Saturday, December 7, 2013
The Alchemist's Lab
Board Enterprises has published and released a new product - The Alchemist's Lab - A Guide to Magical Manufacturers
In most game worlds, the alchemists sit in their dungeon laboratories and craft potions of all manners, sinister and benign. Typically, if they are in a major city, they are churning out healing potions for the adventurers. The same can be said of the enchanters, slaving away making magical swords and armor. But what do they do for themselves?
Making magic is a difficult task, yet these brilliant researchers never seem to take the time to invent things that will directly help them. Even if all their doing is finding better ways to make the magical swords, they really need to spend a little time enhancing their labs. This book does that.
Here you will find dozens of products and techniques that can be used to make making magic easier. For player character alchemists, this book is required reading. For GMs, it can be a wonderful source of background color, loot, and/or explanations for why you do or don’t allow the sale of magical items in your world.
This book is written in a generic format, so that the items can be used in the widest range of magical role-playing games.
This supplement contains:
51 pages of content. Artwork is kept to a minimum to deliver more to you the reader.
over 250 different items in the price list - from the mundane to the highly magical
All that for less than $4
The Alchemist's Lab on e23
The Alchemist's Lab on RPG Now
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Bought this right away...seems so mundane when you first think about it, but as I read it I keep thinking of all of the ways that the ideas and items and processes, etc. could really enhance a campaign. Really, this is a whole new facet of a fantasy world, something akin to "magic" in that in just seems to work without really needing to think about it.
ReplyDeleteI remember my GM having me chasing some item or another, but the idea of random items...well, just think; some fishy wizard hires you to get him some odd item, not realizing that with it he will be producing a poison to slowly kill the King far away...finding his lab, talking to other people or experts about what goes into such a poison...great stuff for running around town and a great way to meet experts. Another great product from BE.
Maybe my strategy was bad, but I kept the more mundane stuff upfront so it would show in the freebie pages, rather than give away the best stuff for free.
ReplyDeleteThrilled that it sparked cool ideas in you! I have given over to my unintended results - Fletnern is a high fantasy world, there is a ton o magic in it. The Alchemist's Lab is the first blatant sign of that.
I was in the shower the other night, of course thinking about RPGs; I thought about a bag of holding. These are very difficult and time consuming to create; thus, one can take a mighty short-cut by skipping the ground unicorn horn ingredient (hard to get...) and have a bag of holding that has all of the associated properties...except they weigh as much in the bag as they did before entering the bag. This makes a lower level bag of holding that is better for GMs to control hoarding, you may have two hundred pounds of gold and jewels in your bag of holding, but it sure isn't going to be easy to carry. I am sure this has been thought of before. Seems like the type of thing BE would be good at; be it in the creation process or whatnot, having a GM friendly and empowering way to reel in some of the incredible powers of many magical items.
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