Thursday, March 14, 2013

Poison in Chanbara

I just spent the past hour or so trying to find a blog post from a little while back - could have been as far back as last November, or maybe only January.  Don't remember exactly.  Anyway, the blogger had posted about the actual effects of poison, and how they're actually a lot more fun than simply keeling over dead.  Projectile vomiting, uncontrolled diarrhea, swelling, hallucinations, all that sort of stuff.

And I can't find it.

Anyway, thanks to my very light Thursday schedule, I've just about got the Chanbara combat chapter done.  All that's left is the poisons.

Inspired by this renegade blog post (and if you're reading this or you also remember that post and happen to remember who blogged about it please let me know!  I'd love to give credit where credit is due, and also stick that post up on the Links to Wisdom wiki so I and others can find it again), Chanbara [and Flying Swordsmen when I get around to revising it] will have three different types of poisons with effects as follows:

Intoxicants: affect the mind, and could cause any of the following - sleep, drowsiness, confusion, impaired judgement, hallucinations, slowed reactions, severe headache, death

Contaminants: nausea, pain, vomiting, diarrhea, lethargy, blindness, choking/coughing, death

Destructive: hit point damage, greater hit point damage, damage plus intoxicant symptom, damage plus contaminant syndrome, convulsions, rash/swelling, death

I'll have charts with the various symptoms, and different die roll spreads for differing strengths of poison: weak 2d4 (never results in death), moderate 2d6 (slight chance for instant death), strong 2d8 (higher chance for instant death).  Of course, the weak destructive poisons could easily result in death through hit point damage even if there's no chance to roll for instant death on that chart.

Once I get all this sorted, then I just need to come up with prices for the different types...

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