Healing potion side effects

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.