D20x5 Dubious Drugs

D20	This Drug Is Derived From...
1	The urine of horses that have licked deposits of a rare sort of salt.
2	The greyish-red amber of a now-extinct species of trees, dug out of the ground or found washed up on certain beaches.
3	A failed attempt at alchemically transmuting gold.
4	Carnivorous slime mold scraped off cave ceilings.
5	The yolk of a songbird’s egg that’s been fertilized by a fish and incubated by a serpent. Incubating serpents often need to be muzzled so they don’t eat the egg.
6	Slag produced from smelting magical alloys.
7	The crushed stamens of a night-blooming flower which grows from the ears of sleeping mammals.
8	The webs of a fatally venomous spider. Its webs contain a recreationally lower dose of its venom.
9	Juices wrung from the brains of elves.
10	Aromatic woods burnt by dragonfire, platonic flames, or something of a similar heat.
11	A hideous shade of green refracted through blasphemous crystals.
12	Unknown pigments scraped from a prolific, maverick painter’s works.
13	Exquisitely complex fractal patterns. The more layers the fractals repeat through, the more potent the resulting drug.
14	Ghoul bile.
15	Tea steeped from the needles of evergreens from the uttermost north of the world.
16	Pus from the pustules that sprout on sufferers of an uncommon affliction.
17	Mist filtered off a pond host to particular starlight-eating worms.
18	Seeds of berries crossbred with infernal varieties.
19	The roasted spores of a truffle that can only be found by the truly paranoid.
20	Rootworked solutions that must be cooked for months under a pile of decomposing guano.

D20	This Drug Is Most Effective When Taken By...
1	Mixing it into gum and chewing it.
2	Packing it into your ear canal.
3	Dripping it in your eyeballs.
4	Suppository.
5	Insufflation, like getting a buddy to blow it up a pipe and into your nasal cavity.
6	Grinding it into splinters and sticking it under your skin.
7	Boiling it in vinegar and inhaling the fumes.
8	Applying it to your nail beds, most often with needles.
9	Sprinkling it on food like spice. Downsides of drug are much more intense if taken on an empty stomach.
10	Working it into a poultice and absorbing it through the skin.
11	Spreading it onto your lips and eyelids like makeup.
12	Pressing it into paper then rolling and smoking that paper.
13	Baking it into bread and eating the bread.
14	Injection it into the underside of your tongue.
15	Dripping it into a trepanation-hole drilled right through to your brain.
16	Rubbing it onto a fresh bruise.
17	Cutting a slit in the bottom of your belly-button and stuffing it with the drug.
18	Smoking it through long pipes, as the drug combusts hot enough to burn the lips and lungs if too close.
19	Dissolving it into a bath then soaking in it.
20	Steady intravenous drip.

