D20 Drugs

Not to be confused with my previous drugs post.

Inspired by friend of the blog Blackout's post also of 20 drugs to finally get this one out.

1. Stinkhuff (AKA gas, testudo, shell, stench)

The bottled flatulence of zaratans, often infused into thimbles of isinglass-jelly for ease of storage. Most is of course produced by the migrant zaratan-back corsair-republics which gather in Pibaw, and so it can be found anywhere near a coast. Stinkhuff tastes awful, befouls the breath, and greens the teeth with common use - but use is common regardless, as it is a fine painkiller which doesn't induce unconsciousness or dull the reflexes - in fact steadying shaky hands.

2. Visk (AKA intro, gutsy, gutgab, biologue)

A synaesthetically-tasty sort of yoghurt fermented with bacterial cultures scraped from certain iridescent star-jellies. Awakens all the nerve-clusters in your body that aren't your brain to sentience, or at least makes you aware of their pre-existing sentience. Lets you hold telepathic conversations with your liver, kidneys, and so on, enabling self-diagnosis of subtle medical problems, have entertaining internal banter, and take a backseat in your own body if you take too much, while another organ of yours gets the driver's seat.

3. Babycakes (AKA nannypap, gaga, inner child)

Quite literal cakes, made from the milk of wild wolves and the fresh green sprouts of certain marsh-herbs. Eating them induces a state of child-like innocence and wonderment - and like children, those on it are best watched closely so they don't wander off ledges or choke on their own fists. Babycakes go bad quickly, and induce a state closer to petulant adolescence when they do - and their ingredients are hard to source, making it a regional delicacy. Production is thus far controlled by the Fingernail Princes, a gang of werewolves who hide among the hills of Cathalo.

4. Nightingale (AKA smoochy-moon, loontune, drood)

An entheogen manufactured by circles of druids who claim descent from the once-great Draioch. Dried rose-petals are placed in rattles made from the skulls of nocturnal birds, then these rattles are used in the druids' sacred dances. At the climax of such a dance, the petals are poured from the rattles into a great stone mortar, and the powder produced by their grinding is sprinkled in the ears and eyes. This leads to a pareidoliac perception of prophetic instruction in the songs of crickets and other creatures of the night, and in the glinting of moonlight. It's advisable not to look at the moon while one's under the influence of nightingale, even in a reflection.

5. Hadean Dust (AKA gloomy, grey, nil)

The literal dust of the Grey Waste, coating every surface there, and sold brushed-off the boots and coats of planar travelers for a quick buck. Only amateurs eat or insufflate it - that'll only make you depressed. The real ticket's in injecting it, or rubbing it into a bleeding wound - you'll get a numbness so deep it numbs itself, and a sense of general meaninglessness which renders itself meaningless - an escape deeper than death in the rocking of the Great Wheel. Some edgy philosophers have taken to refining the dust into a fine crystal, then diluting it many times over in honey and rosewater, quaffing the solution to attain a state of intellectual nihilism from which they may reconstruct their systems from first principles.

6. Maelstrom Juice (AKA zoop, cuckoo, loopy)

There's a hole in the ocean that goes all the way down to the underworld. Around the hole there's a huge, perpetual whirlpool, like an unplugged bathtub that never runs dry. Some believe this is the headwaters of the rivers Styx, Lethe, and so on - the necromancer Gartholemeow the Hellfarer tried to prove it, racing headlong down the vortex on a raft made of bones, and no one's seen him since. There's life in that whirlpool, adapted to the endless whirling, plankton and fish and seals - maelstrom juice comes from the latter. It's their endolymph - the fluid within their ears. Drink the stuff - you don't need very much at all - and you'll experience several hours of giddy spinning dizziness, the kind that makes you want to say "whee!" rather than throw up, along with alternating time dilation and contraction. Taking too much - which is easy - will make you spray the contents of your stomach out both ends, and extend the normal trip to days instead of hours. Experienced zoopers swear that brining pickles in a solution of the stuff then eating the pickles all but eliminates the odds of an overdose.

