See first post of strange fantasy drugs
Simurgh Spit Soup- The Simurgh, legendary and benevolent Bird of Birds, the size of a Roc and emblazoned with eye watering colors, She-Who-Is-Thirty, The Thirty-In-One. Her nest is built of branches of the Tree of Life held together with her own saliva. And some wily bastard keeps finding it and scrapping it up to get high as fuck. Adding the scrapped, hardened spit into boiling water creates a multi-hued semi-gelatinous soup (which is often paired with parboiled lotus fruit) and is enjoyed by only the most wealthy of addicts–y’know Kings and High Priestesses and such-like. Indulgence in the soup vastly slows one’s perception of time while also significantly broadening one’s senses–vision going into the ultraviolet and infrared, hearing reaching the ultra- and subsonic, smell like an elephant, taste exceeding the most experienced sommeliers. The combined effect gives the imbiber the the ability to perceive and process vastly more sensory stimuli, feeling as though one is living a fuller, longer life–sort of a substitute for the Elixir of Immortality, after all if you cannot live forever, you can at least live forever in the moment. Oracles and other wise-folk have been able to use this experience to perform a sort of limited Maxwell’s Demon future sight by making predictions based upon the vast sensory input, but most of the folks who can afford this soup would rather lay in a hedonistic stupor. Abusers are easily identified by the oil-slick rainbow hue of their lips, their sluggish movements, occasional bird-like habits, and (probably) a fancy hat of office
Pickled Goblin Amygdala– The amygdala is already a fairly small section of the brain, but in (most) goblins it is especially withered, in favor of a significantly bolstered dopamine system. Chewing on this organ (looking and tasting not unlike a weirdly gamey Umeboshi) causes a temporary reduction in the functionality of one’s own Amygdala– resulting in a complete inability to feel fear or anxiety. The lack of fear further inhibits one’s self imposed limitations, allowing one to perform feats of strength (at the cost of bodily harm.) This also, however, suppresses one’s ability to learn from the experiences while under the influence (in game terms any knowledge or XP gained while influenced is void.) Abusers go through fits of extreme thrill-seeking behaviors followed by extended periods of severe delusional paranoia and memory gaps. Abusers are often plagued with numerous chronic injuries and green-tinted fingertips. A single goblin yields two Amygdalae.
Pit Floss– The silk of interdimensional spiders and strands of ether (refined ectoplasm works just as well) are spun into a thread which is left to absorb starlight for a fortnight. This can then be used to sew the edges of a hole and turn it into a foldable cloth–the well known Portable Hole. Pit Floss is a street name for that thread when it is fed up through one nostril and out through the mouth, then flossed. This effectively causes one to exist simultaneously in the material and ethereal planes, and further allows one to perceive the insides of extra-dimensional spaces such as bags of holding, portable holes, and several kinds of mimics. One is able to affect and be affected by anything in either plane (good for dealing with ghosts and material threats simultaneously.) The drug is particularly popular among thieves who are daring enough to pickpocket wizards and the sort who might have access to those extra-dimensional spaces. It is extremely disorienting to perceive two sets of senses in two separate dimensions, making it difficult to notice anything beyond a narrow focus (game terms disadvantage to perception, initiative, similar.) Abusers often have permanently runny noses–the mucus being particularly vicious and glows under ultraviolet light. They are also prone to attracting stray spirits and minor poltergeist activity.
Tyrant Drops– Tears harvested directly from the fearsome Eye Tyrants then dripped into one’s own eyes. There is a 1-in-20 chance of it causing the user to be able to fire a single instance of a random Eye-Tyrant ray such as disintegration, anti-magic, charm, sleep, flesh-to-stone etc. Otherwise the drops cause one to perceive oneself as the most perfect and idealized form, vastly bolstering self confidence making it popular among second rate actors and businessmen. Abusers are prone to fits of extreme narcissism and solipsism. Eventually the abuser’s eyes gain sapience and escape from their owner’s heads upon fleshy wings. A more powerful form exists by squeezing the juices of the Eyestalk directly into one’s own eye–this lets you use any effect of the Eye Tyrant and gives you an absolutely sociopathic increase in self-esteem but completely dissolves your eye in the process.
Condensed Elf Dreams– Elves, as a rule, don’t sleep. However certain herbal soporifics can induce episodes of microsleep and micro-dreaming. That alone is a sort of drug for Elves, though there are only a few cases of abuse going as far as what would ordinarily be considered a full night of sleep. Wizards have already perfected a method of extracting dreams (it involves a Baku, a complex distillation system, and a tempered glass helmet), and when an Elf Dream is extracted it gives a thimbleful of incredibly dense liquid. When a human dreams, their dreams process the previous day–when an Elf dreams, even for a moment, it could process centuries. Mortal brains are not made to process centuries so this must be administered by a dropper to avoid overdose. A proper dose lets one have unwakeable sleep for eight hours followed by a full week without the need for sleep (along with a small chance of learning ancient history from the dreams)– popular among grad students, paranoid aristocrats and those who need to feign death. You can probably already see its potential use as a poison–a full thimble of Elf Dreams plunges the imbiber into a torpor so deep that only the most experienced oneiromancer could hope to delve in and wake them. Luckily this shit is prohibitively expensive. Abusers tend to have bishounen eyes with raccoon eye bags, the worst caffeine jitters imaginable, and the occasional slippage into dialects from two hundred years ago.
