Mad Jimkin's Old Tenebrous

 In the town of Ang vy Moir, you will find Mad Jimkin's Brewery. The eponymous Jimkin died centuries ago, but the recipe he created for the Old Tenebrous is still a closely-guarded secret among the senior brewers. It is the most popular beer in town by a long shot -- though the apprentice brewers regularly produce small quantities of less exciting varieties of beer, the local tavern considers the Old Tenebrous to be the default option, and it is served to anyone who orders “beer" without specifying what kind.

The Old Tenebrous is exceptionally strong -- as far as alcohol content goes, it's closer to fortified wine than anything you'd expect from beer -- and worryingly dark and thick. It is pitch-black, and barely on the correct side of “something one drinks" vs. “something one eats with a spoon". The odor is like something unwholesome burning, and it tastes like a swamp smells. The locals, of course, do not find this odd, and may well mock you for being overly dainty if you react badly to it. The reason for the appeal of this beverage has nothing to do with its taste, and little to do with its alcohol content. Mad Jimkin was a brilliant but eccentric alchemist, and the Old Tenebrous is designed as a safe delivery mechanism for the substance he named krwvygẅelo¹ -- an Old Northern compound that roughly translates as “blood of the sight".

Some background is called for. In many forests in the colder parts of the continent, a plant called visionvine, a powerful hallucinogen, grows wild. Since before recorded history, cultures near forested regions have chewed visionvine recreationally. In addition to the vivid psychedelic hallucinations this inevitably provides, there is a 1% chance² that any given hallucination is actually a true prophetic vision. Some centuries ago, people discovered a technique for drying and treating visionvine that made the prophecy aspect slightly more reliable: dried visionvine has a 5-10% chance of providing prophetic visions, depending on the talent of the alchemist treating it. In this form, it is smoked instead of chewed; certain decadent nobles with good taste will possess elaborately-carved long-stem pipes for this purpose, and any number of seers or fortune-tellers will have a large hookah in the center of their hut / wagon / tent / office / whatever in which visionvine may be smoked. As far as the world at large knows, the 10% accuracy one gets with the finest dried visionvine is the peak of this particular technology. That is because Mad Jimkin never saw the need to tell the outside world about his work.

Jimkin's krwvygẅelo is the distilled and refined essence of the plant, augmented with a drop of a secret ingredient that is stored in a ceramic jug locked in the brewery's safe. The current head of the brewery is the only one who has access to Jimkin's notes, and the only one who knows what the secret ingredient is -- the venom of the anemone man, a species found only near deep subterranean seas. (It's very expensive, and possibly illegal, but luckily a jug of it lasts a long, long time.) The result of consuming the krwvygẅelo with alcohol -- i.e., of drinking the beer known as Mad Jimkin's Old Tenebrous -- is that your hallucinations are, while not always prophetic, always true to some degree.

Now that you have the background, here's how to put it in your game.

• Each pint of Mad Jimkin's Old Tenebrous provokes a Fortitude save, rolled as soon as the drinker takes the first sip. (People who know what to expect usually choose to voluntarily fail this save.) The save for the first pint is DC 20, and the DC increases by 2 for each pint the drinker consumes before resting.
• Failing the save means:
• This pint has pushed you over the edge into drunkenness; roleplay accordingly.
• You are subject to Initial Hallucinations.
• The krwvygẅelo sticks around in your system for roughly a week after consuming it. At any point during the next week (i.e., whenever the GM thinks it's a good idea), you may be subject to a Flashback Hallucination. Usually, this will only happen once in that week, unless you spent more than one night drinking the Old Tenebrous, but it is possible to have multiple episodes.
• Probability of hallucinations is based not on the drinker's constitution, but on whether they've acclimated to the krwvygẅelo. While they can avoid the initial hallucinations with a successful Fortitude save, as above, flashback hallucinations are based on a flat percentage chance.

Hallucinations

First, roll percentage dice. People who have developed a tolerance will only sometimes get hallucinations, even upon failing their save -- people who have not will almost always get them.

First-Time Drinker³: 100% chance of hallucinations
Infrequent Drinker: 90% chance of hallucinations
Occasional Drinker: 75% chance of hallucinations
Frequent Drinker: 50% chance of hallucinations
Habitual Drinker: 25% chance of hallucinations
Addict⁴: 10% chance of hallucinations

Initial hallucinations tend to be small-scale -- maybe you see an illithid walking into the bar, but you probably don't see Cthulhu eating the bar. They wear off as you sober up.

