Let me rephrase that, and offer a small alchemy tutorial. I'll need to find a way to put this in-game somewhere, not sure where. Note that in 0.1, local reputation and alchemy botch consequences are not yet implemented, so the risks I describe actually aren't risks yet, but they will be.
The
only way to brew potions is to stay at an inn, village, or campsite, and select "Do alchemy work" for one or more characters. (If you select more than one, the one with the highest skill will take the lead and the others may add dice. Note that having very clueless helpers can potentially make things worse, not better!) When you spend a day on your various activities, you'll be presented with a selection menu where you can choose which potion to try and make, along with how many doses. Note that I am planning to change this menu from coming up
after the day goes by, to
before, so you can plan it better and choose something else if necessary. It's just trickier to code it that way.
Brewing at a campsite is the safest option - if you blow something up, the worst it'll do is make the campsite uninhabitable, no big deal. But it carries a penalty to your alchemy score, because pine needles and drifting seeds are not recommended inclusions in your Morienus' Transformation, and a campfire makes a lousy furnace. Brewing in a village has no bonus or penalty to your skill, but if you anger the villagers due to a botch it's a slightly bigger deal; villages are also rarer than campsites, so you might have to walk further before you happen across one. Brewing in an inn carries a small bonus to your skill, but the potential consequences of leveling it are much more severe.
Schattenlander adds one last option which wasn't in Darklands, the option to rent lab space from the city alchemist, and use that instead of doing it in your inn room. You still use the inn as your base of operations for daily activities while in town, but you pay the agreed-upon fee and get a substantially larger bonus than the inn by itself grants. However, the potential botch consequences are even more severe; it's one thing to piss off an innkeeper, it's quite another to accidentally level a powerful alchemist's laboratory, while your combatant friends are off praying or being masters-at-arms somewhere!
When looking at consequences, bear in mind that some potions are intrinsically stabler than others. Screwing them up will still have consequences, but they're more likely to take the form of additional fees and disgruntlement, rather than deadly explosions. This information isn't currently accessible in-game, I need to add a dialogue option to look over your recipes. The 'quester's tools' links from
http://www.darklands.net/ will provide you with this data, potions are labeled LRM for low risk magic, MRM or HRM for riskier types.
This tutorial will get incorporated into the game somewhere, eventually. For now, here it is.
