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Avista
2020-07-11, 03:23 AM
My rogue has come into possession of a flask that can produce any alcoholic drink your heart desires. Want a tequila sunrise? Pour orange juice in the flask and tell it to make tequila. Conjure the king's Dwarven stout or the queen's Elven wine. The limit is it can only produce alcoholic beverages that are non-magical.

So far I've used it for very "harmless" stuff, like sharing a drink among friends and enemies. But I am sure this flask has some potential.

What kind of fun shenanigans could I get up to?

Zhorn
2020-07-11, 05:19 AM
some vials and rags: Molotov cocktails

NichG
2020-07-11, 05:38 AM
Is ambrosia/nectar alcoholic? If so, you've got immortality on tap.

Depending what references you can draw on, there's the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, though what exactly it would do is sort of ambiguous.

Hm, there's surprisingly little in the way of overtly supernatural alcohols I can find. There should be some kind of sake myth since it has strong associations with purity and ritual - there's the sake used to put Yamata-no-Orochi asleep, so that might be useful for something if you can replicate it. There also seems to be a myth of a sacred white sake belonging to a sort of monkey spirit which staves off death for those whose hearts are pure.

Mastikator
2020-07-11, 06:06 AM
If you can choose which alcohol types then you can make methanol, a methanol beer is almost impossible to distinguish from an ethanol beer but is hella toxic.

No brains
2020-07-11, 07:23 AM
Theoretically, any drink described as an 'elixir' is an alcoholic drink. Enjoy free elixirs of health and Final Fantasy elixirs!

Assuming a sensible limitation that the beverage produced must be drinkable and non-magical, I would nominate any low-alcohol drink that's partially frozen like a slurpee. Maybe it wouldn't actually confer a benefit, but pouring one of those on another PC's burns is thoughtful and funny.

Jay R
2020-07-11, 01:24 PM
Make extremely expensive Cognac, Champagne, or single-malt Scotch to sell or trade — or to give to somebody whose help you need.

Psyren
2020-07-11, 01:34 PM
Putting aside the most fun use (getting smashed), here's some practical considerations for such an item:


Anything with sufficiently high proof is flammable/can be used as accelerant
Sufficiently pure alcohols can clean or sterilize surfaces, such as preventing wounds from being infected.
As above but solvents too - you can dissolve certain substances like glues or inks.
Alcohols have distinctive odors - so if you conjure something particularly rare or exotic to the region you're in, you can create something with a fairly unique smell. This can be used to mask other smells, make you or another target easier to track by smell etc.
As others have mentioned - just about any substance can be a poison in the right composition/amounts, and alcohols are no exception, so you can basically conjure up a variety of liquids that could be very harmful to ingest.


Adding to the list above is probably going to require us knowing more about alcohol is treated in your game. What system are you playing?

Avista
2020-07-11, 06:33 PM
I love these ideas! Molotov cocktail - surprised I didn't think of that. I'm going to go buy a bunch of vials and rags now, and make my DM a little nervous. :smallbiggrin:

It's limited to only non-magical alcoholic drinks, so it won't be conferring any boons or benefits. I've had plenty fun conjuring exotic drinks, and using it to bribe for information or favors.

I'll have to ask if the methanol beer is allowed. Although my rogue probably doesn't know the difference between ethanol and methanol, since they're not an alchemist.



Adding to the list above is probably going to require us knowing more about alcohol is treated in your game. What system are you playing?

We're playing D&D 5e. Alcoholic drinks are what you'd expect in a typical fantasy setting, and really strong drinks can force you to make a CON save.

Terane
2020-07-11, 07:15 PM
Any alcoholic beverage? My first thought would be to ask the GM if he has stats for Kvasir's Mead (or is willing to homebrew). Of course, as a magical drink, that seems likely to get vetoed.

Edit: And I missed reading the express non-magical only. Oops.

Rynjin
2020-07-11, 07:57 PM
If Saltzpyre is to be believed, healing potions are primarily alcohol.

Kaptin Keen
2020-07-12, 04:45 AM
My rogue has come into possession of a flask that can produce any alcoholic drink your heart desires. Want a tequila sunrise? Pour orange juice in the flask and tell it to make tequila. Conjure the king's Dwarven stout or the queen's Elven wine. The limit is it can only produce alcoholic beverages that are non-magical.

