Character Careers that can relate to Botanicals
Ancient/Medieval Professions and Gear
- Shaman/Voudoun/medicine people: Bags of magic herbs, rocks, etc
- Folk Healers: Wood-Witch/Hedge Witch/Sorcerer/etc.: batches dried herbs and salves
- Wise men and Women: collecting baskets, digging stick/spade
- Religious Figure (Monk): Cross, batches of salves, some essential herbs
- King/Emperor/Ruler: Kingdom, gardens
- Archiater (Court Physician): scientific-looking devices, home base
- Farmer/workers: land, specific crops
- Gardener: gardening implements,
- Alchemist: Lab
- Assassin: poison vials or bags
- Leech/Doctor/Physician: Tools
- Apothecary: Home base, connections with merchants
- Pirate/Smuggler: ship, secret compartments
- Explorer: ship, usually, knowledge of spice trade and buyers
- Merchant: same as explorer, knowledge of buyers
Medieval and Ancient cultural characters
- Muslim Apothecary
- Chinese Physician
- European Monks and Witches
- Medicine men/women
- Witch Doctors
Modern Day Titles
- Gardener/Horticulturalist/landscape architect
- Anthropologist/archeologist
- Pagan/Wiccan
- Scientist/Botanist/
- Survivalist
- Farmer/Crop Management Specialist
- Stoner
Skills
- Herblore: Legends and folklore
- Herbcraft: Dying, Textiles, Chefs/Culinary, Artisans
- Medicines: Making medicines
- Potions: Making potions and brews
- Alchemy: Using plants (and other things) to make special concoctions
- Poisons: To kill
- Wilderness Survival: To survive a long time in the Wilderness
- Ritualistic magic: Usually used magic herb blends
- Identification: recognizing plants in the wild.
- Crops (specializing usually in a type)
- Landscaping: Understand how to use the lay of the land to produce ideal conditions Business: About the type of plants or garden
- Botany: How plants live and grow
- Foraging: To sustain for brief periods in the wilderness
Using herb-related characters
This started back in 1992 when I was playing D&D and I wanted to play something I was interested in—an herbal witch. The GM said “sure,” but wouldn’t actually let me do anything with it because he didn’t know enough himself. Here’s how, as a GM, some of this can be handled.
Identifying herbs for medicine, food, or trade
Character is in unfamiliar territory and decides to keep his or her eye out for “any plants that might be of use.” If using the above skill list, a character should take Identification or Foraging to be able to find these plants. A character that takes Potions or Medicine should only be able to identify obvious plants in the wild, having gotten most of his or her herbs pre-dried and prepared.
For example, an herbalist with Identification would recognize Datura (highly poisonous, yet used at one time for visions and medicine) on the vine and be able to collect it correctly. Stick a character who specializes in Medicine out in the wild and he or she likely wouldn’t recognize the plant.
Character rolls to identify and GM rolls on following chart:
Herbal Identification Chart
| 1–3 | Character finds little of value |
| 4–5 | Character finds medicinal plants useful for binding wounds |
| 6–7 | Character finds rare medicinal plant to use or sell |
| 8–10 | Character finds poisonous plants to use or sell |
| 11–12 | Character finds gourmet food plant to use or sell |
| 13–16 | Character finds plants animals graze on |
| 17 | Character disturbs wild carnivorous animal |
| 18 | Character finds plants that cause rash when touched |
| 19–20 | Character finds edible foraging plants |
The Gamemaster can allow the player to determine which herb plant he or she found based on the above description. In magic worlds, be selective and add “rare magic plant” as a possibility.
Using herbalism to heal should do no more than staunch a wound or prevent infection out in the field unless there’s a magic plant nearby. As I said in the previous article, Even in cases where magical healing is commonplace, mundane healing techniques should not be ignored since magic uses energy and it takes more energy to heal up a freely bleeding wound than one that’s been patched to a slow ooze. Also, you seal up a wound too fast and you risk infection; no one ever points that out in magic healing… what magic also disinfects as it miraculously closes wounds?
Okay, only an evil GM would think of that.
