Chapter 1
Of this book and its use
Hesper Aldwine was an apothecary. She kept a shop in a river town for something over fifty years and died there. She was also a druid, a fact she records once and never uses again. This book is her working notes: what she prepared, what she sold, and what she treated in the people who bought it.
It was never published, only copied, and copied again from the copies. No two editions agree on the order of the chapters, and the marginal notes in any given copy may not be hers. This edition follows the earliest text available.
Who she wrote for
Not for patients. She assumed a reader who could tell one leaf from another, keep a fire at a given heat for four hours, and be trusted with the answer to “how much is too much” — that answer is given here for every substance she cataloged, plainly, with the numbers.
The book does not moralize, with one exception. The exception is water: she states in four separate places that water drunk on its own rusts the bones, and records no argument against it in fifty years of practice. Substances that both help and harm are cataloged the same way as the ones that only help. Her stated position, written once in a margin, was that people drink and dose themselves regardless, and that a practitioner’s only question is whether they do it knowing the cost.
How a receipt is read
Every entry in the two catalogs is laid out the same way.
It opens with what the thing is: where it grows or who makes it, and how a practitioner knows it — by sight, by smell, and by taste, in that order, because that is the order in which one meets it.
Then her preparing, set apart, in her own words. It is the one part of an entry where she speaks directly, and it usually carries the practical detail the rest of the entry does not.
Then what it does. A measure is her unit throughout — one dose, defined per entry, because a mouthful of one thing is not a mouthful of another. The entries say what one measure does, what a second does on top of it, and where the line is past which a Constitution saving throw decides the matter. Where a substance is habit-forming she gives what it adds to Craving, which is the count she kept of how much a body has learned to want a thing.
She uses spells sparingly and names them by their common names. Where a spell already does what a step of a receipt does, she says so and does not write a second one. Where a spell is commonly claimed to serve and does not, she says that as well.
The count she kept
Craving runs across both catalogs. Everything in this book that a body learns to want carries it, and it behaves the same way for all of them.
A Craving is a count kept for one creature and one substance. Each entry says what it adds. The count falls by 1 for each full day a creature goes entirely without — without any measure of the thing at all, and not merely without enough of it to feel. A creature taking something every day never falls at all, however little it takes.
It is counted per substance: a body that wants one thing does not want another on that account, however alike the two look from outside. There is one exception, and it exists because a body cannot tell the difference — all the drink in the fourth chapter shares a single count between the whole of it.
At 6 the count converts. The creature becomes Addicted to that substance at the first degree and the count resets to 0. It then runs on as before, and each further time it reaches 6 the addiction deepens by one degree, to a maximum of the third. So 6 in total brings a creature to the first degree, 12 to the second and 18 to the third, however many days each of those takes to arrive.
What moves what
Three things are counted in this book and they are not the same kind of thing. Intoxication is a condition that arrives and goes within an evening. Craving is a count that moves over days. An addiction is a state that does not move once it has arrived.
| What moves it | What it does | How it goes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intoxication | A measure past capacity, on a failed Constitution saving throw. Drink only | Four levels, one at a time | Falls 1 an hour without drinking |
| Craving | Drink: a day that reached the third or fourth level. A simple: what its entry names | Nothing at all until it reaches 6 | Falls 1 for each full day gone entirely without |
| Addiction | Every further 6 of Craving, to a maximum of the third degree | Three degrees, on any day gone without | Only by going without, and never completely |
The chain runs one way. Drinking does nothing until it passes capacity, Intoxication adds nothing to the craving until it reaches the third level, and the craving does nothing until it reaches 6. A creature that drinks every evening and stops before the third level never enters the second column at all.
When any of it is worth keeping
A count is worth keeping for very few creatures, and the arithmetic decides which.
A Craving that never reaches 6 does nothing whatever, and the count falls by 1 on every day between. A creature drunk at a wedding and again at a funeral is at 2 in the spring and 0 by the summer. Two nights in a season, or four, or one a month, arrive nowhere, and there is nothing to record.
What moves is a creature taking something on more days than it does not — a soldier with a flask, a scholar on a commission. That is the only case in which a count climbs faster than it falls, and the only case in which 6 arrives.
Each of the three is worth holding for a different length of time. Intoxication matters until the morning. A Craving is worth writing down once a creature has strung days together. An addiction is worth recording permanently, because a creature that recovers and takes one measure years later returns to the degree it left.
