Everyone knows wizards are a little eccentric (to put it mildly). The average (competent) wizard makes neurosurgeon med-students look like mildly slow and slightly lazy high-schoolers. When you’re loading your brain with unfiltered cosmic chaos and editing your soul with the power of your mind, the people who survive (and many either don’t or “limit out” quickly) tend to have some pretty severe character quirks. How do they react to that pent up tension, you might ask? All the normal ways- casting meteor swarm at abandoned castles, deep meditation and spiritual detachment, extra-planar orgies, losing themselves in work, and drugs. Lots and lots of drugs.
If you have addiction rules, feel free to use those instead. Personally, I bounce around on how addiction works mechanically but for a narcotic to be usable in-game requires three things-
-A primary effect
-Effects of being addicted
-Effects of withdraw
Depending on how much you want your players to actually use the system, how good or bad these effects are will be important. If you want to add risk/severity, you can also add a threshold for how addictive a drug is- it’s a lot easier to get hooked on heroine than weed. I also like a detox category as well- how do you clear it out of your system? Finally, some drugs should have an overdose level.
If you really want to break bad, add in cost, legality, and creation.
Also, to be clear- all the normal drugs exist as well, but the magic ones are just better most of the time. Why take something makes you feel like your flying, when you can take something that makes you high as a kite both figuratively and literally. There’s also way more stuff than this- Druid’s Beard, Myconid Spores, and
- Muddle
Description: A brown, nasty tasting paste- it smells like vomit, baking yeast, and peroxide. Slimy, and thoroughly unpleasant.
Lore: As any established alchemist can tell you, alcohol is the gift given to us by the molds and fungi when we feed them- they especially love sugar, as all small things love sugar (children, ants, bees, Oompa-Loompas, etc.). This paste introduces these molds to the intestinal track, allowing a body to create alcohol from the food ingested. Permanently.
Primary Effect: After consumption, any food is fermented within the stomach, creating permanent intoxication- within an hour after eating, you’ll be soused. After a few hours of not eating, you’ll only be tipsy or hungover.
Effects of Being Addicted: NA- once you take it, your body starts producing alcohol. It’s really a way for irreparable drunks to drink themselves to death on a budget. So terrible impulse control, rapid liver failure, impaired motor functions, and more.
Effects of Withdraw: The worst alcohol withdraw symptoms possible. Immediate medical care and a slow weaning off of with supplementary alcohol is required, or seizures and death are likely.
Detox: There’s a slim chance of success by drinking only water and alcohol for several days, but the best cure is drinking a small- diluted!- portion of green slime… and hope it’s diluted enough. You’ll pass blood for a month, but you might live.
Cost: Cheap, when you consider you only need one dose.
Fabrication: Massive fermenting vats, with a series of Underdark fungi, fermenting yeasts, and literal clay. - Blue Opium
Description: A fine, baby-blue powder.
Lore: The Blue Opium, from the Sky-Blue Poppy. It grows only on the floating isles, at a height of over 20,000 feet (noting that Nod’s atmosphere has a troposphere up to 15 miles in the air), making it rather difficult to harvest.
Primary Effect: All the normal fun stuff of Opium- relaxation, pain relief, euphoria- along with an out of body experience, causing one’s astral self to drift along the winds. You can’t control where you go, and your high the whole time, but it’s very fun floating miles above the earth.
Effects of Being Addicted: Bright blue eyes, constipation, dry nose, and an increased risk of OD. Lungs grow accustomed to thinner atmospheres.
Effects of Withdraw: Difficulties breathing, bloodshot eyes, and extreme exhaustion. - Demon Bone
Description: A white, powdered bone meal that smells and tastes strongly of sulfur.
Lore: When killed outside their plane, most demons and devils go through a process known as “Discorporation”- for demons, they return to the primordial evil that spawned them. Their individual will being subsumed and reassigned by one of the greater powers of the hells, being born into a new body. The body turns to green goo that stains the land and the soul.
There is a chance though, for a demon to be tainted by their time on another plane, for their souls to wander and lose themselves, or even for the greater powers to reject them based on their failings. In this case, the soul cannot reincarnated in hell, and the demon dies a true death. It happens more when demons are killed en masse (the road to hell literally gets clogged). In this rare case, demon hunters can scavenge the rarest components of all- demon bone.
Primary Effect: A total loss of all moral accountability. Seriously. You lose your conscious while on the drug. Not only that, but (aside from the serious sin of taking the drug in the first place) you aren’t held accountable for any actions done during the time (at least by the more-arbitrary judges of morality, such as detect good and evil).
