Unpacking potions.

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Targeting:
Does the potion target some specific part of the thing it is used on? For instance, a potion which grants nightsight would have to target the eyes. Granting nightsight to your digestive organs, or your whole body, would be of questionable worth. For instance, without a target you might gain the nightsight at the cost of becoming photosensitive; taking damage from any bright light. Similarly, an oil which creates fire is great if you can pour it on a sword and it affects only the blade, not the parts you hold. Possible use of the magical law of similarity, where like produces like. Mixing eye like fruits into the potion could result in it targeting eyes with its effect. Possible.

Effect:
The most important part of the potion is what it does; though it is also a very complex aspect. The examples I used were a Healing potion and a vial of alchemist's fire. The question is, what happens when I pull the active ingredients out of each of them and switch them? Healing grenade and a drink that catches fire when ingested. What if Combine them? Healing fire? How many effects can be stacked into one potion and how do they act when combined?

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Potency:
Simply put, what happens when I stick more of the same ingredient into a potion? Does it take effect faster? Does the effect double? Last twice as long? And can someone overdose on the ingredients or the potion? If I drink a bunch of healing potions and overdose, will I get some sort of autoimmune disease or cancerous growth as my flesh repairs beyond normal?

Container:
Part of the creation process of some potions would inevitably require special containers or equipment. Alchemical fire, as described, reacts with air, meaning the container it's in must contain either a vacuum or some manner of inert gas. Powerful corrosives couldn't be held in normal materials, and some things might be light sensitive. All these things would have to be kept in mind.

When is it effective:
The major thing here is the decision of how to delineate this. See, the problem is that you could have hundreds of these individual conditions about when a potion activates. On skin, on metal, in air, when ingested, when shaken, when mixed in water, when injected, when exposed to light etc etc.

There are a few methods to avoid this while still allowing control. Modularity of effective state is probably best, though that entails a great deal of parts OR a use of the Magical Law of similarity. Alternatively, effective ingredients, that is to say the ingredients that have the effects built into them, could also determine when the potion is effective. For instance the ingredient that allows healing may only take effect in the body and not outside of it.

But this in turn leads to possible conflicts between effective locations and requires extra work on the ingredients.

The last possibility is a few hard effective locations which are modified by the targeting to get the desired specificity.

The speed of a potion's interaction is something that may end up mashed in with other variables. In modern pharmacology the speed of reactions is often controlled via certain "Shielding" techniques such as time release capsules. The same could be used for delayed or "latent" effects but there is still the idea of making effects that are continous, rather than all at once. A potion of strength should last more than 1 turn. Capsules could be used to do this too, with slow release rather than instant. This would of course lessen the potency.

It may be possible to effect this via some method of alchemical apparatus. For instance, brewing times. If, say, a potion would last for turns equal to the number of hours it is slow boiled during the creation process. This process could work well with concentration, allowing someone to boil something out for four hours, creating a potion that lasts 4 turns, while also concentrating the ingredients 4 times in order to create a potion that acts as effectively as a 1 turn potion but for 4 turns.

This thread is neat.

Targeting:
The ability to target a specific thing is quite important for certain potions. As I said, night vision to your liver is not terribly helpful. The idea that I put forward was the use of the magical law of similarity to do this. The law of similarity is basically one of the two laws that govern magical thinking, the other being the law of contagion, which could also be used here. The law of similarity states that something which is similar will produce similar results, hence why voodoo dolls have to look like the person they're aimed at. The law of contagion states that two things which were once in contact will continue to act as though they are still in contact even if separated. Hence why voodoo dolls need a bit of hair or something from the target.

I think that targeting can be done quite well with these two laws. For instance, if I want a potion of night vision that affects only the eyes, then I need something that looks vaguely eye like. You see this is "traditional" medicine where stuff that looks like organs is supposedly good for those organs. Billberries (Basically blueberries) are considered to be good for your eyes by many a quack homeopath, so using them to specifically target a body part might work. However, this creates a problem: How do I stop ingredients from muddling the targeting? Because clearly there's the chance that an ingredient might look like something. If I use a billberry in my alchemist's fire, does that mean it only burns eyes?

The possible remedy I have for this is a bit complex and also horrible.

