A medical professional who creates and dispenses medicines for a variety of ailments from natural herbs and minerals. Serving as a key community health figure by formulating remedies, selling drugs, and sometimes even providing basic medical advice or services. Their shops are vital hubs for healing, filled with jars of potent ingredients, blending alchemy, botany, and traditional knowledge to create tinctures, salves, and potions for the sick, with extensive knowledge of herblore and reagents for medicines. This experience and knowledge allow you to identify these ingredients and assess their quality, whether you are foraging in the forest for herbs or browsing goods at a local shop, and to have extensive knowledge of the bodies, health, herbs, chemicals, oils, and salts that go into making medicines & poisons. Also adept at discerning the nature of various potions, elixirs, poisons, and tinctures. Major insight into herbology, botanicals, natural medicines, etc. (traits, uses, etc.), for foraging and growing herbs. Spent years learning various plants and their properties, and the many concoctions you can create from them. They often journey into nature to study, forage, and tend to plant life and how many creatures interact with it. Knows which herbs can soothe a fever and which oils can help prevent the pox. Not all medicine is good for the body, though: they have also learned which toxins can stop the heart or drive a man to madness. They know how to manufacture and refine all of these things, and they make a living dispensing tonics and tinctures to those in need. Sometimes, when there's no cure for an ailment, people come to them looking for the mercy of a painless end to their suffering. A few come for the means to get rid of someone who has wronged them; helping them, too, is also a mercy. In essence, The Apothecary is a respected, skilled practitioner blending science and tradition.
Medicine Preparation: Crush, mix, and compound remedies like pills, powders, syrups, and salves using pestles, mortars, and other tools.
Herbal Expertise: Deep knowledge of plants, their cultivation, harvesting, and use of both local and imported botanicals was essential.
Retail & Dispensing: Sell medicines directly from their shops, decorated to attract customers with beautiful jars and displays that showcase their craft.
Holistic Care: Beyond selling, they often served as community healers, providing broader medical care, especially in less developed areas.
- Skill Proficiencies: Medicine and your choice between Nature or Survival.
- Tool Proficiencies: Alchemist's Supplies, Brewer's Supplies, and Herbalism Kit.
- Equipment: A Herbalism Kit, Alchemist's Supplies, Brewer's Supplies, a Healer's Kit, a Poisoner's Kit, a Merchant's Scale, a set of Traveling Clothes, and a pouch containing 15 gp.
A reputation as a healer of the sick, they are often called upon by those who are diseased or injured. Usually gains an audience with anyone who needs treatment, even if protocol would typically prevent them from doing so, simply by offering their assistance by spending a few moments examining a chemical, a vial of liquid, a packet of ground powder, or the like; they can determine whether the substance is intended to harm, heal, or neither (all of this is at the DM discretion). Expertise with ointments and potions lets them determine the nature of any liquid they encounter, including the components used in its making and whether it contains magic. As an apothecary, they've worked with or for a wider swath of society than most, and often finish a client's job, promising to say nothing about the private struggles they frequently become privy to. At the DM's discretion, they may occasionally find they know details of a situation others do not. As medical professionals, they can volunteer as medics or nurses in times of need. This gains them favour and trust among folk who require help. They can expect to receive healing for their party from Clergies of gods of life, who act as doctors, or other medical facilities, and are often willing to lend their own supplies for them to work with, if available, and even offer rewards in the form of payment or free lodging. In a pinch, they can even perform minor medical procedures, although these things are better left to a proper surgeon. When encountering a wound or illness, they can correctly identify the sickness's name, what may have caused it, and the effects it may have on the bearer. In addition, they can determine the medicinal properties of plants, minerals, and animal parts. They have an easier time getting the trust and comforting the sick, the dying, and the dispossessed. The local provider of medicines, herbs, and alchemical concoctions, they are the people others come to when they can't afford clerical magic. However, Clerics, Mages, and nobles also seek them out when in need of medical or alchemical supplies (or even just a lovely tea). Because they work with substances that could be deadly in the wrong doses, they know how to neutralize many poisons. Some Apothecaries become proficient with the deliberate creation of poisons. The local Thieves Guild often frequents such merchants.
Suggested Characteristics
Lives off the land, so therefore very connected to the earth, nature, and the natural elements around them; very down-to-earth, peaceful, and loving. Always a bit odd and never completely fitted in. A knack for herbs and poultices. In isolation because others are ready to shun and cast them out for their ways, though they still seek them out, looking for a remedy.
Comments