In the *Wilderlands of High Fantasy* written for D&D 3.5 I found an alchemist described as a Wizard 5 _ Alchemist 5 multi class. I assume that this is a very weak combo since the rule number one of min-maxing has always been to not loose caster levels. But still: my campaign assumes that rulers of remote villages and citadels will have level 5 or 6, not a character level of 10. Curious, I started to look around._
I found that Dragon Magazine issue 45 talks about alchemists and says that they have 10d4 hit points. That would explain the strange multi-classing.
I also found that the Labyrinth Lord rules say nothing about character levels. Instead, the rules just mention that cost and time requirements for the brewing of potions they know are halved compared to magic users. In the back of the book it is suggested that potions should take a a magic user a week of brewing and cost 500 gp per spell level of the effect or something appropriate if there is no obvious spell level to be found.
Wow. A simple potion of *Healing* will therefore take a week to brew and cost 500 gp if a magic user creates it, and it will take an Alchemist half that long and cost half as much if he knows the potion. It will take an Alchemist twice that long and cost twice as much if he has to research the potion.
I think what I will do is this: Alchemists are ordinary zero level humans. They can brew potions. Typically they will know a few potions and offer these for sale.
The price list of the alchemist in question for my campaign:
+-----------------+--------+ | Potion | Price | +-----------------+--------+ | Healing | 300 gp | | Heroism | 400 gp | | Invulnerabiliy | 300 gp | | Poison (frogs) | 500 gp | | Water Breathing | 350 gp | +-----------------+--------+
The poison will be very weak and grant a +4 on the Save vs. Poison.
What do you think?
(I had to write this twice because when Safari crashes or reloads, the content of the text area is lost – unlike Firefox, which I cannot use on the iPad. Grrrr!)
#RPG #Old School