Some Thoughts on Morrowind Alchemy

Everyone has their own take on alchemy, and I’m throwing mine onto the pile. I think alchemy is too easy, reliable, and safe. Here are a few thoughts on how I would change it up.

Ingredients

Skipping over the actual effects of ingredients, because that’s more of a balance thing and other mods already handle that. Instead, I’m interested in the functionality of ingredients.

Quality

An ingredient’s quality is determined when it is harvested. For some ingredients, the quality lowers over time; the ingredient decays. The quality of an ingredient determines the strength and/or reliability of their alchemical effects.

Ingestion

In the newer Elder Scrolls games, you can ingest ingredients “raw,” and you’ll learn their effect(s), and possibly enjoy some of their effect(s). Watching Onyx Levithan’s recent Deep Dive on the Cuisine of Elder Scrolls video, I took note of his discussions of some of the fungi found in Morrowind, and his suggestion that eating them will make you sick. I say, most if not all alchemical ingredients should make you sick if you ingest them raw, and some should cause permanent damages. I’m looking at you, “raw glass!”

Solvents

Many potion ingredients in the game are relatively dry, such as the petals of flowers, or literal chunks of fungi. Once you smash ‘em together in a mortar and pestle, they become a liquid. There needs to be something else that helps that process, and that is a solvent. The Witcher games, or at least the first one, uses alcohol as a solvent, and I think that’s ideal. It inherently limits how many potions you can ingest, before things become problematic, getting sickened or even drunk. Different solvents will impact the resulting potion. Alcohol gets into the bloodstream quickly, but has side effects. Pure water, like (regular) glass can represent the cleanest solvent, with no chance of contamination. Impure water, such as that from lakes (or worse, sewers) can cause impurities. Perhaps there are some specific solvents required for certain potions - animal blood, plant sap, maybe even other potions!

Containers

Every potion requires a vessel. Bottles, vials, cups, and the like - something to hold the potion for enjoying later. Or, maybe you’d rather drink it immediately. Or maybe you have to drink it immediately! Directly from whichever alchemical tool you’ve used to create it. Glass vessels have a chance of breaking during combat, or if taking falling damage. Metallic vessels can survive better. Maybe other materials have better durability. Maybe certain materials offer other functionality: regular glass is the purest material, and has no chance to introduce impurities. Glass, the kind they make armor out of, is more resilient but has a chance to contaminate potions somehow. There’s a lot of options here for creating magical containers too. Vessels which extend uses, enhance effects, reduce spoilage, and so on.

Potions

Quality

Like ingredients, potions have qualities. This is already represented in the game based on skill, and I would additionally include varying effect duration or strength based on the quality of the ingredients used. Higher quality ingredients, with high quality solvents, in a high quality vessel, represents the pinacle of alchemy, and costs (and fetches!) good septims.

Spoilage

Potions decay over time, like ingredients. Certain potions may be more volatile than others, and may only stay potent for short periods of time. Perhaps some potions must be consumed immediately, straight from the mortar and pestle! Certain vessels may help keep potions safe longer, as perhaps some solvents may. Whichever approach is used may have unwanted side-effects.

Crafting

In the game, the player either crafts a potion, or fails. I think every attempt creates something, just perhaps not what was desired. Like cooking burgers on a grill, if you’re trying to keep a bit of pink, you need to understand your heat, timing, and meat. It requires experience! The more experienced an alchemist you are, the more certain you can be that you’ve made the potion you intended to.

Food

Onyx Leviathan’s video about cuisine brought up another interesting notion: should ingredients always have an effect? If garlic gives a bit of fire resistance, and I make some garlic potatoes, does that meal give me a bit of fire resistance? Food falls outside the scope of alchemy traditionally, but other mods like Sun’s Dusk cover cooking. It could be fun to include longer-lasting, but weaker effects with meals. I’m reminded of Breath of the Wild, and the various meals you can cook in that game. Those fill a simliar place as potions do in the Elder Scrolls games, I suppose.

Making It a Mod

Both mods I’ve made for Morrowind rely on OpenMW, and this alchemy mod would likely benefit from it as well. I imagine requiring a different user interface than the standard alchemy one, as well as accounting for dynamic effects and things like decay and contamination. I’m always a fan of more options, and of nifty magical items, so adding in magical containers and solvents sounds like a cool system to play around with. Pathfinder’s alchemist class has a lot of functionality related to potions, such as improving their effects, mixing multiples together, or reusing potions in exchange for their daily extracts. These sounds like perfect examples of magical vessels. As it stands, though, I have no experience with OpenMW’s Lua, and generally little experience with Lua in general (though a bit more with Fennel…), so approaching an overhaul like this mod sounds quite daunting. Then again, I’ll have to start somewhere!