Fun question about the “Venomous” special ability: What kind of nonsense should I prepare myself for now that the Leech at my table can secrete psychedelic drugs?
Follow up: Does anyone have any suggestions for scenarios that would lend themselves to this exciting yet mildly unsettling development?
Prepare yourself for a lot of trick-handshakes.
Do you know which drug or poison they’ve chosen for the ability?
My go-to complication for bad rolls with Venomous is that the drug is more effective on the target than you anticipated.
It seems like there are plenty of good devil’s bargains around them accidentally drugging people, or being seen as a god or demon by those who were drugged.
For the second part of your question, I think the prime opportunities for this ability are for when you can’t openly use a weapon. So tricky social situations where you need to drug a doorman, assassinations in plain sight through poisoned handshakes, taking down a guard after they’ve confiscated all your weapons, etc.
Tim Denee It’s a substance that the Leech and Whisper produce by transfusing a live subject with Leviathan blood and compelling a ghost the whisper has subjugated to possess the subject, effectively expelling their spirit and infusing it with the Leviathan blood. They then extract the blood and distill it into a tincture which can be consumed as a liquid or dried into a powder and snorted, smoked, main-lined, huffed, hooped, dropped into the eyes, or any other imaginable method of ingestion.
It causes strong hallucinations and euphoria, followed by adrenaline and sometimes violence. The notable hallucinatory effect is that colours become inverted, hence the name Wightsky, or Wight for short. It’s “The Good Stuff” as per the Hawkers’ special crew ability, so folks in Duskwall are pretty fond of it by default.
That’s funny that you mention a handshake; the way this Leech revealed that he had the ability in our last session was accepting a handshake from Baszo Baz. I wasn’t sure how to deal with it, so I made the Leech roll to see how large of a dose he was able to secrete (it was high) and then started a clock ticking down to the “adrenaline+violence” stage of Baszo’s trip (the clock didn’t fill in that scene, so the crew will have to hear about the aftermath later). I think it’s probably safe to say that the Lampblacks are hooked on Wight now, which might make things difficult as they’re the crew’s number one distributor.
Zachary Miller This is a good call! I’ll be sure to keep this in mind.