Healing potion side effects

hey, odd request but i want some ideas for side effects if someone were to drink healing blood, I'm in a setting where nothings nice and dandy, potions labeled "Fear resist" cause you to have hallucinations of your worst fear, people are out for themselves, monsters amuck, and healing potions have terrible consequences.

Heres the deal, in this system health potions aren't a thing, and in this (fantasy) setting just about everything is here, from vampires to cthulu. so i want to give my players (who have been taking a real beating without a party healer) a way to recover. heres what i ask. Come up with some kind of origin for the potion and what the side effect might be.

Ex: the potion is the blood of an immortal, drinking it causes extreme regenerative qualities, however shortly after the effects wear off your body becomes immensely fatigued and you find it hard to move.

or make it even more extreme and say after drinking it you go into a state of madness acting crazy like the immortal who's blood you drank.

Other urls found in this thread:

plasticbrickautomaton.com/?id=71
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

The potion works by speeding up your bodies metabolism to an exteeme degree. After the fight the person who drank it must take a rest to eat something or just collapse from starvation very quickly.

Multiple usages of the potions results in rapid aging as your cells undergo years of reproduction and decay in a matter of moments

Some of potion that uses earlier 'templates' of your body, made by a time mage or something. Causes you to forget everything that happened since you last slept for moderate wounds. If you are too seriously injured when you drink it, it'll take away more than just that.

Some kind of mythical deep jungle sap that causes rampant growth: each time you use the stuff your hair and nails grow out of control, and you permanently gain a few inches of height. Overuse will eventually crush you under your own weight.

Healing potions make your body heal itself faster at the cost of a shortened lifespan.

...

Potion doesn't heal, but restores.
The recipe was stolen from some wizard named Dave and every injury it reverses makes you look slightly more like Dave.

Maybe Dave was taller than you so when you fixed your broken leg, it ended up a half inch longer than your other leg.

Cancer. I'm serious.

Your body is made of cells.
Injury means some cells got destroyed.
Your body heals forcing your cells to reproduce themselves at a faster rate.
Tampering with the celular replication mechanism (like what a healing potion would do) can only lead to fucking up said mechanism.

So, it's either cancer or mutations / deformities on the long run.

Lepercure Poultice

When applied to the body, particularly wounds, the skin in the affected area rapidly regenerates, causing injuries to seal themselves shut. The skin around the affected area will be of a more deteriorated version of the normal skin that covers the affected's body, leaving a nasty scar. Repetitive use of the poultice causes skin quality to deteriorate faster, eventually causing full-on skin decay and leprosy.

when you drink it recovers your wounds, however when you go to sleep the wounds re open and you lose half of what you gained? also causing severe pains

By the same token, I imagine someone with an autoimmune disease who gets given such a potion might have a seriously adverse reaction.

Mmm, that's a good idea, potions might react in diferent ways on people with certain conditions.

I just use something vaguely akin to witcher toxicity, more than your con modifier in potions between long rests will give you an exhaustion level.

post entirety

dude, thats fucked, i went and looked for that

Your metabolism increases.
You must eat as much food at you would need to survive a comparable number of days to heal the amount of damage for the healing.

So say you heal 5 points a day, and your potion healed about 37.

You'd better eat an entire week's worth of food right now, or you're fucked.

theres all these negative side effects, why not some positive and negative.

Demons Blood: drinking the blackened sour blood grants extreme regenerative qualities, closing wounds within an instant, but also granting enhanced vitality and strength and speed.

after one dose, sure it grants a nice kick for a short while, but after each dose the feeling lasts longer and longer, but you begin to have an insatiable bloodlust and become dizzy. until the point where you actually blackout and go into a rage state attacking everything around you.

The potion is actually a mixture of biological tissue that literally invades your blood system upon drinking. It will fastly cover your wounds a close them but you become less human everytime you need to do this and, after a while, your body starts rejecting itself and old wounds will start randomly reopening.

In the setting my group plays in, the most common form of healing potion has blood root as a major ingredient. Blood root does weird shit if you plant it next to a corpse, or even in a corpse, it grows faster, merges with the body, and if it's fresh enough it might even make it start moving a bit, nothing like resurrection though, just creepy as fuck.

The thing is, for the potions to be safe, you need to be a very experienced alchemist and use some fairly rare extra ingredients that are often secret, or hard to get, which makes them ludicrously expensive, which means that people like adventurers or the soldiers who can get their hands on any, make do with cheaper low grade stuff.
People who have used them a lot, like veteran mercenaries, pit fighters or judicial champions frequently develop root sickness.

The first stages involve personality quirks, like an increased fear of the dark and heightened aggression. This can usually be cured by strong purging medicines, fasting, leeches and staying out of the sun for an extended period of time (which usually has to be forced, a patient will almost never have the willpower to stay in the dark while the sun is up.)

The second stage of root sickness comes with discolored veins, swelling, heightened blood pressure and even more intense displays of the symptoms from stage one. In advanced cases patients will start sprouting little red leaves like small blades of grass, usually in their hair, neck, face or hands, all the places that are not covered up by clothes. By this point it's almost always to late, and the patient will often be mercykilled and the body burned immediately.

In the final stage, the root spreads so much in the body that it causes severe damage, often brain damage, which is preceeded by intense bouts of pain and aggression, and ends with a severe stroke or heart attack, after which the corpse will sprout blood root, usually from the chest and skull.

Not OP but I like it.

Heres a few that havent already been posted:

>health pots are addictive and, as any drug, their effects weaken with extended abuse. They could be addictive by their very nature, because a common additive is something addictive, or cause the alchemists guild makes them addictive to increase sales.

