So, I am currently in the Council of Thieves AdPath playing a Rogue. I opted to be a traveler from a Nadal family and trained in the use of poisons.
We have a druid in our group who is doing craft alchemy as well as herbalism.
Our current conundrum is that I am having him make poisons for me and we wanted to try to gain some of the raw materials for them using his herbalism skill but there is no place in the core rule book or anything else we can find that shows what exactly the base materials are for each poison and where to find them or if we can find them.
So in short:
1. How can we tell what the raw materials are for each poisons?
2. How can we know if these will be available to buy in Cheliax or find in the area around it? (Using Herbalism)
3. Should we just house rule it?
Thank you in advance.
I'm pretty sure you need to house rules to do this. My comments below are probably a reasonable suggestion for those house rules.
1. How can we tell what the raw materials are for each poisons?
This is probably an knowledge roll, although I could see using Herbalism. Whichever knowledge is related to poisons would be the one to use. I'd set the DC to the DC to craft the poison. You need to succeed on this once per poison, then you know what you need after that.
2. How can we know if these will be available to buy in Cheliax or find in the area around it? (Using Herbalism)
To know if it's for sale would be either knowledge(local) or diplomacy in its gather information mode. To find some, I would use an Herbalism check. Spend 1d4+1 hours searching an area, then make the check (same DC as to craft the poison). If you pass, you find the ingredients for a dose. If you beat the DC by 5 or more, you find an additional set of ingredients for each additional 5. (So rolling 21 against DC 10 would yield 3 doses worth of ingredients.)
The GM should feel free to set a maximum number of ingredients that you can find in an area. If you're in not quite the right area or the area has been heavily used, a large circumstance penalty (-5 to -20) could easily apply.
Depending on how much poison you want to use and your GM is willing to allow you to have, the one dose per +5 on check could be increased, although there would then definitely need to be limits on how much you could find.
I had a poisonmaking character in a campaign once, and we encountered all these same questions. I don't think the RAW really intended to make poison something the PCs would invest heavily in, IMO. For starters, as you point out, there's just not that much information about them. The natural response to killing off a poisonous creature is, "How can I get me some of that?"
And then, you'll find that as you gain levels, the monsters you face become increasingly tougher to affect with poison (Fort saves get ridiculous and poison DCs don't really change). So using poison quickly becomes less attractive by mid-level (or lower).
You will probably have to houserule most of it, but before you go inventing a system, I strongly suggest you take a look at a couple of resourced I've found to be both instrumental in adjudicating this and a source of even more colorful and nastier poisons.
From Bastion Press: "Pale Designs - A Poisonmaker's Guide"
or
From Blue Devil Games: "Poisoncraft"
Both introduce systems for harvesting raw materials (though the mechanics are different between the two), and both have lots of new poisons in them. "Pale Designs" has a much larger catalog, including drugs, but "Poisoncraft" delves deeper into the mechanics of actually crafting the stuff and includes descriptive text that shows "what the poisons are made of."
I have taken the Poisoncraft system and designed an Excel template from it for making your own poisons, which I'd gladly send you (or anyone) if you're willing to post an e-mail address.
Thank you both, Email is jrlail@hotmail.com if you wouldnt mind sending me that template. My DM is pretty open minded and will prolly go with Udalrich's system but, I like to have more options so send away.
Seems to me after all this time and having multiple classes that use poisons, Paizo would have came up with some system or atleast expanded on the poison making rules. After reading the Core book for pathfinder then going back to the 3.5 book and finding almost the exact thing it got kinda frustrating.
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So, I am currently in the Council of Thieves AdPath playing a Rogue. I opted to be a traveler from a Nadal family and trained in the use of poisons.
We have a druid in our group who is doing craft alchemy as well as herbalism.
Our current conundrum is that I am having him make poisons for me and we wanted to try to gain some of the raw materials for them using his herbalism skill but there is no place in the core rule book or anything else we can find that shows what exactly the base materials are for each poison and where to find them or if we can find them.
So in short:
1. How can we tell what the raw materials are for each poisons?
2. How can we know if these will be available to buy in Cheliax or find in the area around it? (Using Herbalism)
3. Should we just house rule it?
Thank you in advance.
I think the question becomes does your DM require you to make checks to find the raw materials to make magic items? Does your GM require you to find unguents and rare ingredients to make alchemical items with Craft (Alchemy)?
The rulebook states that poisons can be made using Craft (alchemy) where the DC tomake a poison is equal to its Fortitude save DC.
Other than the fact that you can poison yourself while crafting the poison, under normal rules there are no specific requirements to find the Black Lotus to make Black Lotus extract, for example. Of course, your DM can rule otherwise to restrict or otherwise curtail poison use in his or her campaign.
From a flavor perspective, Cheliax is a dark place where many things can be bought and sold on the black market. I would imagine that a simple check to find information would be good enough. If you were required to find it out in the open then Survival to forage would be an acceptable substitute. I do not believe you need Knowledge (herbalism) to identify the raw materials you know you need for items you already know how to make, and if you have Craft (alchemy) it should generally be accepted that you know how to make an item whose DC you can achieve.
In any case, you should have to pay out the normal 1/3rd cost required by the Craft skill in order to obtain those components. However you roleplay that is up to you and your GM, be that in bribes, payments, or expenses to forage for components.
...if you wouldnt mind sending me that template.
Done.
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To the OP, if your GM likes to research these things a little bit you might also consider having them Google for "netbook of poisons". Lots of information there.
Also, I came across the following pages recently and they may help you. Note that I haven't read all of them so I can't vouch for any given link:
http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=4854.0
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63130
And then here on the Paizo forums was the discussion of how the poison game mechanics actually work, how the DCs increase, and so forth.
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Thanks for linking my handbook, Azhrei :)
Given Cheliax's reputation, I'd assume that poisons are readily available in the shady back alleys of most small cities and up.
Complete Adventurer has expanded rules for poisons, by the way - it makes them faster to create, and much cheaper if you have the materials available. It's a sort of mini-fix since poisons are difficult to use effectively otherwise (and are still pretty difficult if you don't plan ahead).