Say for example you want to poison a castle and all of it's residents and you have 1000 pints of beer ready to give them for a giant party.
How much poison would you need?
|
Depend is the castle in forgotten realms? Because I'm quite sure all the level 30 fighters and wizards are going to pass the saves...I kid.
Not really a whole of poison. Poisons are actually quite potent. You probably could buy an entire batch of arsenic and you would be good. I don't think that it would kill everybody in the castle but many people will be sick or die from it after a couple of days.
Depend is the castle in forgotten realms? Because I'm quite sure all the level 30 fighters and wizards are going to pass the saves...I kid.
Not really a whole of poison. Poisons are actually quite potent. You probably could buy an entire batch of arsenic and you would be good. I don't think that it would kill everybody in the castle but many people will be sick or die from it after a couple of days.
How many doses is an 'entire batch'? That must be an imperial unit.
By RAW, you need a dose for each person you want poisoned, which is one reason why a Poisoner build stinks in Pathfinder. Also, the max damage a dose of arsenic can do to a character is 8 Con damage, so unless they had below-average Con in the first place, you can't actually kill anyone with it.
In the rules i will need enough doses pr. Person to bring them to where i want them. So it depends on the poison an the wanted effect.
The poison rules in PF are not really supporting what you tell me i am planning.
This will have to be a talk to the GM kinda thing.
1000 pints of beer is 125 gallons, one dose of arsenic is enough but well I would pour two doses to be safe.
Two doses of arsenic? For over a 100 gallons? That doesn't sound right to me. If that were accurate you could buy a single dose of arsenic at the beginning of a 1-20 campaign and never run out...
By RAW, you need a dose for each person you want poisoned, which is one reason why a Poisoner build stinks in Pathfinder. Also, the max damage a dose of arsenic can do to a character is 8 Con damage, so unless they had below-average Con in the first place, you can't actually kill anyone with it.
Multiple doses increase the duration, so it would work.
2000 doses would be optimal, to raise the DC by 2. I recommend oil of taggit - cheap (only 180,000gp!) and high DC (up to 17) - most of the place will be unconscious instead of dead. Not as good an onset delay though.
Belladonna or arsenic both work well also.
|
|
Only because it is diluted into a liquid, actually my bad about it let me correct my math:
1 dose can "infect" 10 cubic feet of liquid in best situation, 10 cubic feet is 75 gallons, 2 doses could infect 140 gallons. But of course, like people says talking with your dm is probably a better idea than doing actual math for it.
You'd need one thousand doses, one per pint.
There aren't any rules about how large a poison "dose" is in Pathfinder, just how much it costs. Generally, poisons cost about 100 gp/dose and up, so absent some sort of quantity or crafter's discount, you would be looking at about 10,000 gp or more.
In terms of realistic volume and mass, not much. The lethal dose (LD50) of arsenic pentoxide is about 1 gram (in the real world), so 1 kg would be enough to kill or disable everyone who drank a pint of beer. And of course, there's no way that 1 kg of arsenic would cost anywhere near 10,000 gp, that being the real-world equivalent of millions of dollars (or euros).
I have no idea what "dark reaver powder" actually is, but there are certainly more toxic substances than arsenic known to modern science. The LD50 of botulism toxin is less than a microgram, so a gram of that stuff in a barrel of beer would kill everyone who drinks from it.
1 dose can "infect" 10 cubic feet of liquid in best situation,
Where do you get this from? I have always been under the impression that dose of poison was sufficient to affect one creature, so dividing a dose among ten people means that each of them takes at most a minor effect.
Poisoning someone isn't as easy as it looks.
Actually, it's fairly easy. You just have to use real poisons.
I already cited the LD50 of one of the arsenic compounds. The LD50 of strychnine is even less; less than 2mg for a normal-sized human. While it may be detectable by taste, it primarily tastes bitter, so it would be masked by the normal hops in beer. Cyanide isn't quite as poisonous by mass, but also less strongly flavored, and again it would mostly taste bitter.
I'm not sure how hemlock extract (coniine) tastes -- Agatha doesn't go into detail about this one -- but it's comparably deadly to cyanide or strychnine.
|
|
1 dose can "infect" 10 cubic feet of liquid in best situation,Where do you get this from? I have always been under the impression that dose of poison was sufficient to affect one creature, so dividing a dose among ten people means that each of them takes at most a minor effect.
From an adventure I played in the past which involved mass poisoning of a castle into a stew. Of course like I said earlier there are no official rules for mass poisoning, yet it still happens. It would be totally unreasonable to think someone would drop 24 000 gp worth of arsenic to poison 100 people by tossing into a liquid. Might as well hire a group of orcs or a professional assassin for 24 000 gp.
Back in those days, food often spoiled (no refrigeration), so everyone was basically sniffing their food to see if it was good. Someone might think the beer is "off" and not drink it, not realizing they only took a sip of poison.
Prestidigitation would solve this problem, I believe. You'd have to cast it a lot of times in order to flavor that much beer, but it is a cantrip.
You would have to cast it once. One casting lasts an hour and lets you use any of its effects at will for that hour.
I *am* the GM in this game. The "poison the castle" strategy was recently brought up to tackle a bunch of Ogres in a fortification and I had no idea how to rule on it in game.
It looks as though I was right that by the rules you would need a dose per pint, or at least per Ogre. But that seems to expensive for what seems to be a really good idea. I don't want it to be too cheap though... I guess if 30 of the Ogres were effected (all still getting saves) then taggit would only cost 2,700 or one dose per Ogre. I may even halve that.. still seems expensive.
A disease or curse would be much more efficient. Do you consider it reasonable to allow bestow curse to poison an entire castle, in one or multiple castings? It is also explicitly capable of giving a creature amnesia and erasing all its class levels, for comparison purposes.
I *am* the GM in this game. The "poison the castle" strategy was recently brought up to tackle a bunch of Ogres in a fortification and I had no idea how to rule on it in game.
It looks as though I was right that by the rules you would need a dose per pint, or at least per Ogre. But that seems to expensive for what seems to be a really good idea. I don't want it to be too cheap though... I guess if 30 of the Ogres were effected (all still getting saves) then taggit would only cost 2,700 or one dose per Ogre. I may even halve that.. still seems expensive.
Well, crafting is well-understood to be broken in Pathfinder.
But in this case, there's an easy fix. There's a variety of feats and abilities that I'm too lazy to look up that adjust alchemical crafting. It's simple to say that "normally" an alchemist wouldn't bother to make this stuff in quantity because who needs 1,000 doses at time?
But if you need a bucket of the stuff, he can give it to you with a quantity discount.
Back in those days, food often spoiled (no refrigeration), so everyone was basically sniffing their food to see if it was good. Someone might think the beer is "off" and not drink it, not realizing they only took a sip of poison.
Purify food and drink being an orison makes that a non-consideration. Surely the castle has at least one divine caster.
I may even halve that.. still seems expensive.
I'd go less than half. Poisons are already overpriced and making this solution prohibitively expensive is punishing the players for thinking outside the box some.