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>>51792573
The remedy is two fold. First, for materials or objects, you use replicas made out of some kind of similar material. For instance, If I want alchemist's fire that only catches fire when it is smeared on a sword blade, I need to include in the brew a tiny metal sword blade. Preferably one that is either dissolved or ground up or otherwise integrated into the material itself.

For organic things, you need a bit of the thing you're targeting. This means that creating a potion that targets the eyes means I need eyes as part of my potion.

In order to prevent ingredient muddling, I am probably gonna include a separate end stage process for this, so it is included after the "Effective" portion of the potion is made. So you have your alchemical fire all made up and then you add in your dash of ground up lead sword blade and boom, done.

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>>51785769
Reminder that in Dark Sun, potions are replaced by magic berries that explicitly have properties exactly like potions, but stay fresh as berries for iirc 99 years? Or was it 99 days?

And it has to be berries, squeezing the juice out of the berries or drying the berries out destroys the magical effects.

This is too valuable to be lost just yet.

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>>51795711
Oh, don't worry, I'm thinking aloud here so I'll keep updating as I work.

Effect is something that is, in my mind, intrinsically tied to the ingredients of the potion. I've had good results with modular syntactic spell systems in the past (Lungs turning to kittens is a good result, I think) so I plan to follow the same system, so long as it makes sense. Each ingredient can be given a simple effect, and then mixed and matched among others to provide a great deal of variety. The question becomes one of specificity.

With the alchemical fire, is it simply a "fire berry"? An ingredient which has the effect of fire in an otherwise completely empty potion? Probably not. When I think alchemical fire, I think napalm and napalm is liquid fire, so clearly a berry for fire and some bark with the effect of "liquid". Combine and brew such to create a potion that is effective when exposed to air and you have it.

The oddities happen when you have strange combinations, especially if the effects of a substance are not immediately obvious or are unknown to the players. Which I intend them to be for the most part. The best method to figure them out would be experimentation, and perhaps the old alchemist's trick of tasting them. Though, that begs the question; If I have a berry that has the effect "Spiders" exactly what does that taste like?

A rather crawly texture I suppose.

The following Tools may be useful.

Alembic/retort: Used for distilling and purifying chemicals. Could be used to concentrate the effects of ingredients.

Aludel: Used for sublimation. Sublimation might be useful for certain things; specifically for creating gaseous forms of potions.

Athanor: A furnace used to provide constant heat. Might be good for the previously mentioned brewing process to extend effects.

Crucible: Could be used to produce certain containers.

Mortar and Pestle: Used to grind ingredients down into usable pulps and powders for use in potions.

There are various other bits of laboratory glassware to look into, but a lot of this will require some thinking more about how things work before I look into them.

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>>51793655
have filename slash, use it wisely

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Potency:

So if length of brewing determines length of potion effect, probably with some limits or at least not staying 1 to 1 forever, then you also need the ability to concentrate the ingredients such that they can be made to give their full effect for that entire length too. Of course, this implies that you're taking 2 or 4 or 8 or however many times the amount of ingredients and super concentrating them down into one potion. And if this can be done to expand the effective length of a potion, then it can be done to increase the potency of a potion as well.

Potency in a modular system like this is sometimes hard to visualize. Lets take the alchemical fire for instance. If I were to concentrate the ingredients 3 times (effectively using 3 times as many of them for 1 potion) what would that change on the potion's effect? Would the SIZE of the effect increase or would the SEVERITY of it increase? Would the fire burst out in a radius 3 times larger or would it burn 3 times hotter and do 3x the damage? Would a healing potion heal three times as much or would it begin healing things that it previously didn't, such as poison or paralysis?

And is there an overdose limit to such concentrations if used in a person. If I want to make a potion that effectively turns me into the flash by concentrating some sort of "Speed" potion to insane levels (x30 or something). Now, is the massive amount of materials you need to do this a good enough restriction? Or should there be some kind of other limitation? The easiest method I can think of is that of backlash. Say there's some limit (perhaps informed via a relevant stat like Endurance) that if passed, you get backlash. And backlash is, in the most simple mechanical form, whatever bonus you got from the potion, but as a negative instead. So my +30 speed makes me a living god for a bit but then once it runs out the biological damage of moving like that catches up with me and my speed drops to -30.

>>51802580
The second way to do this, and the way I'd personally do it, is have the backlash be related to the nature of the potion in a more thematic way. For instance, high speed for a short period results in broken legs or torn up muscles that hamper your speed by a lesser extent but for a longer time.