Poison Harvesting

[Sayer_of_Nay]

Are there any official rules on how to handle the harvesting of poisons from living and/or dead creatures? Can this be done? And if so, how many doses of poison can one get from a fresh corpse? And how often could one harvest the venom from a pet viper, for instance?

[Jadeite]

No.

[Starglim]

I think you would use Profession (hunter) to obtain raw materials of a value depending on your roll, then Craft (poison) to process those raw materials into a durable and spreadable injury poison.

For a pet viper, you'd use Profession (snake-keeper) instead.

[Gloom]

In my games we use a heal check in order to harvest the venom, DC = to CR+10, if successful obtain 1d4 doses of the poison, for each 5 above the DC add +1 to the dose amount.

The poison is in a usable but unstable state when harvested, and needs to be properly processed and preserved. It can either be used within an hour after harvesting it or can be processed with Craft (Alchemy) DC = CR+10. A Check needs to be made for each dose of the poison, unless you have Master Alchemist which allows you to do a number of doses equal to your Int modifier (Minimum of 1) at one time. This process takes 30 minutes to prepare for and 10 minutes to do per dose of poison or batch with Master Alchemist. You can opt to increase the DC by 5 and lower the time it takes to 5 minutes per dose/batch.

Success indicates that you have made a lasting poison that you can use at any time you can use a normal poison. Failure indicates the process spoiled your attempt, failure by 5 or more indicates that you have accidentally poisoned yourself! This can be harmful with multiple doses of the same poison, as each dose increases the DC by 2 and the duration by 50% of the base duration!

If the poison is attempted to be sold, measure the value of the poison based on 50% of the encounter "gold" reward. Assume the other 50% could have been recovered by properly preparing the creature's corpse.. Skin, bones, hide, meat, etc.

We also allow the ability to grow poison components in proper environments, this requires Profession (Apothecary) and Knowledge (Nature) rolls and generates an amount of components per week as your normal check would bring in. It cannot be harvested until it meets 1/3 of the final value of the poison!

If you can't tell by my musings.. I've thought about this a lot, and I really enjoy playing Rogues/Assassins/Etc in my campaigns and love it when my players do as well. :)