Flashback hallucinations tend to be larger and longer-lasting -- and, as noted before, you get them whether or not you made your save. A flashback hallucination can last for several hours per pint you drank -- if you had a lot, it can stretch into days.

The hallucinations one has when consuming Mad Jimkin's Old Tenebrous have a couple unusual properties. First, they are contagious. If a drinker of the Old Tenebrous points out something they are hallucinating, or is noticeably interacting with one of their hallucinations, the people around them see what they see. This works as a high-level illusion, and if sober witnesses have the presence of mind to disbelieve, they get a Will save DC 20 to not see the hallucinations. (Anyone who has also been drinking the Old Tenebrous automatically fails these saves.) For this reason, entering a tavern where other people have been drinking the Old Tenebrous is already liable to be exciting -- and if one PC decides to partake, the rest of the party is probably getting dragged along for the ride whether they drink anything or not.

Second, they are true. The hallucinations exhibit total verisimilitude and internal consistency. If a drinker sees the king walk in and sit down across from them, the hallucination of the king will act exactly like the king would act in that situation. If they ask what the king is doing there, he will be able to provide an entirely reasonable explanation.⁵ The hallucination of the king knows everything the king knows, and could be a very useful information source if the king happens to be the kind of person who would answer questions put to them by drunken commoners. This sort of thing is how the Old Tenebrous can deliver prophecies -- it is entirely possible that the drinker could hallucinate someone from the past, or the future, or a present that might have been, and thus get all kinds of information that might otherwise be totally inaccessible. If this happens in conjunction with a large-scale flashback hallucination, the drinker -- and anyone who happens to be with them -- can end up with a fully-immersive vision of the future that lasts for hours. It is, unfortunately, impossible to control what sort of hallucinations one gets, so someone drinking the Old Tenebrous for information-gathering purposes may just as likely end up with a three-hour tour of the Abyss in perfect agonizing detail.⁶

---

1: /krʊ.vi.gʊ.ɛ.lɔ/

2: GMs who put this into their campaign are encouraged to describe the visions first, then roll to see if they're prophecies or just random nonsense. The hallucinations tend to always seem prophetic, along the lines of “seven fat cows and seven thin ones, one of which was playing a trombone," but the majority of the time don't actually mean anything.
3: Specifically of Mad Jimkin's Old Tenebrous; a frequent drinker of alcohol still counts as a first-time drinker if they haven't had the Old Tenebrous before. Conversely, a habitual user of visionvine in another form might start a step further down the hierarchy, as they are already acclimated to a related substance.

4: Visionvine by itself is very slightly addictive. One can become addicted to Mad Jimkin's Old Tenebrous with regular consumption; it's a step more habit-forming than regular alcohol. Whether you want to make your PCs roll to avoid addiction depends on the tone of your game.
5: For that matter, if you hallucinate dancing pink elephants, a few confused questions will reveal that they are a travelling troupe of elephantfolk riverdancers who dye their hides bright colors in order to provide a more memorable show. Everything you see makes sense if you look for an explanation, or at least to the same degree reality makes sense.

6: It should be noted that the hallucinations can't actually hurt the drinker, though they seem to be able to interact with them in every way. When the hallucination wears off, any wounds or other results of interaction with hallucinations fade away. Someone “killed" by their hallucination blacks out until the hallucination ends and takes 1d4 Wisdom damage, which heals normally.

D100 Table: Hallucinations

So you ate the funny mushrooms...

This table was requested by someone who wanted it for an assassin who incapacitates victims with hallucinogens. She described the substance as “incapacitat[ing] them with Weirdness," which is why a lot of the results leave the character unwilling to move. 

Anyone using this table is encouraged to copy it into a text file. Then, after each use, you should delete the results you used during the session and replace them with new results of your own devising, ensuring that the hallucinations never repeat. Since, you know, that would be weird.

I am always willing to write up tables for tabletop gaming by request. For free.

