2023 Advent Calendar Day 6: Brandy, Hot Cocoa, Wassail of Good Will (potions)

Brandy (common). Also known as "adventurer's breakfast," drinking 2oz of this potion substitutes for a meal, allowing you to gain the benefits of resting, although it does not prevent starvation. For the next 4 hours, you are considered distracted, taking a -5 penalty to passive Perception, and rolling a natural 1 on Dexterity checks or saving throws is a critical failure, regardless of bonuses. Brandy is usually sold in 26oz bottles, weighing 2lbs and costing 1gp.

Hot Cocoa (common). This thick brown potion takes the edge off of cold. The first time you take cold damage within 10 minutes of drinking it, you have resistance to that damage. The effects of the potion then end. Hot cocoa costs 5gp per dose.

Wassail of Good Will (legendary). When you drink this potion, your alignment becomes neutral good. Every 24 hours, you must make a DC 18 Charisma saving throw; on a success, your alignment moves one step back towards your original alignment.

What makes an interesting potion? If we look at video games and other media, it seems like there's two categories: everyday, run-of-the-mill consumables like health or mana potions, meant to be consumed in large quantities and managed as a resource; and rare, powerful, iconic items like love potions or Harry Potter's Felix Felicis, that are often unique and bend the entire story around their presence. D&D seems to have plenty of the former, but few or none of the latter; even the very rare potions of flight, speed, and invisibility just mimic low-to-mid-level spell effects, and other very rare potions have equally banal mechanical effects. (Though it's worth noting that, as usual, magic item rarity has little to do with its power level - the potions of resistance and water breathing also replicate 3rd-level spells, but are only uncommon.)

Potions-as-commodity makes a lot of sense for D&D. They form part of the resource management system, along with hit points, spell slots, torches, rations, and everything else. Except, uniquely, they are also treasure - as part of your reward for delving the dungeon, you are able to delve it further, whether it's by finding phials in a chest, buying them with your hard-won gold, or brewing them yourself from looted reagents. It's an effective loop. But it's also kind of uninspiring.

With most other magic items, even a lowly +1 sword, you can easily imagine building an adventure around finding or using it. (Perhaps exploring the tomb of a long-dead local hero to recover the only weapon that can permanently slay the specter haunting the village.) And it has the potential to reshape the party dynamics: if there's a fighter and a rogue who both want it, then distributing loot becomes a real strategic decision, and the rest of the party may have to adjust their own tactics to accommodate.

Can any of that be said for potions? If you only have one or two healing potions, then maybe there's a tactical choice about who carries it. Perhaps, a party lacking certain spells or types of casters might quest for a potion of mind reading or clairvoyance, but more likely, just hire a local alchemist or wizard to brew one up or write a spell scroll. The only one in the DMG that feels worthy of a quest is the potion of longevity, but its effects are purely narrative - there's no reason to want it unless you decide your character wants it, it's not useful as a part of a larger adventure.

But potions should be awesome! These are elixirs of eternal youth, and panaceas that can close mortal wounds in seconds - things real alchemists tried to do for millennia. Mostly this is a side effect of D&D's high-magic setting and forgiving rest mechanics. What's so special about a panacea, when you could just go sleep for 8 hours? Who cares about eternal youth when you either fall into a pit trap by the age of 30, or retire alive and well at the end of a campaign? These are simply not things that the system has decided to care about. And that's fine - there's plenty of other magic items to be awed and astounded by, it's okay for some of them to be mundane. But why must it be all the potions?

So that's what I'm trying to do here. The first two potions are meant to be useful parts of the resource management system, something you can use every day to prolong your adventure and overcome basic hazards. Hot cocoa protects you from the cold, naturally, and it could easily hook into systems for extreme weather or exposure if those were a fully-supported pillar of 5e gameplay. Brandy is a lightweight way to pack lots of unhealthy rations into your limited carrying capacity. There's no need for it to be expensive or rare, because it has intrinsic downsides.

The Wassail of Good Will is a major quest item, no longer brewed in the current Age of Man, kept in rare vats in secret druidic halls in the lands of the barbarians, used to seal alliances and toast the accession of their great chieftains. Tracking down a vial is an adventure. Negotiating it from the druids is an adventure. Slipping it to the Evil Overlord is an adventure. Figuring out what to do with a few days of good alignment is a conundrum. Dealing with the Evil Overlord afterwards is an adventure. The ethics of magical brainwashing are a moral dilemma. Every stage of its use is a hook for quests and roleplaying.