7. Hellblood (AKA gorge, blister, Mister Rager, throbert)

From hell, but it's not actually blood. It's extracted from the musth glands of the souls of damned elephants. Swells up your body and brains like a full-body erections, making your veins as big and wriggly as pythons. It makes you strong, makes you fast, and makes you extremely excitable - anything that provokes an emotional reaction in you provokes it 110%. It also makes you bleed from the eyes and nose, and bleed out rapidly from puncture wounds. Mixed with jellified stinkhuff it makes for a gnarly, often counter-effective combat drug.

8. Gallowgrass (AKA slip, greenbelt, the tickler)

A sting-leafed herb which grows from the fallen tears of an innocent sincerely though mistakenly accused and unknowingly condemned to the gallows. The longer you chew it, the more you feel a deepening catharsis, have your guilt and regrets slip away, and the more you poison your mouth to a swollen and tender state. Best case scenario with long-term use is that you choke on your own gums. Worst case scenario is you lose any moral sense whatsoever.

9. Wizard Soup (AKA Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Gift of the Magi, cantrip)

Take everything even remotely magical you've got on hand - wizards' teeth, expended wands, someone's familiar, manticore hair, etc. - throw it in a cauldron, boil it all together until it congeals into a runny octarine sludge - that's wizard soup. Drinking it feels magical, chaotically, wonderfearsomely magical, and it makes you magical, able to cast spells just by willing it. These spells are mostly very weak, and pushing them too far, especially with large doses or prolonged use, is likely to backfire terribly.

10. Grudge Gum (AKA chew-the-stairs, neg, lump)

Comes in hard, red, rubbery lumps that should be softened for a few minutes in a bowl of spittle before you stick it in your mouth. Grudge gum's cheap, but usually cracked-down on, and is smuggled stuck to the bottoms of flat-hulled riverboats. A potent though quite specific hallucinogen. Chewing it makes you feel as though you're really chewing up the flesh of someone you hate, hearing their screams, tasting their blood, and so on. Junkie myth holds that grudge gum really can affect the health of your enemies by channeling your negative feelings, but only if you hate them more than they hate you - otherwise it'll be you who suffers.

11. Worldthorn (AKA prickadillo, yggy, link-me-up)

Power and pride of the blasphemous narcocrats of Ostelottz - thorns plucked from their grafted ersatz world-tree. When used to pierce the body in secret configurations along vital meridians, they create feelings of unity with the flowing aspects of the cosmos - the wind, rivers, the cycle of decay and renewal, etc. These feelings are so euphoric that the ministration of worldthorn forms the psycho-political basis and end of Ostellotzian society. Those who escape the country with the occulted knowledge of its ministry are hunted to the ends of the earth by its sap-armoured knights.

12. Archanum

A flavourless, cloudy tincture bottled by a handful of fanciful brands (Nieblund’s Knockouts! The caps are shaped like fists) which all have their cadres of devotees. Archanum brings a tranquil stillness to one’s thoughts, and guarantees a dreamless sleep the following night. It’s best served mixed with honey and warm water. Produced and most consumed on the island of Bluetspur, where it's preferred by the well-to-do over alcohol or an infestation of madness fleas to prevent the constant nightmares of that place. Archanum is extracted from seaspawn minions (sluggy leechish creatures that burrow into peoples’ brains and take them over to feed to their father-mother). Nobody mentions that in polite society. It also renders drinkers more vulnerable to psychic influences.

