Writober! Poison! Shadowdark Post-a-Day In October

This month is Drawtober: 31 drawing prompts related to the Shadowdark RPG, 1 a day, throughout October. But I’m borrowing the prompts for short essays. Today’s prompt is “Poison”.

For today’s topic, I wanted to research how Poison is handled in Shadowdark because there are a number of possible effect–just like in real life poisons can do different things. Below is a list of uses of poison in the core Shadowdark book:

• An herbalist knows poisons.
• Cloudkill is the only spell with a poison effect, causing blindness and 2d6 damage.
• The following creatures have poison that just do damage or add to it: Assassin; Dragon, Forest; Ettercaps; Golem, Iron; Spiders (non-giant); Wyverns
• Centipedes, Driders, Naga have poison that paralyzes for 1d4 rounds.
• Couatls, Imps, Drow, and Fairies have poison that causes deep sleep for hours.
• Devil (Erinyes) has a poison that causes eyes to go jet black and attack allies for 1d4 rounds.
• Giant Manta Rays, Void Spiders, and Snake Swarms poison can drop a foe to 0hp in 1d4 rounds.
• Medusa and Purple Worms and Scorpions poison drops a foe to 0hp immediately.
• Snakes (Cobras) drop a foe to 0hp with a death timer of 1.
• Spiders (Giant) paralyze for hours.
• And no magic items or charts for them mention poison except to protect against it.

One that seems unusual is spiders paralyzing for hours when every other paralysis is just 1d4 rounds. And another that jumps out is an Erinyes Devil causing the victim to attack allies.

But this does make you think of several other possible poison effects:

• Lose an action or movement each turn (effectively slowed).
• Lose a point of an ability each hour or each day, subject to a save. (The latter at least isn’t healed without somewhat powerful magic.)
• Be confused: attack randomly allies or foes.
• Blinded or Deaf for a period of time.

Here are our previous Writober posts so far:

1. Torch – Rules for magic torch items (each is a single use magic effect spell like alarm or detect magic).
2. Skull – Goblin shaman who can turn victims’ skulls into ways to store spells.
3. Fiend – Lists of talents that Devils & Demons typically have for making your own.
4. Shadow – Easy ways to make other creatures into shadows.
5. Contagion – Discussing the purpose of diseases.
6. Valkyrie – A new 3rd party class.
7. Toadstool – A new 3rd party ancestry.
8. Witchlight – Alternate sources of “witchlight”.
9. Luck Token – Alternate ways a GM may allow a luck token to be used.
10.  Rage – The signature ability of a Barbarian class.
11. Altars – Ways to amplify priest spells into rituals when using an altar.
12. Pit Trap – Several ideas to spice up the good old pit trap.
13. Death Slug – Looking at the Death Slug’s deadliness and how that’s similar to old-school and low fantasy games.
14. Evil Eye – Various types of “Evil Eyes”: magic items, monsters, or curses.
15. Morzo Moth – A look at the Morzo Moth’s talents/actions makes one see the variety of the Western Reaches book’s monsters.
16. Diamond – Three subtopics: diamonds impacting economy; as spell components for rituals or spells not-yet-accessible; and a enhancements for magic weapons.
17. Slime – Game-able aspects of mundane slime as well as a green slime monster for Shadowdark.
18. Wyrdling – Shows how different and fun Shadowdark can be with this unusual class as an example of how much design freedom a creator of GM has.
19. Stingbat – Renaming (or even not giving creatures names) re-establishes the sense of wonder players had when fantasy was new to them.