Support Your Local Herbmonger

Why are D&D towns filled with apothecaries? Are the desperados gleefully hurling themselves into haunted necropoleis and beast-infested ruins concerned about their wellness routine or self-care rituals?

Whatever the reason, there they are and your players will inevitably send someone in and you'd best have something ready... It's been on my to-do list for a while, but now, printed and glued into my notebook, I have what I need to run a quick scene and give them something to spend a few coins on.

Tacuinum Sanitatis

Weirdos

• Herbie: Tall & thin-framed with a pot-belly. Eager to tell you about "mushroom dreams". An expert on local wildlife.
• Fern: Shaggy and shuffling. A big hugger, with horrific body-odor. Wanders the woods regularly and, if asked, will draw a map to any well-known landmarks in the nearby wilderness. 
• Dr. Stooper: Fastidious and florid. Always tries to upsell patent aphrodisiacs. Feuding with local witch or faith healer, eager for someone to "do something."
• Erma Prunebottle: Weathered and withered. Usually stoned. Knows a shocking amount about local history.

Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen

Wares

• Tea — Requires a fire, water and a teapot to brew. Advantage on rolls to regain hit points from meals if you have a hot drink.
• Chamomile — Relaxing & calming. Basically the same as tea (I'm sure my UK readers agree).
• Tobacco — Regular users can get a boost (d4 hp) by smoking a full pouch, but they must smoke some every watch or become Deprived. It's a beacon for any creature that hunts by smell.
• Pipe Weed — Takes the edge off (d4 hp) but penalizes alertness & response time (disadvantage on defense rolls). Healing doesn't stack with tobacco. 
• Garlic — Prophylactic. Wards off illness; reputed to ward off undead (efficacy is limited).
• Willow bark — Pain killer. 1hp restored, effective once per watch.
• Sage — Burn to reveal incorporeal spirits.
• Wormwood — Steep as tea or burn. Vivid dreams; some users report spirit contact or prophetic glimpses.
• Aloe — Burn treatment. d6 hp restored, fire damage only.
• Poultice — Eleven secret herbs & spices. Applied to bleeding wounds: advantage on death save. Applied during rest: d4 hp over a day's rest.
• Poppy — Pain killer. d6 hp restored. Intoxicating, addictive. Dangerous with alcohol. Very precious. Only a small number of vials will be available, perhaps d3, maybe just one.
• Spell components — An apothecary will carry the basic stuff.

A note on mundane healing: In my homebrew system, Ultra Bastard, characters can eat to restore d4 hit points every watch (a slightly hand-wavey 4 hour period) and can engage in other vices e.g. alcohol, smoking etc. to restore an additional small number of hit points. Effective once per watch for any category of vice. For example, a character could eat, drink and smoke to restore 3d4 hit points but would be drunk, smelly and addicted to nicotine. 

Deprivation is also an Ultra Bastard mechanic. I use it to apply penalties to characters who are hungry, tired, cold etc. For a smoker, I'd impose level 1 after a watch without, level 2 after a day, and clear the addiction if they tough it out a few days. Deprivation is pretty hardcore, so you really don't want to run out of cigarettes. You can substitute whatever your system uses for similar penalties. 

Deprivation
Level 1	No mundane HP recovery
Level 2	Max HP halved
Level 3	Max HP =1
When no longer deprived, effects go away.

If the characters are visiting an apothecary hoping to harm someone rather than heal them, I've got a whole post on poisons. 

If your game is more high-magic, let me proffer these potions. 

Pricing & Perishability

Maintaining a price list is too much book-keeping for me. Generally, I aim for a scale of 1sp = $10 and 1gp = $100. Assume that most of the apothecary items cost equivalent to a few meals per dose. This excludes the poppy (basically a mundane healing potion & you can borrow that price) and spell components (which I use to tax wizards that don't need much gear).

Assume anything but the poppy will expire in a week. I recommend picking a day of the week on which all perishables go bad for ease of book-keeping, or, alternatively, every time the party comes back from a delve. This doesn't need a spreadsheet.

Spectres

Rules as written, the official D&D spectre is mostly just a copy-paste wraith with a couple more hit dice and an attack that drains 2 levels (the horror!). It will come as no surprise to readers of previous entries in this series that I want my Spectres to be more distinct. 

Rather than position Spectres as another undead, impersonal void, I've opted to make them larger than life characters. They are the souls that have somehow dodged the Reaper and by intensity of personality or drive have maintained ego cohesion without corporeal form. 