So far I've used it for very "harmless" stuff, like sharing a drink among friends and enemies. But I am sure this flask has some potential.

What kind of fun shenanigans could I get up to?

Retire - open a bar. Become the wealthiest person in the world, because you have zero expenses, and can always provide whatever your clients dream of. Buy out evil. Win the game.

Anonymouswizard
2020-07-12, 05:20 AM
We're playing D&D 5e. Alcoholic drinks are what you'd expect in a typical fantasy setting, and really strong drinks can force you to make a CON save.

A more boring use than most, but the setting almost certainly has small beers with a very low alcohol content, this essentially lets you skip the waterskin/wineskin while travelling and is probably safer than water (don't drink too many glasses or you'll get drunk). Not as impressive s the booze-powered jet fighter, but significantly more practical.

You might also be able to swing unfiltered beers letting you stretch rations a little bit further, although at this point we might as well being up ancient beer recipes that made bread with less moisture and trying to talk your GM into letting the flask make bread, and at that point we're just getting silly.

But yeah, it could also be used as a fuel source, but then you'd need something to fuel...

Quertus
2020-07-12, 07:15 AM
Gold-______ (schlagger?) is made with real gold. Fill a lake with it / use it to drown a cave full of enemies

Asmotherion
2020-07-12, 09:56 AM
My rogue has come into possession of a flask that can produce any alcoholic drink your heart desires. Want a tequila sunrise? Pour orange juice in the flask and tell it to make tequila. Conjure the king's Dwarven stout or the queen's Elven wine. The limit is it can only produce alcoholic beverages that are non-magical.

So far I've used it for very "harmless" stuff, like sharing a drink among friends and enemies. But I am sure this flask has some potential.

What kind of fun shenanigans could I get up to?

I can see an arguement on how "Alchemist's Fire" probably has a ton of alcohol in it.

But the most interesting I can think of is a limitless suply of pure alcohol both for bombs and medical purposes.

Jay R
2020-07-13, 08:28 AM
Gold-______ (schlagger?) is made with real gold. Fill a lake with it / use it to drown a cave full of enemies

That's a clever idea. Goldschläger does indeed have (very thin) gold flakes in the bottle. Depending on the DM, this might work.

But since they are inert, then I (as DM) wouldn't include them as part of the alcoholic beverage, just as you wouldn't get a label, cork, or Tequila worm.

It's worth remembering that a bottle of Goldschläger, with the flakes, is not even close to the most expensive bottle of alcohol available. Making a single malt scotch or top-level wine is worth more on the open market than the gold you would get from Goldschläger.

The advantage is that gold is infinitely negotiable, but I suspect it would take far more time to produce enough gold than it would to sell a top grade whiskey or wine.

My wife just suggested, "Does cough syrup count as an alcoholic beverage?" She's right. Many medicines have an alcoholic base. [And far more fake medicines did.]

Quertus
2020-07-13, 07:36 PM
That's a clever idea. Goldschläger does indeed have (very thin) gold flakes in the bottle. Depending on the DM, this might work.

But since they are inert, then I (as DM) wouldn't include them as part of the alcoholic beverage, just as you wouldn't get a label, cork, or Tequila worm.

It's worth remembering that a bottle of Goldschläger, with the flakes, is not even close to the most expensive bottle of alcohol available. Making a single malt scotch or top-level wine is worth more on the open market than the gold you would get from Goldschläger.

The advantage is that gold is infinitely negotiable, but I suspect it would take far more time to produce enough gold than it would to sell a top grade whiskey or wine.

My wife just suggested, "Does cough syrup count as an alcoholic beverage?" She's right. Many medicines have an alcoholic base. [And far more fake medicines did.]

Lol. Your wife & I think alike, as cough medicine was my first idea. :smalltongue:

I feared it might be considered anachronistic, though.

I won't deny that, for a single serving, Goldschläger would be financially suboptimal. However, at lake / "drowning a dungeon" scale, I doubt you'll be able to sell all that dirty malt scotch, whereas gold is, well, the gold standard.

Avista
2020-07-13, 08:29 PM
Lol. Your wife & I think alike, as cough medicine was my first idea. :smalltongue:

I feared it might be considered anachronistic, though.

