Text for [Name This Alchemical Book!] is finalized, short of final copy editing, and is about to head towards layout.

Wanted to take the time to give a retrospective of the alchemy system in His Majesty the Worm: how it was iterated on and how it ended up.

The Tools of the Trade

Items are important in His Majesty the Worm. Making little decisions about what to take with you on your Crawl and what to leave at home are things the players are always talking about. “If I carry your food, can you carry the tent?”

A few class Talents give you the ability to use a suite of special items. For sorcerers, it’s using components. For alchemists, it’s using an alchemy kit and hermetic bottles. These are the alchemist’s tools of the trade.

Whereas sorcerers pick their components prior to descending into the Underworld, and so make some educated guesses about where they’re going and what they’ll need, alchemists have far more potentiality.

Each hermetic bottle is just waiting to be filled with a potion.

Brewing Alchemy

In its earliest iterations, alchemy had a lot of…baggage. You had to carry all this stuff, but you also had to spend a lot of time during the Crawl Phase to gather reagents. You had to combine two reagents to create an effect. Reagents included herbs growing in the Underworld but also monster parts.

Then, you spent a lot of time at the Camp Phase to laboriously turn two reagents into a single alchemical substance.

In playtesting, I noticed a simple thing: PCs weren’t using alchemy.

Why not? I was so excited about it! It seemed so cool to me!

It was too much. PCs frequently didn’t have the pack slots or Camp Actions to do all that was required of them. PCs felt that their personal projects (e.g., looking for herbs) were intruding on the group’s main tasks.

I carved the requirements way back.

• Now, alchemical reagents are taken from monsters. Alchemist PCs don’t have to sniff around separately for ingredients.
• When you take the Brew Alchemy action at Camp, every bottle with reagents is transformed into an alchemical substance. You don’t have to do it one at a time.

The result is more players actually engaging with the system.

Alchemical Substances

Alchemical substances bottle up the powers of monsters. Alchemists are like Kirby or Mega Man.

There are three types of substances: potions, bombs, and oils. Potions are drank and give you some benefit. Bombs are thrown and unleash some attack. Oils are dumped onto objects to create some sort of environmental effect.

Here’s an example I like:

Slime

Bomb: The bomb explodes in a spray of neon-green acid ooze that covers the target. Any armor the target is wearing is Destroyed.

Oil: Slime oil is a powerful acid that can eat through any non-magical material except for glass. Creates a hole about 5’ in diameter. Will eat through the floor. • Destroys any non-magical object it touches. • Deals a Critical wound if it comes into contact with flesh.

Potion: Your bones stop being bones and become fluid-filled sacks for a watch. You take no damage from falls for the duration. You can also squeeze your body through any space you can reach your hand through during this time, e.g., through a portcullis or into a mouse hole.

So, if your party defeats a slime and you harvest its tiny squishy heart, you gain weird tools which can be used in many ways to solve puzzles.

It’s appealing to me how this can be built out. It is relatively little work to develop new alchemical substances for homebrewed monsters that you bring in. Discovering what a monster’s guts do is half the fun.

Coming soon

I’m looking forward to this release. It’s very playful and will have a lot of Easter Eggs hidden in it. I hope you will like it.