[5e DM] Strong poison for the weak!

So I thought it was weird that all the poisons in the 5e PHB and the 5e DMG were so weak. In novels and movies there is poison that someone can just put in my food and I die when I eat it.

So I checked out the 2e DMG and it said that these kinds of poisons can exist (class J on page 101) but doesn’t really give deets. Also looking around on this topic I hear that most peeps think insta-kill poison is pretty bad gameplay.

Obviously if&when you can cook up more, uh, interesting poisons like Ghar’s poisons in DCO, go for it. But sometimes you need a baseline to know what some good numbers are.

OK, OK… so hit points were put on this God’s green Oerth for a reason. They’re scalar plot armor! Once you run out of HP you are toast.

So here is my new attempt:

Plain vanilla generic “put in their food so they die” poison!

(A.k.a. “The Blackwood Family Special”)

It scales with the level of the person with proficiency in Poisoner’s Kit that made/harvested/brewed/metered out the poison.

Con save (DC 8 + the poisoner’s proficiency [prof+mod]) or:

lose 1d6 max HP per level (poison maker’s level, not victim’s level)

“poisoned” condition

get one death safe failure marked all the time

and those three effects go away after 1d3 long rests or with the use of a Lesser Resto spell or greater magic. If the con save was successful you might be diegetically a little queasy for a few hours but no effects on the symbol layer (dice&stats&sheets) of the game.

The 1d6 per level was modeled after assassins, whose 1d6 per two levels sneak attack dice are doubled when they manage to land their special whamma-jamma assassination attack. Yeah, yeah, they also do weapon damage and their ability mod but if you want the job done right ya gonna need to get your hands dirty yourself.

Flavor to taste, change die expressions to other expressions with the same average but way swingier (for example use the falling damage from Veins of the Earth), invent flavorful names & sources for your poison etc etc.

1d3 long rests

Bonus: Ya Basic Weapon Applied Poison

The poison on the PHB p153 is much decried for how weak it is for its price but it’s actually not so bad if you rule that it works for every chop/slash/cut the entire minute. The threat of the extra 1d4 stacks with everything. In my campaign it’s made from a little white flower (that’ll never awaken you) called Precious Tears that you can forage for and then spend two days brewing the poison. If they want to brew it from spiders or scorpions or w/e that’s fine too, take the loot equiv of 50 gp basically. Or 50 spiders (that’s like two swarms…?)

You can also make the blowgun poisons from “Beyond Damage Dice”. Wait, why are they so much cheaper than regular weapon poison? Idk, I also think that’s weird. Maybe it’s because they only work on blowgun needles?

forage