I won't deny that, for a single serving, Goldschläger would be financially suboptimal. However, at lake / "drowning a dungeon" scale, I doubt you'll be able to sell all that dirty malt scotch, whereas gold is, well, the gold standard.

I'm pretty sure my DM's going to impose a limit on the flask if I try to flood a dungeon with fine wine. :smallbiggrin:

Anonymouswizard
2020-07-13, 08:32 PM
I mean, if you have a good number of clean bottles (a Prestidigitation cantrip per bottle should be enough), you can probably produce and bottle enough high quality wine, whisky, whiskey, or any other expensive alcoholic beverage to make the equivalent weight in gold much faster that drowning a dungeon and collecting gold flakes. If we assume that the bottle costs 2gp, we sell for half cost, and filling and corking a bottle takes an average of five minutes, then with eight hours of work a day we have roughly eighty four bottles of high quality alcohol a day, if we make good wine and assume we sell at half list value we can make two hundred and fifty six gold pieces with a single days work, although depending on how the flask works anything as little as a fifth of that could be more plausible.

You could probably get more with high quality spirits, and that might be a good idea because we want to make as much money as possible and run before any guilds begin breathing down or needs. Otherwise your best bet is probably to come up with a name in another language and sell some bottles in every town as an imported vintage, do it right and you could potentially live in comfort for your life with trips to a few cities each year.

w15p
2020-07-14, 12:02 AM
I mean, if you have a good number of clean bottles (a Prestidigitation cantrip per bottle should be enough), you can probably produce and bottle enough high quality wine, whisky, whiskey, or any other expensive alcoholic beverage to make the equivalent weight in gold much faster that drowning a dungeon and collecting gold flakes. If we assume that the bottle costs 2gp, we sell for half cost, and filling and corking a bottle takes an average of five minutes, then with eight hours of work a day we have roughly eighty four bottles of high quality alcohol a day, if we make good wine and assume we sell at half list value we can make two hundred and fifty six gold pieces with a single days work, although depending on how the flask works anything as little as a fifth of that could be more plausible.

You could probably get more with high quality spirits, and that might be a good idea because we want to make as much money as possible and run before any guilds begin breathing down or needs. Otherwise your best bet is probably to come up with a name in another language and sell some bottles in every town as an imported vintage, do it right and you could potentially live in comfort for your life with trips to a few cities each year.

So, basically your (OP) DM needs to set a limit on volume produced per day, because that's just silly.

Sapphire Guard
2020-07-15, 08:02 AM
I would avoid trying to be overly creative here, or the DM will just take away your toy. That's a fun thing to have, but don't push it.

Reathin
2020-07-15, 11:05 AM
I'm pretty sure my DM's going to impose a limit on the flask if I try to flood a dungeon with fine wine. :smallbiggrin:

Unless that flask has a LOT of flow, that would take decades, if not centuries, to pull off. So no worries there anyway!

You could easily become the world's most popular sommelier. Rich folks pay through the nose for exotic drink. Just keep the source quiet, to avoid thieves. Or accusations of fraud, since magical "doesn't count" for some.

Kyutaru
2020-07-16, 05:01 PM
Oh interesting, may I assume it can produce more than just pure ethyl alcohol since it has flavored drinks? If that's the case then might I point out that all of our gasoline contains the same alcohol we drink in vodka.

Ask the flask for Petrol.

Jay R
2020-07-16, 09:32 PM
Oh interesting, may I assume it can produce more than just pure ethyl alcohol since it has flavored drinks? If that's the case then might I point out that all of our gasoline contains the same alcohol we drink in vodka.

Ask the flask for Petrol.

I’ll bite. What value does petrol have in a world with no gasoline engines?

Petra oleum (rock oil), which name will eventually be shortened to “petroleum”, is just lamp oil.

Phhase
2020-07-20, 06:06 PM
My first instinct is Everclear (Also known as pure ethyl alcohol). It's great for burning things, as a solvent, and for several chemistry uses. Additionally, it looks exactly like water. So, if you remove the smell and the flavor with Prestidigitation, and offer someone you don't like a drink of "Water", bam! Potent poison. And it looks like they simply drank too much! If you can calculate by bodywieght, you could also modulate the dose to knock them out instead. Hell, injected ethanol works pretty much the same way, but quicker.

