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Old-School Essentials presents a list of standard potions and their effects, but only provides brief guidelines on how potions can be manufactured and identified. This article adds extra detail around brewing, identifying, and (optionally) buying potions

Creating Potions

Under the Magical Research rules in Old-School Essentials, potions are treated as single-use magic items that duplicate the effects of a spell. Brewing a potion thus costs 1 week and 500gp per level of the equivalent spell. The table opposite lists the equivalent spells and creation costs of all standard potions.

Restrictions: Any character able to create magic items (e.g. clerics and magic-users of 9th level or above) can create potions.

Equivalent spells: Not all potions exactly duplicate the effects of a spell described in Old-School Essentials. In order to provide a concrete list of costs, this article lists approximately equivalent spells. In some cases this includes spells from other editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

Spell lists / spell books: The character does not need to be able to memorise the equivalent spell in order to create a potion with the equivalent effect. e.g. a magic-user can create a potion of healing.

Cursed potions: Potions of delusion and poison are not discussed here, as it is assumed they are only created by accident (for example, due to the 15% chance of research failure).

Hiring an Alchemist

Characters can hire a specialist alchemist to produce potions. Alchemists can create potions either by recreating a provided sample potion or by researching a potion from scratch.

Recreating potions: Takes half the time and cost listed in the table opposite.

Researching potions: Takes double the time and cost listed in the table opposite.

Wages and upkeep: When hiring an alchemist to create potions, PCs must also pay their wages and upkeep cost: 1,000gp per month.

Example: Working from a sample, an alchemist could create a potion of healing in half a week at a cost of 250gp. In a month, they could thus create 8 potions of healing, at a total cost of 3,000gp (375gp per potion), including the monthly wage.

Potion Ingredients

As noted in Old-School Essentials, creating magic items often requires rare components. It can be particularly fun to require PCs to gather components from monsters, as this drives adventure. PCs must follow up rumours hinting at the dwelling place of a monster of the requisite kind, travel to the location, then attempt to acquire the component (e.g. by theft, bribery, or slaying the monster). The table below lists suggested monster ingredients, optionally required to manufacture each type of potion.

Sampling Potions

Potions can be identified by sipping a small amount, as the character is briefly affected by the magic. The referee may choose to simply reveal the nature of the potion, naming it directly. Alternatively, the referee might wish to describe a minor magical effect that the sampling character experiences, hinting at the full effects of the potion. The following table lists example hints noticeable when sipping standard potions.

Duration: All hints last for 1 round.

Describing Potions

Every potion is unique—even potions of the same type differ in odour, taste,

and appearance. The table below can be used to determine the characteristics of potions found in treasure hoards.

Rolling characteristics: Roll 1d20 once per column in the table.