiently)
An Alchemist working Hastily can decrease his time by 10% for every additional point of Ob. he wishes to take. However, working Hastily revises the DOF table for failures to the following: 1-4: Catastrophic Failure, 5-6 It Works (only not really)!.
Working with Formulae
An alchemical formula can be a great help when trying to repeat a procedure someone else has already successfully attempted (even if that person is you!). However, as alchemical script is an arcane and idiosyncratic language, it's not as easy as one might hope. It can take anywhere from a few hours to weeks or even months to properly understand what all of those little squiggles mean.
As a rule, correctly deciphering an alchemical formula requires a Symbology roll of difficulty equal to the Ob. of whatever it is that's described in the formula. Obviously if the alchemist was of a different culture or tradition, penalties may apply. Alternatively, it's significantly easier to read notes in a familiar hand (like your own), so in that case there should be a substantial reduction in Ob.. Success indicates that you've correctly deciphered the alchemical script enough so that you can follow it.
Alchemical formulae vary in quality. Successfully deciphering a formula grants anywhere from 1-4 bonus dice that can be used when making the actual Alchemy skill check.
You can assume that any alchemist worth his salt keeps copious notes while in the laboratory. Distilling those notes into an actual formula with a Symbology check is usually done after the smoke clears. Assume two levels of Ob. on the Symbology check for every bonus die you want the formula to be worth, up to a maximum of 4 bonus dice (or Ob. 8).
Potions, Essences, and getting Bruno laid
Creating a magical potion is a difficult thing, not lightly attempted. After all, you can't jam the magical power of a spell that meddles with the very fabric of reality as we know it into a pitcher of cream during afternoon tea.
Magical effects -- incantations -- can only be stored in materials appropriately attuned to their particular element. These materials are called Essences, and are vital to the creation of magical items and potions. These Essences can then be cleansed of impurity and refined into Perfect Essences, which are even more effective in storing magical power than essences are. If the Perfect Essences of each element are refined yet further, and combined in a specific and controlled manner, you get the Ultimate Essence, more commonly referred to as the Philosopher's Stone.
Creating an Essence of a particular element is an Ob. 4 Alchemy check. Assume that enough Essence is created to hold the energy from one spell. Extra in the Alchemy check not devoted to working more quickly can be put towards making the Essence more pure -- no extra successes spent in this manner indicates an Essence that is just pure enough. You can only store as many extra successes from an incantation in an Essence as the Essence has successes devoted to purity.
For example, Mordecai the Wizard wants to create an Anima Essence to store The Sense in. He achieves 6 successes on his Ob. 4 Alchemy test, and decides to devote the 2 extra successes to purifying the Essence. When it comes time to channel The Sense into the sticky green paste that he comes up with, he gets another 6 successes, beating his Ob. by 4. Nevertheless, when it comes time to actually use the Essence it will be as if he cast The Sense with only 2 extra successes.
Important note: No matter how pure an essence is, it is not the element which it can store. A Water Essence is not pure water. It is a complex combination of conventional and magical compounds and radicals which has been specifically designed to be able to store the magical energy of an incantation that invokes the power of that particular element. It is also almost certainly extremely toxic. This becomes a problem if the sorceror hopes to create a potion that needs to be imbibed to take effect. The sorcerous incantation "Like Water" is very popular among alchemists who enjoy imbuing Essences with magical effects.
A Perfect Essence is an Ob. 6 Alchemy check. A Perfect Essence must be refined from a regular Essence of the desired element. A Perfect Essence has two advantages over a regular Essence: The first is that there is no limit to the number of extra successes for any particular incantation that can be stored in a Perfect Essence. The second is that eight Perfect Essences can be combined into a Philosopher's Stone (with an appropriate Alchemy check, of course).
How To Do It
You need three things to imbue an Essence with a magical effect: The Essence itself, the ability to cast the Channel Forces spell and the spell that you want to imbue the Essence with. Here's how it works: First you cast Channel Forces on the Essence as normal, and sustain it. Then you cast the spell you wish to store in the Essence. For spells with a variable Ob., like Witch Key or Persuade, you determine now how powerful you want the potion to be. You would decide that you're going to imbue this Earth Essence with a Witch Key spell with an Ob. of 4. If you try and use that imbued Essence on a lock that requires an Ob. of 5 to open, it will not work. Also, in the case of Persuade or similar spells, the exact wording of the incantation must be determined as it's being cast. For all intents and purposes, that's it. The incantation is cast now, but doesn't take effect until the potion is used.
If a Garbled Transmission occurs at this point, the effects should be quite interesting. The elemental forces manipulated with incantations are sensitive and finicky. They don't take well to being forced into the Essence of an inappropriate element.
The exact finished form and use of the imbued Essence is between you and your GM. For example, an Earth Essence successfully imbued with Witch Key spell might come in the form of a noxious, gritty, oily black liquid that you drink, and the next lock you touch opens. It might be a dry flaky red dust that you sprinkle over a lock to make it work. It might be a sparkling block of wax that you have to melt inside the actual mechanism itself. Use your imagination. The only hard-and-fast rule is that once used, an imbued Essence is gone. It can't be used again to store an incantation.