1. A bird's leg descends from the sky. It is inconceivably massive, and so tall that the bird's body is too far away to be seen. It is shortly followed by another, and then by the beak, as the cosmic-scaled bird tries to find out what sort of food is beneath the surface of this campaign world.
2. A creature of titanic scale cracks open the sky from outside -- like a clamshell -- and starts eating bits of the world with brobdingnagian chopsticks.
3. A gargantuan human-looking mouth opens in the ground at your feet and screams as if in terrible pain. The scream continues as long as the hallucination lasts -- if you run away from the screaming mouth, another one opens in front of you and now you have to listen to two screams.
4. A quasi-humanoid face forms on the largest surface you can see (other than “the ground", “the sky", or “the ocean" -- maybe on a mountainside). It immediately begins criticizing your every decision as well as every aspect of your appearance and personality with incisive and hurtful accuracy.
5. A small imp materializes before you. It refuses to answer any questions, but pulls out a quill and a book, where it begins meticulously documenting your every motion, word, and thought. If you leave, it follows you, still writing. It may hum to itself off-key.
6. A spectral aye-aye pulls itself out from inside your head, informs you that living on your thoughts is boring, and that it's going to go eat the dreams of some innocent children. Then it scampers off.

   

   Baby aye-aye -- the perfect combination of “creepy" and “adorable".

7. Alien abduction. Flying saucers, greys, probes, the whole shebang. Described in a setting-consistent manner, of course.
8. All animate things within your field of vision are staring upwards and screaming. You're not sure why.
9. All artificial objects are sprouting limbs and forming themselves into humanoid shapes, then sprinting away as quickly as possible. It might be wise to chase down your undergarments and your more important equipment.
10. All containers are filled with bees.
11. All insects, arachnids, & other such vermin are growing to hundreds of times their natural size. As they swell to monstrous proportions, you can see malice in their eyes.
12. All living things within your field of vision turn straight towards you, open their mouths impossibly wide, roll their eyes back in their head, and moan terribly.

    

    Art by Jessica Hayworth.
    (Welcome to Night Vale)

13. All natural features and large buildings in the area are actually giants wearing ill-fitting disguises -- how did you never notice this before?
14. All openings, portals, holes, and apertures are prone to turning into a vast bottomless pit when you approach, providing a corresponding sensation of vertigo. This includes doorways, drinking vessels, anthills, small punctures in cloth, mouths, ears, &c.
15. All senses inverted -- your eyes only see back into your skull, your ears only hear the sounds of your own internal systems, you can only feel the INSIDE of your skin, &c.
16. All voices, including those of animals, are replaced with threats.
17. Become utterly convinced that everything, including your “friends", wants to kill & eat you.
18. Birds are conspiring against you. If you stay perfectly still and quiet, you can hear the hidden meanings behind the birdsong.
19. Chanting in a language you've never heard before, at a deafening volume, is coming from all directions. You can see things starting to disintegrate from the arcane pressure behind the words.
20. Did you read Dr. Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins as a child? You now have that problem, except instead of hats, it's hideous & uncomfortable ritual masks.
    
21. Discordant, atonal piping comes from nowhere. Ten-foot-high monstrosities with too many eyes and not enough skin emerge from every conceivable hiding place and begin dancing, carousing, and generally carrying on bacchanal-style.
22. Elven abduction. Carried off to the Realm of Faerie for incomprehensible reasons, saw some bizarre and disturbing sights, then dumped back where you started -- after experiencing several subjective years in a few objective hours because that's how the Fair Folk roll. Bonus points if the GM quotes Sir Orfeo (or similar) at length.
23. Everyone else is dead and rotting, but haven't realized yet and keep walking around. This applies to animals as well.
24. Everyone is a demon in disguise. Including your neighbor, your neighbor's dog, the fleas on the back of your neighbor's dog, &c.
25. Everything around you is melting; in about ten minutes, the only solid items will be you and the one-foot-radius portion of ground you're standing on, floating on a glutinous, deeply suspicious sea.
26. Everything has eyes. They're watching you.
27. Everything is mimics.
28. Everything is suddenly one thousand times larger than it was. You must move carefully to avoid being eaten by roaches.
29. Everything is suddenly one thousand times smaller than it was. You must move carefully to avoid crushing the town beneath your feet.
30. Everything you touch turns to centipedes.
31. Everything, including you, is becoming perfectly spherical. In a few minutes, you won't be able to do anything without rolling around and bumping into other spherical objects like a game of billiards .
32. For a brief period, you have the color vision of a mantis shrimp; your brain desperately tries to catch up and interpret what you're seeing, but mostly everything is psychedelic madness that you will never be able to explain to another person.

    

    There's some debate about whether they actually see the amazing range of color suggested by their 16-coned eyes, but their visual system is definitely different from what you're used to. And they can see polarized light.

