This time we are going to be looking at some of the ingredients that might be found in an Alchemy Labs. Of course we need to have the classic table that can be even used for your crazy Halloween witch who is mixing all kinds of nasty brews:

Then after those nasty little bits and pieces that can be found, we have some classical chemical compounds. This table is a list of the “Alchemical Names” matched with their “Chemical Compound” so that if your group or yourself want to know a little bit more about the chemical then it is here:

So we’ve got Animals, Chemicals, and now we are going to needs some Plants to round out our ingredients needed for the lab.

• We’ve talked about what they look like.
• Then we talked about the Weaknesses that a vampire might have.
• After that we discussed the powers that one might wield.

And now we want to wrap them up with a little a bow before we mix it up again and throw it into that magical thing called a generator which is going whip out unique vampires for your game. So today we are going to take a quick look at the source of vampirism, the society that has grown up around these immortals, and some ways for locals to keep them away.

Source
When developing a new vampire villain it is important to know how it became a vampire.  This will help us determine the culture, and the spread of the disease.

Society
Once we know how the vampire has become infected we want to know how they live in the world.  Or their organizational status.  Are vampire lonely creatures that maurade through the countryside or are the social creatures with complex hierarchies.

Apotropaic Items
We’ve already discovered how to defeat the vampires, and we know all about their society and how they have come to be. But what do the common people believe is going to keep them away from their own necks? Well here’s a quick little table to help give us some answers.

Special Powers
In any good vampire story the vampire is a challenge to battle, they seem human-like but are superhuman because of their history and background. What superpower are we going to roll for our vampire?

Psychic Powers
The mind of a vampire is generally pretty powerful and much more active than a human. They have had many years of unlife to develop the powers of their brain. Who knows what awesome powers they can harness?

Shape Shifting Ability
Since Dracula himself vampires have had the ability to change their shape. The shape that a vampire can assume adds a certain amount of flair and characteristics to their personality.

Extraordinary Powers
Beyond our three major categories, there are a some other powers that can make a clan or individual vampire unique in your setting. This can set them apart from everyone else.

First Up: Stakes!
Let’s figure out whether it is worthwhile to stab our enemy vampire with a stake. That’s the cornerstone to the vampire myth. Of course, this should only be used when the vampire has already been vanquished and they are trying to finish it off:

Second Up: Stake Materials
Not every stake is or should be effective. If you want a little bit more flair or more flavor or background source material about vampires well, having the stakes be made of a certain type of material is a good idea:

Thirdly: Sunlight
The Daywalker was immune to the sun and therefore able to wreck more havoc. If you want a cult that is a little different here are some options to tweak their powers against the sun.

Fourth: Other Destruction Methods
How are we going to kill the vampire other than stake through the heart? Well here are a couple of different ways for us to kill those vampires.

Fifth: Body Destruction
We all know that vampires regenerate unless the body is destroyed. So we can get rid of the body and the problem of this undead creature, we need a solution. Here they are:

First Up: Skin Tone.
Not all Vampires come Marbled skinned and pales, sometimes they need a little flair at the base. Here we decide what their base color is going to be.

Second Up: Fang Features.
Vampires are notorious for biting, and sucking the blood out of their victims, but mythos’ cannot agree on the best way for them to do so. Single Sharp Canines? Cat Like Tongue for lapping it up? Retractable fangs? Now we know.

Third Up: Attractiveness.
Of course the original Dracula wasn’t a Gothy-Hottie, but we can thank Ann Rice for her depiction of these gorgeous vampires.

And Finally, what good is knowing what a vampire looks like, if we don’t know if he can see himself?

Fear that fact! And We will have a set of tables coming out that will help us solve this problem. According to www.spiritalchemy.com there are 12 (well, 14) goals of alchemy:

We start to see what’s really happening in our lab. But don’t worry, our Experiment isn’t over year, we still need to choose which of the Inner Transformations we will be using:

Then we need to figure out the which of the four methods we will be using to get this Experiment done!

Of course there’s a lot more to Alchemical Experiments and we’ll return to those in a later episode.

P.S. – As a side note, I’m excited to announce that all of these tables are dynamic from our backend SQL Server which means they could change at any time! Hahaha! But what it really means is that it becomes immensely easier for me to write some entries about an idea, and then turn that idea later into a generator!

Oars!

Oars.

