Alchemy for all!

How?

Just print the PDF, fold into a pamphlet and keep ready on the gaming table.

Whenever a player character gets their hands on a magically potent ingredient like a troll’s heart, manticore’s tail or a unicorn horn, they may take it into a city and, for a fee, let an alchemist turn it into a potion.

Potion brewing is a chaotic, mercurial process, which is only stabilised at the very end into one of the usable potions. Roll 2d20 to see which one they get.

Why?

Because buying potions in unlimited amounts may lead to surplus, abuse and overshadowing of other tools and abilities. This way, it’s limited by the number of monster trophies and other magical ingredients players can get as loot in regular play.

Thanks to the randomness of the table, they can’t just repeatedly craft the same set of the most optimal potions. The probability distribution on 2d20 makes it so that approximately one in seven attempts yields a Healing potion, while the rarer elixirs will come up less often.

Every unexpected and seemingly useless potion will eventually find its use in play. And these unpredictable interactions between weird tools and complex situations are exactly what makes having an alchemy sub-system worthwhile.