GURPS Magic Poison Spells

[Bruno]

Poking through GURPS Magic: Plant Spells (the green kingdom always like doing horrible things to us meatsacks) there's actually not much in there in the way of poison-y things.

Bloodsucking Branches (p11) is fun so I'm mentioning it, but it's about taking things OUT of peoples bodies, not putting dangerous things in.

Green Death (p14) isn't poison per ce (plants grow in your body until you suffocate and leaves burst out of you) but it's mechanically treated as a poison. You could steal the mechanics and just describe it as an actual poison instead. They choke from partial paralysis, throat swelling, or lungs filling with fluid, not throat/lungs filling with leaves.

Toxic Plant (p19) turns a random plant into a toxic-gas-spewing animated attack-plant. It's kinda indirect, but there's that.

Pollen Cloud is on the list with Stench - not exactly subtle, but hey.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Atreyu_Hibiki

My go-to site for extra spells is Patyrsun's Grimoire Arcana: http://patyrsun.tripod.com/magic.htm
You'll find extra Poison spells under the pages for Water, Food, Healing and Necromancy.
Also Vapor of Death under Air spells, and Poison Earth under Earth spells.

You could probably go through the site and pull together a pretty decent Poison College, honestly.

Thanks, that's a great start for my list.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

In the Alchemy section and in DF.

Does nothing for a Wizard seeking spells or when trying to build a list for a God of Poison.

Kromm wrote a whole pdf's worth of death spells too. I can't say if it's good. I thought we already hand enough such things.

Very few of which are really what I'd call poison... Death spells? Yeah...

Originally Posted by Refplace

Note that Mortal conditions and other topics in the Death Spells book are a good source for building poisons.

That is one of the things I'll be referencing in making some spells... but as this is going to be for DF game... I'm leaning away from "Save or Die" and more to "Follow-Up Toxic with a Cyclic rate", "Follow-Ip Toxic Damage", and making some more variant's in the vein of "Poison Cloud" and "Poison Missile" with then being Contact Agents.

[simply Nathan]

Personally I feel there should be a mix of poison spells with cycles of multiple minutes or hours so that the Neutralize Poison spell can get some love, and those with cycle intervals measured in seconds so that Instant Neutralize Poison has a reason to exist.

The vast majority of poisons I've seen in GURPS just take effect instantly...

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Does nothing for a Wizard seeking spells or when trying to build a list for a God of Poison.

I'm not sure a God of Poison would have much of a list. THat's kind of a specialized portfolio.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

Personally I feel there should be a mix of poison spells with cycles of multiple minutes or hours so that the Neutralize Poison spell can get some love, and those with cycle intervals measured in seconds so that Instant Neutralize Poison has a reason to exist.

The vast majority of poisons I've seen in GURPS just take effect instantly...

Not just Neutralize Poison, but give a reason to bother carrying Anti-Toxin.

As it stands neither of those things get any use as far as I can see.

[simply Nathan]

The God of Poison would probably give that Water to Poisoned Wine critical failure result from the normal Water to Wine spell instead of the standard version.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Does nothing for a Wizard seeking spells or when trying to build a list for a God of Poison.

You didn't say "Wizard seeking poison spells" You said "subtle magical assassin". Gurps already does subtle magical assassin quite well.

I must remember to have a "God of Poison" show up the next time I'm running. I don't think you'd be amused by what happened to him but my players probably would be. :)

"What do you mean I just Neutralized a God? I thought was only aiming at a spell. It was a very small god I guess."

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

You didn't say "Wizard seeking poison spells"

It's in the title of the thread. Spells.


As for Alchemy there are two directly useful elixirs (kinda) and several sort of semi useful elixirs (if you rewrite their effects from "magically induced" to "poison induced"). As such, even Alchemy isn't very useful when looking for poisons.