Alchemy - Power Gaming/Munchkinism, Need Help!

[Mulsiphix]

The Character Concept In Question
I will be playing my first real campaign with my wife in the near future. She has come up with a character concept that gives her both a insanely rare "gifting" with Alchemy as well as a lifetime of training (she is currently 23). On top of that her trainer is the mastermind of her cultures entire known history and her mother is also "gifted". Her father is "gifted" but in engineering. Both are legends in their own right, though after she was born both parents chose to live a simpler life with a focus on imparting their wisdom to their daughter. She received formal training as well from the previous "master of her culture" mentioned previously.

The General Focus Of The Campaign
I was hoping the campaign itself would be very high power. Whether it be fighting large groups, small armies, very large beasts, or otherworldly monsters, her sessions should high powered. I was thinking of a character along the lines of an Exalted which in that setting are actual demi-gods. She will most often fight alone, have virtually no help along the way, and will hopefully aspire to be the savior of her time.

The campaign will be cinematic. I'm hoping to do this as close to "by the book" as possible without too many house rules or regular fudging. My focus right now is on Alchemy itself. The setting will not contain magic users per say. While it is there few will understand it. Alchemy is about as close as it comes to wielding it and Alchemy is general is rare.

What I Need Help With
How can I make her character possible? The campaign is aimed at a year or more of play so there definitely needs to be room for her to grow in power. I don't have a CP limit. Right now I am just focusing on my options for power gaming an Alchemist. Any suggestions or feedback or ideas for how this character concept could be realized would be greatly appreciated.

NOTE: I've been focusing on the Basic Set, Magic, Thaumatology, certain Pyramid issues, but am open to other sources.

Here are some advantages I'm positive would be helpful (so far);

• Gizmos
• Quick/Gadgeteer
• Luck/Extraordinary/Ridiculous
• Snatcher
• Weird Science

[Langy]

You could give her a gadget pool, allowing her to create various concoctions via purchasing them as 'gadgets' rather than just using the normal rules.

Alternatively, utilize the Alchemy for Ritual Path Magic rules found in Pyramid 3-43.

[starslayer]

There are rules for alchemical quick gadgeteering on RPKs site, and inside GURPS Thaumatology; referring to those would be quite useful. Those rules would basically change her from a 'every couple of weeks' per potion to 'every couple of hours'- basically allowing her to:

1- Be insanely rich if there is not some sort of alchemists guild that ruthlessly tries to keep down the 'gifted' (because it would make every regular alchemist effectively useless).

2-Carry virtually any selection of potions at only moderate cost.

3- Research new potions at radically discounted rates and much faster (effectively allowing the creation any potion)

However this may now be the direction you want to go- because the issue is that your going to spending a LOT of time trying to figure out how to challenge someone who can build a potion for any situation, and will just be virtually overburdened by different options (10x invisibility, 10x fetching and carrying, 10x improved invulnerability, 10x sleeping pastille in a molotov, etc etc, 50x healing charms [effectively granting 1d6 regeneration/turn]).

You MAY want to instead make 'gifted alchemy' a type of RPM that can only make charms in a lab (Give some sort of discount on the magery involved)- this will limit what she can carry to IQ+magery charms, and there will be more of an upper limit on the absolute power of those individual charms. It will also provide even MORE versatility then regular alchemy, which will be an upside and removes the need for you as the GM to handle all kinds of inventions and assigning largely arbitrary skill penalties to them.

[Lamech]

If you are set on the Magic alchemy rules, there are several options:

1) Snatcher +300% permanent -X% potions/charms only -X% requires reagents/tools, 0% power mod so you can use alchemy for the IQ roll, 0% is actually alchemy, will give top tier alchemist abilities. You can brew any potion with however much in the way of reagents and tools she should use. This is the most powerful option. If you spend more than 300 CP on alchemy she should have this power.

2) Quick gadgeteer/gizmo's+wealth These rules are in thaum. Not quite as powerful. She'll be able to produce a lot of potions fairly quickly. Luck is good for this.

I however would go the powers route, or the RPK alchemy route.
For powers, assuming she can only make potions her "brewing" ability will be
Affliction+Malediction+Delay (when drunk/thrown/whatever)+Area of Effect+Selective Area+variable enhancement*+ requires immediate preparation (whatever time is right) -X% Requires tools/reagents +extra duration (if you want).

Then the alchemist "afflicts" a potion, powder or whatever, sets the delay and when it goes off people can resist (or choose not) and she can choose what effects their are each time. This lets her make potions that otherwise wouldn't be possible; immunity to bird flu, g-tolerance, or doesn't sleep for example.

*This is an enhancement that costs +10*X%, and every time you use it you can choose up to X% in different enhancements for the ability.

[Edges]

What would your wife like alchemy to do? So far, the assumption seems to be that she will be making potions, but that is only part of what fantasy alchemy is about. The show Full Metal Alchemist, for instance, is supposedly all about alchemy and I don't recall a single potion featured in the entire series. Is your wife thinking she would like to make homunculi? How about hybrid animals? Can she turn base metals into gold? Can she transmute other materials? Has she achieved immortality and if so, what does that mean (just Unaging or Unkillable/Regeneration)? Has she constructed a philosopher's stone and if so, what can it do? Can she create or does she have a universal solvent?

Making potions is all well and good. Is that is what she wants to focus on?

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Mulsiphix

The Character Concept In Question
I will be playing my first real campaign with my wife in the near future. She has come up with a character concept that gives her both a insanely rare "gifting" with Alchemy as well as a lifetime of training (she is currently 23). On top of that her trainer is the mastermind of her cultures entire known history and her mother is also "gifted". Her father is "gifted" but in engineering. Both are legends in their own right, though after she was born both parents chose to live a simpler life with a focus on imparting their wisdom to their daughter. She received formal training as well from the previous "master of her culture" mentioned previously.

