Any ideas for poison or drug rules, I cannot find much in the book to help me with this.
What do you want to do in your game? What’s the situation?
Some of my players are wanting to use poison and drugs to kill/mess up mice and animals, we have not started play yet, but I was wondering if there was a mechanic to it.
You could use Insectrist or Scientist to extract or make poisons.
You could use Deceiver or Fighter to poison a mouse.
Poison could call for Health test. Failure causes the Sick result.
Against animals, poison could be used as a weapon in conflicts.
Okay, Thanks.
Don’t forget the every popular Herb-wise with Survivalist FoRK to scrounge up some poisonous berries. Perhaps Healer to distill a concoction from them (a bit of a perverse use of Healer but it fits in my opinion). I forget exactly how we did it when the PCs wanted to poison a Raven, to weaken him before they attempted to escape from him. But it was something like that. Maybe Deceiver or Cook to get it in his food?
Oh, Cook’s a good one! I disagree with Healer, though. Healer is healer…
I went back to the notes. Herb-wise with Survivalist FoRK (I bet I didn’t allow him to use his r33t Survivalist Skill to cheap out on that roll) to gather the berries. This was a Guard mouse that wasn’t captive, so he was free to roam the woods looking for the raw materials. The other Guard that rolled had been captured and was a slave servant. He used Cook (none of the mice had Deceiver but I would definitely have allowed that FoRK) against the crow’s Health roll to make sure the crow leader (not a raven, it was a crow that was nearly as big as a raven) got a big enough bite of the bad berries to overcome his sizable constitution.
P.S. Incidentally they did succeed, I assigned Sick and Injured to the crow (-2D). In the ensuing combat the mice managed to permanently blind the crow leader, in the process throwing the vast crow army into disarray and preventing (postponing?) the impending Crow War against the mice and the rest of the woods.
Almost all medicines are poisons, Luke.
Nods
Clan of the Cave Bear is one of my favorite “what if we RP’ed cavemen?” idea generators
Yeah, plus to heal poisoned victims you generally learn about the poison itself. There is no “Herbalist” in MG and the way I read the Healer description it got rolled into there. I just chalk it up as an artifact of MG not being a game that focuses on the seedier actions, it’s a game about heros rather than anti-heros.
Maybe that’s not what you intended Mr. Crane but to stop me you are going to have to send the Game Police to try pry the book out of my cold, dead hand. Me, Smith, and Wesson will be waiting! :rolleyes: 
Stay where you are, citizen.
This entire discussion sounds good.
However, I think you’ll want to put some kind of balance in here; otherwise, we’ll have too many “scientist” mouse guard characters running around with vials of poison; and I’ll have to impose a “pick up the littered syringes” mission as part of spring cleaning!
Storytelling-wise, the GM should seek situations where having concentrated collections of poison may add an obstacle or hindrance to the players. Things like: “Oh, you failed your climbing roll … one of your poison vials spills and hits you … now you’re sick.”
And preparation of the poison/drug itself shouldn’t be too easy. A straight up test vs Ob5 or Ob6 is probably good, and the margin of failure would inflict a condition … maybe something like:
– one or more margin of success, you get what you wanted, and nothing bad happens;
– if no margin of success, you get what you wanted, but a little bit gets on you and now you’re tired;
– fail by one, and you don’t get what you wanted, but nothing bad happens;
– fail by two or more, and you don’t get what you wanted, but now you’re sick
I’m with Aramis on this one (and I’m an MD). Between Cook and Healer it’s no contest. Most primitive meds are poisons carefully titrated to the desired effect. Cook might be useful to distill it into a usable form though. Using this knowledge as a Healer should (IMO) give someone a Poisoner Trait (upshift to use Heal to hurt, downshift in social situations or nasty twists when using this knowledge and fails - e.g. hurting self or allies, knowledge of your dastardly deeds gets out, he’s only poisoned enought to know you did it, etc). I’d make it hurt. Poison is just not very heroic (against the genre) and it burns my profession to see Healers turn bad. :o
Of the worst serial killers in terms of numbers, and not counting those employed by the state to murder (thus evading a certain German Doctor), one finds a surprising number of nurses. Several in the dozen+ category.
Medicines may be poisons, but the Healer only knows how to use them for good. He might know that doing certain things is ‘bad’, but not well enough to get the desired effect.
And I think Cook was only mentioned as a delivery method.
I have no grounds to argue a positive tone for the game in this one. The healer is a poisoner in the story. Carry on!
Yeah, we assumed the berries grew with inherent poisonous potency. There was no distillation per say, it was more a matter of preparation. Cook was also used to hide the taste, plant poisons are generally alkaloids which are usually quite bitter, and make the food more palatable so the crow would really scarf it down.
That’s why I would have accepted Deceiver as a FoRK. Since there was verbal interaction with the crow the guard mouse could talk up the tasty aspect of the meal.