33. Fregoli delusion.
34. Friction stops working. If you move, you'll slip on the perfectly-smooth ground and slide until you bump into a wall or fall in a hole.
35. Gravity has decided to hate you; any movement of voluntary muscles will send you careening off through the air in a random direction.
36. Half of the world drops away. You are now looking over the edge of a cliff that reaches on and on into a terrible infinite void.
37. Horrible abominations live inside everyone's pupils, including your own.
38. Hundreds of slugs the size of your forearm are performing an impressive aerial ballet. You never realized slugs could fly, but they're actually quite good at it. Take some time to appreciate the artistic merit of their performance.
39. Inanimate objects begin to develop horrible fanged mouths that snap at you whenever you approach.
40. Inanimate objects move around when you aren't looking. Their plans are detailed, wicked, and targeting you personally.
41. It is suddenly absolutely clear to you that the world you live in is a crudely-made stage set. You can see the strings holding up birds as they “fly" by and the costume fastenings on that “monster" over there. Optional: All women are actually men in drag, since women can't be actors in this time period.
42. It's raining goats. They bounce impressively, and ricochet unpredictably, bleating angrily the entire time.
43. It's raining. But the rain is an acidic orange fluid of unknown provenance, and it's coming up from the ground & falling into the sky.
44. Previously-unknown deity manifests in front of you, informs you that you are its chosen prophet, and begins dictating a holy book. Better write it down quick. (At GM's discretion, individual suffering from hallucination may successfully start small religion, perhaps cause previously-hallucinatory deity to actually exist out of sheer belief -- but it's a pretty crappy deity until they get a bigger cult.)
45. Reversed gravity. Hold on tight.
46. Sailing ships filled with tentacular things drift down from the sky and, inexplicably, start sailing through the ground as if it were water. The crew is grabbing any people around and pulling them aboard.

    

    Art by Raya Golden.
47. Some sort of stinking ooze starts bubbling up from the ground and forming itself into monstrous shapes. Odds are good they want to eat you.
48. Spiders the size of your hand keep appearing from nowhere, swarming towards you.
49. Strange beings with cyclopean visages and horrible claws sprout out of the earth and slither about on their murderous business. They viciously dismember anything living, but you're pretty sure they can only see movement, like a badly-researched T. Rex.
50. Strange limbs keep ripping through the fabric of reality, flailing around for organic matter, and retracting with their prey through the unsettling portals they created. DON'T LOOK THROUGH -- you don't want to know.
51. Struck with sudden-onset omniscience, paralyzed by complete knowledge of all things. (5% chance any given piece of information learned from this episode is remotely accurate.)
52. Sudden guerilla attack of sixteenthlings (one-eighth the size of a halfling) who tie you down Gulliver's-Travels-style.
    
53. Swarms of sea urchins begin migrating across the landscape. Rather than use their wee little feet as would be expected, they move like deranged tumbleweeds, bouncing from spine to spine at an alarming pace.
54. Tentacles keep poking out of everyone's skin-suits. If no people are around, this applies to all living things instead.
55. The air around you is entirely composed of miniscule air elementals. They are making fun of you and taking an unsettling amount of joy in the fact that you keep accidentally inhaling them.
56. The color drains out of everything you touch.
57. The entire world is on fast-forward. Seasons fly by in seconds. People are a blur too fast to see clearly. Pigeons treat you like a statue.
58. The floor is lava.
59. The GM should choose a passage in Revelations and read it out loud. That's what's happening right now.
60. The ground beneath you turns into quicksand. It is also full of various invertebrates mocking your plight.
61. The literal Grim Reaper is stalking the landscape, and you have a horrible certainty that he's looking for you.
62. The moon is made of green cheese and is falling out of the sky, the distinctive odor of aged dairy products preceding it. (If you get this result when the moon is not in the sky, then it comes over the horizon, rolling over all obstacles with a sound exactly like a giant ball of cheese squishing into things. (Bonus points if the GM simulates this by balling up some cheese and gleefully rolling it over the dice and various gaming accoutrements on the table.))
63. The nearest reflective surface (ponds, armor, any reasonably-shiny metal objects qualify if you are away from actual mirrors) bulges and distorts. Gnarled hands reach out of it and stretch it like a rubber band. A twisted facsimile of you with a malevolent grin clambers out and makes its way towards you. You KNOW, deep down in your gut, that this thing wants to kill & replace you and nobody will ever be able to tell the difference.
64. The sky is the sea, and it's falling towards you.
65. The sounds of revelry approach! When you look, however, you see a carnivalesque parade of unspeakable horrors. The GM should describe in obscene detail the things gibbering, waving flags, eating humans-on-a-stick, singing songs of madness, &c.
    