As a rule, if the effect is a simple one that requires no direction, like say Witch Key or Strength of the Ox, the potion can be used by anyone, Gifted or not. Granted, a non-gifted character might not know what to make of what she's seeing or hearing through The Sense, but it's not something that requires a lot of conscious control. On the other hand, a potion imbued with a spell that requires concentration or targeting, like White Fire, just isn't something that a non-gifted character wants to try to use. Controlling and channeling that kind of arcane energy without the gift is like trying to focus sunlight through a flawed lens. Whether the presumptuous character's head simply explodes in a burst of lightning, or whether the lightning zaps whomever is closest irregardless of whether they're friend or foe, or whether nothing at all happens, it's up to the GM. Whatever it is, though, it should be bad. Mortals who meddle in things beyond their abilities should be punished.
Let's look at an example: Bruno the Cad is madly in love with the fair Damsel Endistressa, a maiden of great beauty and distressingly unassailable virtue, so he goes to Helga the Woods Witch who has been known to supply a love philtre to unscrupulous suitors from time to time, in exchange for... favours. He approaches her with the suggestion and she's amenable -- Bruno's a jerk, but he's got a nice body, and it's not like Helga gets a lot of company. So after favours are exchanged (he closed his eyes, gritted his teeth and thought of the queen) Helga decides to do what she can for him.
First she'll need an Anima Essence. That's an Ob. 4 Alchemy test, which takes a base time of four weeks. She's going to work Patiently, though, so that time is increased to 6 weeks. She asks Bruno a couple of questions and then tells him to come back in a month and a half, but brush his teeth next time, and gets to work. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, Helga stars off in her lab. The GM makes her player roll her Alchemy skill of 5 against an Ob. 4, and with a little Artha she makes it. Success! Six weeks later she has a pitcher of pale green liquid that smells like freshly mown grass. She feeds a little bit to a rat she found in a trap earlier that day. It squeaks once, voids itself, convulses and dies. So Helga casts "Like Water" on the substance, rendering it non-toxic, if not very palatable. It works, and the next rat doesn't die (until Helga feeds it to her cat, anyway).
Next, Helga portions the Essence into a few parts -- she figures she's got enough for three potions -- and casts Channel Forces. With her B4 Sorcery and her B6 Will she gets 6 successes, easily beating the Ob. of the spell, which was 4. Her player sets aside a Will die to sustain the spell as Helga watches the liquid fizz and bubble. She knows she can't wait forever, so she casts Persuade next. Persuade has an Ob. of the target's Will. She knows from questioning Bruno that the Damsel Endistressa isn't particularly strong-minded, so she figures casting Persuade against an Ob. of 4 should do the trick. She speaks the arcane syllables of the spell, and then "Damsel Endistressa, you are so beautiful. Why waste your youth? Wouldn't it be a good idea to retire in private with the next thing you see and rut like wild animals? If you do, I'm sure you'll enjoy it." Bruno said he needed a love potion, but Helga knows what he REALLY wants. It's a little harder now to make the Ob. 4 spell, as Helga's down a Will die, but with a little bit more Artha she manages to do it. The Essence stops bubbling and turns a light yellow shade. There we go. Helga's sure that if Bruno manages to get the fair Damsel to drink it, and he can ensure that he's the next thing that she sees, he should be in for a good time.
Little does she know that she's a lot tougher than she looks -- how else has she managed to stay a maiden this long? -- and actually has a Will of 5...
The Philosopher's Stone
To create a Philosopher's Stone, first you need a Perfect Essence of one of each element. Assuming you put your years in and succeed in your roll, congratulations, you've got what most men would kill their mother for. The Philosopher's Stone in and of itself does nothing. It's what it allows you to do that makes it so valuable. First of all, no alchemical manipulation with an Ob. greater than nine is possible without a Philosopher's stone. Second, when you're using a Philosopher's Stone you can consider the Ob. of an alchemical skill check of Ob 8 or less to be 2 lower than it actually is for the purposes of calculating how long it takes (obviously, Ob. cannot be reduced below 1). Finally, a Philosopher's Stone allows you to use your Alchemy skill as if it were one shade lighter than it really is. Please note that it doesn't actually lighten your skill shade -- you just roll dice as if it did.
A Philosopher's Stone is not necessarily indestructible, nor is it necessarily a stone. It can be a vial of silver liquid, a gem, a swirling, indistinct form glowing at the center of a glass orb or even a potent arcane symbol burned irrevocably into an alchemist's mind.
Recommendations
How a GM uses alchemy in his own game is up to him, but I do have a few recommendations for both players and GMs on how to handle it:
First of all, alchemy is more chemistry than magic. If a skinny, knob-kneed bookish sorceror type sets out to create "a substance that will give me great strength, the ability to take a lot of punishment and fearlessness in battle!", and he succeeds at his check (at least an Ob. 5, probably higher), he didn't just create a potion of Rhymes-with-Fencer's Transformation. Instead, he just invented PCP.
Alchemy is unpredictable, and has side-effects. There's no OSHA or FDA to regulate alchemy. Lots of time spent in an alchemical laboratory or heavy use of alchemical products isn't good for you. For characters that overindulge, consider lowering Health or applying traits like Palsy, Disturbed, or Halitosis and the like to simulate the sorts of things that happen to someone constantly exposed to dangerous substances that they don't know enough about.
Negative consequences should be balanced and serious. If someone tries to create a tonic that grows back hair and they fail, the result shouldn't be a tonic that makes someone grow fluorescent blue hair. It should be a tonic that causes severe chemical burns to the scalp. If you're really stuck on the blue hair thing, at least make the alchemist and his client think twice before meddling with the forces of nature: The hair is not only blue, but also ignites when it comes in contact with sunlight.