The General Focus Of The Campaign
I was hoping the campaign itself would be very high power. Whether it be fighting large groups, small armies, very large beasts, or otherworldly monsters, her sessions should high powered. I was thinking of a character along the lines of an Exalted which in that setting are actual demi-gods. She will most often fight alone, have virtually no help along the way, and will hopefully aspire to be the savior of her time.

The campaign will be cinematic. I'm hoping to do this as close to "by the book" as possible without too many house rules or regular fudging. My focus right now is on Alchemy itself. The setting will not contain magic users per say. While it is there few will understand it. Alchemy is about as close as it comes to wielding it and Alchemy is general is rare.

What I Need Help With
How can I make her character possible? The campaign is aimed at a year or more of play so there definitely needs to be room for her to grow in power. I don't have a CP limit. Right now I am just focusing on my options for power gaming an Alchemist. Any suggestions or feedback or ideas for how this character concept could be realized would be greatly appreciated.

NOTE: I've been focusing on the Basic Set, Magic, Thaumatology, certain Pyramid issues, but am open to other sources.

Here are some advantages I'm positive would be helpful (so far);

• Gizmos
• Quick/Gadgeteer
• Luck/Extraordinary/Ridiculous
• Snatcher
• Weird Science

I've written two articles on Alchemy and have a follow-up article half-written sitting in my queue. It's Pure Chemistry! (IMHO) greatly expands basic alchemy, and was pioneered in my own campaigns. It works well to make standard alchemy a bit more fun and the role of alchemists useful as adventurers rather than lab-rats. To make a truly world-shattering alchemist, make Alchemy a TL skill, give your character Cutting-Edge Training from Power-Ups 2 (p. 16), and allow Magery to add to Alchemy. Add some fine-quality equipment and a sprinkling perks in the form of Malleable Alchemy (from the article) enhancements and you should be good.

Now if you are using Ritual Path Magic (originally from Monster Hunters 1 then my Bottled Magic article will be intensely useful, as base RPM has no way to really make potions. Also keep in my that this will be the main alchemy system for RPM (whenever that book comes out) and it will be made more general. Due keep in mind that my examples in that article are just that, you as the GM can use whatever symbolic materials make sense to you, not just drawings and other representations of objects.

Your list looks good but let me add a few to that:

• Acute Taste & Smell [2/level], Discriminatory Smell [15], and Discriminatory Taste [10] - These three traits could have been attained as a side effect of working with alchemy over the years or could just be inborn (which could be a good reason why the character is such a good alchemist). This also adds to the rolls for analyzing elixirs (Magic p. 212)
  
• Spells [varies] - Cook, Create (whatever), Distill, Essential (whatever), and Mature (from Magic) are all really useful spells to mage-alchemists, even if you don't allow alchemists to actually cast spells you could consider giving them a form of Magery that allows them to learn any of the above plus any spell that could conceivable be used to make a specific potion (such as the Drunkenness spell for the Drunkenness potion) but only for the purposes of actually making potions, i.e. they cannot cast it in combat or such. I'd price this at about -50% as a limitation for Magery (much smaller than a college but still broadly useful.
  
• Stabilizing Skill (Alchemy uses Chemistry) [1] - This is really useful and makes Chemistry useful in a way it might not otherwise be. It uses the rules from Skills to Salvage Critical Failures box from p.40 of Thaumatology
  
• Unusual Background (Alchemical Prodigy) [varies] - this is campaign dependent but in my games any elixir technique that defaults to Alchemy-4 or higher can only be improved by those with this trait, it sets a fine distinction in my personal opinion. Only the really gifted can easily make the harder potions, also keep in mind that it makes charms/amulets the province of Alchemical Prodigies alone (something that could be good or bad).
  
• Wild Talent (Focused, Alchemy, -40%; Retention, +25%) [17/level] - to 'know' recipes you couldn't possibly know; i.e. you're a savant who just knows how to do things.

Finally there are several other options: a alchemy-based Realm or Syntactic system (from Thaumtology might also suit you though you would need to build it from the ground up as there are no examples in that book of such a system. Kuroshima is currently running a supers campaign with a character who uses something similiar to this and has had decent luck with it (from what I know).

Also consider using just Powers for a alchemist, Create (Gas, Inorganic, Liquid, Organic, or Solid) are good choices, but you add the modifiers: Magical (-10%) and Transmutation (typically at the -100%); if you want to be really versatile take either Create Organic/Inorganic or Create Gas/Liquid/Solid and make the extra Create advantages Alternative Abilities. Now this approach can work quite well but keep in mind that it a) costs 1 (or 2 if actually creating) FP per attempt and b) requires you to spend CP to permanently stabilize the matter you transmuted (or created). Reduced FP Cost (+20%/level) lets you get around the first, and I (as a GM) have allows Cosmic, no Creation Pool needed (+300%) to get around the second. This makes the ability more costly but really you don't need more than a level for your typical alchemist (level one lets you affect 10 lbs).

I love alchemy, I'm no historian or expert but I've read everything I can find on the subject form Taoist alchemy (or sorcery depending on the source) to Paracelsus; every people on the planet seems to have some form of it and its one of those shared cultural beliefs that's too fascinating to ignore.

Ghostdancer

[Mulsiphix]

*mouth drops* You guys... are AMAZING!! I was hopeful to maybe get an advantage suggestion or two but you fine folks have gone so far beyond that. Thank You!! Thank you so much for these ideas and this feedback. I am so excited! My lack of GURPS knowledge will make the process of fine tuning the final system we use a little slow but I will continue to post questions and design process updates. This community is absolutely amazing. I couldn't ask for better help and guidance. Sincerely, thank you!