    
66. The stones are talking to you, but they're strangely supportive and approve of your dress sense.
67. The sun and moon are eyes of some colossal being... watching you, personally.
68. The sun is being pushed across the sky by a giant dung beetle. The beetle hates you.
69. The world around you is incredibly fragile. A sudden movement could cause you to rip through the ground like it was paper and plummet to the center of the earth.
70. The world blinks out of existence, and you are floating in an endless void.
71. There are horrible monsters, the size of a large dog, roaming the streets. Nobody else can see them. They regularly steal things, which people seem to assume they have dropped and lost in a completely innocuous way. They also eat people, and nobody seems to notice.
72. There is a huge shadowy creature lurking nearby, stalking you. If you point this out to anyone else, it manages to hide just before they look in the right direction.
73. This region is haunted by everything that has ever died here. This includes huge swarms of ghostly bugs.
74. Unusually aggressive crabs scuttle out from hundreds of tiny, previously-unnoticed trapdoors and menace you with surprisingly dangerous-looking claws.

    

    This is actually a fiddler-crab mating ritual. So maybe the crabs aren't menacing you, exactly...

75. Up is down, east is west, north is left, south is out, right is backwards in time, and in no longer exists.
76. You are a turtle. Drop whatever you're doing and do turtle things instead.
77. You are acutely aware of the movement of the tectonic plates, the rotation of the planet, the slightest currents in the air and water, the sound of sand grains moving against each other, and every other natural process that people normally do not notice. You cannot focus on anything else.
78. You believe very strongly that you are dead and beginning to rot.
79. You can hear the GM and the players talking at the table.
80. You can hear the incomprehensible-yet-clearly-malevolent thoughts of the massive mollusk hive-mind a mile below the earth.

    

    The ALL-CONSUMING MOLLUSK HIVE-MIND is the true master of the earth, and it thinks you surface-dwellers are but IRRITATING PARASITES.

81. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the distant future. It may or may not be accurate, but it is horrifying on an existential level. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
82. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the distant past. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
83. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the near future. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
84. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the near future. It is completely fictional, and seemingly designed to play into your most paranoid fantasies. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
85. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the recent past. It is accurate in every particular. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
86. You have an incredibly vivid vision of the recent past. It is completely fictional, and seemingly designed to play into your most paranoid fantasies. You cannot move or react to anything until the vision is complete.
87. You have microscopic vision; your eyes seem stuck on 500x zoom. The microscopic world is bizarre and you can't really get a grasp on what's going on at the macro level when you can only see tiny bits of it at a time.
88. You suddenly notice that you're standing on a sleeping dragon. Hold... very... still...
89. You suddenly realize the nearest person is a beloved childhood friend in disguise. If there are no people within eyesight, this applies to the nearest living thing. You cannot be dissuaded from this belief in any way.
90. You're turning to stone. You have maybe five minutes before you are nothing but a statue.
91. Your arms, legs, and neck are all growing longer at a rapid pace. Your hundred-foot-long-legs are too clumsy to control, even if you could see what you were doing from atop your eighty-foot neck.
92. Your ascension to godhood is imminent. Remain still and await apotheosis. Dramatic poses are acceptable.
93. Your blood is made of ants. They bite.
94. Your digestive tract is full of angry hornets. Sit down, keep your mouth tightly shut, and don't move; it'll be so much worse if they get out.
95. Your ears have turned into bat wings and your head is flying away. While you struggle to get control of the wings, you pretty much have to accept that your body below the neck is a lost cause, as it's already somewhere out of sight behind you and you can't access the muscle systems anyway.

    

    From the 2e Monstrous Manual.

96. Your limbs detach themselves and crawl off to take care of their own inscrutable business.
97. Your shadow is not your own.
98. Your skin is independently alive, mobile, and it hates you.
99. Your teeth begin carrying on a vicious debate about impenetrable skeletal politics. A few of them “storm out of the room" by uprooting themselves, sprouting legs, and either hopping onto the ground or stomping off down your throat.
100. Roll twice; reroll contradictions. Both are happening simultaneously.

You have my permission to use this, and any other resources on this blog, as long as you tell me how it went.