A poison is a substance that interferes with the natural functions of a living creature’s body, causing injury or death, typically requiring only a very small amount. The target of a poison may resist with a successful saving throw. Poisons can be delayed or cured with spells such as delay poison and neutralize poison.

Poisons are somewhat unique in the fact that they utilize a DC for their saving throws rather than an opposed roll, though some creatures may still utilize an opposed roll if they naturally produce poison.

Poison Types

Poisons fall into one of four categories, based on how they reach the target: contact, ingested, inhaled, or injury.

• Contact: These poisons are delivered the moment a creature touches the poison with its bare skin. Such poisons can be used as injury poisons. Contact poisons usually have a somewhat higher onset time than injury poisons.
• Ingested: These poisons are delivered when a creature eats or drinks the poison. Ingested poisons usually have the longest onset time.
• Inhaled: These poisons are delivered the moment a creature enters an area containing such poisons and do not usually have an onset time. For most inhaled poisons, 1 dose fills a volume equal to a 10-foot cube. A creature can attempt to hold its breath while inside the area to avoid inhaling the toxin, receiving a 50% chance of not having to make a save each round. If a creature is holding its breath and fails the Tenacity check to continue doing so, rather than suffocating it begins to breathe normally again (and is subject to the effects of the inhaled poison if still in the area).
• Injury: These poisons are primarily delivered through the attacks of certain creatures and through weapons coated in the toxin. Injury poisons do not usually have an onset time.

Applying Poison

One dose of poison smeared on a weapon or some other object affects just a single target. A poisoned weapon or object retains its poison until the weapon scores a hit or the object is touched (unless the poison is wiped off before a target comes in contact with it).

Applying poison to a weapon or single piece of ammunition is a standard action. Without proper training whenever you apply a poison, there is a 5% chance that you expose yourself to the poison and must save against the poison as normal. This does not consume the dose of poison. Whenever you attack with a poisoned weapon, if the attack roll results in a natural 1, you expose yourself to the poison, consuming the poison in the process. Certain abilities and class features allow you to avoid the risk of accidentally poisoning yourself when applying poison.

Once exposed to a poison using the correct application method of the poison’s type (such as injury) the poison may have an onset time. If the onset time is blank this means the poison acts instantaneously, some poisons may have an onset effect causing an additional effect on the onset before any save is to be rolled. Once the onset has occurred a creature must make a save to resist the poison, success allowing the creature to be immediately cured of the poison, while failure causes the creature to take the effect of the poison and be subject to additional saves based on frequency.

If a creature fails the onset save they must now make additional saves based on the frequency of the poison, with successes avoiding the effects of the poison each time. Each poison may have different conditions to cure, such as a single save, multiple saves, or multiple consecutive saves; the cure condition only is relevant for creatures who failed the save on the onset of the poison.

Applying Poison to Natural Weapons

A creature may apply a poison to a natural weapon, but with some limitations. If the natural weapon does not naturally produce poison, or the source of the poison isn’t something like the creature’s own blood, the creature can only safely apply injury poisons to a natural weapon. Contact poisons applied to a natural weapon will poison the owner of that natural weapon when applied. Bite weapons generally will always risk poisoning the owner of it when applying contact or injury poison.

Multiple Doses of Poison

Unlike other afflictions, multiple doses of the same poison “stack,” meaning that successive doses combine to increase the poison’s DC and duration.

Making your initial saving throw against a poison means stacking does not occur—the poison did not affect you and any later doses are treated independently. Likewise, if a poison has been cured or run its course (by you either making the saves or outlasting the poison’s duration), stacking does not occur. However, if there is still poison active in you when you are attacked with that type of poison again, and you fail your initial save against the new dose, the doses stack. This has two effects, which last until the poisons run their course.

• Increased Duration: Increase the duration of the poison by 1/2 the amount listed in its frequency entry.
• Increased DC: Increase the poison’s DC by +2.

These increases are cumulative (a third dose adds another 1/2 of the frequency to the duration and +2 to the DC, and so on). When affected by multiple doses of the same poison, you only make one saving throw at this higher DC when required by the frequency, rather than one saving throw against each dose of the poison.

Multiple doses do not alter the Cure condition of the Poison, and meeting that Cure condition ends all doses of the poison.

Additional doses of the poison applied before the duration expires may provide an additional onset effect after the onset time expires, if applicable.

Doses from different poisons (such as an assassin with wyvern poison on his dagger and black widow spider venom on his short sword) do not stack—the effects of each are tracked separately.

Harvesting Poisons

While Profession(Toxicologist) is necessary to brew long-lasting poisons, there are many natural sources of poison in the world, and poison crafters who wish to avoid the expense of purchasing raw ingredients may seek to harvest poison from natural sources instead.

Poison may be harvested from a creature, plant, or other object that contains a naturally occurring poison such as a dead body, milked from fangs or other similar parts of the creature, or even the leaves of a plant.

Poison harvested in this way uses the normal save DC of the poison and is not treated as if the harvesting creature had crafted it (for the purposes of effects that would increase the DC from crafted poisons. If a poison harvested required an opposed roll rather than a DC, treat the DC as if the opposed roll had rolled a 10 (for example a +4 roll would become a 14 DC) Poisons become inert after 24 hours unless preserved.

If a character wishes to preserve harvested poison for a longer period, they must treat it alchemically, as if crafting the poison with Profession(Toxicologist) but using the poison dose as the raw ingredients normally needed to brew a dose of the poison, allowing the crafter to create the poison at 75% cost. The craft DC is equal to the DC of the poison, and the DC of the poison may be improved as normally with poison crafting at the normal cost and crafting DC increase.

Crafting Poison

You can make poison with the Profession(Toxicologist) skill. The DC to make a poison is equal to its save DC. Rolling a natural 1 on a Profession skill check while making a poison exposes you to the poison. This does not consume the poison. If you have the poison use feat, you do not risk accidentally poisoning yourself when applying poison.

A poison’s DC may be raised from its default amount by making a more concentrated version, this raises the craft DC by an equal amount, but also raises the cost of the poison by 10% per DC increase. The DC of a poison may only be raised to a maximum of 50% higher than the base DC (for example a DC 20 could at maximum become a DC 30).

The sample poisons listed below represent just some of the common poisons available in cities. Of course, most cities have laws against buying, selling, or crafting poison.