>theyre a magical 'blood transfusion' and the spirit/soul/whatever is carried in the blood. Eventually you may start to hear voices with long term abuse leading to full on schizophrenia or dissociative disorder as fragments of whoever contributed to the potions soul is merged with yours (typically this is multiple people unless you always buy your pots from the same place). Potentially because of the settings religions you may end up being considered an abomination/cannibal at that stage and disallowed from certain gods paradises.

>they are actually just potions that exponentially increase your luck/odds of success with a very helpful side effect being that it makes your bodies processes extremely effecient as everything in your body just chances into place. The downside is that messing with the way the universe is supposed to work causes it to have to balance itself out. Meaning that for the same length of time that you were extremely lucky you must have a time of being extremely unlucky. That time does not necessarily have to be immediately following the luck wearing off.

nice, i love the first part too, how you can plant it in a corpse. maybe the players come across an alchemist who is using a bunch of corpses to grow the stuff.

Drinking a healing potion regenerates the hymen.

It's just a PWO but no one is lifting so they feel fucked up after the beta-alanin in it makes it feel as if bugs are crawling under their skin.

The healing potion heals you, but also starts to cause all orifices to start healing shut. In heavy doses you need to be woken up multiple times each night to cut open your mouth and nostrils else you will suffocate in your sleep.

Yes it also affects your penis, vagina and anus.

plasticbrickautomaton.com/?id=71

Or, just sleep with straws in your holes. Thanks for putting sounding in the game.

that would be truly terrifying the first time it happens

> I want to give my players a way to recover but make it such a huge inconvenient pain in the ass that they'll try it once then forget about it forever because I made it more of a hassle than a help, then I'm going to get pissed off at them later for not using my "clever" bullshit.

> im a sad cynical piece of shit who can't appreciate when somethings got a catch that forces players to actually consider the weight of their actions

im sowwy, did you get all upset when your GM showed you not everything was roses and candy?
here enjoy 10 magic artifacts and free healing potions.

fuck off.

Side effects may include:
>vomiting and diarrhea.
>dizziness
>mild stomach upset
>thoughts of suicide

Contact your local apothecary if you experience any of these symptoms for longer than five days.
Health Potions should not be taken by those who are pregnant or nursing.

>Corpse breath
>Hair growth
>Hiccups
>Vomiting
>Memory loss
>Copper after taste
>Vertigo
If i was a potion brewer i'd make sure that the liquid itself would be pure nutrients.

hehe, i can imagine someone standing out in the town square repeating this after a demonstration

Healing potions are temporary, they don't so much heal the wound as delay it. You either need to get yourself to a situation where your wounds can be treated properly or imbibe a steady and likely increasing dose of healing potions to keep your injuries at bay.

The Donjon de Naheulbeuk RPG deals with potion spamming by treating it just like any strong medication. Take your nearest "may have side-effects, including..." list and pick a couple of them when the players start abusing the magical kool-aid. Which would look like:
"You didn't listen" tier
>nausea
>vomiting
>fatigue
>diarrhea
>haemophilia
>acne
>chills

"You could have prevented this" tier
>phantom pain
>anxiety
>allergic reactions
>anemia
>insomnia
>erectile disfunction
>vision trouble

"It's happening" tier
>addiction
>hallucinations
>depression
>nightmares
>ulcers
>aggresion

"It's over" tier
>psychosis
>necrosis
>myopathy
>immunosuppression
>stroke

If you want to get fancy, you can add magical side-effects like mutations, entropic spells and energy surges.

Magic fertility. I'm not necessarily talking lewdness, either. Having excess life energy flowing out of you, doing things like causing plants to grow more rapidly under your feet, mold, fungus, or possibly plant life to grow on your body, bacteria to spread and grow, or the like could work if played well. Look up SCP-407 if you want to know what a healing overdose could wind up looking like.

Potion sickness.

Hardier characters can withstand more punishment from the physically taxing potions. The brew provides resistance to bleeding, as well as restoring a certain amount of HP over a short duration, but tends to cause nausea, vertigo, fatigue and other ailments normally associated with food poisoning. Characters with a higher Constitution score have a better chance of withstanding these effects, but drinking more than one a day makes it harder to resist.

Bottled time: a flask contains a week's worth of time, usually resting at an inn and eating two meals a day. You can only fill thoses flasks bycarrying them in your left pocket for a week and doing whatever. While doing that, your food feels like mud, water leaves you parched and you cannot sleep.
It is recommended to not fill an entire flask in one go, one day is already a burden (no hydration).

A healing potion that heals all damage but but you suffer horrible pain later.

Pot heals 63 damage so over the next few hours you suffer 126 damage bit maybe at a rate of 10 per hour

Frequent consumption of "healing potions" has been linked with unwanted growths like warts, hemarhoids, cysts and even cancer as well as blood clots and a host of other ailments.

Mutations.
Healing potions require the controlled tapping of infinite chaos, to provide energy and initial possibilities. While normally this Chaos is restrained and directed via precise patterns, infinite improbabilities are difficult to channel into finite probabilities. This leads to, over time, excess/undirected energy performing conceptual linkages to similar/different patterns and enacting those.
(Monte Cook's Chaositech has some great mutations using this theme, as does DH)

Not the same guy but you're the one coming off as a little bitch.

Just make it a regular healing potion, no crazy names needed. But if some smartass starts chugging them too much for your liking, it starts with some skin tags. Continued abuse leads to tumors, dermoid cysts, supernumerary teeth, and occasional bleeding episodes.