Effects of Being Addicted: You are just, like, the worst person man. You’d eat a baby if someone paid you ten bucks and you knew you could get away with it. Advantage on all deception and intimidation checks. +1 to all charisma skill roles in general.
Effects of Withdraw: Horrible fits of remorse followed by rage followed by remorse. Your suppressed conscious goes into overdrive, trying to fight off the “infection” of immorality.
Notes: Currently found all over the place in Iago. Place is going to hell. - Zam
Description: Bright purple, chewy (a bit like taffy mixed with hair), and weirdly bland with a strong chemical aftertaste.
Lore: Every large army in the north-eastern Commonwealth fights, wins, and dies on its wizards, at least for the last thousand years. Not every nation has the luxury of training such a large body of scholars though, and so an alchemical solution was sought out, mostly unsuccessfully. The princedom of Gulthi led the most successful efforts. They created a potion that temporarily gave a normal man sorcerous powers, to help build an army of wizards. Unfortunately, it proved highly addictive, led to emotional volatility, and was eventually lethal, leading to the utter collapse of the princedom. When the Chrysanthemum discovered this though, an entirely new market began, in the few Chrysanthemum people unable to use magic.
Primary Effects: You begin to get spells slots like a sorcerer or magic user of your level. Pick two schools when you first take the drug. All spells you learn must be from these schools. Charisma is your spell casting modifier, if applicable.
Effects of Being Addicted: Your dying. Actively, consciously dying. You don’t feel like it most of the time- you feel euphoric on the drug, like you can do anything- but in the quiet moments it catches up to you. You won’t live more months than your constitution. You might be able to make it a bit longer if you pace yourself. You’ll be overconfident in the extreme.
Effects of Withdraw: Extreme psychological symptoms- you’ll do almost anything for more, along with exhaustion, unpredictable spell casting (wild magic surges plus a chance for misfires).
Notes: Generally made in basements or secret labs in the Chrysanthemum isles, the reliability of this stuff is non-existent. When buying this stuff, roll on the table below- you can try to buy higher grade stuff, but even that’s not stable. Give them a +1 on the table for every doubling of the price.
1- Toxic, con save vs exhaustion and no benefits. You may enter withdraws or the effects (death) could happen quicker.
2/3- Low quality product, any spells cast are minimized (all die rolls are as low as possible, all opposing saves are with advantage, etc.)
4/5- Product’s been cut with a filler, roll a 1d6 for each spent spell slot during a long rest- you only get recover it on a six.
6/9- Average Product
10- Amazing product, advantage on any dies rolled due to casting a spell (including damage!) - Black Sea
Description: Black powder. Fine as powdered sugar, black as shadow. Feels smooth, like satin. Melts on the tongue, stains the teeth.
Lore: Consciousness. What is it? What primordial depths, what divine providence spat out the facilities we call awareness today? And what space do we share, does a collective psychic exist behind our eyes? Black Sea is harvested from the depths of the ocean, from the oldest primordial pits, from the Abyssal Octopus. It’s ink is extracted and dried. The octopus only lives in the deepest pits, the very pools from which life, and eventually awareness, emerged. It’s ink returns you there.
Primary Effects: One of the most powerful psychoactive compounds in the known world. It… undo’s consciousness. It strips awareness down to it’s most basic level. It drives away possessing spirits and even some types of insanity and curses- the best way to think of it, is as doing a “Ctl-alt-del followed by a reboot” for a brain. It can also help in access the astral plane. The druid’s like it.
Effects of Being Addicted: Total personality changes, complete inability to function as person, or just straight up lobotomizing yourself
Effects of Withdraw: Unpredictable, normally short term insanity. - Baguli Tea
Description: A dark green powder with a pale green smoke and an earthy, slightly trashy smell
Lore: From the lands of Bagool comes the Baguli tea, from across the dark-shadow sea. There, it is drunk as tea and used as incense, to help meditate and unlock the inner eye. When smoked directly, it drastically increases the mind-body connection, allowing for incredible levels of mindfulness.
Primary Effects: The tea temporarily unblocks the hidden walls within the minds, or in other words, it allows for more direct sensory feedback and removes the mental stops. Normally, you can’t feel your heartbeat, don’t notice your breathing, or see your nose unless you focus on them. Suddenly, you do. You see everything, feel everything, every faint change of air and flex of your muscles. You can’t stop, can’t turn it off. On one hand, your motor control is amazing- if you focus on a task, it’s a thousand times easier. Everything else is so much harder though. Manually making sure your tongue resumes the correct position so you don’t bite it incredibly tedious. Most people spend the trip lying on a couch looking at their hands.
Effects of Being Addicted: It’s actually pretty hard to get addicted to this one. You can OD easily enough though.