I have a player in my game who wants her character to dabble in poisons. She's asking me lots of questions concerning how she would go about making poisons for use. I gave her the simple answer, pointing to the table in the Core Rulebook.
But what about naturally occurring poisons? If her party kills a Medium Spider, can the poison sacs be harvested for Medium Spider Poison? What about striped toadstools? Can they be found in the wild, and if she can she harvest them and avoid the cost? What if she wants to actually adventure with the goal of gathering ingredients for some of the nastier poisons?
Aside from the fact that gathering ingredients from the wild makes more sense to me than magically transforming gold into poison with a craft check, and the fact that it offers interesting adventure ideas, I'm wondering if there are rules published that might assist in allowing her to play the DIY poisoner.
Intuitively, I feel as though a Knowledge (nature) to identify ingredients, as well as to identify growing areas is appropriate. A Survival check to harvest makes sense, too. Any ideas if the developers have tackled this?
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I haven't seen anything official, but here's what I usually do:
Knowledge (Nature) will identify ingredients (such as toadstools or venom glands), and tell the character how to harvest them. Survival can be used as a substitute.
Craft (Poison, Alchemy, Herbalism) or Heal will allow the character to distill the substance into something more usable. Again, Survival can be used as a substitute.
I don't allow the characters to substitute more than one of the two skills with Survival.
Part of the craft skill for poisons is stabilizing the poison so it doesn't degrade before it can be used. As such she can harvest the sacs or what not, but has to roll the skill to keep the poisons from breaking down before she can use them. This is actually a fairly (but not the rule and certainly not in pathfinder!) common problem with many organic poisons and why a craft skill roll is still needed even with "obvious" poisons.
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I made a feat for extracting poisons from creatures.
Extract Poison
You can extract poisons from creatures you have killed.
Prerequisite: 1 rank Heal
Benefit: You can make a special Heal check to extract poison from a recently slain creature. The DC for this check is 10 + the DC of the poison, on a successful check one dose of poison is extracted plus one additional dose for every 5 points by which the your check exceeds the DC. A poison extracted in this fashion remains potent 1 hour unless a successful craft (alchemy) check is made to stabilize the poison. You must spend 1/2 the normal crafting cost to stabilize the poison and the DC to stabilize the poison is equal to the poison’s DC. Characters handling poison in this fashion have a 5% chance of being exposed to the poison unless they have the poison use class feature.
Normal: Characters cannot use poisons from slain creatures.
I made a feat for extracting poisons from creatures.
Extract Poison
You can extract poisons from creatures you have killed.
Prerequisite: 1 rank Heal
Benefit: You can make a special Heal check to extract poison from a recently slain creature. The DC for this check is 10 + the DC of the poison, on a successful check one dose of poison is extracted plus one additional dose for every 5 points by which the your check exceeds the DC. A poison extracted in this fashion remains potent 1 hour unless a successful craft (alchemy) check is made to stabilize the poison. You must spend 1/2 the normal crafting cost to stabilize the poison and the DC to stabilize the poison is equal to the poison’s DC. Characters handling poison in this fashion have a 5% chance of being exposed to the poison unless they have the poison use class feature.
Normal: Characters cannot use poisons from slain creatures.
That, sir, is a solid feat.
I have a player in my game who wants her character to dabble in poisons. She's asking me lots of questions concerning how she would go about making poisons for use. I gave her the simple answer, pointing to the table in the Core Rulebook.
But what about naturally occurring poisons? If her party kills a Medium Spider, can the poison sacs be harvested for Medium Spider Poison? What about striped toadstools? Can they be found in the wild, and if she can she harvest them and avoid the cost? What if she wants to actually adventure with the goal of gathering ingredients for some of the nastier poisons?
Aside from the fact that gathering ingredients from the wild makes more sense to me than magically transforming gold into poison with a craft check, and the fact that it offers interesting adventure ideas, I'm wondering if there are rules published that might assist in allowing her to play the DIY poisoner.
Intuitively, I feel as though a Knowledge (nature) to identify ingredients, as well as to identify growing areas is appropriate. A Survival check to harvest makes sense, too. Any ideas if the developers have tackled this?
To be honest the crafting rules for poison suck, I'd suggest looking at the Iron Heroes poison making feats for a good substitute.
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I made a feat for extracting poisons from creatures.
Extract Poison
You can extract poisons from creatures you have killed.
Prerequisite: 1 rank Heal
Benefit: You can make a special Heal check to extract poison from a recently slain creature. The DC for this check is 10 + the DC of the poison, on a successful check one dose of poison is extracted plus one additional dose for every 5 points by which the your check exceeds the DC. A poison extracted in this fashion remains potent 1 hour unless a successful craft (alchemy) check is made to stabilize the poison. You must spend 1/2 the normal crafting cost to stabilize the poison and the DC to stabilize the poison is equal to the poison’s DC. Characters handling poison in this fashion have a 5% chance of being exposed to the poison unless they have the poison use class feature.
Normal: Characters cannot use poisons from slain creatures.
I'd have made the DC a little lower, but that is a good feat.
I'd allow Profession (herbalist) checks to gather material components - the Profession skill is the game's way of turning time into money. You make a Profession check to gather raw materials, and the money you make from those count as the raw materials needed for a Craft check. That's how I'd do it if someone wanted to gather naturally-occurring materials for poisons.
I'd probably allow a player to use Survival with the same mechanics as well, since you can gather food with a Survival check, and it doesn't require points in another skill.
The 1e AD&D DMG had some rules for Assassin characters to learn poison manufacture and application skills that you may want to reference if you have access to it and wanted to go down the feat path.
For going down the skill path: Knowledge, Profession and Craft are all potentially relevant and you could make the poison manufacture expensive or cheap in terms of skill points needed.
For the raw ingredients there's animal, vegetable an mineral types. The extraction method to preserve the ingredients and the crafting of a poison.
You could rule that one skill covers multiple aspects of the process or is very specific in the process stage or that one skill covers many types of poisons or a very specific type.
The one thing I wouldn't do is just let a character apply the contents of a creature's poison sac to their weapon and expect it to work as a poison.
I'd allow Profession (herbalist) checks to gather material components - the Profession skill is the game's way of turning time into money. You make a Profession check to gather raw materials, and the money you make from those count as the raw materials needed for a Craft check. That's how I'd do it if someone wanted to gather naturally-occurring materials for poisons.
I was going to say pretty much this, though I doubt I'd call it "Herablism" since a lot of poisons are in creatures. Probably Profession (Apothecary) or something--or just let them use Craft for it with the Profession rules on money making.