D20	When You Take This Drug...
1	Every muscle you’ve got tenses like the onset of dengue fever. Teeth grind like continents. Your body feels as though it’s tearing itself apart, could tear apart the world. You automatically succeed at the next feat of strength you attempt if it’s vaguely within the realm of human achievement.
2	The crown of your skull feels as though it’s blossoming to the universe. Impossible ideas-like-bees buzz about and dance across the folds of your brain. While under the drug’s effects you cast spells as though you’re a higher level. If you can’t cast spells you gain the ability to cast a random spell.
3	Your irises bleed through with golden light. Perfect satisfaction seems just within reach. Things of monetary value begin to glow in your vision, even through chests and walls, while cheap things appear offensively ugly.
4	Lightning jolts rush up and down your fingers and every nerve. Every second stretches like chewed taffy. There is no movement so precise that you may not now perform it.
5	Easy, leaden numbness settles in your flesh. You become a stoic mountain, able to endure anything with inert amusement. You suffer no penalties, for pain, hunger, sleep deprivation, etc., while under the drug’s influence.
6	Veins throb and nerves burst with sensational sparks. Anything that feels good feels ten times better. Anything that feels bad kind of feels good at the same time. You gain the energy and the urge (though not the friction-resistance) to fuck for days.
7	Awareness falls away. The end of your body and the end of the earth become coterminous, simultaneous. For a slice of a heartbeat, eternity is you. When you come back to, you’ve beheld one piece of information, not necessarily one you knew you wanted, but one that will turn out to be useful.
8	Parallel possibilities flow flood-like fast in your mind’s eye. Countless deadly decisions are made, appreciated with phantasmic sadomasochism. While on the drug you’re primed to detect dangers that you’d have no way of knowing about sober. Ambushes, hidden traps, cursed objects, and the like are felt in imagined fatalities before they can catch your real self.
9	Tendons twitch in time to staccato celestial music, always building up to but never reaching an apocalyptic crescendo. You can move with blinding, clumsy speed. The first time you die on the drug you rush back to screaming life.
10	Your world creases into itself like solipsistic origami. Sight becomes introspection, your self reflected back and forth across a million facets. No outside influence can touch your mind while you’re affected, not magic, or psychic blasts, or mundane intimidation.
11	You feel like time-lapse forest soil. Roots and worms and hyphae wiggle down through your bones. All that you are dies, is born again in countless refreshing cycles. You gain a lingering regenerative ability while under its influence.
12	Sweat beads cool and dew-like, pores shudder, moan faintly across your skin. An intense body-high like being flayed without the pain, or melting into the air. You gain a touch attack that (1d6: 1, burns/ignites; 2, corrodes; 3, puts to sleep; 4, paralyzes; 5, tickles to incapacitation; 6, petrifies) for the rest of the trip. Touch attack affects everything organic you come into contact with.
13	Spit, phlegm, and spew dribble from your mouth like an oozing cornucopia. Theirs and everything else’s taste becomes distractingly intense yet with fulsome bands of nuance. Your stomach clenches itself into a crucible. Some crumbs and muddy water could sustain you as a day’s rations, and potions (and poisons) can take full effect with only a sip.
14	Angles and edges begin to lean at contradictory perspectives. Your sensory homunculus roils with swelling gout, making the backs of your knees or wherever else feel as big and important as your fingertips. While on the drug you become (1d4: 1, larger; 2, smaller; 3, elastic; 4, harmlessly inside-out).
15	Reality and imagination blur at the edges. You interact with illusions as though they’re real, and with an exertion of will can treat a real thing as though it were an illusion.
16	Thinking and memory become like carving stone where before it was grasping vapour. Recall is perfect, learning is rapid, baroque schemes can be crafted and held in the mind.
17	Body and mind crack cathartically. Limiting beliefs seem to shatter. So do your bones. They push up through your skin, making armour and barbed weapons, sinking back and reassembling when the dose wears off.
18	You are oil floating immiscible on the stream of time. Tragedy becomes comedy with this newfound perspective. Even after the drug wears off, your lifespan has been extended.
19	Flaws melt away, features mold to primordial ratios, bliss sweetens the space behind your eyes. You become beautiful to everything, able to charm with the right pose and words.
20	Your blood feels as though it’s champagne-bubbling. Everything is buoyant, buoyed by everything else, troubles lie massless on your shoulders. You can carry much more without being encumbered, fall too slow to be hurt, and leap wuxia distances.

D20	This Drug’s Downside Is...
1	It’s incredibly addictive. Even one dose is enough to induce withdrawal if you don’t keep it up.
2	Each use induces cumulative mutations. Subtle at first, unmistakable in long-time users.
3	It’s toxic. “Safe” doses only minimize the chance that it’ll kill you. Some damage is inevitable.
4	Your judgement is significantly impaired while on it.
5	That by obscure legal tradition, possession of it is punishable by being made to fight to the death with others convicted of the same crime.
6	It builds up in the tissues. Long-time users can smell it in each other, and feel tempted to devour the narcotic flesh.
7	It might animate one of your organs and cause it to slither out your mouth while you’re unconscious.
8	It’ll turn you into a demented ghost when you die.
9	Thoughts randomly transmit between yourself and other users who’re on it.
10	Using it risks converting some section of your body into more of it.
11	You’re harassed by lingering hallucinations after you take it. The hallucinations become more real the more you take the drug.
12	It wears away at memories you made while not on the drug.
13	It induces lasting insomnia.
14	It can react violently if mixed in the body with other drugs, potions, enchantments, and suchlike.
15	Using it attracts the attention of airy alien spirits.
16	It requires larger, more expensive doses each time.
17	It’s cursed with a multi-level-marketing scheme that will compel you to buy more and sell it to others.
18	Dosage of it is a sensitive thing, and disabling overdoses are a severe risk if you don’t take the time to cross-reference all the factors involved.
19	It induces crippling nausea while on it. Keep a bucket handy.
20	It fucks up your everything with repeated use. Teeth, skin, eyes, genitals, etc.

D20	This Drug Is Most Popular Among...
1	Young nobles without a care in the world.
2	Ecstatic zealots seeking enlightenment.
3	Overworked labourers after a long day.
4	Artists chasing inspiration.
5	Students of the arcane arts.
6	Long-lived gladiators.
7	Hunters of rare beasts.
8	Sacred prostitutes, holy whores, hierodules.
9	Wealthy gentleman-farmers.
10	Widely-traveled merchants.
11	The wives and husbands of warriors occupied in foreign wars.
12	Orphans raised in state institutions.
13	An inbred and extensive aristocratic clan.
14	Bandits, brigands, and other violent criminal types.
15	Fiery rebels and political deviants.
16	Burnouts who look much older than they are.
17	Crusty sailors.
18	Middling craftsmen.
19	The hopelessly destitute.
20	The inhuman and those touched by the same.

Submitted September 29, 2018 at 10:59PM by semiurge https://ift.tt/2NNYFOC