The first thing that we need to do is figure out how many oars are needed to move the ship. Fortunately we talked about this WAAAY back at the beginning with these entries:


1,|ship_type =Barge|
_ |movement=oars| |move_type=1|
_ |cargo_room=5| |crew_size=120|
_ |num_oars=40| |num_sails=0|
_ |default_size= 3|


So each type of ship is going to tell us how many a standard sized ship is going to require, and then we use a size transformation to increase or decrease the amount of oars to keep it relative to its size. I don’t think I’ve shared this snippet of the code here. What is happening down below is the every stat from the ship_type entry above is being modified by the new size modifier. We get more or less cargo, a bigger or smaller crew size, and an increase or decrease in the movement items.


;Modify Size
1, Ship Size: %ship_size%
_ |size_modifier={Calc~%ship_size% / %default_size%}|
_ |size_modifier={Round~0,%size_modifier%}|
_ SIZE_MOD: %size_modifier%
_ |cargo_room*%size_modifier%| {If~%cargo_room% < 1 ? |cargo_room = 1| / }
_ |crew_size*%size_modifier%| %crew_size% {If~%crew_size% < 2 ? |crew_size = 2| / }
_ |cargo_room = {Round~0,%cargo_room%}| |crew_size = {Round~0,%crew_size%}|
_ {If~%num_oars% = 0 ?
_ |num_oars = 0| /
_ {If~{Calc~%num_oars%*%size_modifier%} < 2 ? |num_oars = 2| / |num_oars*%size_modifier%|}}
_ {If~%num_sails% = 1 ?
_ {If~%size_modifier% < 1 ?
_ |num_sails = 1| / } / |num_sails*%size_modifier%| }
_ {If~%num_sails% > 3 ? |num_sails=3|/}
_ |num_oars = {Round~0,%num_oars%}| |num_sails = {Round~0,%num_sails%}|
_ |ship_size = {Round~0,{Calc~%ship_size% * %size_modifier%}}|
_ {If~%ship_size% > 6 ? |ship_size = 6| / }
_ {If~%ship_size% < 1 ? |ship_size = 1| / }
_ [Ship Size=%ship_size%]


All of that brings us to this simple entry in Describe Oars


;Generate Oars
1,|temp_oars = {Round~0,{Calc~%num_oars% / 2}}|
_ %temp_oars% oars reach out towards the water on both the starboard and port side
_ of the %ship_type%. [Oar Descriptions]


It might be noteworthy to mention the reason we added the {Round~0, … } in there was because when the amount of oars is being transformed by our new ship size, we might get an odd number of oars. So, this little round statement hides that fact, because now we will always have an even number.

The Generate Oars leads us to another group where we actually describe our Oars. This is a super boring group, but my “Google-Fu” can be weak at times, and trying to find anything actually about classical galley ship oars.... So we are left with this:


;Oar Descriptions
5,
1,The oars appear to be [~Miscellaneous.General Quality] [~Miscellaneous.Wood]
1,The oars are sheathed in [~Miscellaneous.Metal]


One thing to realize here, is that this description doesn't necessarily give us the correct description of oar placement on Galley's. I mean, what about a “Bireme, Trireme, or Quadreme?” Most ships were limited to 3 rows as that provided the most leverage and speed to the ship. But to go through and be accurate on our ship types we'd have to put oar_rows as a stat in our ship variables. But instead of that, we will do a quick little hack:

OLD:

;Generate Oars
1,|temp_oars = {Round~0,{Calc~%num_oars% / 2}}|
_ %temp_oars% oars reach out towards the water on both the starboard and port side
_ of the %ship_type%. [Oar Descriptions]


NEW:

;Generate Oars
1,{If~%num_oars% < 20 ?
_ |temp_oars = {Round~0,{Calc~%num_oars% / 2}}|
_ %temp_oars% oars reach out towards the water on both the starboard and port side
_ of the %ship_type%.
_ /
_ |oar_levels = {Dice~1d3}|
_ There are %oar_levels% levels of rows with {Round~0,{Calc~%num_oars% / {Calc~2 * %oar_levels%}}} oars
_ reaching down into the water on both the starboard and port side of the %ship_type%.
_ }
_ [Oar Descriptions]


You might notice that we added another variable in there to make it work. And now we've added some depth and historical accuracy to our ship.

This nifty generator will name, and describe an ale for you semi-based on BCJP Guidelines.
You may notice some weird outliers, and the verbage is pretty sad, but hey, it’s decent enough for the first one, right? Hopefully this means you’ll start seeing a couple more posts around here.