Maybe they were snagged by a witch-bottle in transit to Gehenna or the assigned Valkyrie got waylaid by demons before fetching the fallen warrior to Valhalla. Perhaps the magical-warding on a criminal mage's prison (I'm picturing Magneto in X2) kept the Anubian soul-couriers at bay. It is not a good thing when your friendly local psychopomp is putting up Missed Connections listings on Craigslist.

An Anecdotal Interlude

Over all my years as a player, I can only recall one memorable encounter with a Spectre. It was in the long running Arden Vul game that I've mentioned before. 

This spectre was a named ancient archon guarding an ostentatious tomb at the bottom of a deep descent and so when we woke him, it was difficult to escape the way we'd entered. We lost a few characters and he became a bogeyman for us for several months.  

He stands out because he was:

• Extremely dangerous
• Kept popping up at unexpected times & places
• Was a persistent obstacle along a route that we wanted to travel
• Had just enough of a personality that we could hate him specifically
• Had a cocktail of abilities that made it very difficult for us to deal with him at all at the level we were when we encountered him.

Eventually, we defeated him by leveling our cleric until we could come back with "Dispel Evil". The "fight" was almost an anti-climax. He appeared, got spell-nuked and it felt like a real arrival for our party. Spectral undead were no longer a threat. We found another incorporeal undead shortly thereafter, "Dispel Evil" was already on the list and he got zapped like a mosquito. Never learned his name or cared about him even a little.

All this to say, there's a rich niche here for a terrifying challenge with high-mobility that can hold a whole dungeon-region under threat. Personality, and near-invulnerability on first encounter cultivate player-hatred. Ultra Bastard doesn't have "Dispel Evil" on the standard list so we will need another victory vector. 

Mummies

Mummification is an act of optimism. An irreversible bet that the future will be better than the present. It's a big investment to have a secure tomb built, a body prepared and (often reluctant) favored retainers rounded up for interment. The commitment of capital is total, an undiversified stake in the most illiquid of assets, a spice-packed, spell-swaddled, sealed-for-freshness corpse.

Mummification is the cryonics of my setting's bronze age. When things went wrong, when the sky fell, when the heavens warred, in the days of Ragnarok, of Apocalypse, the Flood and the Sea People, the great high priests and god-kings retreated from the world to sleep through disaster and awake to a new day, when they could emerge and resume their rightful dominance.

Karloff in the Mummy (1932)

After our recent discussion of the wight and wraith, monsters with comparatively weak presence in the popular imagination, we're once again examining a monster with a lot of cultural resonance. All the usual writers had a go at mummy stories (Poe, Conan Doyle, Stoker, later Lovecraft & Rice) and there's a stack of memorable movies: Karloff for Universal, Lee's Hammer mummy and then the 1999 action romp reboot. Each with a constellation of sequels and spinoffs. 

When mummies appeared in the original D&D Monsters & Treasure booklet, they were culturally ubiquitous and that popularity has continued to the present. 

All that to say, your players might not know what a wight is but they definitely have a mental image for mummies. Does the D&D mummy actually feel like the mummy pre-existing in players' imaginations? Does it have anything interesting to do?

Lee in The Mummy (1959)

Mummy Dearest

Across D&D editions, the mechanical structure of the mummy is fairly consistent: Fear-based paralysis, melee hits convey rotting disease, resistance to basic attacks. Usually vulnerable to fire. It's a tough, but eminently physical threat (distinguishing it from the wraith & spectre) and often has a religious/cleric flavor (distinguishing it from the Lich). Honestly... very solid. 

Of the Basic undead, the mummy is one of my favorites.

The initial save vs. paralysis can swing a fight. I've run into mummies a couple of times recently as a player in an OSE Arden Vul campaign. In the first, we mostly made our saves, volleyed spells and crushed the mummies handily. In another tomb-raid, we discovered mummies but most of the party (including our cleric) failed the fear save and it turned into a desperate scramble for escape in which we lost several characters. 

We managed to avoid the Rot but that's another iconic, thematically resonant danger. It's an effect that lingers and often even a successful fight results in a side-quest to find a cure. 

Even as a mid-level party, discovering mummies is a tense, scary moment. 

Vulnerability to fire is also perfect. On the level of practical instinct, a dehydrated, cloth or paper enveloped corpse seems like an ancient Duraflame. On the fictional memory level, Karloff's Imhotep is destroyed when his animating scroll is burned by holy fire. 