Brain Pain Jam- The cerebral juices of certain psionic creatures (especially the sort with tentacles and live in eternally dark places) can be mixed with pectin, sugar and a bit of lemon juice then boiled down into Brain Pain Jam. Eating Brain Pain Jam is the psionic equivalent of drinking an Icee too fast to get a brain freeze, and then you do it again because it’s funny after the pain subsides. Brain Pain Jam causes a psychically attuned individual to broadcast their psionic energies in a wave, causing a chaotic mix of telepathy, psychokinesis and other such phenomena while leaving the psychic themselves blessedly free from the voices and pulses inside of their head for a time. In individuals who are not psychically attuned, the Jam causes them to broadcast their own perceived qualia and experiences while they themselves are in a temporary lobotomized stupor. Some high end drug dens have been known to feed one individual heroic doses of a drug followed by Brain Pain Jam so the clientele can have all the experience of the high with none of the addiction or downsides. Psychic abusers will eventually sever their psionic power from their own minds, leaving them “normal” but also unleashing a powerful Thought-Being into the world. Non-psychic abusers often die from other addictions or a brain aneurysm, but eventually their brain will grow legs and burst from their skull to seek other brains to feed upon.
Adventurer’s Cologne– Also called Fermented Fart, Swamp Snort, ‘That Good Cheese’, and other more or less creative names. This…drug is created by sealing the decaying carcass of an Otyugh or similarly filthy sewer-dwelling creature (about 500 sewer rats work) in some sort of container then capturing the fumes in a bladder. The gas is then vigorously huffed similar to the huffing of glue. The effects have been described as invigorating and nostalgic, something between the rush of cocaine and the sedative of heroin–a feeling not dissimilar to the constant rise and fall of adrenaline that adventurers live by. The drug is therefore popular among retired adventurers and those who want all the excitement and none of the physical danger. Regular use often also causes PTSD-like hallucinations of prior experiences of combat. Abusers smell VILE and often ignore many of their other needs beyond the drug, becoming as filthy as the creatures who begat it. Some major adventuring hubs have started up rehab chapters just for this spreading issue
Gob Drank– Three goblins in a trench coat approach you, they open their trench coat to reveal pockets laden with foaming flasks. They ask in unison, “Ever wonder what a Neutron Star tastes like?” Gob Drank is everything that these goblins stole from the local apothecary and the local alchemist, poured into a moonshine jug, left to ferment for a few weeks and then given a vigorous shake. I’m going to be straight with you here, there is no way to narratively describe what the fuck happens. Just pull every random table you have available and give it a few rolls to find out what the fuck it does. Include those dungeon decoration and NPC attitude and wandering monster tables too. There are no abusers, because generally there are no survivors.
Ghost Salts- Y’see, the soul has two parts. The rational and the irrational, the body and the wandering, yin and yang, ba and ka. One goes to meet their final reward while the other is retained within the body. This is the one that Necromancers talk to, the one that animates the undead guarding the king’s tomb, the one that receives instructions from The Kings(LINK) to make sure your body is functioning right. But after death, after decay, when even the skeleton is dust–there remains the Salt, for we are the Salt of the Earth are we not?
Ghost Salt containsthe Instructions for a body to function, devoid of the personality or knowledge of the original spirit. Necromancers, posing as healers, have been known to use them to force a heart to continue pumping. Slavers (and Athletes) have used them to force a body to continue moving past total exhaustion. It temporarily overwrites your own body’s instructions (“stop moving itit hurting us” “You don’t have enough blood” “your stomach is full”) with a generic and monotonous instruction (“Legs move” “Heart Pumps” “The Mouth Eats”). Abuse of Ghost Salt slowly overwrites your soul until either half of your original soul remains, you become an organic machine reacting to stimuli, a P-Zombie. I wonder if your friends and loved ones will be able to tell.
What about the other soul? It is harder to catch–after all you need to capture it at the instant of death, before it can be pulled to the Great Beyond. But if this soul can be captured then refined down into a Salt, it is something else entirely. While the former contains the drive of the body, Ka Salts contain the impulse, the personality, the passion–without inhibition. To ingest Ka Salts is to, for a time, absolutely become that individual–your own Ka is shunted out of the body until the effect wears off. While rare enough that abusers are unknown, it is likely that such an abuser may end up ingesting too great a Ka and obliterate their own soul in the process. There are Liches who are determining a way to fuse Ba and Ka Salts (perhaps through near-light speed impacts) to somehow snag the spark of divinity that created the Soul in the first place.
Sal’s Sensational Sage Salvia– You can get this cheaply from any corner side seedy apothecary or “two copper” store. For half an hour you will have the absolutely most nightmarish dissociative trip you’ve ever experienced– I mean some real cenobite/clockwork orange kinda imagery. But, it’s cheap and it’s not reality, and it’s not yet regulated. And it totally isn’t made with a mix of salvia and cordyceps fungus harvested from the faintly glowing waste heap outside of the wizard’s college. It totally doesn’t cause abusers to eventually seek the highest place possible and vomit their entire body weight in spores, leaving only a skin that blows away with the wind. And it is absolutely not slowly becoming a hive-mind of god-like intelligence bent on world domination. Nope!
