New Alchemical Item Design Guidelines?

[rdcoll]

Hello all,

I am interested in designing some new (and more easily/quickly) constructed alchemical items and I was just wondering if anyone has seen any good guidelines (official, third-party, or homebrew) with respect to cost and craft DC?

I'm hoping to find something similar to the "Estimating Magic Item Gold Piece Values" table (and related contents) from http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/creatingMagicItems.htm, except for alchemical creations.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

[rdcoll]

Nothing, eh?

Well I could start by noting a couple of things from the Arms and Equipment Guide (pg. 35). To paraphrase, alchemical items:

- shouldn't duplicate or replace the effects of spells or magic items

- can induce temporary states (but magic is needed for permanency)

- can induce these states in single creatures (but magic is needed to affect groups)

- can deal small amounts of damage to a small numbers of targets

- can impart temporary properties to items

- can help creatures alleviate or resist some conditions

When it comes to creating new alchemical items, these are the only "official" guidelines that I have encountered.

If we look at things like the tindertwig and the sunrod, they are clearly replacements for mundane equipment with a price that is tremendously inflated. A single flint and steel striker (also in Arms and Equipment), for instance, costs 2 gp and can be used up to 10 times to light a fire as a standard action. This is equivalent to 10 tindertwigs at 1 gp a piece, with no apparent justification for the price discrepancy.

Sunrods, on the other hand, are about 150% as powerful as torches and last 6 times as long, but a single sunrod costs 2 gp - 200 times the price of a torch.

We could also look at the smokestick at 20 gp, which is virtually identical to a single-use item of fog cloud that would be priced at 100 gp.

So how should we come up with the strength/cost/dc of new alchemical items? Should we be looking at fractional magical effects for an inflated cost or should we be estimating costs based on the piece of mundane equipment that is most similar?

Any thoughts?

[unseenmage]

Alchemical items are just mundane, non-magical equipment that also usually happens to be one-use.

My suggestion is to just use existing mundane equipment, of which there is plenty, and refluff it to be described as being alchemical. You'll have the fewest rules interactions that need fixing this way.

Another option that comes to mind is making one Alchemical item for each 0-1st level spell. Maybe make them half as effective for half the price of an equivalent magic item that just duplicates the spell outright to represent Alchemy's inferiority to "real" magic. Make the inverse true if you instead want to boost Alchemy's efficacy in your campaign.