Name This Alchemical Book

You have the one, true book of alchemy. 

This arcane text provides a framework to steal the powers of monsters and craft fabulous potions, feasts, and elixirs.  

I will not name this book. You will. 

When you interact with this book, it undergoes an alchemical change. Secrets are revealed only to you that show you the true nature of the universe. 

Pour over this text thoroughly and have many secrets revealed to you.

Wait...what is this?

His Majesty the Worm is a fantasy megadungeon-crawling game. It attempts to make the boring parts of dungeon crawls (mapping, resource management, food and water, light, interparty conflict) actually fun and central to game play. 

His Majesty the Worm was Itchfunded! That means that people generously contributed to the development of the game, donating to view early drafts of the chapters. As thanks, these sample chapters are now free.

This is a sample chapter of the alchemy rules for His Majesty the Worm. 

How does alchemy work?

Here's the essential gimmick: Alchemical substances bottle up the powers of monsters. When you use an alchemical substance, you’re using a monster’s ability.

• Drink a potion to gain a dire spider’s wall climbing ability.
• Throw a bomb to poison a foe with the spider’s venom.
• Distill the spider’s webbing into a glue-like oil that bonds together whatever it touches.

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

This book contains tons of example alchemical substances as well as structures to build this system out. It is relatively little work to develop new alchemical substances for homebrewed monsters that  invent. Discovering what a monster’s guts do is half the fun.

Downloading and using the dang thing

There are three versions of this book to download. 

First, there is a sample chapter from His Majesty the Worm. This is intended to give you a preview of the game, and thank those who helped fund the game's development with an improved version of the original draft text.

We've also included the two versions of the original draft rules: The Complex Version and the No Nonsense Version.

The Complex Version undergoes an alchemical change when you interact with it. To view and play with this version, you will need to open the file using Adobe Reader. You can get Adobe Reader for free.

You can also download the No Nonsense PDF. This PDF doesn't have any of the same functionality, but can be opened in your browser window, with your e-reader, with your screen reader, etc.

All images for both PDFs are on a separate layer than the text. If you wish to print this book, just turn off the image layers.