13. Wraithstalk (AKA creep, sneak, breakneck)

Cut grass screams, in its own fashion. Cut grass growing on the grave of a corpse risen to potent undeath, collect their screams in some conductive medium - that is wraithstalk. It's taken by holding the collected screams to your heart until its beating synchronizes, just for a moment, with their pitched frequencies. Wraithstalk causes you to hallucinate a nightmarish pursuer, whose speed and psychedelic terror are particular to the dose's providence. Most reliable vendors will give you a trip that rides the knife's edge between an exciting thrill and heart-stopping dread. Should the pursuer catch the user, they'll be infused psychically with the bit of negative energy that animates it - causing some slight and manageable misanthropy with weaker doses, and dissociative anti-life episodes with stronger ones.

14. Kissy-Clam (AKA lovesluck, splurt, goldie)

There is a species of clam in the reeking Pissmire which grows a lure on its lip with the shape and luster of a gold coin. Biting into this lure releases a glittering goop, which a short while after consumption induces an increase in one's appetites, and a commensurate increase in the pleasure of satisfying those appetites - it's said that no one may call themself a hedonist who has not had a spoonful of mud caviar while on kissy-clam. Some days after sampling the stuff your nose will be overcome by a horrid burning itch, alleviated only by dunking your head into water and sneezing out stream after stream of mucus - this is the true purpose of kissy-clam: to have you feed and then re-deposit the clam's young, which are contained in the lure. It's really more of a brain-altering parasite than a drug. By old compact the Pissmire's bargemen bear the sole right to harvest kissy-clam, and even the nobility of its sodden capital Crapaud must cozy up to them for a try.

15. God's Tears (AKA githy, astral fudge)

Gunk harvested from the corners of the eyes of dead gods floating in the astral sea. Horrifically addictive, and the funding base of the githyanki pirate-empire. Civilizations across the planes have been toppled to open up markets for it. Consuming the stuff lets you share in the vast, transcendent dreams of the dead god it came from, like nothing mortal minds were built to experience. The drug commonly leads to thanatocratic cults, mass suicides, and artistic revolutions. A knock-off made from dead dragons instead of gods is fairly common as these things go, difficult to distinguish from the genuine article, and much less potent.

16. The Greedy Captain's Urchin (AKA nip, tingle, scabby)

A yellow-bodied, blue-spined species of sea urchin about the size of a dainty woman's balled-up fist. Its bite carries a venom that induces lazy, languorous pleasure, though this feeling is short-lived, so the urchin must be allowed to "graze" on users for any lasting high. The bites from this grazing are small and shallow, so one must be really out of it to die from a single session. Captains sailing on the Southern Brume would forcibly apply batches of these urchins to would-be mutineers to defuse their rebellious attitudes.

17. Fairy-Lemon (AKA pinch, pucker)

A citrus cultivar of Fairyland, so tart that it causes your whole flesh and soul to pucker up and sour. While its flavour lasts on your tongue (which can be quite some time if you don't rinse it out) you will be shrunken, unrecognizably pinched, and tricksy. Addicts are made of repressed sorts slipped its juice or rind by pixies.

18. Bastard's Brood (AKA clutch, eggwhite, ovenbun)

The egg of a giant cuckoo. The developing cuckoolet within the egg produces an infrasonic warble that induces strong maternal feelings in those who hear it, protectiveness against those who'd harm or steal it, deep satisfaction when its needs are met. Those who refuse to let go of the cuckoolet after it's hatched often become its first meal.

19. Hydra Hookah

An invention of the flesh-forging Lords Teratomata, only a few examples of which have survived their fall. The hydra hookah resembles a many-headed serpent with a cental body like a limbless cow's. Pressing one's mouth to one of the serpent's heads' and inhaling the jaundiced fumes of its bile will induce sensations of melting physically and mentally into one's surroundings, which some find pleasant.

20. Horsemouth (AKA grazer, greenteeth)

A mycelial wad you press under your tongue and suck on. Makes grass and leaves taste amazing, but doesn't grant you any ability to digest it. Habitual users tend to have worn-down teeth from all the silicates. Also imbues a comforting herd mentality in groups, and intense autophobia if separated.