The three degrees
The effects of a degree are cumulative and stack together. What they describe is a day on which the creature goes without:
- The habit. The creature has Disadvantage on ability checks based on Wisdom and Charisma. It can go the day without, and would rather not.
- The need. The creature gains 1 Exhaustion level, which no Long Rest removes while the addiction lasts and which taking a measure removes at once. Where another creature presses a measure on it, it must make the saving throw below to refuse, and makes it with Disadvantage.
- The ruin. A measure present at all calls that saving throw — offered, sitting on a table, or its own and in a cupboard. On a failure the creature takes one, and takes the entry’s excess with it.
That Exhaustion level does not accumulate. A creature ten days into going without has 1 level from its addiction and not 10, and the day it takes a measure the level goes. Withdrawal from anything in this book is a very bad day repeated for as long as it lasts. It is not a death.
An entry with an excess names it in its own text. It is the thing a creature at the third degree does that it would not otherwise do, such as the money it spends or the sleep it will not take, and it is where the harm of an addiction falls. Where an entry names none, the creature simply always has some.
The saving throw
One saving throw serves an addiction, and it is made in two situations: to refuse a measure in front of the creature, and at the end of each day gone without, to be free of the addiction altogether. Both use the same Difficulty Class and the same ability.
The Difficulty Class is 15 on the first day the creature has gone without and falls by 1 for each consecutive day after that, to a minimum of 5. Refusing gets easier the longer it has been. Taking a measure returns the Difficulty Class to 15.
The ability depends on how long it has been, because the wanting moves. For the first 3 days it is a Constitution saving throw: the body is doing the wanting. From the fourth day it is a Wisdom saving throw, because the body has largely finished by then and what remains is the creature’s memory of the thing. A creature can therefore relapse years after the body has stopped asking. Where a case sits on the line, the Game Master decides which the day belongs to.
A creature at the second degree makes this saving throw only when somebody presses a measure on it, and makes it with Disadvantage. A creature at the third makes it whenever a measure is within reach, and with Disadvantage only if somebody is pressing. Both are made carrying whatever Exhaustion the addiction has laid down, so the roll is hardest on the days a creature is least able to make it.
Reading the degree
Where a count has been kept, the degree is settled by arithmetic. Most creatures a practitioner meets have had nobody counting, and for them the degree is read from what the creature does. The descriptions in the entries are what to read it against: a creature that wants one every day and is poor company without it is at the first degree, and a creature that has stopped choosing is at the third.
No spell reads it. It is read by watching, and by asking the people a creature lives with rather than the creature.
How it ends
An addiction ends by going without, and by nothing else. At the end of each day a creature goes without a measure it makes the saving throw above, and it needs successes equal to 1 plus its degree to be free of it — two at the first degree, three at the second, four at the third.
There is one exception in the book, and it is in the fifth chapter. An addiction to something that was never the substance it was sold as can end by being explained, if the creature accepts what it is shown.
A failure does not undo a success. Taking a measure does: the successes go to none and the Difficulty Class returns to 15 with them, so a relapse late in a recovery costs more than one early in it.
An addiction that has ended is not undone. A creature that was Addicted and takes a measure again is Addicted again at once, at the degree it left off, without passing back through the count. It does not matter how long it has been, whether a season or thirty years. Nothing else in this book persists this way, and it is why the degree is worth recording after a creature is well.
The treatments in the seventh chapter make those days survivable and shorten them considerably. Nothing removes an addiction in an afternoon, and nothing removes the fact of having had one.
The count is mine and I have kept it forty years, and I will say what it is for. It is not a punishment and it is not a prophecy. It is a way of writing down that a body has begun to expect a thing, which is a fact about the body and not about the person, and which is why I write it in a column and not in a sermon.
What she asks
Three things, from the front page of the oldest copy.
The first is that the numbers be kept. She measured them over a working life, on people who trusted her. Halving a dose because it seems harsh does not make the substance gentler; it makes the reader’s knowledge of it worse.
The second is that a preparation be finished or abandoned, never rushed. Most of what she records going wrong went wrong because somebody was in a hurry.
The third she wrote as a single line, and it is the only advice in the book she gives twice: know what the person in front of you has already taken.
What this book assumes of a table
It is a book about things that help and harm, and the harm is written down as plainly as the help — the doses, the comedowns, the wanting, and what happens to a creature that does not stop. Some of it is grim.
None of it obliges anybody. A table that wants the drinking and none of the rest can take the fourth chapter and leave the sixth on the shelf, and a table that wants the whole weight of it will find that written down too. The Game Master decides which book this is at their table.