Anti-Eagle
2020-07-20, 06:49 PM
Use it to make good scotch and share it with people while making diplomacy checks. Simple and probably effective.

Stattick
2020-07-21, 12:59 AM
I mean, if you have a good number of clean bottles (a Prestidigitation cantrip per bottle should be enough), you can probably produce and bottle enough high quality wine, whisky, whiskey, or any other expensive alcoholic beverage to make the equivalent weight in gold much faster that drowning a dungeon and collecting gold flakes. If we assume that the bottle costs 2gp, we sell for half cost, and filling and corking a bottle takes an average of five minutes, then with eight hours of work a day we have roughly eighty four bottles of high quality alcohol a day, if we make good wine and assume we sell at half list value we can make two hundred and fifty six gold pieces with a single days work, although depending on how the flask works anything as little as a fifth of that could be more plausible.

You could probably get more with high quality spirits, and that might be a good idea because we want to make as much money as possible and run before any guilds begin breathing down or needs. Otherwise your best bet is probably to come up with a name in another language and sell some bottles in every town as an imported vintage, do it right and you could potentially live in comfort for your life with trips to a few cities each year.

You're still thinking in terms of retail value. Much of that retail value includes the markups involved with shipping, storing, and aging said wines. The amount of money that a vineyard makes when selling their wine to a wholesaler who is able to store said wine and distribute it or sell it up the distribution chain is going to be far, far less than half of the retail price. That wholesaler probably needs to buy at a rate of 1/10 to 1/20 of the retail value.

Now maybe you could sell to a particular tavern, but they're not likely to have huge sums of gold that they're just sitting on. They might be able to buy a few bottles. But they'll have to do it on the sly, otherwise the vinter's guild, upon finding out that they're buying from non-guild members, are going to hurt their business. Remember, the medieval guild operated much like a modern mafia racket. Well, you might be able to help fill some nobleman's wine cellar, if they have the coin to pay. Heck, just sell to a nobleman at 1/4 or 1/8 of retail, as a favor to them. It's nice to have nobles that owe you favors.

RedheadDev
2020-07-22, 04:14 PM
These sorts of items are exactly what taught me to put limits on item usage. Made the mistake of giving my party a magic jar that slowly leaks honey, and they immediately de-railed and created an entire brick and mortar bakery. I shudder to think what they would do if they had their hands on a flask like this one lol

Lvl 2 Expert
2020-07-22, 05:45 PM
Lol. Your wife & I think alike, as cough medicine was my first idea. :smalltongue:

I feared it might be considered anachronistic, though.

I won't deny that, for a single serving, Goldschläger would be financially suboptimal. However, at lake / "drowning a dungeon" scale, I doubt you'll be able to sell all that dirty malt scotch, whereas gold is, well, the gold standard.

A nice upside of this ridiculous scheme is that doing it on a large enough scale actually saves work. In a large enough hole filling up with the stuff most gold will eventually sink to the bottom, while the alcohol and water start coming out of the exit or draining into the ground. If you can just leave the flask hanging over the hole/dungeon producing more and more of the stuff eventually the hole will pretty much fill up with gold. Say that the flask can conjure around a pint of booze every ten seconds, making for 3 liters per minute. This stuff contains approximately 13mg of gold per liter, according to wikipedia. Let's say suboptimally stacked gold flakes have 10 times the density of water and we use a small 6 room dungeon where every room is maybe around 6 by 10 by 3 meters in size (20 by 30 by 10 foot, sort of) and we ignore any hallways in between, that means we'd have a dungeon full of gold in just there was a calculation here that came down to 22 years, but I think it was several sorts of wrong because late night phone maths is hard.

Dr paradox
2020-07-23, 02:06 AM
Could you cork the bottle, make champagne, then pop the cork with the noise and the foam and everything?

No real mischief here, I just think it would be nice for celebrating jobs well done.