An Interesting Way to Handle Characters making Magic Potions and Spells
For Pete’s sake, don’t tell them that they failed and let them start over. One thing I’ve always emphasized in my own games is “you THINK you made it correctly.” Also, just because they got a recipe out of a book doesn’t mean there can be instances of carelessness, misinterpretations, bad ingredients, a worm falls in the mix, etc. So a character decides to make a potion of invisibility. They roll and succeed or fail. If they succeed, make a counter-roll to see if they got what they wanted or if happenstance occurred. If they fail, don’t just let them shrug it off. For one thing they probably made SOMETHING, so long as it didn’t explode. Now they have an unknown substance that may be highly volatile or have strange effects that they have to discard in some way shape or form.
Why should it be any different for fantasy settings than it is for the real world?
Bibliography
Here’s what I remember; add your own!
Websites
Wikipedia: Yep. I totally stole hundreds of entries from this here site. And I’m not sorry either.
Also:
- http://plants.usda.gov
- http://www.hort.purdue.edu/
- http://www.pfaf.org/index.php
- http://www.fourdir.org/
- http://www.primitiveways.com/#anchor702979
- http://www.cyberpict.net/sgathan/essays/woad.htm
- http://www.botanical.com/
- http://www.mystical-www.co.uk/trees/trees_a2z/trees_a.htm
- http://www.tarahill.com/treelore/trees.html
- http://www.worldbiomes.com/biomes_map.htm
- http://www.enchantedlearning.com/Home.html
- http://www.runet.edu/~swoodwar/CLASSES/GEOG235/biomes/main.html
Books
These are out of my own Library:
- Llewellyn’s Magic Almanacs 1996–2008
- Llewellyn’s Herbal Almanac, 2006, 2008
- Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, Scott Cunningham
- A Brief History of Gardening, Fairbairn
- How Indians use Wild Plants for Food, Medicine & Crafts, Densmoore
- Compendium of Herbal Magic, Paul Beyerl
- A Field Guide to Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels, and Other Subversive Spirits, Mack
- Civil War Pharmacy, Flannery
- Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs
- Culpeper’s Herbal
- Eyewitness Handbooks: Herbs, Bremness
- The War for Power and Knowledge, Illustrated History Encyclopedia
- Weaponry, an Illustrated History, Chuck Wills
- The New Age Herbalist, Richard & Mabey
- The Time-Life Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were
- A Victorian Grimoire, Telesco
- The Complete Medicinal Herbal, Ody
- Encyclopedia of Assassinations, Sifakis
- Magical Gardens, Monaghan
- The Timetables of History, Grun
- Discoveries: Native Americans
- The Ancient Egyptians, Wilkinson
- Encyclopedia of Ancient History, Lorenz Books
- Garden Flower Folklore, Martin
- The Complete Book of Spices, Norman
- High Times Encyclopedia to Recreational Drugs
- Reader’s Digest Magic and Medicine Plants
- Country Wisdom & Know-How, Storey Books
- Using Wild & Wayside Plants, Dover
- The Giant Encyclopedia of Mushrooms
- Jen’s Gardening Book, that’d be me.
Gamebooks/Sourcebooks
- Herblore, for Hârnworld, Columbia Games by Crossby, Edwards, King, Leitch
- Brews: Good & Bad Volume I, Precis Intermedia
If you know of any other game sourcebooks that can be useful, list them.
Hundreds more were taken out of libraries and copied dutifully into notebooks and than re-transcribed for you amusement. No, I can’t remember all of them, here’s a few I re-found.
- Folklore & Odysseys of Food and Medicinal Plants, Lehner
- Folklore & Symbolism of Flowers, Plants, and Trees, Lehner
- The Color Treasury of Mushrooms & Toadstools, Crescent
Thanks to Shannon and the other Skotos people, CW Richardson for his stint as journal editor, Tangency for allowing me to bounce ideas off them, and my family.
‘Bye ... for now
So that’s it, folks; There’s a lot more I learned as I continued researching and I’m compiling it all together to make one big tome for RPG and fictional settings. Soon to be available, or something.
Twenty-four articles and two years have passed. As of this writing four of my articles should have over 3000 reads each (boy, you people liked the poisons....)
I will be starting a new column soon, similarly put together, on geology. I don’t know if it’ll go until 2010, but I look forward to putting it all together.
Take care.
