Treating Poisons and Addictions

If you have magic, nearly all poisons and short term addictions (less than a month in duration) can be cured with a cleanse poison spell or the zebra potion equivalents (purge, cure poison, superior cure, or panacea verumi). The proper use of a healing talisman (one charge cost, MFD ¾ medicine) can also remove either of these conditions. Many poisons can even be prevented in advance with the use of a pre-antidote potion. Unfortunately, characters don’t always have the necessary magic at their disposal – making addictions nearly impossible to remove and making poison removal much more difficult.

For dealing specifically with poisons without magic, you must use either science or medicine to create an antidote or antivenom. Creating either of these requires a fairly advanced lab with a hotplate or Bunsen burner and at least a half dozen beakers, flasks or test tubes as well as a centrifuge. These devices are necessary for isolating the compounds needed to create an antidote or antivenom.

Antidotes are harder to make than antivenoms but can be used to counteract a larger range of poisons, including most zebra poisons. Antivenoms only work on natural poisons, such as what you might encounter in a manticore, nightstalker, bloatsprite or radscorpion. For more artificial creations, such as the concentrated and distilled poisons favored by zebra combatants, you would need an antidote. Antidotes are also capable of alleviating the effects of natural poisons.

Creating antivenom requires only a sample of the venom you’re trying to treat, a source of non-poisoned blood, a lab, and about 30 minutes. The roll to actually create it is either science (MFD ½) or medicine (MFD ¾), and one dose of the poison will produce 1d4+2 doses of antivenom. A critical success on this roll will produce 1d4 doses of antidote instead.

When you don’t critically succeed, making an antidote is trickier. Creating an antidote requires at least 3 different types of poison instead of the single sample required for antivenom; otherwise the requirements, including time, are identical. The roll to create an antidote is either science MFD ¼ or medicine MFD ½. Successes produce 1d4+2 doses; critical successes create 1d6+2 doses.

Addictions that have been with a character longer than a month tend to be past the point where they can be easily removed, even by magical means. By that point, many users have developed a physical or psychological dependency on the drug. Med-x, Buck, and Mint-als in particular are quite dangerous in this regard.

If a character has been addicted to a substance for longer than a month, removing the physical components of the addiction must be done gradually, or the shock to their system caused by magical cleansing can easily leave them debilitated or kill them outright. They must be slowly weaned off the drug, requiring at least 20 doses and an MFD ¾ medicine roll (the “detox roll”) over a period of at least a week (the “detox period”). Lack of doses of the drug makes the medicine roll’s difficulty increase by one MFD step per dose missing. If the addicted character takes the substance as a full dose over the detox period then all the work is undone and needs to be started again from the beginning; 1d4 doses of the drug are wasted for every day into the detoxification process they were. Failures on the detox roll extend the duration of the detox period by a day and require two additional doses of whatever drug they’re trying to break the addiction to, prompting a reroll for each failure until the medic succeeds. Critical failures reduce one of the attributes scores of the addicted pony by one point permanently. The reduced attribute should ideally be one affected by the withdrawal symptoms or by the drug itself. If you lack the necessary cleansing magic, this method can also be used to break short-term addictions.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 828