Dr paradox
2020-07-23, 02:16 AM
A nice upside of this ridiculous scheme is that doing it on a large enough scale actually saves work. In a large enough hole filling up with the stuff most gold will eventually sink to the bottom, while the alcohol and water start coming out of the exit or draining into the ground. If you can just leave the flask hanging over the hole/dungeon producing more and more of the stuff eventually the hole will pretty much fill up with gold. Say that the flask can conjure around a pint of booze every ten seconds, making for 3 liters per minute. This stuff contains approximately 13mg of gold per liter, according to wikipedia. Let's say suboptimally stacked gold flakes have 10 times the density of water and we use a small 6 room dungeon where every room is maybe around 6 by 10 by 3 meters in size (20 by 30 by 10 foot, sort of) and we ignore any hallways in between, that means we'd have a dungeon full of gold in just there was a calculation here that came down to 22 years, but I think it was several sorts of wrong because late night phone maths is hard.

By my calculations, that comes to 43,334,493 pounds of gold. At current prices, that comes to around the tidy sum of 1.3 trillion dollars, if you could find a portal to modern earth. Unfortunately you'll probably have to melt it down and mint your own coinage out of it, producing a mere 2,166,724,650 gp. At that point you'd do well buying your own kingdom just so people have fewer questions about why you have two billion gold coins with your face on them.

Squire Doodad
2020-07-25, 05:23 PM
Since it's alcohol, you could always use it as spare ingredients for munitions or incendiary component. If you need to burn down the cottage the evil stronghold is over without carrying 50 tons of explosives, you can have it produce whatever is in Molotov Cocktails and drizzle it across the area. Heck, you could probably get your DM to let it make a Molotov Cocktail.
Even better, lots of mythical creatures like alcohol for some reason (someone mentioned putting Yamato Orochi to sleep with sake, for one), and it's great for grabbing attention at a bar.

Seriously, if your PC ever needs to get the attention of a chieftain or something, have them enter a bar the chieftain is in and start betting with others that they can make a better brew than the bartender.

I think you could probably use it as a bonus on making alcohol-related substances, including lots of magic things. And you could possibly make certain "drinks" like dragonsbane with surprisingly few base components if you rule they are alcoholic and/or the main limiting factor is that you can't take out the item that needs to steep to give it power.

If it fermented things then it would have even more utility, but this is creating alcohol directly...

All in all, it's a bit specific but it's an exceptionally useful item if you know what to do.

Kyutaru
2020-07-27, 12:26 PM
Challenge people to a drinking contest. You should be advised that there are, in fact, no rules for intoxication from alcohol anywhere to be found. It can therefore be concluded, via strict interpretation of the holy Rules-As-Written, that one can drink gallons of tequila like water.

Lord Torath
2020-07-27, 03:28 PM
You should be advised that there are, in fact, no rules for intoxication from alcohol anywhere to be found. It can therefore be concluded, via strict interpretation of the holy Rules-As-Written, that one can drink gallons of tequila like water.Yeah, see, this is why there's a DM, and not just a robot with knowledge of the rules. :smallamused: For when you need a "Ruling" from the DM to handle a situation not covered by the rules, or when following the RAW leads to a nonsensical outcome.

Lord Haart
2020-07-28, 06:11 AM
Aside from the Molotov's cocktail, there are firebreathing liquids.

Need to gain some influence or good standing over a city? Present it an endless fountain of wine as a gift.

Magic beverages have been nixed… but i'm pretty sure that if we dig deep, deep, oh so deep enough into 3.5, we can discover some nice psionic/incarnumous/martial or otherwise "non-magical" (in the same way Riverine, a material made of forcefields, and Shapesand, a substance that can turn into any item as you will it, are considered nonmagical) beverages.

JAL_1138
2020-07-28, 07:31 AM
Depending on whether Prestidigitation has killed the spice trade or not, potently-flavored extracts are likely to be worth more money per ounce than wine or liquor. Saffron is still more expensive than gold by dry weight today; imagine having an unlimited supply of saffron extract you could bottle and sell in the year 1300. Sure you won’t get the same price for extract as for the dry spice, but if you can get, I dunno, a quarter of it, you’re doing great.

Fiery Diamond
2020-07-30, 03:37 AM
Theoretically, any drink described as an 'elixir' is an alcoholic drink. Enjoy free elixirs of health and Final Fantasy elixirs!

Eh.... that's a misunderstanding of how definitions work. One of the definitions of "elixir" involves the mixture containing alcohol. The use of the term is far broader than that, and elixirs of health and FF elixirs are not using that definition. That's even less accurate than claiming anything called a "cordial" must be an alcoholic drink.