Trampier for the AD&D Monster Manual. This rocks

We'll keep all this good stuff in and I'll add a sprinkle of my own spices as we wind up the bandages and tie it off with a bow. 

Speedy Starting Equipment

I recently started a new Ultra  Bastard campaign with some players who are completely new to role playing games. Wanting to get into the action as quickly as possible, I opted to forego purchasing equipment at character creation and instead made this little chart.

It's a handy thing to have printed out & pasted into my DM notebook and I'm sure it'll get a lot of use in the future. 

Posting it here, in case it comes in handy for any of y'all. 

Pick Your Poison

Sometimes it's handy to have a list of poisons. 

When stocking a dungeon or a search-the-body table, it's nice to add something specific to the key rather than just "poison" and, if you're running someone else's key, what does "poison" actually do?

There's a page in my DM notebook for just this eventuality: 

Ignore the central diagram. It's an artifact of a recycled page.

The poisons I've pre-loaded on the page are mostly gestures toward real world toxins. They might not be medically accurate, but the profiles are recognizable. These seemed like a good starting basis for improvisation and cannibalized concoctions. Lots of space on the page to add new entries as they come up in play. Reproduced below, so that you don't have to suffer through my hand-writing.

If you have poisons that you like to use in your games, please put them in a comment. 

Nightmare Before Christmas

Wraiths

Wraiths have a strong visual identity: hooded, faceless black figures. They are the Grim Reaper, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the Nazgul, even the Dementors (if you must). They look scary. Everyone knows the empty cowl means death. 

My own drawing

D&D doesn't know what to do with them. Are they corporeal? Do they paralyze or Energy Drain? Are they Nazgul or is that Spectres? It all depends on which edition you prefer. Delta has a great round-up. 

With their intimidating visages, wraiths should advance the thesis that I've explicated in previous posts (skeletons, zombies, ghouls, wights) that each undead type ought to be uniquely terrifying. 

My wraiths are of the semi-corporeal, black mist mode of wraithdom. They'll look solid enough, but your glaive-guisarme passes clean through. Unlike wights, wraiths don't have names or personalities. They are anti-life voids, avatars of nihilistic hatred. They just want to snuff all the candles. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

Death Spirals Revisited

These guys are brutal. They've got auto-hit life drain (don't worry, I won't make you deduct levels), dissolution at 0hp (no save, no res) and escalating damage that snowballs like a motherfucker.

This monster sets up tactical puzzle-fights and is a bit more mechanically complex than my previous undead. They can float over obstacles and flow between people, so fight positioning will be unusual.

Instead of the canonical level-drain, I've given the wraith an area-of-effect aura. Wraiths deal damage to all adjacent creatures, with no roll and the monster gains the hit points taken. This damage increases every round. The party needs to win fast or it will get out of hand. 

The goal here is for the players to fear them. For their arrival to be an "Oh, shit!" moment, without having to resort to level drain.

Muppets

Wights

As the appellation Wight once referred to men, so too the creatures thus called were once mortal lords. Now they are bitter undead, who loathe and envy the living. Their visages are bleached and their personalities eroded by time, until nothing remains but fierce hostility and simmering resentment. 

They were lords and still believe they should be. 

My own post-it drawing, referencing this one by Vance Kelly

A Boss Suitable for Low-Level Parties

The wights in my game are an undead boss monster. I want something that can stand on its own thematically, not just a stronger zombie with "No. Appearing 2-16" and level-drain. 

A wight should have a name and a story.

In my version, I hope to bring back the dread and vindictiveness of the Tolkien original and evoke the draugr sagas they were based on (e.g. Grettir, Hrómundar and Hervör's saga, perhaps the barrow-dragon from Beowulf). Fun fact: the original use of the term "barrow-wight" was by William Morris in his Grettir's saga translation. I also thought of M.R. James' "A Warning to the Curious" and its BBC adaptation. 

Wights haunt the vicinity of their own tombs and must return to them during the day, unless they are deep underground. 

They'll gain the ability Shuttered Room suggested in their comments section, "undead being vulnerable to weapons that were made while they were still alive, so that rusty old broadsword is of use while that specially imported custom rapier is not." You can reduce them to zero hit points, but they'll dissolve and reform until they're finally dispatched with a suitably ancient implement.

They can track treasure stolen from them, with dire consequences for anyone paid with it. 

You'll think you've defeated one only to have it show up at your campfire a night or two later.

Cairn in Snow (1807) by Caspar David Friedrich